Kubernetes is an open source container management system. Kubernetes is sometimes described as “the Linux of distributed systems” and this description makes sense: the large numbers of users and contributors in the Kubernetes community is comparable to the volume of Linux adopters in its early days. There are many different distributions of Lin ...…

Continuous integration and delivery allows teams to move faster by allowing developers to ship code independently of each other. A multi-stage CD pipeline might consist of development, staging, testing, and production. At each of these stages, a new piece of code undergoes additional tests, so that when the code finally makes it to production, ...…

The DEV Community is a platform where developers share ideas, programming advice, and tools. Ben Halpern started it after running an extremely successful Twitter account creating humorous tweets for developers. One way to describe DEV Community is as a cross between Medium, Stack Overflow, and Reddit–but it has its own personality, so I recomme ...…

Modern applications produce large numbers of events. These events can be users clicking, IoT sensors accumulating data, or log messages. The cost of cloud storage and compute continues to drop, so engineers can afford to build applications around these high volumes of events, and a variety of tools have been developed to process them. Apache Ka ...…

A company runs a variety of distributed systems applications such as Hadoop for batch processing jobs, Spark for data science, and Kubernetes for container management. These distributed systems tools can run on-prem, in a cloud provider, or in a hybrid system that uses on-prem and cloud infrastructure. Some enterprises use VMs, some use bare me ...…

Netflix users stream terabytes of data from the cloud to their devices every day. During a high bandwidth, long-lived connection, a lot can go wrong. Networks can drop packets, machines can run out of memory, and the Netflix app on a user’s device can have a bug. All of these events can result in a bad user experience. Other errors can occur th ...…

Stock traders have access to high volumes of information to help them make decisions on whether to buy an asset. A trader who is considering buying a share of Google stock can find charts, reports, and statistical tools to help with their decision. There are a variety of machine learning products to help a technical investor create models of ho ...…

Engineering organizations can operate more efficiently by working with a continuous integration and continuous deployment workflow. Continuous integration is the process of automatically building and deploying code that gets pushed to a remote repository. Continuous deployment is the process of moving that code through a pipeline of environment ...…

Engineers need to have an awareness of the business model that allows their company to succeed. When a software company is going to market, the engineers need to work closely with the sales and marketing team to formulate a strategy for building and selling that product. This is especially true in highly technical products, such as database- or ...…

For most of history, a typical musician would learn to play one specific instrument. As synthesizers became available to the public, it became commonplace for a musician to create their own instruments using hardware and software. By the early 2000s, digital audio workstation software allowed a musician with a laptop to have access to the tools ...…

Robinhood is a platform for buying and selling stocks, cryptocurrencies, and other assets. Since its founding in 2013, Robinhood has grown to have more than 5 million user accounts, which is even more than the popular online broker E-Trade. With the surge in user growth and transaction volume, the demands on the software infrastructure have inc ...…

TIBCO was started in the 90’s with a popular message bus product that was widely used by finance companies, logistics providers, and other systems with high throughput. As TIBCO grew in popularity, the company expanded into other areas through products it developed in-house as well as through acquisitions. One acquisition was Jaspersoft, a busi ...…

Self-driving transportation will be widely deployed at some point in the future. How far off is that future? There are widely varying estimations: maybe you will summon a self-driving Uber in a New York within 5 years, or maybe it will take 20 years to work out all of the challenges in legal and engineering. Between now and the self-driving fut ...…

Kubernetes is in production clusters around the world with hundreds of thousands of containers. Kubernetes provides a distributed systems management environment for small startups and giant enterprises with applications ranging from microservices to machine learning pipelines. Because the use cases are already so wide-ranging, and the project h ...…

Every company with a large set of customers has a large set of data–whether that company is 5 years old or 50 years old. That data is valuable whether you are an insurance company, a soft drink manufacturer, or a ridesharing company. All of these large companies know that their data is valuable, but some of them are not sure how to standardize ...…

The main user interfaces today are the smartphone, the laptop, and the desktop computer. Some people today interact with voice interfaces, augmented reality, virtual reality, and automotive computer screens like the Tesla. In the future, these other interfaces will become more common. Developers will want to be able to expose their applications ...…

Back in 2014, platform-as-a-service was becoming an increasingly popular idea. The idea of PaaS was to sit on top of infrastructure-as-a-service providers like Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud, and simplify some of the complexity of these infrastructure providers. Heroku had built a successful businesses from the idea of platform-as-a-service, and t ...…

