Learning Definition

How to use Google AdWords Keyword Match Types

2022-11-10T19:08:00.002-08:00

How to use Google AdWords Keyword Match Types in Hindi/Urdu

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How To Write Google Ads Description Google AdWords in Hindi/Urdu

2022-11-01T19:17:00.002-07:00

How To Write Google Ads Description Google AdWords

Automate your Infrastructure Access Workflows

2021-12-23T19:33:00.001-08:00

With the push for stronger security, new employees are often frustrated during an initial couple of days of their employment, just waiting to get access to all the resources they’ll need as IT staff frequently has to manually go through each and every system and generate tokens for the new hire.

Given the current industry preference towards agile development – especially in startups, we often run across circumstances where:

One person manages the database access (and pretty much all the other Operations-related credentials).
The team grows from 2 to 10. Easy, we can still grant each one of the new hires access tokens, etc., manually.
As the team and number of systems begin to scale, the amount of manual operations to provide access quickly gets out of hand.

User provisioning and de-provisioning are the act of granting/revoking access to the company’s resources to an employee (or in some cases, an external vendor) – automating this flow eases the burden from either the HR or IT department of the firm, and ensures that both are done correctly each and every time. User de-provisioning can increase security by restricting access to employees right when they leave the company.

In a small team it’s all easy to manage, but as the team grows, forgetting to remove privileges from a user’s privileges after they leave the team is all too easy – opening up your system to attacks.

Think of how DevOps pipelines are handled these days (even in small-to-medium scale startups) –just a simple commit to the repository sets off a chain of operations and everything works like a well-orchestrated system. Could this be done manually? Yes. Why do we not do it manually? There are several motivations: the likelihood of errors; to improve team productivity; and because manual processes are often undocumented and non-standardized.

In the past, many companies have tried to approach this problem headfirst by just scripting the orchestration of provisioning and de-provisioning, but just like in the case of DevOps, automating the workflows triumphs hand-written scripts for several different reasons. For example, you’d likely prefer that your engineering resources be focused on adding value to the business.

Another major reason is scalability. While these scripts work when you just have to provision for one database, what happens when you use a whole suite of databases, and each one has different requirements for access? These scripts will have a hard time keeping up with the growth of your team and technology stack.

Automating this entire process brings a whole suite of benefits

Contractors/Temporary workforce can be integrated quickly
In an ever-increasing remote-first world, the need to hire remote temp workers and third-party vendors for projects has increased. That means there is a need to grant and revoke specific privileges to these temp workers, and more importantly, to ensure that all privileges are revoked by the time the employee leaves the firm.

An automated system not only shortens the onboarding time, ensuring that the temp employees are unblocked quickly, it also takes out the guesswork of all the privileges that need to be revoked from them.

Onboarding employees (temp or full time) becomes a breeze
Employee onboarding encapsulates a number of different tasks. Everything from getting to know your team, to gaining access to the necessary databases and ops accounts, etc. Even if we just focus on getting access to accounts, it’s time-consuming when done by hand. Either IT or HR must sit down and evaluate all the necessary resources and then provision them one at a time manually. All while the new hire is doing… practically nothing.

Easier management of company-wide resources
At some point, your organization will add another database to the already long list of resources that the employees need to access. In most circumstances, this would require manual user provisioning – resulting in a costly and high-overhead process.

When automated, every existing employee can get access at the click of a button. This new approach to access is also available to new hires – saving the organization time and money.

How strongDM helps you automate this

Tools like strongDM were designed to address this specific challenge. From an administrator’s perspective, there is only one integration that needs to happen for each server or database, rather than a multitude. Once the strongDM gateway has been configured, their job is done.

Provisioning and de-provisioning of users is a much simpler process. Simply provision a new hire in your existing (single sign-on) SSO, direct them to install the strongDM client and you’re done. That account can exist in strongDM if you don’t have a company directory, or they can be assigned to SSO on the platform that your company uses everywhere else.

Automating infrastructure access can be simplified, allowing manpower in both – HR & IT to work on business-specific tasks.

You can try out StrongDM for free at https://www.strongdm.com/sedaily.

