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Software Engineering Daily

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Software Daily: The world through the lens of software.

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#1319
Jan 22, 2020 · 1 hr 9 min
DFINITY: The Internet Computer with Dominic Williams
If the Internet was reimagined with the software and hardware infrastructure we have today, what would it look like? That is the question that DFINITY is working on answering. DFINITY’s goal is to build a decentralized, secure Internet computer. DFINITY takes concepts from the cryptocurrency world, but it is focused on computation, not financial products. DFINITY can be thought of as a decentralized cloud provider, with redundancy and scalability properties that are achieved by operating on data centers across the world. DFINITY wants to host web applications such as the ones that we use today on centralized servers. A developer who wants to run their application on DFINITY compiles their code to WebAssembly and deploys it to the DFINITY decentralized runtime. Transactions across DFINITY applications are processed through a collateralized proof-of-stake system to ensure reliable, decentralized computation. DFINITY is an ambitious project, and it would seem nearly impossible to bring to market if not for the quality of the team. DFINITY has hired Andreas Rossburg, a co-designer of WebAssembly, as well as talented engineers across security, web development, and backend infrastructure. Dominic Williams is the president and chief scientist of DFINITY, and he joins the show to talk about the vision for DFINITY and the roadmap to making it a reality.
#1318
Jan 21, 2020 · 1 hr 7 min
Webflow Engineering with Bryant Chou
Webflow is a visual programming tool used by designers, developers, and other technical users. Webflow is a leader in the “low code” or “no code” category of software tools that has become prominent in the last few years. Webflow has been years in the making. In a previous show with Webflow CEO Vlad Magdalin, he told the story of being heads down on Webflow, steadily working through the engineering problems that stood between him and his vision of a visual programming environment. In the early days, it was unclear who would even want to use Webflow. A critic of Webflow might have said that Webflow was too high level for developers, and too technical for designers. But Webflow caters to a large subset of developers and designers who want the kind of low code experience that Webflow provides. The product has also helped define a new category of knowledge worker: the “visual programmer.” Bryant Chou is a co-founder of Webflow and was the CTO in the early days. He joins the show to discuss the engineering problems that the company has had to work through, and his perspective on how Webflow fits into the software market going forward.
#1317
Jan 20, 2020 · 1 hr 5 min
Software Media with Tim O’Reilly
Software has changed the way the world functions. The rapid pace of change has made it difficult to know how to navigate the new world. Knowledge workers who want to keep advancing in their careers develop a strategy of continuous learning in order to adapt to these changes. O’Reilly Media has existed for almost 40 years, providing resources for the technical consumer. As O’Reilly has expanded its product line from books to conferences to online learning, the business has grown slowly but steadily. That business trajectory stands in contrast to many of the software companies that are financially structured to either grow rapidly or die. Today, O’Reilly has a large impact on the software ecosystem. Software professionals congregate at O’Reilly conferences. Enterprises pay O’Reilly to educate their employees. And O’Reilly continues to grow into new product lines, recently acquiring the interactive learning platform Katacoda, which can be used to learn about Kubernetes and other popular technologies. In a previous episode, we discussed Tim O’Reilly’s book “What’s The Future”. In today’s show, Tim returns to the show to discuss his experience building O’Reilly, and how his business philosophy contrasts with much of the assumed wisdom of software company building.
#1316
Jan 17, 2020 · 1 hr 6 min
Apollo GraphQL with Geoff Schmidt
GraphQL has become a core piece of infrastructure for many software applications. GraphQL is used to make requests that are structured as GraphQL queries and responded to through a GraphQL server. The GraphQL server processes the query and fetches the response from the necessary databases, APIs, and backend services. Around 2016, when GraphQL was becoming popular, a company called Meteor was deciding what to do with its business. Meteor was started off of the popular framework MeteorJS, a system for building real-time JavaScript applications. MeteorJS was loved by many developers, but Meteor needed to decide if it was the most viable opportunity that it could be pursuing with its resources. From the vantage point within the Meteor company, there were some trends in the frontend ecosystem that were potentially disruptive to the viability of Meteor. There were also some large potential opportunities. The dramatic change to the frontend was largely coming as a downstream effect of Facebook’s open source technologies: React and GraphQL. Amidst these changes, Meteor shifted the company’s efforts entirely towards GraphQL and renamed the company Apollo. Geoff Schmidt is the CEO of Apollo, and he joins the show to talk about the GraphQL ecosystem, the business opportunities around GraphQL, and the process of pivoting from Meteor to Apollo. If you are planning a hackathon, check out FindCollabs Hackathons. Whether you are running an internal hackathon for your company, or you are running an open hackathon so that users can try out your product, FindCollabs Hackathons are a tool for people to build projects and collaborate with each other. You can create your own hackathon at FindCollabs.com.
