The underlying cause of failure for many startups is that the founders are afraid of discomfort. An environment where everyone is comfortable is unlikely to be an environment where personal growth and value creation is occurring. When you are in a startup, calibrating the right amount of discomfort is often about calibrating risk. What are your ...…

Tinder is a popular dating app where each user swipes through a sequence of other users in order to find a match. Swiping left means you are not interested. Swiping right means you would like to connect with the person. The simple premise of Tinder has led to massive growth, and the app is now also used to discover new friends and create casual ...…

Online advertising enables free content and services of the Internet. One of the free services that is powered by advertising is the browser. 60% of web browsing is done through Chrome, which is owned by Google, which is powered by advertising. The application that most of us use to explore the web is made by a company that relies on ads, so it ...…

The applications that demand deep learning range from self-driving cars to healthcare, but the way that models are developed and trained is similar. A model is trained in the cloud and deployed to a device. The device engages with the real world, gathering more data. That data is sent back to the cloud, where it can improve the model. From the ...…

Spotify is a streaming music company with more than 50 million users. Whenever a user listens to a song, Spotify records that event and uses it as input to learn more about the user’s preferences. Listening to a song is one type of event–there are hundreds of others. Opening the Spotify app, skipping a song, sharing a playlist with a friend–all ...…

Moat is one of the most successful advertising technology companies in history. After building a business from measurement of ad impressions, Moat was sold to Oracle for $850 million. Advertising powers the free content on the Internet. Measurement makes it easier for publishers to monetize their content. At Software Engineering Daily, we know ...…

If I have a picture of a dog, and I want to search the Internet for pictures that look like that dog, how can I do that? I need to make an algorithm to build an index of all the pictures on the Internet. That index can define the different features of my images. I can find mathematical features in each image that describe that image. The mathem ...…

Software gives us new ways of communicating with each other. Engineers build scalable systems for e-commerce, helpdesk, and video sharing–and these systems do scale, to millions of people. But software alone cannot serve all of the demands of all the users and customers on these platforms. We need customer service representatives to address une ...…

Machines understand the world through mathematical representations. In order to train a machine learning model, we need to describe everything in terms of numbers. Images, words, and sounds are too abstract for a computer. But a series of numbers is a representation that we can all agree on, whether we are a computer or a human. In recent shows ...…

The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) was a digital form of venture capital. It was an ambitious idea–to provide a new decentralized business model for organizing corporations on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Few people in the crypto community were opposed to this premise–but the timeline was short, the code requirements were tremen ...…

You have probably missed some of the best episodes of Software Engineering Daily. If you listen to just a few episodes a week, it can be difficult to identify the high quality shows. And if you are new to the podcast, you have no idea how to find episodes that might appeal to you. Software Engineering Daily has a discovery problem. We have 600 ...…

When a cyber attack occurs, how do we identify who committed it? There is no straightforward answer to that question. Even if we know Chinese hackers have infiltrated our power grid with logic bombs, we might not be able to say with certainty whether those hackers were state actors or rogue Chinese hackers looking for an offensive asset to sell ...…

Ransomware and DDoS attacks happen all the time. Sometimes they affect large swaths of users. WannaCry ransomware froze the computer systems in hospitals. Mirai botnet DDoS attacks took down a DNS provider, making Netflix and Twitter inaccessible for a short period of time. These are innocent attacks compared to what we could face from a world ...…

Software companies that have been around for a decade have a ton of data. Modern machine learning techniques are able to turn that data into extremely useful models. Salesforce users have been entering petabytes of data into the company’s CRM tool since 1999. With its Einstein suite of products, Salesforce is using that data to build new produc ...…

We write code in a language that looks like English. Whether it is JavaScript, Fortran, or assembly language, that code is an abstraction on top of layers of intermediate languages, binary, transistors, and physics. 100 years ago, this would have seemed like magic. Most of us know about Alan Turing, who described the vision of a multipurpose co ...…

Automation will make healthcare more efficient and less prone to error. Today, machine learning is already being used to diagnose diabetic retinopathy and improve radiology accuracy. Someday, an AI assistant will assist a doctor in working through a complicated differential diagnosis. Our hospitals look roughly the same today as they did ten ye ...…

Loans give people more financial security. If people know that they can receive a loan, they will be more willing to take intelligent risks. A loan can allow for a short-term investment that pays off enough to justify the interest rate on that loan. For the lender, a loan can be a fantastic return on capital–as long as the lendee does not defau ...…

