HTTP is a protocol that allows browsers and web applications to communicate across the Internet. Everyone knows that HTTP is doing some important work, because “HTTP” is at the beginning of most URLs that you enter into your browser. You might be familiar with the request/response model, and HTTP request methods such as GET, PUT, and POST. But unless you have had a reason to learn more about the details of HTTP, you probably don’t know much more than that. Julia Evans is a software engineer and writer who creates Wizard Zines, a series of easy-to-read online magazines that explain technical software topics. Julia’s zines include “Linux Debugging Tools”, “Help! I Have A Manager!”, and recently “HTTP: Learn your browser’s language”. Her zines are a creative, innovative format for describing the world of software engineering while also exploring her own artistic pursuits in writing, design, and illustration. Julia was previously on the show to discuss Ruby profiling, and she returns to the show to discuss HTTP, as well as her creative process and goals with Wizard Zines. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Announcements We are hiring a content writer and also an operations lead. Both of these are part-time positions working closely with Jeff and Erika. If you are interested in working with us, send an email to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com. We will be at KubeCon San Diego 2019, and AWS re:Invent Las Vegas. We are planning a meetup at re:Invent on Wednesday December 4. The post HTTP with Julia Evans appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Frontend software development has become as complex as backend development. There was a time when frontend web development was simple. There was a small number of JavaScript frameworks and templating systems. Your CSS was simple configuration for the colors on your webpage. Today, there is a giant ecosystem of frontend tools, APIs, and middleware delivering data to the user. Gatsby is a framework based on React that allows developers to build performant web applications. Gatsby is not easy to explain. In some ways, it is like a compiler for your website. Gatsby pulls in the data that you need to build your website, including CMS data, APIs, and markdown, and then links that information into React components and CSS. This happens on the server, so your user gets served a website that does not require lots of round trips as your website renders. Kyle Mathews and Sam Bhagwat are the founders of Gatsby, the company that is based around GatsbyJS. They join the show to describe their vision for the framework, and their vision for the company. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Check out our active projects: We are hiring a head of growth. If you like Software Engineering Daily and consider yourself competent in sales, marketing, and strategy, send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com FindCollabs is a place to build open source software. The SEDaily app for iOS and Android includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. Subscribe for ad-free episodes. The post Gatsby with Kyle Mathews and Sam Bhagwat appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Webflow is a platform for building applications without programming. Software engineering has barely been around for 30 years. Over that period of time, there have been many attempts to create a platform that allows for the creation of software without writing a line of code. Most of these systems have not been able to fulfill that task. And this should come as no surprise. It is hard enough to build an application if you know how to program.  Vlad Magdalin has been working on Webflow for more than seven years. He has persisted through multiple failed attempts at building Webflow, and pushed past continuous rejection from investors who did not see the viability of his vision.  As Vlad patiently worked on Webflow with his two co-founders, the power of the web browser slowly improved. V8 became a powerful runtime that could deliver the performance necessary to build applications visually in the browser. The unmet goals of past WYSIWYG application platforms faded into irrelevance, as Webflow came into being and allowed for an entirely new type of software development, driven by a visual interface in the browser. Webflow is one of the coolest, most ambitious software platforms in existence. Vlad joins the show to discuss Webflow and the future of software development. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Check out our active projects: We are hiring a head of growth. If you like Software Engineering Daily and consider yourself competent in sales, marketing, and strategy, send me an email: jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com FindCollabs is a place to build open source software. The SEDaily app for iOS and Android includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. Subscribe for ad-free episodes. The post Webflow: No-Code with Vlad Magdalin appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Isolation is a fundamental concept in computer science. Software workloads are isolated from each other in order to keep resource access cleanly separated.  