Greatest Hits Archives - Software Engineering Daily (Greatest Hits Archives - Software Engineering Daily)

“There are a lot more people who have the problem that Hadoop solves than there are people using Hadoop.”

Pachyderm is a containerized data analytics platform that seeks to replace Hadoop.

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The post Replacing Hadoop with Joe Doliner appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“Creativity never comes to you – she will only meet you halfway.”

Derek Sivers is a programmer, musician, and writer. He has created several companies and products, including CD Baby, which became the largest seller of independent music online.

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The post Creativity and Engineering with Derek Sivers appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“If I was trying to learn coding on my own, to the level that App Academy was able to teach me, it definitely would have taken me significantly longer.”

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The post Poker to Programming with Haseeb Qureshi appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“The official motto that we have in our help manual is ‘Losing is fun!’ ”

Dwarf Fortress is a construction and management simulation computer game set in a procedurally generated fantasy world in which the player indirectly controls a group of dwarves, and attempts to construct a successful underground fortress.

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The post Dwarf Fortress with Tarn Adams appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“Free Code Camp is my effort to correct the extremely inefficient and circuitous way I learned to code. I’m committing my career and the rest of my life towards making this process as efficient and painless as possible.”

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The post Free Code Camp with Quincy Larson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“Mutable state is the root of all evil.”

Erlang is a functional, concurrent programming language that was originally designed within Ericsson in the 1980's. It was built to support distributed, fault-tolerant, non-stop applications suitable for telecommunications infrastructure.

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The post Erlang with Joe Armstrong appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“The cloud as an environment – I had thought it was a purely utilitarian kind of thing. What I realized is that it’s a fascinating centralized repository of computation.”

Wolfram Research makes computing software powered by the Wolfram language, a knowledge-based programming language that draws from symbolic and functional programming paradigms.

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The post Knowledge-Based Programming with Stephen Wolfram appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“Changing anything changes everything.”

Technical debt, referring to the compounding cost of changes to software architecture, can be especially challenging in machine learning systems.

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The post Machine Learning and Technical Debt with D. Sculley appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

"Software is this really unique field that is growing so rapidly that people are almost forced to specialize into one subdomain – and that kind of stratification is good for your job and for your employers, but it's not necessarily good for you as an individual trying to grow in the field of software.”

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The post Episode 100 with Pranay Mohan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“If you can make a system that can survive this random failure testing, then you will more or likely survive whatever other chaotic conditions exist.”

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The post Scaling Uber with Matt Ranney appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“You’ve listened to podcasts where you gotta fast forward 8-9 minutes in before the actual meat happens.”

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The post Hanselminutes with Scott Hanselman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“Systems are giving up correctness for latency, and I’m arguing that stream processing systems have to be designed to allow the user to pick the tradeoffs that the application needs."

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The post Demystifying Stream Processing with Neha Narkhede appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“Humans are the most complicated thing out there – judging human skill is extremely hard, there’s all kinds of ways that people can be good.” Triplebyte is a technical hiring platform that vets engineers using a comprehensive evaluation platform and connects them to companies that are interesting in hiring them. Triplebyte was part of the

The post Hiring Engineers with Ammon Bartram appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“It’s a classic case where you have to be contrarian. It seems like the worst idea in the world to start a cloud hosting business. We didn’t know any better.” Moisey Uretsky is the cofounder of Digital Ocean, a leading cloud hosting provider based in New York. “It’s the usual immigrant story. My parents moved

The post Founding Digital Ocean with Moisey Uretsky appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Vint Cerf is Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. He contributes to global policy development and continued spread of the Internet. This episode is republished from The Quoracast. Questions: What will the world look like in 5 years? What are the biggest problems associated with rapid spread and development of the Internet? Does blockchain technology present

The post Internet Future with Vint Cerf appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“The best computer science is the kind where the theory is inspired by some practical problem, you develop a better theoretical understanding of what you want to do, and that feeds back into better practice.”

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The post Language Design with Brian Kernighan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“Actually it’s more work to turn a table into a chair, than it is to just make a damn chair.”