Sensors are being attached to trains, lightposts, and all kinds of factory equipment. Industrial machinery gives off high volumes of data that can be captured, stored, and processed with machine learning in order to improve workflows and ensure safety. Jayson Delancey works at GE, which is building tools and systems to manage large IoT deployme ...…

Most products do not sell themselves. Salespeople bridge the gap between a product creation and a customer who purchases it. People can make a good living on the internet selling niche products–if they can find their customers. The process of taking a large group of potential customers and narrowing it down to only the subset of those customers ...…

Applications built in the cloud are often serving requests from all around the world. A user in Hong Kong could have written to a database entry at the moment just before a user in San Francisco and a user in Germany simultaneously try to read from that database. If the user in San Francisco is allowed to see a different database entry than the ...…

Religious extremists use technology to recruit vulnerable individuals to a violent cause. Google is developing ways to combat this extremism through its platforms, namely YouTube. When a user looks for inflammatory religious or supremacist content, YouTube’s “Redirect Method” instead sends those users toward anti-terrorist videos. Google’s figh ...…

Content websites are supported by advertising. Most of the advertisements around the internet are dynamic ad slots that change depending on the user who visits the site. Those dynamic ad slots are available to a variety of different bidders. For each ad slot, an auction occurs. The highest bidder gets to serve an ad for that slot. Praneet Sharm ...…

The Internet runs on advertising. Advertising is subject to fraud–but then again, so is every system of online transactions. The amount of money lost in electronic payments fraud and ecommerce scamming is probably much greater than what is lost due to ad fraud. So why do we keep covering advertising fraud on Software Engineering Daily? More of ...…

Querying a search index for objects similar to a given object is a common problem. A user who has just read a great news article might want to read articles similar to it. A user who has just taken a picture of a dog might want to search for dog photos similar to it. In both of these cases, the query object is turned into a vector and compared ...…

Augmented reality is coming at us fast. Every large tech company is rumored to be building an AR product. Microsoft HoloLens is already available to developers. Pokemon Go, the most popular augmented reality product today, was made by a company that was spun out of Google. But Apple seems to be ahead of everyone. Apple’s ARKit is a set of tools ...…

When a user experiences an error in an application, the engineers who are building that application need to find out why that error occurred. The root cause of that error may be on the user’s device, or within a piece of server-side logic, or hidden behind a black box API. To fix a complex error, we need a stack trace of contextual information ...…

GatsbyJS is a framework for building web applications for JavaScript. Gatsby’s original goal was to allow users to create super fast static web sites that could be hosted and served efficiently at a low cost. Most web pages have components from a framework like React or Angular that need to render after the user requests them. This rendering ca ...…

Building and nurturing a developer community is hard work but it is vital for the growth of a country’s technology ecosystem. When communities coalesce around programming languages, tools or programming methods, what follows is a network of conferences, meet ups and other similar events. Juan Pablo Buriticá, VP of Engineering at Splice, has spe ...…

Quality assurance testing is a form of testing that closely mirrors user behavior. Sometimes it is manual, sometimes it is automated. Automated QA tests are scripts that validate correct data representation as the application mechanically runs through high-level workflows–like a login page. Manual QA testers act out use cases of an application ...…

Facebook was rapidly outgrowing its infrastructure in 2009. Classic data center design was not up to the task of the rapid influx of new users and data, photos and streaming video hitting Facebook’s servers. A small team of engineers spent the next two years designing a data center from the ground up to be cheaper, more energy efficient, and mo ...…

Slack is an application for team communication. Users chat across mobile devices, web browsers, and a desktop application, which means Slack has three places to deploy on rather than two. And the desktop apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux are not identical, so Slack has even more places to deploy. With so many different runtime environments, Slack ...…

Animations make an application more fun and engaging. For most apps, animation is an afterthought. Developers are concerned with getting the functionality right, and designers have enough work to do simply getting icons, text formatting, and page layout correct. There is also the issue of cross-device compatibility. iOS, Android, and web have d ...…

JavaScript is moving so fast. It’s not easy to keep up with all of the frameworks, build tools, and packages. No other language spans frontend to backend, mobile to web to server. Sacha Greif is an independent designer and developer most prominent in his roles as co-author of Discover Meteor and community builder at Sidebar.io, a design newslet ...…

The Internet of Things is the concept that traditionally analog objects, like thermostats and lightbulbs, can be given digital guts and connected to the internet to create more value for users. From Nest thermostats to Phillips Hue lightbulbs, these connected things are starting to enter the mainstream. According to recent estimates by Gartner, ...…