#1315
Jan 16, 2020 · 1 hr
JS Party with Kevin Ball
The JavaScript ecosystem stretches across frontend, backend, and middleware. There are newer tools such as GraphQL, Gatsby, and WebAssembly. There are frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular. There is complex data handling with streams, caches, and TensorFlow.js. JavaScript is unlike any other ecosystem, because a single language can be used to construct every part of an application. Because JavaScript is used for such a broad spectrum of use cases, the amount of tooling available can be intimidating to someone new to the ecosystem. Kevin Ball is a host of JS Party, a podcast on The Changelog network. Kevin joins the show to give his perspective on the JavaScript ecosystem. We discussed ES Modules, the JAM Stack, and the growing number of tools, libraries, and workflows used by JavaScript developers.
#1314
Jan 15, 2020 · 50 min
Packet: Baremetal Infrastructure with Zachary Smith and Nathan Goulding
Cloud infrastructure is usually consumed in the form of virtual machines or containers. These VMs or containers are running on a physical host machine that is also running other VMs and containers. This is called multitenancy. Servers across cloud providers such as AWS have a high utilization because there are multiple virtual instances running on each physical server host. Cloud computing has led to a low cost of compute infrastructure. But in some cases, this low cost comes at the price of not being able to control the underlying hardware with as much precision as the user would want. Some users want specific types of hardware. Other users want to be using dedicated hardware that does not risk the “noisy neighbor” problem of sharing a physical server with some other application that is using most of the resources. Packet is a company that provides remote access to baremetal infrastructure. The user experience is similar to that of a cloud provider, but with more control over how a given physical host will be used. Zachary Smith is the CEO of Packet and Nathan Goulding is the chief architect. Zach and Nathan join the show to talk about the business and the engineering behind Packet, as well as the future goals for where they want to take the company.
#1313
Jan 14, 2020 · 50 min
Edge Computing Platform with Jaromir Coufal
Edge computing is the usage of servers that are geographically close to the client device. The first common use case for edge computing was CDNs: content-delivery networks. A content delivery network placed media files such as images and videos on multiple servers throughout the world. These are big files, and they take lots of bandwidth to transfer. By placing them at CDNs, the files would be closer to any user around the world. These early use cases for edge computing were purely about storing large files. But the vast majority of compute still took place at the central application servers. Over time, users have required faster and faster application experiences. Today, an increasing amount of compute has been moved to the edge, in addition to the existing storage applications. More user data is being cached at the edge to make for quicker transactional processing. Machine learning model training and hosting at the edge makes for a faster, more responsive machine learning feedback loop. Jaromir Coufal is an engineer with Red Hat. He joins the show to talk about modern applications of edge computing, and how the demand for edge computing is creating a market opportunity for companies that have lots of servers at the edge, such as telecoms. These telecoms can repurpose their widely distributed telecom infrastructure as edge servers that they can sell usage on.