When programs are properly isolated, it is easier for the programmer to reason about the memory safety of that program. When a program is not properly isolated, it can lead problems such as security flaws where one program can access the information that should be exclusive to a different program. Poor isolation can also lead to garbage collection problems, or running out of disk space. Isolation takes many forms, including individual processes, containers, and virtual machines. The techniques for isolation evolve over time. A more recent technology that can assist with isolation is WebAssembly, a newer execution system that can run a variety of languages that compile down into the WebAssembly binary format. For previous episodes about WebAssembly, you can listen to some of the shows in our archives. Tyler McMullen is the CTO at Fastly, a cloud provider that focuses on edge computing systems such as content delivery networking. Tyler has written and spoken about WebAssembly in detail. He joins the show to talk about computational isolation, and how WebAssembly presents new efficiencies for engineers looking to isolate their workloads. Full disclosure: Fastly, where Tyler works, is a sponsor of Software Engineering Daily. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Check out our active companies and projects: FindCollabs is a place to find collaborators and build projects. Find a project to work on Podsheets is an open source podcast hosting platform built with the learnings from Software Engineering Daily. Our goal is to be the best place to host and monetize your podcast. If you have been thinking about starting a podcast, check out podsheets.com. The SEDaily app for iOS and Android includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. Subscribe for ad-free episodes. The post WebAssembly Isolation with Tyler McMullen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

The browser has become the central application of the consumer operating system. Every piece of client software, from email to document management, has become usable through the browser. Even modern desktop software such as Slack is built using Electron, a tool for building client applications that essentially run inside of a browser without an address bar. One activity that still takes place largely outside of the browser is the process of writing and deploying code. A developer often uses an IDE such as Eclipse to write their code, then switches over to a terminal where they can build and deploy their code to a remote server running in the cloud. For a developer who has been writing code for a long time, this process feels completely intuitive. But for a new developer, it can be totally disorienting. New developers sometimes have trouble understanding the difference between a local and remote environment, or how to use repository management software like Git. This is in addition to all the other problems a new developer might be dealing with, such as language installation, syntax, and package management. Repl.it is a browser-based coding environment, compute engine, and collaborative workspace. Repl.it has found significant traction among new programmers who begin their programming journey within Repl.it and then stay in the environment, even as their applications become more richly featured and complicated. Repl.it is an amazing piece of software, and the story behind it is remarkable. Amjad Masad had the idea for Repl.it many years before he started the company for it, but he needed to first build up the money and confidence in order to go after the business with full force. Amjad joins the show to talk about his long journey towards building Repl.it, and to discuss the thriving Repl.it platform in its current form. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com Check out our active companies and projects: FindCollabs is a place to find collaborators and build projects. Find a project to work on Podsheets is an open source podcast hosting platform built with the learnings from Software Engineering Daily. Our goal is to be the best place to host and monetize your podcast. If you have been thinking about starting a podcast, check out podsheets.com. The SEDaily app for iOS and Android includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. Subscribe for ad-free episodes. The post Repl.it: Browser Coding with Amjad Masad appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Facebook was built using PHP, a programming language that was used widely in the late 90s and early 2000s. PHP allows developers to get web applications built quickly and easily, although PHP has a reputation for being difficult to scale.  In the early days of Facebook, the company was scaling rapidly on every dimension.  New users were piling into Facebook. Existing users were increasing their interactions and developing new patterns of usage. The Facebook application was rolling out new features quickly, adding them into the Facebook PHP codebase. A common pattern for scaling a large software application is to use a microservices architecture, breaking up the monolithic application into small services which can scale independently. For many applications, this pattern works well. But for some applications, microservices makes less sense. Microsoft Excel is one example. In Excel, a user is making updates to a complex data model using formulas, functions, and other in-app tools that need to be fast, performant, and integrated. The user needs to have a sense that the Excel data model will update quickly in response to changes.  A software team working on a spreadsheet product such as Excel might prefer to keep all the application logic in a monolithic application.  A monolith can centralize logic and make it easier to reason about. A monolith can reduce the number of network hops, cutting down on distributed systems problems. Testing and deploying a monolithic application can be less complex than doing so in a distributed, microservices system. Facebook chose to scale its PHP monolith rather than breaking it up into distributed microservices. Scaling PHP allowed Facebook to continue moving fast without going through a painful refactoring that would have slowed down the entire company.  