Software Daily
1,633 episodes - English - Latest episode: over 2 years ago - ★★★★★ - 1 ratingTechnical interviews about software topics.
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Episodes
Godot Game Engine with Juan Linietsky
April 06, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesBuilding a game is not easy. The development team needs to figure out a unique design and gameplay mechanics that will attract players. There is a great deal of creative work that goes into making a game successful, and these games are often built with low budgets by people who are driven by the art and passion of game creation. A game engine is a system used to build and run games. Game engines let the programmer work at a high level of abstraction, by providing interfaces for graphics, ph...
V8 Lite with Ross McIlroy
April 03, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesV8 is the JavaScript engine that runs Chrome. Every popular website makes heavy use of JavaScript, and V8 manages the execution environment of that code. The code that processes in your browser can run faster or slower depending on how “hot” the codepath is. If a certain line of code is executed frequently, that code might be optimized to run faster. V8 is running behind the scenes in your browser all the time, evaluating the code in your different tabs and determining how to manage that ru...
Serverless Development with Jeremy Daly
April 02, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesServerless tools have come a long way since the release of AWS Lambda in 2014. Serverless apps were originally architected around Lambda, with the functions-as-a-service being used to glue together larger pieces of functionality and API services. Today, many of the common AWS services such as API Gateway and DynamoDB have functionality built in to be able to respond to events. These services can use Amazon EventBridge to connect to each other. In many cases, a developer does not need AWS La...
Audio Data Engineering with Allison King
April 01, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesCortico is a non-profit that builds audio tools to improve public dialogue. Allison King is an engineer at Cortico, and she joins the show to talk about the process of building audio applications. One of these applications was a system for ingesting radio streams, transcribing the radio, and looking for duplicate information across the different radio stations. In a talk at Data Council, Allison talked through the data engineering architecture for processing these radio streams, and the pa...
Facebook Messenger Engineering with Mohsen Agsen
March 31, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesFacebook Messenger is a chat application that millions of people use every day to talk to each other. Over time, Messenger has grown to include group chats, video chats, animations, facial filters, stories, and many more features. Messenger is a tool for utility as well as for entertainment. Messenger is used both on mobile and on desktop, but the size of the mobile application is particularly important on mobile. There are many users who are on devices that do not have much storage space. ...
Pika Dependency Management with Fred Schott
March 30, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesModern web development involves a complicated toolchain for managing dependencies. One part of this toolchain is the bundler, a tool that puts all your code and dependencies together into static asset files. The most popular bundler is webpack, which was originally released in 2012, before browsers widely supported ES Modules. Today, every major browser supports the ES Module system, which improves the efficiency of JavaScript dependency management. Snowpack is a system for managing depende...
Cloud Kitchen Platform with Ashley Colpaart
March 27, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesFood delivery apps have changed how the restaurant world operates. After seven years of mobile food delivery, the volume of food ordered through these apps has become so large that entire restaurants can be sustained solely through the order flow that comes in from the apps. This raises the question as to why you even need an “on-prem” restaurant. A cloud kitchen is a large, shared kitchen where food is prepared for virtual restaurants. These virtual restaurants exist only on mobile apps. T...
Remote Team Management with Ryan Chartrand
March 26, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesRemote engineering work makes some elements of software development harder, and some elements easier. With Slack and email, communication becomes more clear cut. Project management tools lay out the responsibilities and deliverables of each person. GitHub centralizes and defines the roles of developers. On the other hand, remote work subtracts the role of nuanced conversation. There is no water cooler or break room. Work can become systematic, rigid, and completely transactional. Your co-wo...
Sorbet: Typed Ruby with Dmitry Petrashko
March 25, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesProgramming languages are dynamically typed or statically typed. In a dynamically typed language, the programmer does not need to declare if a variable is an integer, string, or other type. In a statically typed language, the developer must declare the type of the variable upfront, so that the compiler can take advantage of that information. Dynamically typed languages give a programmer flexibility and fast iteration speed. But they also introduce the possibility of errors that can be avoid...
Datomic Architecture with Marshall Thompson
March 24, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesDatomic is a database system based on an append-only record keeping system. Datomic users can query the complete history of the database, and Datomic has ACID transactional support. The data within Datomic is stored in an underlying database system such as Cassandra or Postgres. The database is written in Clojure, and was co-authored by the creator of Clojure, Rich Hickey. Datomic has a unique architecture, with a component called a Peer, which gets embedded in an application backend. A Pee...
