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Software Engineering Daily

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Software Daily: The world through the lens of software.

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#1257
Oct 17, 2019 · 1 hr 4 min
Gravity: Distributed Application Delivery with Ev Kontsevoy
Modern applications are distributed systems. These applications require an installation mechanism that can run and update the software across multiple nodes. When a SaaS company starts to work with large enterprise customers, that company needs to figure out a way to deliver their product to the enterprise. This requires the SaaS company to deploy the product to whatever infrastructure the enterprise is running. Some enterprises use on-prem infrastructure. Some use AWS. Some use a variety of cloud providers and on-premise servers. A SaaS company with limited resources must be able to have a standard deployment model that satisfies all of these different use cases. Ev Kontsevoy is the CEO of Gravitational, a company that builds software for application delivery. Ev’s company maintains Gravity, an open source tool for application imaging and delivery. Ev was also the founder of Mailgun, a popular email API service. Mailgun was acquired by Rackspace, and in his time running Mailgun, Ev became deeply aware of the problems faced by developers and operators who manage server infrastructure. Ev joins the show to discuss his experience building companies and the state of modern infrastructure. Full disclosure: Gravitational is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.
#1256
Oct 16, 2019 · 1 hr 4 min
Incident Reproduction with Tammy Butow
Databases go offline. Services fail to scale up. Deployment errors can cause an application backend to get DDoS’d. When an event happens that prevents your company from operating as expected, it is known as an incident. Software teams respond to an incident by issuing a fix. Sometimes that fix returns the software to its ideal state. Other times the software remains in a degraded state, and it takes more fixing to return the software to the place it should be. One way that a software team can learn from an incident is through incident reproduction. When an incident is turned into a reproducible system, it becomes a predictable training exercise rather than a surprising and painful outage. Tammy Butow is an engineer with Gremlin, a company that makes chaos engineering software. Chaos engineering is the process of creating controlled experiments that simulate outages. Tammy joins the show to discuss common incident types, and how those can be made reproducible for training exercises.
#1255
Oct 15, 2019 · 1 hr 1 min
Diffbot Infrastructure with Mike Tung
Diffbot is a knowledge graph that allows developers to interface with the unstructured web as if it was a structured database. In today’s show, Diffbot CEO Mike Tung returns for a second discussion about how he has built Diffbot and how Diffbot is used. The web has many different entities. Web pages, topics, people, stories, articles, companies, and much more. Humans use a search engine to find answers to their questions within web pages. Machines need to find answers to these kinds of questions as well, but a machine is not sophisticated enough to figure out answers from an unstructured web page. Diffbot brings structure to those webpages, and gives them an API interface for developers to build on top of. In order to create this system in a cost-efficient manner, Diffbot runs its own data centers, where web scraping, machine learning, and API infrastructure are all used to build the Diffbot application. Mike joins me for an interview about creating Diffbot, as well as his strategy for running the business.
#1254
Oct 14, 2019 · 1 hr 13 min
How To Build A Cloud Provider with Anurag Goel
Render is a cloud provider built on top of Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. Render uses the compute abstractions provided by the major cloud providers to build a second layer cloud provider with the goal of providing a better user experience. Anurag Goel is the founder of Render, and he returns to the show to discuss how Render works, and why there is a need for a new cloud provider. Everyone knows that the market for cloud providers is gigantic, so why are so few companies pursuing it? From Anurag’s perspective, there is no good reason. AWS, Google, Azure, Digital Ocean, and Heroku have only explored a small percentage of the potential ways a cloud provider could be built. Anurag shares his strategy for building Render, and also talks through his belief around modern software engineering, including his belief that developers mostly choose their tools based on what they read from popular websites rather than what solves their problems–a phenomenon which he describes as “fashion driven development.”