#1312
Jan 13, 2020 · 51 min
Data Infrastructure Go-To-Market with Sean Knapp
Every large company generates large amounts of data. Data engineering is the process of storing, transforming, and leveraging that data. Data infrastructure companies provide tools and platforms for performing data engineering. The last fifteen years has seen a rise in modern data management companies built in a time of decreasing storage costs, an increased volume of data, and the prevalence of cloud computing. Modern data companies include Hadoop vendors, cloud providers, and a wide variety of individual software companies offering products such as databases, ETL tools, and open source tooling. The go-to-market strategy for a data infrastructure company requires a deep understanding of the data engineering landscape. A company must build something useful, sell it to customers, and eventually build a replicable strategy. Sean Knapp is the CEO of Ascend, a company that builds Apache Spark-based data pipelines that connect APIs, data lakes, and data warehouses together to enable data applications. Sean joins the show to talk about the process of building a data infrastructure company, and his lessons building Ascend.
#1311
Jan 10, 2020 · 1 hr 19 min
Slack Data Platform with Josh Wills
Slack is a messaging platform for organizations. Since its creation in 2013, Slack has quickly become a core piece of technology used by a wide variety of technology companies, groups, and small teams. The messages that are sent on Slack are generated at a very high volume, and are extremely sensitive. These messages must be stored on Slack’s servers in a way that does not risk a message from one company accidentally being accessible to another company. The messages must be highly available, and they also must be indexed for search. When Slack was scaling, the company started to encounter limitations in its data infrastructure that the company was unsure how to solve. During this time, Josh Wills was the director of data engineering at Slack, and he joins the show to retell the history of his time at Slack, and why the problem of searching messages was so hard. Josh also provides a great deal of industry context around how engineers from Facebook and Google differ from one another. When Slack was starting to become popular, the company quickly began to attract engineers from both of those companies. Facebook and Google have distinct solutions for how they have tackled the problems of data engineering.
#1310
Jan 9, 2020 · 1 hr
NoSQL Optimization with Rick Houlihan
NoSQL databases provide an interface for storing and accessing data that allows the user to work with data in an “unstructured” fashion. SQL databases require the data in the database to be “normalized,” meaning that each object in the entire database has an entry (or a null value) for each field. One advantage of NoSQL is that the different objects are “denormalized,” meaning that different objects in the database can have unique fields. There is a widely held belief that NoSQL databases do not scale, or that there is some significant penalty that a developer will pay for using a NoSQL database as soon as their app becomes popular. The truth is much more subtle than that. NoSQL databases can perform as well as or better than SQL databases if the developers know the query patterns that their applications make. SQL databases will be a better choice in the condition where the database has a very wide spectrum of access patterns. But in many cases, an application has a narrow range of different requests for the database, and a NoSQL database can perform very well if the database is structured and optimized for these requests. Rick Houlihan is an executive with Amazon Web Services who works with database teams and engineers to optimize their products and database infrastructure. Rick joins the show to discuss the tenets of NoSQL and describe the fundamental contrast between NoSQL and SQL database limitations.
#1309
Jan 8, 2020 · 28 min
Amazon EC2 with Dave Brown
Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) is a virtualized server product that provides the user with scalable compute infrastructure. EC2 was created in 2006 as one of the first three AWS services along with S3 and Simple Queueing Service. Since then, EC2 has provided the core server infrastructure for many of the companies that have been built in the cloud. A large scale virtualization product requires its engineers to have a deep understanding of scheduling and multitenancy. In previous shows, we have touched on subjects such as hypervisors, the noisy neighbor problem, the cold start problem, and other aspects of multitenant infrastructure. To make EC2 successful, these issues must be continuously revisited and resolved at different areas of the stack. Dave Brown joined the EC2 team in 2007, and now leads the EC2 Compute, Networking, and Load Balancing teams as a Vice President. Dave joins the show to discuss the history of EC2 and the canonical problems of virtualized server infrastructure.
#1307
Jan 7, 2020 · 38 min
Amazon Kubernetes with Abby Fuller
Amazon’s container offerings include ECS (Elastic Container Service), EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service), and Fargate. Through these different offerings, Amazon provides a variety of ways that a user can manage Kubernetes clusters and standalone container instances. The choice of which containerization system to choose depends on the needs of the user, and the tradeoffs they want to make on control and portability. Amazon’s container products have been designed in the context of a shifting competitive landscape. Kubernetes presents a potential long-term threat to Amazon’s status as the most popular cloud provider. Properly responding to this threat has required Amazon to extend itself into the world of open source, contributing to Kubernetes and having more conversations with customers who want their products to have the high quality user experience of AWS along with the open characteristics of Kubernetes. Abby Fuller is a principal technologist with Amazon who works on containers and Linux. Abby joins the show to describe Amazon’s perspective on containers and Kubernetes.