Serverless computing reduces the cost of using the cloud. Serverless also makes it easy to scale applications. The downside: building serverless apps requires some mindset shift. Serverless functions are deployed to transient units of computation that are spun up on demand. This is in contrast to the typical model of application delivery–the de ...…

After raising $18 million, social networking startup Yubl made a series of costly mistakes. Yubl hired an army of expensive contractors to build out its iOS and Android apps. Drama at the executive level hurt morale for the full-time employees. Most problematic, the company was bleeding cash due to a massive over-investment in cloud services. T ...…

Quantum computing is based on the system of quantum mechanics. In quantum computing, we perform operations over qubits instead of bits. A qubit is a vector, which can take on many more values than 0 or 1. The technology used to implement quantum computers is advancing such that it has its own Moore’s Law, but it can also leverage the classical ...…

Continuous delivery is a model for deploying small, frequent changes to an application. In a continuous delivery workflow, code changes that are pushed to a repository set off a build process that spins up a new version of the application. Testing is performed against that new build before advancing it to production, merging it with the existin ...…

Patents allow individuals and company to lay creative claim for an invention. A patent can provide protection from having its idea being used without giving credit to its creators. Of course, is that patents can be filed and not turned into products, inhibiting innovation. Patents can also be used offensively in a practice known as patent troll ...…

Wearables are everywhere. In the medical field they are transforming lives. Haiyan Zhang, Innovation Director at Microsoft Research, created a wearable for a young graphic designer that developed Parkinson’s. Parkinson’s is a condition that inhibits movement, and this wearable allows the Parkinson’s patient to write and draw again. Haiyan expla ...…

Self-driving cars are here. Fully autonomous systems like Waymo are being piloted in less complex circumstances. Human-in-the-loop systems like Tesla Autopilot navigate drivers when it is safe to do so, and lets the human take control in ambiguous circumstances. Computers are great at memorization, but not yet great at reasoning. We cannot enum ...…

A decade ago, a Microsoft developer might have been defined by the fact that they built C# applications on Windows. Today, a Microsoft developer is just as likely to be writing JavaScript for Linux. The company has repositioned itself to focus on cloud services, SaaS products, and enterprise artificial intelligence. Jason Young and Carl Schweit ...…

Building a startup requires constant evaluation of tradeoffs. At the earliest stage, the founders evaluate different ideas. Once an idea is settled on, the company develops strategies for finding early customers and growing. As the company develops traction, the operators consider ways to scale further or partner with an acquirer. Joseph Jacks ...…

Access to education is something everyone strives for but not all achieve–especially education that leads to meaningful and well-paying work. In today’s world where software is eating all sorts of industries, access to a good technical education is still out of the reach of many people. Laboratoria is a social enterprise which teaches women fro ...…

Containers are widely used in projects that have adopted Docker, Kubernetes, or Mesos. Containers allow for better resource isolation and scalability. With all of the adoption of containers, companies like Red Hat, Google, and CoreOS are working on improved standards within the community. Standards are important to this community because of its ...…

Reinforcement learning is a type of machine learning where a program learns how to take actions in an environment based on how that program has been rewarded for actions it took in the past. When program takes an action, and it receives a reward for that action, it is likely to take that action again in the future because it was positively rein ...…

In its most basic definition, machine learning is a tool that makes takes a data set, finds a correlation in that data set, and uses that correlation to improve a system. Any complex system with well-defined behavior and clean data can be improved with machine learning. Several precipitating forces have caused machine learning to become widely ...…

Software engineers have a skill set that can be applied to solve problems outside of a codebase. Analytical skills can be used to evaluate investment opportunities. Creative thinking can be used to build businesses. Communication skills can be used to build and enhance relationships. John Sonmez is a software engineer who created the Simple Pro ...…

Every software company backs up critical data sources. Backing up databases is a common procedure, whether a company is in the cloud or on-prem. Backing up virtual machine instances is less common. Rubrik is a company that is known for building backup infrastructure for enterprises. Their main product is an appliance that sits on prem at an ent ...…

Shopify is a company that helps customers build custom online storefronts. Shopify has built upon the same Ruby on Rails application since the founding of their business 12 years ago starting with Rails 0.5 and moving all the way to Rails 5. MRuby is a lightweight implementation of the Ruby language. Shopify made the decision to use mruby to al ...…