The post Automate your Infrastructure Access Workflows appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here

Automate your Infrastructure Access Workflows

2021-12-22T19:36:00.001-08:00

Given the current industry preference towards agile development – especially in startups, we often run across circumstances where:

One person manages the database access (and pretty much all the other Operations-related credentials).
The team grows from 2 to 10. Easy, we can still grant each one of the new hires access tokens, etc., manually.
As the team and number of systems begin to scale, the amount of manual operations to provide access quickly gets out of hand.

Automating this entire process brings a whole suite of benefits

When automated, every existing employee can get access at the click of a button. This new approach to access is also available to new hires – saving the organization time and money.

How strongDM helps you automate this

Automating infrastructure access can be simplified, allowing manpower in both – HR & IT to work on business-specific tasks.

You can try out StrongDM for free at https://www.strongdm.com/sedaily.

The post Automate your Infrastructure Access Workflows appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here

Trifacta with Joe Hellerstein

2021-12-21T19:33:00.001-08:00

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If you haven’t encountered a data quality problem, then you haven’t yet worked on a large enough project. Invariably, a gap exists between the state of raw data and what an analyst or machine learning engineer needs to solve their problem. Many organizations needing to automate data preparation workflows look to Trifacta as a solution. In this episode, I interview Joseph Hellerstein, professor of Computer Science at UC Berkeley and co-founder of Trifacta.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post Trifacta with Joe Hellerstein appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here

Software Daily Prospectus

2021-12-20T19:30:00.001-08:00

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Abstract
Software Daily is a place to create software.

Introduction
SoftwareDaily.com is a social network that allows people from all over the world to come together and create software.

Inspiration from Amazon
Working at Amazon taught me that we can build anything.

Inspiration from Facebook
Writing “Move Fast” taught me that social networking will allow us to expand our species and celebrate an increased breadth of individuality while also deepening our shared values and experiences.

Faceazon
Faceazon is a social network like Facebook combined with a universal ecommerce experience like Amazon.

Notes on Podcasting
Podcasting has taught me empathy, both technical and emotional.

Software Engineering Daily
SE Daily has proven my credibility as the most knowledgeable software engineer in the world. Anyone who disagrees is welcome to bet me $1M+ that they can out-earn me over the next decade.

Notes on Digital Advertising
Digital advertising in its current form allows for blatant, repeated theft by adtech companies including many with $1B+ market cap.

Adforprize
Adforprize is our video social network and creative advertising platform that will integrate seamlessly with YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Stripe, and OnlyFans to provide you with a full service user generated and industrially maintained advertising ecosystem.

Podsheets
Podsheets is a combination open source podcasting and video publishing and consumption platform.

Notes on Hosting Businesses
Hosting businesses with proprietary UIs or APIs have the best, most defensible margins (even better than payments). Heroku remains one of the most underestimated portfolio sleepers in business, and explains Salesforce’s eventual potential to rival even Amazon as the most rapidly growing behemoth in the world.

Notes on Collaboration Businesses
Super hard to get enough people using a collaboration business, and once they do they are still willing to switch because collaboration is just a little productivity thing that can usually be swapped out (yes, even you Slack will one day be swapped out).

FindCollabs
I should never have shut down FindCollabs and if you want to help me reboot it please email me.

Software Daily
Check out SoftwareDaily.com to see all of my plans, including an Uber-like services company and a new mobile operating system.

Supercompute
Check out supercompute.games to learn the software business while earning botcoin!

Notes on Gaming Businesses
Gaming businesses are high margin, high risk, and super fun to build.

Notes on Payments Businesses
Payments businesses are as sticky as surgical mesh and Stripe is as admirable as AWS and Oracle–which is to say I am deeply envious of Stripe and wish I was a good enough human being and effective altruist to change into a Collison.

Rectangle
Rectangle is an open source, open operations payments systems business with a minimum goal of offering open source alternatives to Stripe.

Notes on Censorship
Companies are forced to censor their content by an outdated, overly religious and warmongering government that more closely resembles the Deep State than The West Wing.

Sqripe
Sqripe is an uncensorable internet built on a data structure I invented called a cloud blockchain.

Notes on Virtue Capital
Venture capitalists are mostly cowards with no real opinions about anything other than which vest to wear given their daily set of potential microclimates.