#1252
Oct 11, 2019 · 1 hr 4 min
Webflow: No-Code with Vlad Magdolin
Webflow is a platform for building applications without programming. Software engineering has barely been around for 30 years. Over that period of time, there have been many attempts to create a platform that allows for the creation of software without writing a line of code. Most of these systems have not been able to fulfill that task. And this should come as no surprise. It is hard enough to build an application if you know how to program. Vlad Magdolin has been working on Webflow for more than seven years. He has persisted through multiple failed attempts at building Webflow, and pushed past continuous rejection from investors who did not see the viability of his vision. As Vlad patiently worked on Webflow with his two co-founders, the power of the web browser slowly improved. V8 became a powerful runtime that could deliver the performance necessary to build applications visually in the browser. The unmet goals of past WYSIWYG application platforms faded into irrelevance, as Webflow came into being and allowed for an entirely new type of software development, driven by a visual interface in the browser. Webflow is one of the coolest, most ambitious software platforms in existence. Vlad joins the show to discuss Webflow and the future of software development.
#1251
Oct 10, 2019 · 54 min
Data Visualization with Sherman Wood and Chad Lumley
Data visualization is the presentation of data in a way that emphasizes certain qualities about that data. Data visualization can be used to prove a specific point, or it can be used as a depiction of a data set to be explored. Data visualization is used in consumer software products as well as backend engineering systems such as logging data. As tools for data visualization have improved, data applications can consume more data at a faster pace. Browsers and mobile phones have improved, giving us the power to render high fidelity, complex visualizations in near-real time. Sherman Wood and Chad Lumley are engineers working on Jaspersoft, an embedded analytics tool from TIBCO. Embedded analytics is a type of software that allows for the creation of data visualizations inside of an application. Sherman and Chad join the show to discuss techniques for data visualization and how the field has evolved. Full disclosure: TIBCO is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.
#1250
Oct 9, 2019 · 58 min
Treehouse: Business and Education with Ryan Carson
The ability to create software is a superpower. But software education is not evenly distributed. Ryan Carson started Treehouse to provide a high quality education system for anyone to learn how to build software. On a previous episode, Ryan and I discussed the field of programming education. Ryan returns to the show for a conversation about building Treehouse, and the company’s expansion from an online programming school to a platform for technology apprenticeship. Thousands of people learn to program on Treehouse. Ryan’s goal is to connect those new programmers to companies where they can learn to apply those software skills to working at a technology company. Treehouse’s apprenticeship program is used by Airbnb, Adobe, Mailchimp, and others. By combining an online education platform with an apprenticeship program, Treehouse has created a business model that could allow it to grow significantly bigger even in an atmosphere where learning to program has been commodified to a large extent. The economic model of Treehouse contrasts with in-person bootcamps such as Hack Reactor and online income sharing platforms such as Lambda School. It was a great conversation about modern technology, the future of education, and the strategy of building a successful business.
#1249
Oct 8, 2019 · 1 hr 3 min
Traces: Video Recognition with Veronica Yurchuk and Kostyantyn Shysh
Video surveillance impacts human lives every day. On most days, we do not feel the impact of video surveillance. But the effects of video surveillance have tremendous potential. It can be used to solve crimes and find missing children. It can be used to intimidate journalists and empower dictators. Like any piece of technology, video surveillance can be used for good or evil. Video recognition lets us make better use of video feeds. A stream of raw video doesn’t provide much utility if we can’t easily model its contents. Without video recognition, we must have a human sitting in front of the video to manually understand what is going on in that video. Veronica Yurchuk and Kosh Shysh are the founders of Traces.ai, a company building video recognition technology focused on safety, anonymity, and positive usage. They join the show to discuss the field of video analysis, and their vision for how video will shape our lives in the future.
#1248
Oct 7, 2019 · 49 min
GDPR in Practice with Joshua Prismon
Data privacy policies have changed how software organizations need to operate. As consumer preferences have shifted in favor of strong privacy, software companies are having to examine their policies around data collection and retention. Many software companies were started in a time with different norms around data. Building a new application that is compliant with GDPR is hard. Updating an existing application to align with GDPR is even harder. Joshua Prismon is chief architect at FICO, a company that builds systems around credit scoring. Joshua joins the show to discuss how a large company like FICO has responded to changing consumer preferences through changes in its software architecture and engineering.