Google Cloud Networking with Lakshmi Sharma
March 23, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesA large cloud provider has high volumes of network traffic moving through data centers throughout the world. These providers manage the infrastructure for thousands of companies, across racks and racks of multitenant servers, and cables that stretch underseas, connecting network packets with their destination. Google Cloud Platform has grown steadily into a wide range of products, including database services, machine learning, and containerization. Scaling a cloud provider requires both tec...
ClickUp Engineering with Zeb Evans and Alex Yurkowski
March 20, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesOver the last fifteen years, there has been a massive increase in the number of new software tools. This is true at the infrastructure layer: there are more databases, more cloud providers, and more open-source projects. And it’s also true at a higher level: there are more APIs, project management systems, and productivity tools. ClickUp is a project management and productivity system for organizations and individuals. The goal of ClickUp is to create a system that integrates closely with o...
Pulumi: Infrastructure as Code with Joe Duffy
March 19, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesInfrastructure-as-code allows developers to use programming languages to define the architecture of their software deployments, including servers, load balancers, and databases. There have been several generations of infrastructure-as-code tools. Systems such as Chef, Puppet, Salt, and Ansible provided a domain-specific imperative scripting language that became popular along with the early growth of Amazon Web Services. Hashicorp’s Terraform project created an open source declarative model...
Infrastructure Investing with Vivek Saraswat
March 18, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesSoftware investing requires a deep understanding of the market, and an ability to predict what changes might occur in the near future. At the level of core infrastructure, software investing is particularly difficult. Databases, virtualization, and large scale data processing tools are all complicated, highly competitive areas. As the software world has matured, it has become apparent just how big these infrastructure companies can become. Consequently, the opportunities to invest in these ...
Sisu Data with Peter Bailis
March 17, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesA high volume of data can contain a high volume of useful information. That fact is well understood by the software world. Unfortunately, it is not a simple process to surface useful information from this high volume of data. A human analyst needs to understand the business, formulate a question, and determine what metrics could reveal the answer to such a question. Sisu is a system for automatically surfacing insights from large data sets within companies. A user of Sisu can select a datab...
Location Data with Ryan Fox Squire
March 16, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesPhysical places have a large amount of latent data. Pick any location on a map, and think about all of the questions you could ask about that location. What businesses are at that location? How many cars pass through it? What is the soil composition? How much is the land on that location worth? The world of web-based information has become easy to query. We can use search engines like Google, as well as APIs like Diffbot and Clearbit. Today, the physical world is not so easy to query, but i...
Descript with Andrew Mason
March 13, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesDescript is a software product for editing podcasts and video. Descript is a deceptively powerful tool, and its software architecture includes novel usage of transcription APIs, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, and other domain-specific machine learning applications. Some of the most popular podcasts and YouTube channels use Descript as their editing tool because it provides a set of features that are not found in other editing tools such as Adobe Premiere or a digital audio workstation. De...
Flyte: Lyft Data Processing Platform with Allyson Gale and Ketan Umare
March 12, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesLyft is a ridesharing company that generates a high volume of data every day. This data includes ride history, pricing information, mapping, routing, and financial transactions. The data is stored across a variety of different databases, data lakes, and queueing systems, and is processed at scale in order to generate machine learning models, reports, and data applications. Data workflows involve a set of interconnected systems such as Kubernetes, Spark, Tensorflow, and Flink. In order for...
Cloud Investing with Danel Dayan
March 11, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesCloud computing caused a fundamental economic shift in how software is built. Before the cloud, businesses needed to buy physical servers in order to operate. There was an up-front cost that often amounted to tens of thousands of dollars required to pay for these servers. Cloud computing changed the up-front capital expense to an ongoing operational expense, with businesses increasingly shifting to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Platform. Although the initial mo...
OneGraph: GraphQL Tooling with Sean Grove
March 10, 2020 09:00 - 1000 BytesGraphQL is a system that allows frontend engineers to make requests across multiple data sources using a simple query format. In GraphQL, a frontend developer does not have to worry about the request logic for individual backend services. The frontend developer only needs to know how to issue GraphQL requests from the client, and these requests are handled by a GraphQL server. GraphQL is mostly used to issue queries across internal databases and services. But many of the data sources that a...