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The post The Evolution of Rails with David Heinemeier Hansson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

This episode is different from the traditional interview format of Software Engineering Daily, and focuses on the history of Hadoop. Thanks to Marco Bonaci for allowing us to republish this in audio format. You can find the original post here: History of Hadoop If you like this podcast, check out Marko’s book Spark in Action (affiliate

The post The History of Hadoop appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Following the successful experiment of History of Hadoop, we are doing another Saturday experiment: an editorial podcast. Let us know your thoughts via Slack, Twitter, or email! Our podcast errs on the side of technical rigor. Whether the topic is distributed databases, microservices, Soylent, Uber, or Dwarf Fortress, we try to separate hype from substance, deferring the

The post 10 Philosophies for Engineers appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“Its not just that we didn’t have git, we didn’t have Subversion, and before that we didn’t have CVS. Basically all that we had was RCS.” Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox–it’s easy to forget that these modern browsers descended from the war between Microsoft and Netscape. Today, we hear from a software engineer who was

The post Browser Wars with Eric Sink appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

This episode is a republication from my interview with Leslie Lamport on Software Engineering Radio. Leslie Lamport won a Turing Award in 2013 for his work in distributed and concurrent systems. He also designed the document preparation tool LaTex. Leslie is employed by Microsoft Research, and has recently been working with TLA+, a language that is

The post Distributed Systems with Leslie Lamport appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“The geeks won because somehow we tricked everyone into carrying around a computer with them!” Stack Overflow is used by developers to find out how to build software. Stack Overflow is both a tool and a community, and today’s guest Jeff Atwood has made a career out of building tools and communities. As the co-founder

The post State of Programming with Jeff Atwood appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“In many ways, nature is still the fastest computer we have when it comes to studying disease.” Software engineering is a deterministic field. We write lines of code, and feed data into that code, expecting to get a certain answer. Computing is deterministic because humans developed it–we understand computers from top to bottom. The same

The post Using Software to Discover Rare Diseases with Matt Might appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“The most important thing behind it is to think about developers in the way that product people think about consumers, and that the first time experience of your API needs to be ridiculously simple.” Software developers have been socializing on chat rooms for decades. In the nineties, we began using IRC and AOL instant messenger.

The post Gitter Engineering with Mike Bartlett and Andrew Newdigate appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“Seeing stuff happen is exciting in the early days. But when you try to be at the senior level, at the architect level, you have to understand that there is a cost to adopting a higher level abstraction.” Frontend web development was simpler in the past–CSS, HTML, and JavaScript were all you needed to know.

The post JavaScript and Frontend Development with Marc Grabanski appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Dropbox has been storing files on Amazon Web Services for 8 years, and Dropbox’s core business is storing files. For the past three years, Dropbox has been working on a project to migrate its file storage from Amazon Web Services to its own custom-built infrastructure. Magic Pocket is the name of Dropbox’s new infrastructure layer,

The post Dropbox’s Magic Pocket with James Cowling appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Coding boot camps are a subject of controversy. Critics of boot camps defend the conventional university system, and argue that boot camp graduates do not have enough experience to write quality software. But the reality is that some boot camp graduates have found success from this new educational path. After graduating high school, Kenny Tran

The post Boot Camps, Mesosphere, and Open-Source with Kenny Tran appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Most programmers spend lots of their time reading content about software. Since our field changes so rapidly, engineers consume news and editorials voraciously, trying to keep up with the impossibly fast pace. The Practical Dev is a collection of blog posts, editorials, and interviews that was created to help with that end. Ben Halpern is

The post Software Editorialism with Practical Dev’s Ben Halpern appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Six years ago, Twitter was experiencing outages due to high traffic. Back in 2010 Twitter was built as a monolithic Ruby on Rails application. Twitter migrated to a microservices architecture to fix these problems. During this migration, the engineers at Twitter learned how to build and scale highly distributed microservice architectures. William Morgan was an

The post Scaling Twitter with Buoyant.io’s William Morgan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Pieter Hintjens grew up writing software by himself. The act of writing code brought him great pleasure, but the isolated creative process disconnected him from the rest of the world. As his life progressed he became involved in open source communities, and he discovered a passion for human interaction. Open source software succeeds or fails