The first effort to scale PHP involved transpiling the entire PHP application into C++. This C++ version of Facebook ran faster and with a lower memory footprint. But C++ required ahead-of-time compilation: the PHP codebase had to be converted to C++ in one synchronous step. The Hip Hop Virtual Machine (HHVM) is a just-in-time compiler that serves as an execution engine for PHP as well as Hack, a language that Facebook created as a dialect of PHP. HHVM allows for dynamic execution of code that is written in PHP or Hack. The code is first transpiled into HHBC, a high-level bytecode format that serves as an intermediate language. This bytecode is dynamically executed by the HHVM. As a bytecode virtual machine, HHVM has similarities to V8, the JVM, or the CLR. Keith Adams was an engineer at Facebook for six years, where he helped develop infrastructure to scale PHP effectively. Keith is now the chief architect at Slack, which is also a scaled PHP application. Keith returns to Software Engineering Daily to discuss why and how Facebook scaled PHP. ANNOUNCEMENTS New SEDaily app for iOS and for Android. It includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. You can comment on episodes and have discussions with other members of the community. I’ll be commenting on each episode, so if you hear an episode that you have some commentary on, jump onto the app, or on SoftwareDaily.com to share your thoughts. And you can become a paid subscriber for ad free episodes at softwareengineeringdaily.com/subscribe. Altalogy is the company who has been developing much of the software for the newest app, and if you are looking for a company to help you with your mobile and web development, I recommend checking them out.     FindCollabs is a place to find collaborators and build projects. FindCollabs is the company I am building, and we are having an online hackathon with $2500 in prizes. If you are working on a project, or you are looking for other programmers to build a project or start a company with, check out FindCollabs. I’ve been interviewing people from some of these projects on the FindCollabs podcast, so if you want to learn more about the community you can hear that podcast. Upcoming conferences I’m attending: Datadog Dash July 16th and 17th in NYC, Open Core Summit September 19th and 20th in San Francisco. We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line. The post Facebook PHP with Keith Adams appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Edge computing allows for faster data access and computation. When your client application makes a request, that request might be routed to the edge. Edge servers are more numerous and more widely distributed than normal data centers, but an edge server might not have all of the data or the complete application logic for the backend to serve your request. Edge servers have historically been used for content delivery networks (CDN). CDNs are useful for hosting and serving media files that might otherwise be slow to access over a network. More recently, applications are also using edge servers for computation, as well as storage of resources which are smaller than the movies, music, and images that have traditionally been stored on an edge server. Steve Klabnik is an engineer with Cloudflare, and he returns to the show to discuss storage at the edge. In Steve’s previous appearances we have explored Rust and WebAssembly, and we also touch on those topics in today’s episode. ANNOUNCEMENTS FindCollabs is a place to find collaborators and build projects. FindCollabs is the company I am building, and we are having an online hackathon with $2500 in prizes. If you are working on a project, or you are looking for other programmers to build a project or start a company with, check out FindCollabs. I’ve been interviewing people from some of these projects on the FindCollabs podcast, so if you want to learn more about the community you can hear that podcast. New Software Daily app for iOS. It includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. You can comment on episodes and have discussions with other members of the community. And you can become a paid subscriber for ad free episodes at softwareengineeringdaily.com/subscribe. Altalogy is the company who has been developing much of the software for the newest app, and if you are looking for a company to help you with your mobile and web development, I recommend checking them out. Upcoming conferences I’m attending: Datadog Dash July 16th and 17th in NYC, Open Core Summit September 19th and 20th in San Francisco. We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line. The post Edge Storage with Steve Klabnik appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Google Earth allows users to explore the imagery of the real world. Imagery for Google Earth is taken from satellites, cars equipped with cameras, and other sources. Google Earth renders a data intensive 3-D model of the world on a client application such as a desktop browser or virtual reality system.  WebAssembly is a runtime for executing code other than JavaScript in a browser-based environment. WebAssembly is useful for data-intensive workloads, and developers can use programming languages such as Rust or C++ in the browser by compiling to WebAssembly. Jordon Mears works on Google Earth, and he joins the show to talk about the engineering behind Google Earth and how WebAssembly is being used to improve efficiency. He also discusses the state of tooling around WebAssembly today.  