Chess.com started in 2007 and grew steadily in the years following. The platform exploded in popularity during the pandemic, to the point that their servers struggled with the traffic. It was a great problem to have. Chess.com was instrumental in helping to elevate chess to its current height of mainstream popularity. But how did Chess.com

Mastodon is an open source, decentralized social network. Eugen Rochko started building Mastodon in response to his dissatisfaction with centralized social networks like Facebook and Twitter. In the Mastodon model, users can run their own nodes, and other users can connect to them. You can follow users whose accounts reside in other nodes. Eugen joins

This episode of Software Engineering Daily is part of our on-site coverage of AWS re:Invent 2023, which took place from November 27th through December 1st in Las Vegas. In today’s interview, host Jordi Mon Companys speaks with Mike Miller who is the Director of AWS AI Devices. Jordi Mon Companys is a product manager and

This episode of Software Engineering Daily is part of our on-site coverage of AWS re:Invent 2023, which took place from November 27th through December 1st in Las Vegas. In today’s interview, host Jordi Mon Companys speaks with Kevin Kelly who is the Director of the AWS Cloud Institute. Visit https://aws.amazon.com/training to learn more about AWS’s

This episode of Software Engineering Daily is part of our on-site coverage of AWS re:Invent 2023, which took place from November 27th through December 1st in Las Vegas. In today’s interview, host Jordi Mon Companys speaks with Rob Zuber who is the CTO at CircleCI. Jordi Mon Companys is a product manager and marketer that

SQL databases were built for data consistency and vertical scalability. They did this very well for the long era of monolithic applications running in dedicated, single-server environments. However, their design presented a problem when the paradigm changed to distributed applications in the cloud. This shift eventually ushered in the rise of distributed SQL databases. One

Frédéric Harper is the Principal Developer Advocate at Kubefirst, which is an open source platform that integrates some of the most popular tools in the Kubernetes space. Frédéric has deep experience at major software companies having worked at npm, Mozilla, Microsoft, DigitalOcean, Fitbit, and others. He joins the show to talk about the challenges and

Supabase is an open source backend-as-a-service platform and competes directly with Google’s Firebase. A key distinction between them is that Firebase is a document store, while Supabase uses Postgres, which is a SQL-based database management system. Software Engineering Daily last covered Supabase in 2020 when its Founder Paul Copplestone came on the show, and a

Containers make it possible to standardize the deployment of software to any compute environment. However, managing and orchestrating containers at scale is a major challenge. Kubernetes was originally created by Google and solves the problem of scaling container deployment. Ben Elder is a Senior Software Engineer at Google, and an Elected Member of the Kubernetes

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

This episode of Software Engineering Daily is part of our on-site coverage of KubeCon 2023, which took place from November 6th through 9th in Chicago.   In today’s interview, host Jordi Mon Companys speaks with Darren Shepherd who is the Chief Architect and Co-Founder at Acorn Labs. Jordi Mon Companys is a product manager and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Incident management is the process of responding to unplanned events or service interruptions, and then restoring service to an operational state. Having robust incident management is vital to many software teams. Blameless is a framework designed to help software companies manage their production incidents effectively. It provides a workflow for managing the incident response as

Cloud applications continue to grow in popularity, but ensuring the security of these applications often presents a formidable engineering challenge. This challenge motivated the creation of Jit. Jit is a continuous security platform for developers, and seeks to enable every cloud app to start with minimum viable security, or MVS, without slowing development velocity. David

ScyllaDB is a fast and highly scalable NoSQL database designed to provide predictable performance at a massive cloud scale. It can handle millions of operations per second at a scale of gigabytes or petabytes. It’s also designed to be compatible with Cassandra and DynamoDB APIs. Scylla is used by Zillow, Comcast, and for Discord’s 350M+