The post Death and Distributed Systems with Pieter Hintjens appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Scheduling is the method by which work is assigned to resources to complete that work. At the operating system level, this can mean scheduling of threads and processes. At the data center level, this can mean scheduling Hadoop jobs or other workflows that require the orchestration of a network of computers. Adrian Cockcroft worked on

The post Schedulers with Adrian Cockcroft appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Negotiation is an important skill for software engineers. The salary you negotiate at the beginning of your job could be a difference of tens of thousands of dollars over the course of an engineer’s career, but intimidating recruiters and exploding offers scare many engineers from negotiating at all. Today, Haseeb Qureshi returns to the show

The post Salary Negotiation with Haseeb Qureshi appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Bitcoin’s cultural implications inform the engineering opportunities and constraints. Andreas Antonopoulos is a bitcoin researcher, journalist, and evangelist. Questions What are the taboo topics within the bitcoin community? What do you think of when people say “we know bitcoin is the first real cryptocurrency, but the big question is whether it will be the last”?

The post Bitcoin with Andreas Antonopoulos appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Container infrastructure has benefits of security, scalability and efficiency. Containers are a central component of the DevOps movement. Joyent provides simple, secure deployment of containers with bare metal speed on container-native infrastructure Bryan Cantrill is the CTO of Joyent, the father of DTrace and an OS kernel developer for 20 years. Questions: Why are containers

The post Containers with Bryan Cantrill from Joyent appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

"What we learn again and again is that security is less about what you think of, and more about what you didn't think of."

Bruce Schneier is a security researcher and author of Data and Goliath.

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The post Security and Privacy with Bruce Schneier appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Functional languages encourage practices and patterns that can simplify concurrent programming. Scala, Clojure, and Akka are functional tools built on the Java Virtual Machine.

Jessica Kerr is a functional developer on the JVM. She currently works at Monsanto. At QCon San Francisco, she will be giving a talk called Contracts in Clojure: Settling Types vs. Tests.

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The post Functional Programming with Jessica Kerr appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

What is it like to be a young software engineer in Nigeria?

Osine and Anesi Ikhianosime have a deep understanding of the startup tactics that have led to so many successful companies in the Web 2.0 boom.

Their favorite podcast is a16z. Their role models include Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates. They recently worked on a machine learning compression project, inspired by the show Silicon Valley.

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The post Crocodile Browser with Anesi and Osine Ikhianosime appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

"If you focus on improving the developer experience, it will naturally translate into good documentation."

ReadMe is simplifying the process of writing documentation. The platform provides a readymade developer hub with the ability to integrate API endpoints into documentation.

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The post Rethinking Documentation with Greg Koberger appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Lee Atchison spent seven years at Amazon working in retail, software distribution, and Amazon Web Services. He then moved to New Relic, where he has spent four years scaling the company’s internal architecture. From his decade of experience at fast growing web technology companies, Lee has written the book Architecting for Scale, from O’Reilly. As

The post Scalable Architecture with Lee Atchison appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

EconTalk is a weekly economics podcast that has been going for a decade. On EconTalk, Russ Roberts brings on writers, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs for engaging conversations about the world as seen through the lens of economics.   Russ Roberts is today’s guest, and it is a treat because I have been listening to EconTalk since

The post Economics of Software with Russ Roberts appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Breakthroughs in modern data research tend to come from companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, with projects like MapReduce, Cassandra, and Dynamo.   Twenty years ago, this types of breakthroughs would be happening in academia, which causes today’s guest Peter Bailis to ask: is the academic data community having an identity crisis?   Peter is

The post Peter Bailis on the Data Community’s Identity Crisis appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Alec Ross worked in the White House as a Senior Policy Advisor to Hillary Clinton. His book Industries of the Future explores the biggest technological opportunities and threats to our society. The industries addressed in his book include robotics, genetics, and cybersecurity. Technological familiarity is increasingly correlated with an individual’s optimism. Cyberwarfare presents attack vectors