#1247
Oct 4, 2019 · 1 hr 11 min
Indie Hackers (3 Years Later) with Courtland Allen
Indie Hackers is a platform for independent software businesses to discuss strategy and find inspiration. Courtland Allen founded Indie Hackers with the goal of sharing the stories of these businesses, and the company has become a thriving community of entrepreneurs, engineers, and creators. Business is a creative medium. The definition of a successful business is as subjective as the rules for what makes a successful work of art. A business owner can be miserable running a company that generates millions of dollars a year, and a new entrepreneur can feel ecstatic from making their first $5 sale. Indie Hackers is a platform that is impossible to define in relation to things you have seen before. It is a media company with a podcast that most SE Daily listeners will probably enjoy. It is a social platform for learning how modern software companies are built. And it is a place where makers post their own progress on their creative projects (I have posted mine here). Courtland was on the show three years ago to discuss the Indie Hackers movement in its nascent stages. Courtland returns to the show to discuss the thriving platform as it exists today, and a wide ranging conversation about software, game theory, and podcasting.
#1246
Oct 3, 2019 · 39 min
The Messy Middle with Scott Belsky
Scott Belsky founded Behance in 2006. Behance is a social platform where designers and creators share their work. Scott was motivated to start Behance due to his desire to combine his love for creativity with his desire to create a business. After 6 years of work, Behance was acquired by Adobe for more than $150 million. Today, Scott works as the Chief Product Officer at Adobe. Behance’s journey from idea to acquisition is told by Scott in his book The Messy Middle. His book chronicles the difficult, winding journey that an entrepreneur must take in order to succeed, and contains some harrowing stories. Scott has a gritty personality, which was required to endure the ups and downs of Behance. Scott joins the show to discuss the story of Behance, and the lessons of his life as an entrepreneur.
#1245
Oct 2, 2019 · 49 min
Fivetran: Data Connectors with George Fraser
Large companies have multiple databases, multiple data formats, and multiple applications that need to use the data. Every data engineer needs to move data between these different components of a system. Moving data between different parts of a system is often called “ETL”, an acronym for “Extract, Transform, Load.” Data engineers spend much of their time writing code for ETL. This ETL code often moves data from a source such as a distributed file system into a data warehouse such as Amazon Redshift. ETL code also is used to take data out of platforms such as Google Analytics, and put that data into a system where it can be joined with internal data sets. George Fraser is the CEO of Fivetran, a company that builds data connectors to improve the data engineering process. George joins the show to discuss modern data warehousing, and the business of building Fivetran. Data connectors may sound like a simple or trivial product, but it turns out to be a gigantic opportunity.
#1244
Oct 1, 2019 · 51 min
Cruise: Self-Driving Engineering with Mo Elshenawy
The development of self-driving cars is one of the biggest technological changes that is under way. Across the world, thousands of engineers are working on developing self-driving cars. Although it still seems far away, self-driving cars are starting to feel like an inevitability. This is especially true if you spend much time in downtown San Francisco, where you will see a self-driving car being tested every day. Much of the time, that self-driving car will be operated by Cruise. Cruise is a company that is building a self-driving car service. The company has hundreds of engineers working across the stack, from computer vision algorithms to automotive hardware. Cruise’s engineering requires engineers who can work with cloud tools as well as low-latency devices. It also requires product developers and managers to lead these different teams. The field of self-driving is very new. There is not much literature available on how to build a self-driving car. There is even less literature on how to manage a team of engineers that are building, testing, and deploying software and hardware for real cars that are driving around the streets of San Francisco. Mo Elshenawy is VP of engineering at Cruise, and he joins the show to talk about the engineering that is required to develop fully self-driving car technology, as well as how to structure teams to align the roles of product design, software engineering, testing, machine learning, and hardware. Full disclosure: Cruise is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.