React Best Practices with Kent Dodds
March 06, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesReactJS developers have lots of options for building their applications, and those options are not easy to work through. State management, concurrency, networking, and testing all have elements of complexity and a wide range of available tools. Take a look at any specific area of JavaScript application development, and you can find highly varied opinions. Kent Dodds is a JavaScript teacher who focuses on React, JavaScript, and testing. In today’s episode, Kent provides best practices for bu...
React Stack with Tejas Kumar
March 05, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesJavaScript fatigue. This phrase has been used to describe the confusion and exhaustion around the volume of different tools required to be productive as a JavaScript developer. Frameworks, package managers, typing systems, state management, GraphQL, and deployment systems–there are so many decisions to make. In addition to the present-day tooling choices, a JavaScript developer needs to watch the emerging developments in the ecosystem. ReactJS is evolving at a rapid clip, and newer primitiv...
JavaScript Deployments with Brian LeRoux
March 04, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesFull-stack JavaScript applications have been possible since the creation of NodeJS in 2009. Since then, the best practices for building and deploying these applications have steadily evolved with the technology. ReactJS created consolidation around the view layer. The emergence of AWS Lambda created a new paradigm for backend execution. Serverless tools such as DynamoDB offer autoscaling abstractions. CDNs such as Cloudflare and Fastly can now do processing on the edge. Brian LeRoux is th...
React Fundamentals with Ryan Florence
March 03, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesReactJS began to standardize frontend web development around 2015. The core ideas around one-way data binding, JSX, and components caused many developers to embrace React with open arms. There has been a large number of educators that have emerged to help train developers wanting to learn React. A new developer learning React has numerous questions around frameworks, state management, rendering, and other best practices. In today’s episode, those questions are answered by Ryan Florence, a c...
NextJS with Guillermo Rauch
March 02, 2020 21:04 - 1000 BytesWhen ReactJS became popular, frontend web development became easier. But React is just a view layer. Developers who came to React expecting a full web development framework like Ruby on Rails or Django were required to put together a set of tools to satisfy that purpose. A full-stack JavaScript framework has numerous requirements. How does it scale? How does it handle server-side rendering versus client-side rendering? Should GraphQL be included by default? How should package management wor...
Slack Frontend Architecture with Anuj Nair
February 27, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesSlack is a messaging application with millions of users. The desktop application is an Electron app, which is effectively a web browser dedicated to running Slack. This frontend is built with ReactJS and other JavaScript code, and the application is incredibly smooth and reliable, despite its complexity. When a user boots up Slack, the application needs to figure out what data to fetch and where to fetch it from. Companies that use Slack heavily have thousands of messages in their history, ...
Makerpad: Low Code Tools with Ben Tossell
February 27, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesLow code tools can be used to build an increasing number of applications. Knowledge workers within a large corporation can use low code tools to augment their usage of spreadsheets. Entrepreneurs can use low code tools to start businesses even without knowing how to code. Modern low code tools have benefited from steady improvements in cloud infrastructure, front-end frameworks like ReactJS, and browser technology such as the V8 JavaScript engine. These building blocks led to the popular lo...
Parabola: No-Code Data Workflows with Alex Yaseen
February 26, 2020 18:08 - 1000 BytesEvery company has a large number of routine data workflows. These data workflows involve spreadsheets, CSV files, and tedious manual work to be done by a knowledge worker. For example, data might need to be taken from Salesforce, filtered for new customers, and piped into Mailchimp. Or perhaps you need to sort all your customers to find only the ones who have spent more than $50. These data workflows might require some basic knowledge of SQL, or an understanding of how to make an API requ...
Decentralized Finance with Tom Schmidt
February 25, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesCryptocurrencies today serve two purposes: store of value and speculation. The application infrastructure that has been built around cryptocurrency is mostly to support these use cases. At some point in the future, perhaps cryptocurrencies can be used as a global medium of exchange that is accepted at the grocery store. Perhaps we will use the blockchain for supply chain management, and as a universal ledger for real estate ownership. But today, cryptocurrencies are mostly used for specul...
Infrastructure Management with Joey Parsons
February 24, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesAt Airbnb, infrastructure management is standardized across the organization. Platform engineering teams build tools that allow the other teams throughout the organization to work more effectively. A platform engineering team handles problems such as continuous integration, observability, and service discovery. Other teams throughout a company use the tools that a platform engineering team builds. For example, there is a team at Airbnb that builds the search and discovery system that is use...