The post Industries of the Future with Alec Ross appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Most episodes of Software Engineering Daily are interviews with an expert about a technical software concept. Occasionally I write editorials, and also record them as a podcast. The first editorial was about 10 Philosophies for Engineers, the second was about how poker relates to software engineering, and the third was about music and software engineering. Today’s episode

The post You Are Not A Commodity appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

When you hear about massive data breaches like the recent ones from LinkedIn, MySpace, or Ashley Madison, how can you find out whether your own data was compromised?   Troy Hunt created the website HaveIBeenPwned.com to answer this question. When a major data breach occurs, Troy acquires a copy of the stolen data and provides

The post Data Breaches with Troy Hunt appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Machine learning has become simplified. Similar to how Ruby on Rails made web development approachable, scikit-learn takes away much of the frustrating aspects of machine learning, and lets the developer focus on building functionality with high-level APIs.   Per Harald Borgen is a developer at Xeneta. He started programming fairly recently, but has already built

The post Machine Learning for Sales with Per Harald Borgen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Research in artificial intelligence takes place mostly at universities and large corporations, but both of these types of institutions have constraints that cause the research to proceed a certain way. In a university, basic research might be hindered by lack of funding. At a big corporation, the researcher might be encouraged to study a domain

The post Artificial Intelligence with Oren Etzioni appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Facebook users provide lots of information about the structure of their relationship graph. Facebook uses that information to provide content and services that are expected to be important to users. If Facebook knows who the most important people in my life are, Facebook can use that knowledge to serve me content that is more relevant

The post Facebook Relationship Algorithms with Jon Kleinberg appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

When a company switches the relational database it uses, you wouldn’t expect the news of the switch to go viral. Most engineers are not interested in the subtle differences between MySQL and Postgres, right?   Uber recently switched from having Postgres as its main relational database to using MySQL. Evan Klitzke wrote a detailed blog

The post Uber’s Postgres Problems with Evan Klitzke appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Microsoft was the dominant technology company in the 1990’s, until it came under fire for anticompetitive practices. Internet Explorer was tightly coupled to the Windows operating system, which prevented Netscape Navigator–a competing browser–from reaching users on the dominant platform.   This episode is about antitrust–what businesses can and cannot do in the name of competition,

The post Microsoft Antitrust with Harry First appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

After nine years at Microsoft, Scott Berkun left to become an author. One of his books on project management was read by Matt Mullenweg, the creator of the WordPress blogging tool that runs a large percentage of the internet (including Software Engineering Daily). Scott became friends with the WordPress founder, who is also the CEO

The post Remote Work with Scott Berkun appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

When a user of a social network updates her profile, that profile update needs to propagate to several databases that want to know about such an update–search indexes, user databases, caches, and other services. When Neha Narkhede was at LinkedIn, she helped develop Kafka, which was deployed at LinkedIn to help solve this very problem.

The post Kafka Event Sourcing with Neha Narkhede appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Bot fraud, the New York tech scene, RethinkDB and open source; these topics and more are discussed in today’s episode. Two of the most popular guests return to the show to explore a variety of topics. Ben Halpern is the creator of The Practical Dev, a massively popular Twitter account and blog that you may

The post Topic Roundtable with Haseeb Qureshi and Practical Dev’s Ben Halpern appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

When Uber’s engineering team published a blog post about moving to MySQL from Postgres, Markus Winand started receiving lots of email. Markus writes about databases on his blog “Use The Index, Luke,” a guide to database performance for developers. The people emailing Markus wanted to know–if Postgres doesn’t work well for Uber, is it safe

The post Database Choices and Uber with Markus Winand appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Indie Hackers is a website that profiles independent developers who have made profitable software projects, usually without raising any money. These projects make anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month to more than $100,000 as in the case with park.io, one of the services profiled by Indie Hackers. Courtland Allen is the creator, engineer,

The post Indie Hackers with Courtland Allen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Legacy code is code without automated tests. Most companies have lots of legacy code, and most developers don’t like working on legacy code. Why is that? What is it that makes legacy code so difficult to work with? And why does a large amount of legacy code slow down an organization so severely? Andrea Goulet