#1306
Jan 6, 2020 · 56 min
Kubernetes Progress with Kelsey Hightower
When the Kubernetes project was started, Amazon Web Services was the dominant cloud provider. Most of the code that runs AWS is closed source, which prevents an open ecosystem from developing around AWS. Developers who deploy their application onto AWS are opting into a closed, controlled ecosystem, which has both costs and benefits. The software industry has a history of closed and open ecosystems existing at the same time. AWS represented a huge closed ecosystem. With the amount of money at stake in the cloud business, it was only a matter of time before a more open ecosystem emerged. Since the creation of Kubernetes, the world of cloud computing has evolved rapidly. Google and Microsoft have both invested heavily into Kubernetes, and Amazon itself has adapted to the newer competitive landscape with a Kubernetes offering of its own. Amazon has also made efforts to become more publicly involved in open source projects, including Kubernetes. Kelsey Hightower has been a part of the Kubernetes ecosystem since the project was started. He is one of the most recognizable faces in the world of Kubernetes, delivering keynotes, appearing on podcasts, and co-authoring the popular Kubernetes Up and Running. Kelsey joins the show to discuss the progress in the Kubernetes ecosystem, and the competitive dynamics between Kubernetes and AWS.
#1305
Dec 20, 2019 · 2 hr 16 min
freeCodeCamp with Quincy Larson
freeCodeCamp was started five years ago with the goal of providing free coding education to anyone on the Internet. freeCodeCamp has become the best place to begin learning how to write software. There are many other places that a software engineer should visit on their educational journey, but freeCodeCamp is the best place to start, because it is free, and there are no advertisements. For most people learning to code, the price of that education is important, because they are learning to code to build a new career. It’s also important that a new programmer learns from an unbiased source of information, because an ad-supported environment will educate the new programmer towards products that they might not need. freeCodeCamp has not been easy to build. Building freeCodeCamp has required expertise in software engineering, business, media, and community development. The donation-based business model of freeCodeCamp doesn’t collect very much money. Why would somebody build a non-profit when they could spend their time building a highly profitable software company? Quincy Larson is the founder of freeCodeCamp, and he joins the show for a special episode about his backstory and the journey to building the best place on the Internet for a new programmer to begin. Support freeCodeCamp
#1304
Dec 19, 2019 · 1 hr 11 min
No Code with Shawn Wang
The software category known as “no-code” describes a set of tools that can be used to build software without writing large amounts of code in a programming language. No-code tools use visual interfaces such as spreadsheets and web based drag-and-drop systems. In previous shows, we have covered some of the prominent no-code products such as Airtable, Webflow, and Bubble. It is clear that no-code tools can be used to build core software infrastructure in a manner that is more abstract than the typical software engineering model of writing code. No-code tools do not solve everything. You can’t use a no-code tool to build a high performance distributed database, or a real-time multiplayer video game. But they are certainly useful for building internal tools and basic CRUD applications. We know that no-code tools can create value. But how do they fit into the overall workflow of a software company? How should teams be arranged now that knowledge workers can build certain kinds of software without writing code? And how should no-code systems interface with the monoliths, microservices, and APIs that we have building for years? Shawn Wang is an engineer with Netlify, a cloud provider that is focused on delivering high-quality development and deployment experience. Netlify is not a no-code platform, but Shawn has explored and written about the potential of no-code systems. Since he comes from a code-heavy background, he is well-positioned to give a realistic perspective on how no-code systems might evolve to play a role in the typical software development lifecycle.