Investment Discussions
Investment Discussions is a Slack group where I give away investment liquidity in exchange for knowledge from entrepreneurs and investors.

Notes on Portfolio Synergies
There are portfolio synergies across every portfolio. a16z, for example gets portfolio synergy from their wide variety of data transfer, ETL, data management, and data engineering businesses, who can share notes and form loose cabals of success. Sequoia Capital gets portfolio synergy by owning the investment communities of both China and the United States. Facebook would get portfolio synergy if it owned both Twitter and Google, hypothetically. See, this is the kind of paranoia I have, which is why I’m planning to run for president.

Notes on Healthcare
Our healthcare system is hurting everyone in the United States, and I have no idea how to fix it. It makes me very sad. I think that instead of focusing on healthcare, we should focus on homelessness, which has more measurable outcomes.Auditable Hospitals
We need a hospital system where every single patient has access to the actions of every single care provider, allowing patients to uncover conspiracies and antitrustworthy market actions.Notes on Fear
You should never let fear stop you from doing what you know you are capable of.

The post Software Daily Prospectus appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here

Codename One with Steve Hannah

2021-12-19T19:33:00.001-08:00

Getting a computer program to run the same in different environments has been a recurring problem since the earliest days of software systems. Software versioning, versions of dependencies, hardware configurations, and CPU instruction set differences are just a few examples of challenges engineers have faced getting their software to run in different settings.

A core promise of the Java programming language has always been its ability to run anywhere. If your system can run the Java virtual machine, it can run Java bytecode in a way that will be invariant to other factors. Java was created long before the modern mobile era and the JVM doesn’t run on iOS devices. For Java and Kotlin developers looking for a consistent way to deploy their applications to Android and iPhone devices, Codename One offers a solution.

Codename One is an open-source cross-platform framework aiming to provide write once, run anywhere code for various mobile and desktop operating systems. In this episode, I interview Steve Hannah about the project.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post Codename One with Steve Hannah appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here

Episode Summary: Showtime: Crypto Art and NFTs

2021-12-18T19:33:00.001-08:00

NFTs are the current blockchain craze. Graphics designer “Beeple”, or Mike Winkelmen, sold his artwork as a NFT for $69 million in March. At the same time. Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, sold a NFT of his first tweet for $2.9 million dollars . Though the hype has died down since then, it has driven development and adoption of NFTs and the ecosystem surrounding NFTs continues to thrive and grow. At the center of this ecosystem is Showtime, the Instagram for NFTs.

To give some background NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, is a unique token that can be used to represent an asset on a blockchain. This token is non-reproducible and non-fungible, i.e individual tokens and not interchangeable. NFTs have a wide use case from art and paintings to in-game items. Even physical assets like property can be represented with a NFT. NFTs have the benefits of being on a blockchain, meaning it is easy to trade and sell it, as well as having an immutable record of who owned it and it’s transaction history. Similar to a painting’s provenance, this record can be used to determine ownership of a NFT and whether or not it is authentic. NFts can even encode contracts such that every time a NFT is sold the original author gets a small fee or cut.

NFTs first took of in 2017 with Cryptokitties, a blockchain based collectable, where individuals could purchase, collect and sell virtual cats as NFTs. There were previous attempts at using NFTs like Cryptopunks in 2016 but Cryptokitties was the first to take off and gain mainstream adoption.

After Crypto Kitties, the hype died down for a bit and important infrastructure was built surrounding NFTs that was not as consumer facing. ERC-721 was released in 2018 which formalized the technical definition of a NFT so that all NFTs followed the same standard. OpenSea was created in 2017 which was a search engine that allowed individuals to trade and search differing NFTs. In July of 2020, trading volume of NFTs exploded and though it has fallen from its peak, it is still growing.

Showtime is a social network built on top of NFTs. While you can’t trade or create NFTs right now, you can display all your NFTs in one place and have followers view your NFTs. Built with a React front end, Django backend, and leveraging OpenSea API for blockchain data, Show time serves as an Instagram for NFTs. A centralized location where collectors can display all their art and gain followers. After all, what use is buying art if people can’t see it. Currently only on web but looking to expand to mobile, Showtime isn’t necessarily a crypto application, rather it’s a web app focused on crypto. However it’s an important part of the NFT ecosystem as it raises awareness and increases mainstream adoption.