The post Legacy Code with Andrea Goulet appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Ben Northrop was sitting at a tech conference, listening to a presentation about a new piece of technology, when he was struck by the sense that history was repeating itself. For the twenty years that Ben has worked as a software engineer, he has been hearing about new technologies that claim they will be able

The post Reflections of an Old Programmer with Ben Northrop appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Amazon Web Services changed the economics of building an internet application. Instead of having to invest tens of thousands of dollars up front for hardware, developers can pay for services over time as their application scales. As AWS has grown to be a gigantic platform, the documentation about how to use cloud infrastructure has become

The post AWS Open Guide with Joshua Levy appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Large technology companies have no shortage of data. But raw data itself does not provide a competitive advantage. Many companies are bottlenecked by a shortage of data scientists who can query that data effectively. This results in an organizational dysfunction where people lining up to ask questions of the data science team are unable to

The post Winning With Data with Tomasz Tunguz appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Everyone has debugging stories. We have all had the experience of wrestling with a seemingly impossible bug for days until we finally come to a solution. In today’s episode, Haseeb Qureshi retells some of his favorite debugging stories: The case of the 500-mile email, Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain, and My Hardest Bug Ever.

The post Debugging Stories with Haseeb Qureshi appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

You have probably received a parking ticket that you felt was unfair,   but instead of fighting it, you paid the expensive price to get rid of it quickly. Fighting a parking ticket sounds like it would be so time consuming that it is a better decision to just pay for it. When Joshua Browder was

The post Robot Lawyer with Joshua Browder appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

When you are deciding who to marry, you are using an algorithm. The same is true when you are looking for a parking space, playing a game of poker, or deciding whether or not to organize your closet. Algorithms To Live By is a book about the computer science of human decisions. It offers strategies

The post Algorithms to Live By with Brian Christian appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

When a human passes away, we create a tombstone as a memorial. Friends and family visit a grave to remember the times they had with that person while they were still alive. Memorial bots are another way to celebrate the life of someone who has passed away. A memorial bot is created by taking the

The post Bot Memorial with Eugenia Kuyda appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

In the 1990s, the barriers to starting a company were significant. Not only did you need an idea, you needed $200,000 for servers and Oracle licenses. With cloud computing, the up-front financial costs of getting a company off the ground have been mostly eliminated–but the idea of starting a company is still perceived as risky.

The post Startup Engineering with Mike Wolfe appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Engineers today have a variety of career options. You could go work for a large corporation, you could raise money and start a startup, you could freelance and move from job to job with freedom–or you could start a business with the goal of quickly becoming profitable. Courtland Allen was a guest on Software Engineering

The post Making Money Online for Software Engineers with Courtland Allen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

What is the relationship between your brain and your conscious experiences? This is is the fundamental question of the work of Donald Hoffman, a professor of computer science and cognitive science at UC Irvine. When Hoffman was a child, he wondered whether there was a cognitive dividing line between humans and machines, and that curiosity

The post Reality with Donald Hoffman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Cloud computing has pushed computation away from our own private servers and into virtual machines running on a data center. In the world of cloud computing, processing is centralized in these data centers, and our smartphone and laptop application performance suffers from having high latency between the client and the cloud server. As machine learning

The post The End of Cloud Computing with Peter Levine appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Most tech companies are moving toward a highly distributed microservices architecture. In this architecture, services are decoupled from each other and communicate with a common service language, often JSON over HTTP. This provides some standardization, but these companies are finding that more standardization would come in handy. At the ridesharing company Lyft, every internal service

The post Service Proxying with Matt Klein appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

If you wanted to build a machine learning model to understand human health, where would you get the data? A hospital database would be useful, but privacy laws make it difficult to disclose that patient data to the public. In order to publicize the data safely, you would have to anonymize it, so that a

The post Where Machines Go to Learn with Auren Hoffman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Brendan Eich created the first version of JavaScript in 10 days. Since then JavaScript has evolved, and Brendan has watched the growth of the web give rise to new and unexpected use cases. Today Brendan Eich is still pushing the web forward across the technology stack with his involvement in the WebAssembly specification and the