#1303
Dec 18, 2019 · 56 min
Roblox Engineering with Claus Moberg
Roblox is a gaming platform with a large ecosystem of players, creators, game designers, and entrepreneurs. The world of Roblox is a three-dimensional environment where characters and objects interact through a physics engine. Roblox is multiplayer, and users can interact with each other over the Internet. Roblox is not one single game—it is a system where anyone can design and monetize their own games within Roblox. Over the last 14 years, Roblox has grown to be massively popular. As the product has grown, the software has evolved to meet changes in consumer demands and engineering constraints. Client devices include mobile phones, desktop computers, and virtual reality. All of these clients must have a consistent experience in graphics and functionality. The backend platform has to support a high volume of concurrent players who are accessing a high volume of content. The networking needs to support multiple players operating in an environment that demands high bandwidth. Claus Moberg is a vice president of engineering at Roblox. He joins the show to discuss the engineering of Roblox and the future of gaming.
#1302
Dec 17, 2019 · 1 hr 7 min
Kubernetes at Cruise with Karl Isenberg
Cruise is a company that is building a fully automated self-driving car service. The infrastructure of a self-driving car platform presents a large number of new engineering problems. Self-driving cars collect vast quantities of data as they are driving around the city. This data needs to be transferred from the cars onto cloud servers. The data needs to be used for training machine learning models. These models must be tested in a simulated environment, which provides more data to be integrated back into the self-driving system that is deployed to the cars. As the cars drive around the city, they can communicate with custom cloud services to get information about traffic, navigation, and weather. Cloud services are also used for internal tooling that can help with automotive diagnostics, configuration changes, deployments, and security policy management. The software platform used to manage infrastructure at Cruise is a combination of cloud products, open source tools, and custom built infrastructure that is mostly deployed to Kubernetes. Karl Isenberg is an engineer at Cruise, and he joins the show to talk about the engineering requirements of building a self-driving car service, and Cruise’s approach to platform engineering.
#1301
Dec 16, 2019 · 58 min
Snyk: Open Source Security with Guy Podjarny
The software supply chain includes cloud infrastructure, on-prem proprietary solutions, APIs, programming languages, networking products, and open source software. Each of these software categories has its own security vulnerabilities, and each category has tools that can help protect a company from attackers that are trying to exploit known vulnerabilities. As open source software has grown in popularity, it has turned into an enormous potential attack surface that is difficult to protect. Snyk is a company that builds security tools for companies that are consuming open source. Guy Podjarny is the CEO of Snyk, and he joins the show to discuss the security vulnerabilities of open source projects, and how his business works. Guy was previously the CTO of Akamai, so he has significant experience in technical leadership. He also is the host of the podcast The Secure Developer, which I recommend for anyone who is interested in technical interviews about security topics.
#1300
Dec 13, 2019 · 55 min
GitLab Engineering with Marin Jankovski
GitLab is a company that builds an open source platform for managing git repositories. GitLab was started in 2012, and has grown to have a large enterprise business with additional products such as continuous integration and security tooling. GitLab is also known for being a large, entirely remote workforce. GitLab does not have any offices, and the employees mostly communicate through Slack, email, and GitLab itself. Marin Jankovski was the first full-time engineer to join GitLab after the company was started. Marin joins the show to talk about the early days of GitLab, the evolution of the remote culture, and how product development works at GitLab today. He also talks about the experience of being a fast-growing company in the public spotlight of the software industry.
#1299
Dec 12, 2019 · 48 min
Basic Income with Floyd Marinescu
Automation has the potential to eliminate rote jobs such as call center workers and truck drivers. The downstream effects of automation also leads to new jobs, such as data labeling and robot operations. The net effect of modern automation technology is unclear, but it is likely to cause some disruption in the job market. Universal Basic Income (UBI) is an economic policy idea in which a government sends money to every person living in the country. The goal of UBI is to reduce the impact of dramatic changes to the economy that are resulting from accelerating technological change. Floyd Marinescu is the CEO of C4 Media, the company that produces the QCon conference series and the InfoQ website for software engineers. Floyd has worked in the software industry for decades and in recent years has become an advocate for basic income. He is a friend and supporter of Andrew Yang, a 2020 presidential candidate who is running on a platform centered around a basic income policy. Floyd joins the show for a discussion of the future, and the potential positive and negative consequences of implementing a basic income.

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