SHOW NOTES Beta of Earth Using WebAssembly Preview of Google Earth on Web Across Browsers WebAssembly Brings Google Earth to More How We’re Bringing Google Earth to the Web  ANNOUNCEMENTS FindCollabs is a place to find collaborators and build projects. FindCollabs is the company I am building, and we are having an online hackathon with $2500 in prizes. If you are working on a project, or you are looking for other programmers to build a project or start a company with, check out FindCollabs. I’ve been interviewing people from some of these projects on the FindCollabs podcast, so if you want to learn more about the community you can hear that podcast. New Software Daily app for iOS. It includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. You can comment on episodes and have discussions with other members of the community. And you can become a paid subscriber for ad free episodes at softwareengineeringdaily.com/subscribe. Altalogy is the company who has been developing much of the software for the newest app, and if you are looking for a company to help you with your mobile and web development, I recommend checking them out. Upcoming conferences I’m attending: Datadog Dash July 16th and 17th in NYC, Open Core Summit September 19th and 20th in San Francisco. We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line. The post Google Earth WebAssembly with Jordon Mears appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Software projects are organized and planned using project management software. Examples of project management software include JIRA, Trello, and Asana. There are hundreds of tools for managing a software project because there are infinite ways that a project could be managed. Google Docs changed project management by allowing documents to be easier to share and collaborate on. Newer SaaS tools such as Slack, Dropbox, and Notion have taken the design lessons from social networking apps to make enterprise software more engaging. As the tools improve, our project management strategies change, and new software tools emerge to fit those new management strategies. Kurt Schrader is the CEO of Clubhouse, a project management tool for software engineers. Kurt joins the show to talk about the history and future of project management tools. He also discusses the engineering challenges of improving performance on a complicated webapp. Project management tools often have to load hundreds of small objects on a page, which required performance optimizations in the Clubhouse frontend JavaScript library. ANNOUNCEMENTS FindCollabs is a place to find collaborators and build projects. FindCollabs is the company I am building, and we are having an online hackathon with $2500 in prizes. If you are working on a project, or you are looking for other programmers to build a project or start a company with, check out FindCollabs. I’ve been interviewing people from some of these projects on the FindCollabs podcast, so if you want to learn more about the community you can hear that podcast. New Software Daily app for iOS. It includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. You can comment on episodes and have discussions with other members of the community. And you can become a paid subscriber for ad free episodes at softwareengineeringdaily.com/subscribe Upcoming conferences I’m attending: Datadog Dash July 16th and 17th in NYC, Open Core Summit September 19th and 20th in San Francisco We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line. The post Project Management with Kurt Schrader appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

WebAssembly allows for web-based execution of languages other than JavaScript. Programs written in Rust or C++ can be compiled down to WebAssembly and shipped over the browser for on-the-fly execution in a safe, memory controlled environment. WebAssembly has been in development for more than two years, and is still an immature ecosystem because building the necessary tooling for WebAssembly is hard. Much of the web has been built around JavaScript and the V8 JavaScript engine, which has been tuned to optimize an interpreted language (JavaScript). WebAssembly modules are often written in C++ or Rust, which are compiled languages. There are engineering challenges at the edge between the interpreted JavaScript runtime and the precompiled WebAssembly modules. Till Schneidereit is a senior research engineering manager at Mozilla. He joins the show to discuss the compilation path of WebAssembly and the state of the ecosystem. ANNOUNCEMENTS FindCollabs is a place to find collaborators and build projects. FindCollabs is the company I am building, and we are having an online hackathon with $2500 in prizes. If you are working on a project, or you are looking for other programmers to build a project or start a company with, check out FindCollabs. I’ve been interviewing people from some of these projects on the FindCollabs podcast, so if you want to learn more about the community you can hear that podcast. New Software Daily app for iOS. It includes all 1000 of our old episodes, as well as related links, greatest hits, and topics. You can comment on episodes and have discussions with other members of the community. And you can become a paid subscriber for ad free episodes at softwareengineeringdaily.com/subscribe Upcoming conferences I’m attending: Datadog Dash July 16th and 17th in NYC, Open Core Summit September 19th and 20th in San Francisco We are hiring two interns for software engineering and business development! If you are interested in either position, send an email with your resume to jeff@softwareengineeringdaily.com with “Internship” in the subject line. The post WebAssembly Compilation with Till Schneidereit appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.