Courier with Troy Goode
February 21, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesA gig economy application generates lots of notifications. There is SMS, mobile phone updates, emails, and native application updates. If you order a ride from Uber, you might receive a text message and a push notification at the same time. If an app overloads the user with notifications, the user might end up annoyed and delete the app from their phone. But perhaps all of these notifications are necessary. You would rather get three simultaneous notifications from your food delivery app...
Data Infrastructure Investing with Eric Anderson
February 20, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesIn a modern data platform, distributed streaming systems are used to read data coming off of an application in real-time. There are a wide variety of streaming systems, including Kafka Streams, Apache Samza, Apache Flink, Spark Streaming, and more. When Eric Anderson joined the show back in 2016, he was working at Google on Google Cloud Dataflow, a managed service for handling streaming data. Today, he works as an investor at Scale Venture Partners. In his current job, he analyzes companie...
Materialize: Streaming SQL on Timely Data with Arjun Narayan and Frank McSherry
February 19, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesDistributed stream processing frameworks are used to rapidly ingest and aggregate large volumes of incoming data. These frameworks often require the application developer to write imperative logic describing how that data should be processed. For example, a high volume of clickstream data that is getting buffered to Kafka needs to have a stream processing system evaluate that data to prepare it for a data warehouse, Spark, or some other queryable environment. In practice, many developers s...
Go Networking with Sneha Inguva
February 18, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesA cloud provider gives developers access to virtualized server infrastructure. When a developer rents this infrastructure via an API call, a virtual server is instantiated on physical machines. That virtual server needs to be made addressable through the allocation of an IP address to make it reachable from the open Internet. When the virtual server starts to receive too much traffic, that traffic needs to be load balanced with another virtual server. The backend networking code that runs a...
Great Expectations: Data Pipeline Testing with Abe Gong
February 17, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesA data pipeline is a series of steps that takes large data sets and creates usable results from them. At the beginning of a data pipeline, a data set might be pulled from a database, a distributed file system, or a Kafka topic. Throughout a data pipeline, different data sets are joined, filtered, and statistically analyzed. At the end of a data pipeline, data might be put into a data warehouse or Apache Spark for ad-hoc analysis and data science. At this point, the end-user of the data set ...
Data Warehouse ETL with Matthew Scullion
February 14, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesA data warehouse provides low latency access to large volumes of data. A data warehouse is a crucial piece of infrastructure for a large company, because it can be used to answer complex questions involving a large number of data points. But a data warehouse usually cannot hold all of a company’s data at any given time. Users need to move a subset of the data into the data warehouse by reading large files from a data lake on disk and putting that data into the data warehouse. The process ...
Anyscale with Ion Stoica
February 13, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesMachine learning applications are widely deployed across the software industry. Most of these applications used supervised learning, a process in which labeled data sets are used to find correlations between the labels and the trends in that underlying data. But supervised learning is only one application of machine learning. Another broad set of machine learning methods is described by the term “reinforcement learning.” Reinforcement learning involves an agent interacting with its enviro...
Flink and BEAM Stream Processing with Maximilian Michels
February 12, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesDistributed stream processing systems are used to read large volumes of data and perform operations across those data streams. These stream processing systems often build off of the MapReduce algorithm for collecting and aggregating large volumes of data, but instead of processing a calculation over a single large batch of data, they process data on an ongoing basis. There are so many different stream processing system for this same use case–Storm, Spark, Flink, Heron, and many others. W...
Druid Analytics with Jad Nauous
February 11, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesLarge companies generate large volumes of data. This data gets dumped into a data lake for long-term storage, then pulled into memory for processing and analysis. Once it is in memory, it is often read into a dashboard, which presents a human with a visualization of the data. The end-user who is consuming this data is often a data scientist who is looking at the data to find trends and design new machine learning models. Another kind of user is the operational analyst. An operational analy...
The Data Exchange with Ben Lorica
February 10, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesData infrastructure has been transformed over the last fifteen years. The open source Hadoop project led to the creation of multiple companies based around commercializing the MapReduce algorithm and Hadoop distributed file system. Cheap cloud storage popularized the usage of data lakes. Cheap cloud servers led to wide experimentation for data tools. Apache Spark emerged from academia, and Apache Kafka came out of the corporate challenges faced by LinkedIn. Over these 15 years, Ben Lorica...
