Daniel Bayer Podcasts

This episode of Software Engineering Daily is part of our on-site coverage of KubeCon 2023, which took place from November 6th through 9th in Chicago. In today’s interview, host Jordi Mon Companys speaks with David DeSanto who is the Chief Product Officer at GitLab. Jordi Mon Companys is a product manager and marketer that specializes in software d…

Josh Prismon is a veteran software architect, having worked at FICO for 17 years before shifting to Index Exchange in 2022. In this episode, Josh joins the podcast to speak with host Lee Atchison, who also has deep experience in software architecture from his time at Amazon, New Relic, and other companies. Josh and Lee discuss different paradigms f…

Data breaches at major companies are so now common that they hardly make the news. The Wikipedia page on data breaches lists over 350 between 2004 and 2023. The Equifax breach in 2017 was especially notable because over 160 million records were leaked, and much of the data was acquired by Equifax without individuals’ knowledge or consent. Data brea…

Virtual Memories Show 565: Danny Fingeroth “I figured my entry point into a JFK assassination book would be Jack Ruby, given my interest in offbeat — to say the least — American Jews.” With the 60th anniversary of the assassinations of JFK & Lee Harvey Oswald, Danny Fingeroth brings us the new biography, JACK RUBY: The Many Faces of Oswald’s Assass…

With the 60th anniversary of the assassinations of JFK & Lee Harvey Oswald, Danny Fingeroth brings us the new biography, JACK RUBY: The Many Faces of Oswald's Assassin (Chicago Review Press). Danny & I talk about what drew him to tell Ruby's story, how many JFK conspiracy rabbit-holes he had to avoid, the challenges of separating Ruby's life from m…

If you’re a sports fan and like to track sports statistics and results, you’ve probably heard of Sofascore. The website started in 2010 and ran on a modest single server. It now has 25 million monthly active users, covers 20 different sports, 11,000 leagues and tournaments, and is available in over 30 languages. Josip Stuhli has been with Sofascore…

Cloud-based software development platforms such as GitHub Codespaces continue to grow in popularity. These platforms are attractive to enterprise organizations because they can be managed centrally with security controls. However, many, if not most, developers prefer a local IDE. Daytona is aiming to bridge that gap. It’s a layer between a local ID…

Knowledge graphs are an intuitive way to define relationships between objects, events, situations, and concepts. Their ability to encode this information makes them an attractive database paradigm. Hume is a graph-based analysis solution developed by GraphAware. It represents data as a network of interconnected entities and provides analysis capabi…

Virtual Memories Show 564: Matt Bors “I just had my first actual post-Nib work week, and I realized that I do not receive and send 200 emails a day, like I did for the past decade.” With The Nib, cartoonist & editor Matt Bors helped build an online (and print!) venue for political satire, graphic journalism and non-fiction comics that featured some…

With The Nib, cartoonist & editor Matt Bors helped build an online (and print!) venue for political satire, graphic journalism and non-fiction comics that featured some of the best names in comics and gave space to a bazillion up-and-comers. Matt & I sat down during CXC to talk about his decision to close down The Nib after 10 years, how it felt to…

Shopify is an e-commerce platform focused on enabling small businesses to sell online. The company was founded in 2006 and since then has become a core technology of online business infrastructure. Mike Shaver is a Distinguished Engineer at Shopify and previously worked at Facebook, Mozilla, Oracle and others. At Shopify he works on the core team, …

When Adam Berger was at Uber, his team was responsible for ensuring that Uber Eats merchants correctly receive and fulfill orders. This required them to think hard about engineering workflows and state management systems. Six years of experience at Uber motivated Adam to create State Backed, which is an open-source backend system written in Typescr…

One of the key challenges that teams encounter is how to smoothly collaborate on converting a design into code. For example, if a designer designs a web component, how can it be most efficiently implemented by a developer? What happens if the designer needs to adjust the design and communicate this change to the developer? These sorts of issues can…

Virtual Memories Show 563: Phillip Lopate “I had a snobbish contempt for blogs, but just because I had a contempt for it, I thought perversely, ‘Maybe I can appropriate it and push it in a different direction.'” With his new collection, A YEAR AND A DAY: AN EXPERIMENT IN ESSAYS (NYRB), master essayist Phillip Lopate explores the world & himself thr…

With his new collection, A YEAR AND A DAY: AN EXPERIMENT IN ESSAYS (NYRB), master essayist Phillip Lopate explores the world & himself through the mode of a weekly blog. We get into how he adapted to a short, time-constrained essay form for The American Scholar, how he avoided The Columnist's Curse (limitless curiosity helps!), whether an essayist …

Frontend web frameworks are software toolkits that handle many of the low-level and repetitive aspects of building a website. These frameworks have made it easier than ever to build a modern website. The open-source Astro framework was created in 2021 for the purpose of creating simple static sites that load quickly. A key factor to its high perfor…