Building software today is much faster than it was just a few years ago. The tools are higher level, and abstract away tasks that would have required months of development. Much of a developer’s time used to be spent optimizing databases, load balancers, and queueing systems in order to be able to handle the load created by thousands of users. ...…

Stitch Fix is a company that recommends packages of clothing based on a set of preferences that the user defines and updates over time. Stitch Fix’s software platform includes the website, data engineering infrastructure, and warehouse software. Stitch Fix has over 5000 employees, including a large team of engineers. Cathy Polinsky is the CTO o ...…

Food gets thrown away from restaurants, homes, catering companies, and any other place with a kitchen. Most of this food gets thrown away when it is still edible, and could provide nutrition to someone who is hungry. Just like Airbnb makes use of excess living capacity, OLIO was started to connect excess food with people who want to eat that fo ...…

WebAssembly allows developers to run any language in a sandboxed, memory controlled module that can be called via well-defined semantics. As we have discussed in recent episodes with Lin Clark and Steve Klabnik from Mozilla, WebAssembly is changing application architectures both in and outside the browser. WebAssembly is being adopted by all of ...…

WebAssembly is a low-level compilation target for any programming language that can be interpreted into WebAssembly. Alternatively, WebAssembly is a way to run languages other than JavaScript in the browser. Or, yet another way of describing WebAssembly is a virtual machine for executing code in a low level, well-defined sandbox. WebAssembly is ...…

DoorDash is a last mile logistics company that connects customers with their favorite national and local businesses. When a customer orders from a restaurant, DoorDash needs to identify the ideal driver for picking up the order from the restaurant and dropping it off with the customer. This process of matching an order to a driver takes in many ...…

Cryptocurrency security is a concern to anyone who has a significant amount of money in the form of Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other crypto assets. Most Bitcoin is held in either a Bitcoin wallet or a Bitcoin bank. Your Bitcoin holdings are recorded on a public ledger. You access these holdings by authenticating with your private key. A Bitcoin wall ...…

At Google, the job of a site reliability engineer involves building tools to automate infrastructure operations. If a server crashes, there is automation in place to create a new server. If a service starts to receive a high load of traffic, there is automation in place to scale up the instances of that service. In order to create an automated ...…

Continuous delivery is a way of releasing software without requiring software engineers to synchronize during a release. Over the last decade, continuous delivery workflows have evolved as the tools have changed. Jenkins was one of the first continuous delivery tools and is still in heavy use today. Netflix’s open sourced Spinnaker has also bee ...…

Klarna is a payments company headquartered in Sweden. Since being established in 2005 it has grown to handling $21 billion in online sales in 2017. Roughly 40% of all e-commerce sales in Sweden go through Klarna. Klarna’s original differentiator was that it allowed users to checkout of e-commerce stores without entering in credit card informati ...…

Stripe is a payments API that allows merchants to transact online. Since the creation of the payments API, Stripe has expanded into adjacent services such as fraud detection, business management, and billing. These other verticals leverage the existing customer base and infrastructure that Stripe has developed from the success of their payments ...…

In the smartphone market there are two dominant operating systems: one closed source (iPhone) and one open source (Android). The market for self-driving cars could play out the same way, with a company like Tesla becoming the closed source iPhone of cars, and a company like Comma.ai developing the open source Android of self-driving cars. Georg ...…

Chad Fowler was the CTO of Wunderlist prior to its acquisition by Microsoft. Since the acquisition, Chad has become the general manager of developer advocacy at Microsoft. He also works as a venture capitalist at BlueYard Capital, an early stage investment firm. I’ve had a lot of fun talking to Chad, because he can move seamlessly between talki ...…

Music collaboration has historically been accomplished by musicians gathering in bands. A band is usually an in-person, physical manifestation: a drummer, a guitarist, a piano player. Or, on a large scale, a symphony of classical instruments led by a conductor. Today, the most flexible instrument that anyone can play is arguably the computer, b ...…

Java programs compile into Java bytecode. Java bytecode executes in the Java Virtual Machine, a runtime environment that compiles that bytecode further into machine code, and optimizes the runtime by identifying “hot” code paths and keeping those hot code paths executing quickly. The Java Virtual Machine is a popular platform for building langu ...…

A token is a unit of virtual currency. Most tokens are built on a blockchain-based cryptocurrency platform, such as Ethereum. Building on top of a platform like Ethereum allows these tokens to form their own financial ecosystem while leveraging the scale of an existing currency. Tokens became highly popular in early 2018, with the boom in ICOs– ...…