The post WebAssembly with Brendan Eich appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Servers in a data center fail. Sometimes entire data centers have a power outage. Bugs in an application make it into production. Human operators make mistakes and cause data to be deleted. Failure is unavoidable. We make backups and replicate our servers so that when a failure occurs, we can quickly respond to it without

The post Failure Injection with Kolton Andrus appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Big technology companies have so much going on at any given time that a journalist can tell any type of story they want to about it. Depending on what angle you observe the company from, you can write a story depicting that company as good, evil, growing, or about to crash. The truth only becomes

The post Amazon and Uber with Brad Stone appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Engineers in Silicon Valley see a world of constant progress. Our work is creative and intellectually challenging. We are building the future and getting compensated quite well for it. But what if we are actually achieving far less than what is possible? What if, after so many years of high margins, gourmet lunch, and self-flattery,

The post Complacency with Tyler Cowen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Facebook’s open source projects include React, GraphQL, and Cassandra. These projects are key pieces of infrastructure used by thousands of developers–including engineers at Facebook itself. These projects are able to gain traction because Facebook takes time to decouple the projects from their internal infrastructure and clean up the code before releasing them into the wild.

The post Facebook Open Source with Tom Occhino appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

We view our iPhones as inanimate objects. But when we see robots such as the Boston Dynamics machines that move with a motion that seems like an animal, the robot comes alive. We feel more sympathy and connection towards it. Today’s episode is about the distinction between inanimate machines and machines that seem alive. Peeqo

The post Robot Assistant with Abhishek Singh appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

There are certain experiences when a product solves a problem so thoroughly and elegantly that it lifts a weight off of your shoulders that you didn’t even know was there. Dropbox did this with file storage. Slack did this with group collaboration. Zencastr does this for recording podcasts. Before I used Zencastr to record my

The post Zencastr with Josh Nielsen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

A new programmer learns to build applications using data structures like a queue, a cache, or a database. Modern cloud applications are built using more sophisticated tools like Redis, Kafka, or Amazon S3. These tools do multiple things well, and often have overlapping functionality. Application architecture becomes less straightforward. The applications we are building today

The post Data Intensive Applications with Martin Kleppmann appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

CRISPR is a technique for altering the human genome. It might be the most powerful tool for biological modification that we have ever discovered. In this episode, we explore CRISPR: how it works, why it exists in the natural world, and the implications for being able to modify DNA so easily. Geoff Ralston is a

The post CRISPR with Geoff Ralston appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Humans have now been defeated by computers at heads up no-limit holdem poker. Some people thought this wouldn’t be possible. Sure, we can teach a computer to beat a human at Go or Chess. Those games have a smaller decision space. There is no hidden information. There is no bluffing. Poker must be different! It

The post Poker Artificial Intelligence with Noam Brown appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter facilitate interactions between individuals. Every message I send to you on Facebook goes through Facebook’s servers before reaching you. This is known as the client-server model. Since the early days of the internet, engineers have always envisioned a peer-to-peer model, where I could communicate to you directly, without a

The post Off-Grid Social Network with Andre Staltz appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

John Looney spent more than 10 years at Google. He started with infrastructure, and was part of the team that migrated Google File System to Colossus, the successor to GFS. Imagine migrating every piece of data on Google from one distributed file system to another. In this episode, John sheds light on the engineering culture

The post Google Early Days with John Looney appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Search engines run our lives. The path we take to information is dictated by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other forms of search. Search engines feel objective and truthful, but are built through ongoing experimentation and subjective decision making. That’s what has kept Danny Sullivan writing about search engines for twenty years. The content Google prioritizes,

The post Search Engine Land with Danny Sullivan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

The history of computing can be thought of as a series of ideas rather than objects. From Aristotle’s formalization of the syllogism, to Alan Turing’s model for an all-purpose computing machine, to Satoshi Nakamoto’s distributed transaction ledger–these breakthroughs did not come in the form of polished, tangible objects. In fact, the objects which end up

The post Computer Logic with Chris Dixon appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

“Culture fit” is a term that is used to describe engineers that have the right personality for a given company. In the hiring process, “lack of culture fit” is used to turn away engineers who are good enough at coding but just don’t seem right for the company. As today’s guest Ammon Bartram says, “lack

The post Culture Fit with Ammon Bartram appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 enumerate to a

The post Self-Driving Deep Learning with Lex Fridman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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

The post Quantum Computing with Vijay Pande appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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.