Observability software helps teams to actively monitor and debug their systems, and these tools are increasingly vital in DevOps. However, it’s not uncommon for the volume of observability data to exceed the amount of actual business data. This creates two challenges – how to analyze the large stream of observability data, and how to keep down the …

The open source coding philosophy has enormous appeal to many software engineers, and with good reason. Open source libraries, applications, and operating systems are now essential to the overall technology ecosystem. And the number of open source projects is only increasing. But many developers don’t know how to get involved in open source. Or, th…

Virtual Memories Show 562: Leslie Stein “As far as developing a style, it’s all experimental. It’s all just making mistakes and then seeing what are good mistakes.” With her wonderful, hilarious & heartfelt new graphic novel, Brooklyn’s Last Secret (Drawn & Quarterly), cartoonist Leslie Stein brings us the story of Major Threat, a getting-over-the-…

With her wonderful, hilarious & heartfelt new graphic novel, Brooklyn's Last Secret (Drawn & Quarterly), cartoonist Leslie Stein brings us the story of Major Threat, a getting-over-the-hill indy band on tour. During SPX 2023, we talked about how she mined the raw material of her own rock & roll tour experiences (and those of her friends) to make a …

There are countless real world scenarios where a workflow or process has multiple steps, and some steps must be completed before others can be started. Think of something as simple as cooking dinner. First you look up a recipe, then you write down the ingredients you need, you go shopping, and then you cook. These steps must be run in a certain ord…

Speech technology has been around for a long time, but in the last 12 months it’s undergone a quantum leap. New speech synthesis models are able to produce speech that’s often indistinguishable from real speech. I’m sure many listeners have heard deep fakes where computer speech perfectly mimics the voice of famous actors or public figures. A major…

If you’re a developer, there’s a good chance you’ve experimented with coding assistants like GitHub Copilot. Many developers have even fully integrated these tools into their workflows. One way these tools accelerate development is by autocompleting entire blocks of code. The AI achieves this by having awareness of the surrounding code. It understa…

Virtual Memories Show 561: Josh Bayer “How do you resolve a play that doesn’t have an ending?” With his new graphic novel/memoir, UNENDED (Uncivilized Books), cartoonist Josh Bayer explores family trauma, memory, art, and more. We get into how Josh spent five years trying to adapt his late father’s unfinished play into a comic, the ways it did & di…

With his new graphic novel/memoir, UNENDED (Uncivilized Books), cartoonist Josh Bayer explores family trauma, memory, art, and more. We get into how Josh spent five years trying to adapt his late father's unfinished play into a comic, the ways it did & didn't help him come to terms with his father's life and his mother's death, and why he blurs out…

Documentation is something that everyone knows is important but it’s often difficult to get right. On software teams, good documentation can help to onboard new people, improve communication across teams, and …

Observability is becoming an increasingly competitive space in the software world. Many developers have heard of Datadog and New Relic, but there are a seemingly countless number of observability products out there. Costa Tsaousis (he/him) is the Founder and CEO of Netdata. His goal was to build an open-source platform that was high-resolution, rea…

Ongoing advances in generative AI are already having a huge impact on developer productivity. Tools like GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT are increasing the velocity of code development, and more advances are on the horizon. However, an ever-growing challenge for developers is how to manage their coding resources – things like code snippets, website link…

The importance of data teams is undeniable. Most companies today use data to drive decision-making on anything from software feature development to product strategy, hiring and marketing. In some companies data is the product, which can make data teams even more vital. But there’s a common problem – analyzing data is hard and time consuming. Lots o…

Virtual Memories Show 560: Adam Sisman “I still think he’s the definitive novelist of the Cold War, and a major novelist in trying to understand Britain’s post-imperial struggle/sleepwalk.” With The Secret Life of John le Carré (Harper), Adam Sisman reveals the secrets he couldn’t publish in 2015’s John le Carré: The Biography, and explores how ser…

With The Secret Life of John le Carré (Harper), Adam Sisman reveals the secrets he couldn't publish in 2015's John le Carré: The Biography, and explores how serial deception & betrayals — through the multiple affairs le Carré (a.k.a. David Cornwell) conducted during both of his marriages — can provide a key to understanding the late, great spy nove…

Platform engineering is difficult to get right, and in the age of DevOps and cloud computing, software developers increasingly serve as platform engineers while they’re building their applications. This can be an engineering challenge because organizations often require their platforms to provide fine-grained control and compliance management. Cory…

Today it’s estimated there are over 1 billion websites on the internet. Much of this content is optimized to be viewed by human eyes, not consumed by machines. However, creating systems to automatically parse and structure the web greatly extends its utility, and paves the way for innovative solutions and applications. The industry of web scraping …