Presto with Justin Borgman
February 07, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesA data platform contains all of the data that a company has accumulated over the years. Across a data platform, there is a multitude of data sources: databases, a data lake, data warehouses, a distributed queue like Kafka, and external data sources like Salesforce and Zendesk. A user of the data platform often has a question that requires multiple data sources to answer. How does this user join two data sources from a data lake? How does this user join data across a transactional database a...
Nubank Data Engineering with Sujith Nair
February 06, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesNubank is a popular bank that is based in Brazil. Nubank has more than 20 million customers, and has accumulated a high volume of data over the six years since it was started. Mobile computing and cloud computing have given rise to “challenger banks” that operate more like software companies. When a software company reaches the size that Nubank is at today, it needs a data platform. A data platform is a collection of different technologies that move data into different storage formats and ...
Changelog Podcasting with Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo
February 05, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesThe Changelog is a podcast about the world of open source. As open source has become closely tied with the entire software development lifecycle, The Changelog has expanded its coverage to the broader software industry. Since starting the podcast ten years ago, Adam Stacoviak and Jerod Santo have become full-time podcasters, and they have started several other podcasts within the Changelog network, including Go Time, JS Party, and Practical AI. Throughout all of their shows, there is a cons...
Rive: Animation Tooling with Guido and Luigi Rosso
February 04, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesAnimations can be used to create games, app tutorials, and user interface components. Animations can be seen in messaging apps, where animated reactions can convey rich feelings over a text interface. Loading screens can become less boring through animation, and voice assistant products can feel more alive through animation. But we still don’t see much animation in our everyday applications. This is partly because animation tooling is difficult to use. To make an animation, the typical work...
John Deere: Farm Software with Ryan Bergman
February 03, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesRobotics has changed modern agriculture. Autonomous systems are powering the tractors, cotton pickers, and corn cutters that yield plants at industrial scale. John Deere is a company that has been making farm equipment for 183 years. Over that period, the planting and harvesting process has become increasingly mechanized, and John Deere has been at the forefront. Over the last few decades, software has played an increasingly important role at John Deere. Today, there is software inside the...
Venture Stories with Erik Torenberg
January 31, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesVenture capital investing requires an understanding of market dynamics, technology, and finance. There is also an element of human nature. Consumer trends can make or break the viability of a new product. And early stage venture investing is always a bet on a small team or individual founder. Early stage investments are usually into companies that have not found perfect traction with their product. Judging the worth of an early stage investment means judging the likelihood that the founder...
Alpaca: Stock Trading API with Yoshi Yokokawa
January 30, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesStock trading takes place across a variety of software platforms. Etrade and Schwab have allowed individual traders to buy securities for decades. Robinhood built a business around a similar model, but also removed the commission. Wealthfront and Betterment provide “roboadvisor” services that abstract away the underlying securities and focus on managing a risk profile. Each of these services has a programmatic execution system for managing assets. In order for a developer to build a product...
Cloud Log Analysis with Jack Naglieri
January 29, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesLarge software companies have lots of users, and the activity from those users results in high volumes of traffic. These companies also have a large surface area across the enterprise. There are hundreds of services and databases that are fulfilling user requests. As these requests enter the infrastructure of the enterprise, the requests travel through the different services and result in database queries, payments, and other transactions. These transactions result in the generation of log...
Replicated Software Delivery with Grant Miller and Marc Campbell
January 28, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesDistributed systems are required to run most modern enterprise software. Application services need multiple instances for scalability and failover. Large databases are sharded onto multiple nodes. Logging services, streaming frameworks, and continuous integration tools all require the orchestration of more than one server. Deploying a distributed system has historically been difficult because the nodes of the system must be managed by the underlying infrastructure. If I have a distributed d...
Mattermost with Ian Tien
January 27, 2020 10:00 - 1000 BytesChat systems have been a part of software development for decades. Older systems like Pidgin and Yammer were surpassed by newer systems like HipChat. And when Slack was created, it quickly became a part of most software companies. But Slack does not fulfill the needs of every company. Mattermost is an open-source chat system. Mattermost can be configured to work within enterprises that have strong constraints around compliance and data governance. Whereas Slack is a SaaS product that requir...