Medical breakthroughs require medical research. Medical research requires patient testing and data collection. The most common form of capturing patient data is through surveys–and most of those surveys today are done on paper. Surveying patients to understand the side effects or benefits of trial drugs or treatments, and getting accurate resul ...…

Apple operating systems are closed source. This closed source nature gives Apple an extremely successful business model–and a very different software developer ecosystem than Linux-based systems. Since Linux is open source, the information on how to manipulate the system at a low level is very public. The lack of information about low-level pro ...…

“Edge computing” is a term used to define computation that takes place in an environment outside of a data center. Edge computing is a broad term. Your smartphone is an edge device. A self-driving car is an edge device. A security camera with a computer chip is an edge device. These “edge devices” have existed for a long time now, but the term ...…

React Native allows developers to reuse frontend code between mobile platforms. A user interface component written in React Native can be used in both iOS and Android codebases. Since React Native allows for code reuse, this can save time for developers, in contrast to a model where completely separate teams have to create frontend logic for iO ...…

Blogging is more than 20 years old. Over that period of time, numerous publishing platforms have been created. Squarespace, Blogger, Medium, and Twitter are popular closed source platforms. WordPress has been the most popular open source blogging platform–and much of the Internet (including Software Engineering Daily) runs on WordPress. WordPre ...…

Howard Marks ran two video game companies in the 90’s: Activision and Acclaim. While running these companies, he developed a love for entrepreneurship that he maintains today. Howard is the CEO of StartEngine, a company that functions as an accelerator, a crowdfunding platform, and ICO launcher. Howard joins the show to talk about his backgroun ...…

Video streaming platforms like Netflix offer a convenient way to watch video content. We are now able to watch our favorite TV shows, movies, or content creators on a range of devices. However, buffering while watching videos can be a painful experience on mobile phones and tablets that use 4G or LTE. As streaming becomes available to a wider r ...…

Enterprises want to update their technology faster. One way an enterprise can accelerate the adoption of new tools is to move more aggressively towards the cloud. By giving internal developers access to the cloud, it becomes easier to provision new servers–allowing for rapid experimentation, test environments, and scalability. In previous shows ...…

JavaScript has been the exclusive language of the web browser for the last 20 years. Whether you use Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari, your browser interprets and executes code in a virtual machine–and that virtual machine only runs JavaScript. Unfortunately, JavaScript is not ideal for every task we want to perform in the browser. ...…

“Bots” are becoming increasingly relevant to our everyday interactions with technology. A bot sometimes mediates the interactions of two people. Examples of bots include automated reply systems, intelligent chat bots, classification systems, and prediction machines. These systems are often powered by machine learning systems that are black boxe ...…

Banking has been a part of the economy for 600 years. Banking has always been evolving. The most recent evolution: the financial industry has been going digital. Newer “fintech” companies have created innovative ways of doing everything related to money–from friendly payments to budgeting; from business transactions to insurance. However, the t ...…

Git is a distributed file system for version control. Git is extremely reliable, fast, and secure, owing to the fact that it is one of the oldest pieces of open source software. But even battle-tested software can have vulnerabilities. In this episode, we explore a subtle git vulnerability that could have potentially led to git users executing ...…

If you operate a restaurant, you want to know how many people are inside your restaurant at any given time. You also want to be able to know your occupancy if you operate a movie theater, coffee shop, or apparel store. Knowing how many people are in your building can answer several business-related questions. Do you need to unlock an additional ...…

Machine learning models allow our applications to perform highly accurate inferences. A model can be used to classify a picture as a cat, or to predict what movie I might want to watch. But before a machine learning model can be used to make these inferences, the model must be trained and deployed. In the training process, a machine learning mo ...…

Modern programming requires lots of integration between APIs. Some of these integrations are trivial–such as using Twilio or Stripe. But there are many more complex integrations. For example, when a large company acquires a smaller company, the acquiring company might want to integrate with that smaller company to leverage the synergies between ...…

Flutter allows developers to build cross-platform mobile apps. In our previous show about Flutter, Eric Seidel from Google described the goals of Flutter, why he founded the project, and how Flutter is built. In today’s show, Randal Schwartz talks about Flutter in more detail–including the developer experience of building Flutter apps and why h ...…

Nubank was started in 2013 with a credit card that was controlled through a mobile app. At the time, it was the first service in Brazil that allowed customers to do banking without going to a physical bank branch. Since then, Nubank has expanded into additional financial services and currently has 850 employees working in Brazil. Edward Wible i ...…