Virtual Memories Show 559: Lisa Morton “I was one of those weird little girls who at Halloween wanted to be a monster, not a princess.” Let’s celebrate spooky season with The Art of the Zombie Movie (Applause Books)! Author Lisa Morton & I talk about her new book and the fun of researching the history of zombies in pop culture and folklore, the cha…

Let's celebrate spooky season with The Art of the Zombie Movie (Applause Books)! Author Lisa Morton & I talk about her new book and the fun of researching the history of zombies in pop culture and folklore, the challenge & joy of assembling the 500 illustrations in the book (including one-sheets, stills, alternative art, and more), and how she got …

If you’re a developer, you’ve probably worked with an API, or application programming interface. An API is a set of rules for how to communicate with an applications or device. For example, when you build an app and want to use Stripe to handle payments, or use Slack to deliver notifications, it’s APIs that make this possible. Handling communicatio…

There are hundreds of observability companies out there, and many ways to think about observability, such as application performance monitoring, server monitoring, and tracing. In a production application, multiple tools are often needed to get proper visibility on the application. This creates some challenges. Applications can produce lots of diff…

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, is used to load webpages using hypertext links, and it’s the foundation of the web. Tim Berners-Lee famously created HTTP version 0.9 in 1989, and defined the essential behavior of a client and a server. Version 1.0 was eventually finalized in 1996, and its secure variant called HTTPS is now used on more th…

Virtual Memories Show 558: Daniel Clowes “As I started working on Monica, everyone around me started dying in succession, and that drastically changed the course of this book.” With MONICA (Fantagraphics), legendary cartoonist Daniel Clowes has pushed the limits of his storytelling and art to make one of the great graphic novels of the decade. We s…

With MONICA (Fantagraphics), legendary cartoonist Daniel Clowes has pushed the limits of his storytelling and art to make one of the great graphic novels of the decade. We sat down during CXC weekend to talk about this amazing, haunting, hilarious book and how it grew out of his attempts at trying to figure out his childhood, the ways in which MONI…

A platform as a service, or PaaS, is the concept of a complete development and deployment environment in the cloud. One of the best examples is Heroku, which was created in 2007 and later acquired by Salesforce. Although these services are great for helping startups get off the ground quickly, they can ultimately become a form of technical debt bec…

It’s now clear that the adoption of AI will continue to increase, with nearly every industry working to rapidly incorporate it into their systems and applications to provide greater value to their users. Business analytics is a key domain that promises to be radically reshaped by AI. Alembic is an AI platform that integrates web data, product conve…

Virtual Memories Show 557: Rachel Shteir “How does someone go against convention and advance an idea that’s not even in the public consciousness? I don’t know if you can do that and stay within the confines of civility.” With her fantastic new biography, Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter (Yale University Press), Rachel Shteir sheds light on a ke…

With her fantastic new biography, Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter (Yale University Press), Rachel Shteir sheds light on a key figure in the women's rights movement. We get into how Friedan's The Feminine Mystique is being erased or glossed over by contemporary writing about women, how the 50th anniversary of TFM sparked this biography, the cha…

When StackOverflow launched in 2008 it lowered the barrier to writing complex software. It solved the longstanding problem of accessing accurate and reliable programming knowledge by offering a collaborative space where programmers could ask questions, share insights, and receive high-quality answers from a community of experts. Generative AI has i…

Picture a user interacting with a web app on their phone. When they tap the screen the app triggers communication with a server, which in turn communicates with a database. This process then happens in reverse to eventually update what the user sees on-screen. The latency for this round trip depends a lot on the physical distance between the user a…

Virtual Memories Show 556: Patrick McDonnell “I feel like I was The Watcher; I was witnessing — without interfering — this book happen. . . . The Watcher is the changeless witness to the changeful mind.” What’s it like to put out books with Jack Kirby and the Dalai Lama in the same year? Legendary cartoonist & artist Patrick McDonnell rejoins the s…

What's it like to put out books with Jack Kirby and the Dalai Lama in the same year? Legendary cartoonist & artist Patrick McDonnell rejoins the show to talk about his amazing new books THE SUPER HERO'S JOURNEY (Abrams ComicArts), his collaboration with the Dalai Lama, HEART TO HEART (Harper One), and more! We get into the secret origin of The Supe…

Developer experience, or DevX, is a critical aspect of modern software development that focuses on creating a seamless and productive environment for developers. It encompasses everything from the tools and technologies used in the development process to the documentation, libraries, and frameworks available to streamline coding tasks. An emphasis …

Infrastructure as code refers to the use of software and configuration files to convey infrastructure specifications. This is in contrast to the traditional approach of manually provisioning servers, operating systems, storage, and other infrastructure components. With the growth of cloud computing, the infrastructure as code paradigm is becoming m…