#1243
Sep 30, 2019 · 1 hr
Software Moats with Astasia Myers
Investors often use the term “moat” to describe the durable competitive advantage of a company. When an investor puts money into a company, they are making that investment based on a valuation. That valuation is subjective–it is how much the investor thinks the company is worth. A valuation is determined by the present value of future cash flows. What are the future cash flows of a company? In order to figure that out, the investor needs to know how the business will look in the future. This is why moats are so important. If an investor looks at how much money a business made this year, it does not tell the investor very much information about how much money the business will make in the future. If the business has a durable competitive advantage, then that means that the cash flows of the company are also durable. It also means that any compounding of those cash flows will be durable growth. It is easy to understand durability for some businesses. Why do we keep using Google? Because there is no substitute search engine that is so integrated with our daily lives. Why do we keep using Facebook? Because there is no other social networking company that has all of our friends and family. But what about companies with substitutes? There are lots of cloud providers, log management companies, and analytics providers. These are crowded markets, and yet in each of the crowded markets there seems to be a dominant player who captures the most market share. Why is that? How do software companies in competitive markets develop a moat? Astasia Myers is a venture investor with Redpoint, a software investment firm that makes large bets on technology companies. Astasia joins the show to discuss how software companies form competitive advantages, as well as several specific markets such as log management and cloud cost optimization.
#1242
Sep 27, 2019 · 55 min
Stripe Infrastructure Management with Uma Chingunde
Software engineering is a new field. There are theories about how we should be building our systems, but these theories might change over time. The same is true for engineering management. There are many successful examples of companies scaling with the management hierarchies pioneered by Microsoft and Google, but since everyone knows that those techniques work, they get continually copied. Of course, there is tremendous risk in pioneering a brand new management structure. There have been examples of successful software companies that have suffered tremendously due to a trial of an exciting new management structure. New software is much easier and safer to try than revolutionary new management structures. New software is easier to try in a company with a strong engineering team, because that team is equipped to assess the new software and figure out if it is actually solving a problem that the company has. Uma Chingunde is an engineering manager at Stripe on the compute team. Uma has worked in management for a decade, and has worked in virtualization in infrastructure for even longer than that. Uma joins the show to give her perspective on management of engineers as well as management of compute infrastructure. We discussed some timeless principles of engineering management, as well as contemporary ideas around virtualization and compute.
#1241
Sep 26, 2019 · 56 min
Life Insurance Engineering with Vipul Sharma and Lingke Wang
Ethos Life Insurance is a software company that sells life insurance products. Software is reshaping established industries such as banking, insurance, and manufacturing. In these large, established industries, incumbents are adopting new technology as fast as they can, but the new technology needs to be integrated with the old technology. The slow rate of technology adoption by incumbents creates an opportunity for new companies to spring up who are building their entire company from scratch, with updated software. Insurance is a gigantic market that is dominated by companies which have been around for 50-100 years. The established players in the insurance industry are trusted brands, but many of them have not significantly updated their technology from legacy techniques of pricing risk. Vipul Sharma is the VP of engineering and Lingke Wang is the co-founder of Ethos Life Insurance, and they join the show to describe the insurance business, the technical problems, and the software stack of modern insurance company. Ethos has more than fifty employees and is growing rapidly, so it is a great case study in scaling a modern company in an established market.
#1240
Sep 25, 2019 · 49 min
WebAssembly Isolation with Tyler McMullen
Isolation is a fundamental concept in computer science. Software workloads are isolated from each other in order to keep resource access cleanly separated. When programs are properly isolated, it is easier for the programmer to reason about the memory safety of that program. When a program is not properly isolated, it can lead problems such as security flaws where one program can access the information that should be exclusive to a different program. Poor isolation can also lead to garbage collection problems, or running out of disk space. Isolation takes many forms, including individual processes, containers, and virtual machines. The techniques for isolation evolve over time. A more recent technology that can assist with isolation is WebAssembly, a newer execution system that can run a variety of languages that compile down into the WebAssembly binary format. For previous episodes about WebAssembly, you can listen to some of the shows in our archives. Tyler McMullen is the CTO at Fastly, a cloud provider that focuses on edge computing systems such as content delivery networking. Tyler has written and spoken about WebAssembly in detail. He joins the show to talk about computational isolation, and how WebAssembly presents new efficiencies for engineers looking to isolate their workloads. Full disclosure: Fastly, where Tyler works, is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.