The post Serverless Startup with Yan Cui appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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

The post Word2Vec with Adrian Colyer appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

In America, the tech companies we focus on are commonly known as FAANG: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google. We all know what these companies do because they impact our daily lives. In Asia, there are three giant tech companies that have similar scale: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, otherwise known as BAT. Technology within a location

The post Analyse Asia with Bernard Leong appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

In the 1960s, advertising agencies were high-dollar creative producers. A client would come to an ad agency and pay millions of dollars for artistic messaging that would convince a consumer to buy a product. How could you measure the success of these advertising campaigns? Maybe you could see success in the sales data. Maybe people

The post Bad Men with Bob Hoffman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

In 2003, Paul Martino co-founded Tribe.net, one of the earliest social networking sites.  Tribe had significant traction, with hundreds of thousands of users. In the early 2000s, hundreds of thousands of users was enough traffic to pose a company with engineering challenges. Paul had studied computer science, and was able to use his knowledge of

The post Parlaying Failure to Fortune with Paul Martino appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

The Netflix API is accessed by developers who build for over 1000 device types: TVs, smartphontes, VR headsets, laptops. If it has a screen, it can probably run Netflix. On each of these different devices, the Netflix experience is different. Different screen sizes mean there is variable space to display the content. When you open

The post Netflix Serverless-like Platform with Vasanth Asokan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

An engineer who wants to start a business using investment capital needs to understand the expectations of investors. The market for the business needs to be huge. The team needs to have a differentiated understanding of the market, or a differentiated product. The CEO needs to have the determination to continue operating the company even

The post Early Investments with Semil Shah appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Imagine that you are a lawyer. Your work involves managing files with dense, technical text. Your co-workers collaborate with you to accomplish a complex goal that can be broken down into smaller pieces. Your work has formal specifications, but there are degrees of freedom in how you express an idea. In all of these ways,

The post Legal Technology with Justin Kan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

As the gig economy grows, that growth necessitates innovations in the online infrastructure powering these new labor markets. In our previous episodes about Uber, we explored the systems that balance server load and gather geospacial data. In our coverage of Lyft, we studied Envoy, the service proxy that standardizes communications and load balancing among services.

The post Fiverr Engineering with Gil Sheinfeld appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

A popular software application serves billions of user requests. These requests could be for many different things. These requests need to be routed to the correct destination, load balanced across different instances of a service, and queued for processing. Processing a request might require generating a detailed response to the user, or making a write

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Automation is changing the labor market. To automate a task, someone needs to put in the work to describe the task correctly to a computer. For some tasks, the reward for automating a task is tremendous–for example, putting together mobile phones. In China, companies like FOXCONN are investing time and money into programming the instructions

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There is a quote from Jeff Bezos: “70% of the work of building a business today is undifferentiated heavy lifting. Only 30% is creative work. Things will be more exciting when those numbers are inverted.” That quote is from 2006, before Amazon Web Services had built most of their managed services. In 2006, you had

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Originally published November 17, 2015 “Changing anything changes everything.” Technical debt, referring to the compounding cost of changes to software architecture, can be especially challenging in machine learning systems. D. Sculley is a software engineer at Google, focusing on machine learning, data mining, and information retrieval. He recently co-authored the paper Machine Learning: The High

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Originally published November 10, 2015 “The cloud as an environment – I had thought it was a purely utilitarian kind of thing. What I realized is that it’s a fascinating centralized repository of computation.” Wolfram Research makes computing software powered by the Wolfram language, a knowledge-based programming language that draws from symbolic and functional programming

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Originally published November 18, 2015 “The playing field has never ever been more leveled – that means everything you don’t build is your choice not to build it.” Seth Godin is a writer, speaker, and entrepreneur. He is the author of many books, including most recently, What To Do When It’s Your Turn. Questions How

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