#1239
Sep 24, 2019 · 44 min
Cloud Foundry with Abby Kearns
Cloud Foundry is a system for managing distributed applications. Cloud Foundry was released in 2011, and has been widely adopted by enterprises that need a platform for deploying and scaling the applications that run within their company. The ecosystem around Cloud Foundry includes systems for continuous delivery, pubsub messaging, and containerization. Abby Kearns is the executive director at Cloud Foundry Foundation, a nonprofit with the goal of raising awareness and adoption of the Cloud Foundry open source project. Abby joins the show to discuss her work with Cloud Foundry, and how the ecosystem has evolved with the maturity of distributed computing. We also talk about what enterprises need from an application runtime platform and how Cloud Foundry has adopted Kubernetes.
#1238
Sep 23, 2019 · 50 min
Kafka Data Pipelines with Robin Moffatt
A new software product usually starts with a single database. That database manages the tables for user accounts and basic transactions. When a product becomes popular, the database grows in size. There are more transactions and more users. A company grows around that product, and the company starts to accumulate more data in different sources. Analytics systems, time series databases, and logging tools start to generate data. Moving this data around between systems starts to become complicated. Apache Kafka is often used as a system for moving data between these different systems, performing transformations, and generating aggregations and summaries of these large quantities of data. Robin Moffatt works at Confluent, and has written numerous articles about how to move data between systems and design effective workflows for data pipelines. Robin joins the show to talk about modern data platforms and databases, and the patterns for using Kafka to connect those systems to each other. If you are interested in learning more about how companies are using Kafka, the Kafka Summit in San Francisco is September 30th – October 1st. Companies like LinkedIn, Uber, and Netflix will be talking about how they use Kafka. Full disclosure: Confluent (the company where Tim works) is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily.
#1237
Sep 20, 2019 · 1 hr 19 min
ReadMe with Greg Koberger
A software company needs to get many things right in order to be successful. Having a useful product with solid engineering is only the beginning. ReadMe was started five years ago. The company solved a seemingly simple problem: documentation for software products. If you have worked as a software engineer, you have looked at documentation. You know that there is a wide range of quality among the documentation that exists for different software products. ReadMe solved the problem of documentation-as-a-service, and it solved the problem better than any other company in the market. But after building a great business around documentation, the direction in which to take the business was unclear. How do you expand a documentation software business? Should you start building API management systems? Should you build lead generation tools? Should you try to sell products to developer evangelists? Greg Koberger is the CEO of ReadMe, and he joins the show to talk about the business, the strategy, and the fundraising process for ReadMe. Greg was previously on the show very early on, and he stood out as a guest that was remarkably friendly and willing to talk about a wide range of topics. In the previous show with Greg, he was one year into his business. Today, it has been five years since ReadMe was started, and we catch up on how his business has evolved since our first interview. ReadMe had become a profitable business very early in its life. In Silicon Valley, a quickly profitable business is the exception. Rather than structuring the finances of ReadMe with the expectation of successive funding rounds every 18-24 months, Greg took a slower approach. His company grew at a rate that was affordable while maintaining that profitability. While ReadMe maintained profitability from its core product of documentation software, Greg patiently thought about what product to build next within the company. A software company will typically expand into adjacent markets, or offer products that their current users are willing to pay additional money for. Eventually, ReadMe found its second product: developer metrics. Greg and his team figured out that gathering metrics around how APIs are being consumed has synergies with the core ReadMe product. With a second product, ReadMe was now able to forecast significant growth. The company also gained an incentive to raise money. With additional money, ReadMe would be able to deepen the developer metrics product, hire a bigger team, and think much bigger than they would have been able to as a single-product company with a smaller total addressable market. ReadMe raised a series A from Accel, one of the most respected venture capital firms in the business, and the company is now entering a new period in its development. ReadMe is a fascinating case study in balancing ambition with financial discipline at a software company.

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