Looking to the future, NFTs still have a ways to go and innovation is still ongoing. Companies like NIFTEX, NFTfi, NFX are providing loans against your NFT. Airbns created money out of idle homes, why not create money out of idle NFTs. Eventually any kind of video, photo or meme on social media will be a NFT. This is especially important with virtual reality and as the world transitions online. A virtual gallery for instance could be created with NFTs and you could charge people admission to view the gallery. Creator coins like those on BitClout or Rally enable individuals to quite literally sell themselves and their unique brand giving rise to a new influence economy and enable individuals to raise funds. All of these things are possible because of NFTs and the blockchain. The current NFT explosion is probably a fad due to the increased price of digital art, but the use cases for NFTs are so numerous that as long as blockchain is there, NFTs will be right alongside it.

This summary is based on an interview with Alex Masmej, co-founder and CEO at Showtime. To listen to the full interview, click here

The post Episode Summary: Showtime: Crypto Art and NFTs appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here

Urbit with Galen Wolfe-Pauly

2021-12-18T03:36:00.001-08:00

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As the internet has grown, increasingly, we are consumers of services provided by corporations rather than owners and operators of our own systems. To many, this trend towards centralization is antithetical to the spirit of a free and open internet.

Urbit is a new operating system and peer-to-peer network. There are several layers of novel ideas in this ambitious project. In this episode, I interview Galen Wolfe-Pauly about the Urbit project.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post Urbit with Galen Wolfe-Pauly appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here

The State of Software Supply Chain 2021 with Ilkka Turunen

2021-12-16T19:36:00.001-08:00

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Everyone is becoming increasingly aware of supply chains for physical goods. Software has its own supply chain. A supply of open source solutions exists as does a demand for these solutions by industry. Both have surely grown, but it would be nice to have a way of measuring by how much.

The State of Software Supply Chain 2021 is an annual publication now in its 7th year. It’s released by Sonatype. In this interview, I speak with their Field CTO Ilkka Turunen. We review some of the highlights from the report including the state of open source and some particularly interesting statistics about supply chain attacks.

The post The State of Software Supply Chain 2021 with Ilkka Turunen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here

InfluxData with Zoe Steinkamp

2021-12-15T19:33:00.001-08:00

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InfluxDB is an open-source time-series database. It’s maintained by InfuxData who offers a suite of products that help organizations gain insights from time-series data. In this episode, I interview Zoe Steinkamp, Software Engineering and Developer Advocate at InfluxData. We explore some of the common use cases for time-series databases such as IoT and some recent announcements such as the ability to run flux queries right inside VS Code.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post InfluxData with Zoe Steinkamp appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here

UIPath with Boris Krumrey

2021-12-15T01:07:00.001-08:00

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Robotic process automation or RPA refers to software robots constructed to automate some business process. Perhaps the most ubiquitous example is adding filters to your email inbox. I’ve worked with a lot of salespeople that configure complex email follow-up campaigns when inbound emails come in, but even that’s a fairly basic example compared to what’s becoming possible.

UIPath is an automation platform. They offer a suite of solutions that empower developers and non-developers to construct effective software robots that can measurably improve business efficiency. In this interview, I speak with Boris Krumrey, Global VP Automation Innovations at UiPath. We overview the platform and discuss the current and future state of RPA.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post UIPath with Boris Krumrey appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here

Modern Data Infrastructure and Tools with Leigh Marie Braswell

2021-12-13T19:30:00.001-08:00

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The first industrial deployments of machine learning and artificial intelligence solutions were bespoke by definition and often had brittle operating characteristics. Almost no one builds custom databases, web servers, or email clients. Yet technology groups today often consider developing homegrown ML and data solutions in order to solve their unique use cases. Today’s modern data stack is a patchwork of interconnecting tools built to suit a variety of personas that need to interact with the data in notably different ways.

In this episode, I speak with Leigh Marie Braswell, an Investor with Founders Fund. We have a wide-ranging discussion about the technology landscape of data and machine learning solutions and the modern enterprise data stack.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post Modern Data Infrastructure and Tools with Leigh Marie Braswell appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here

Render with Anurag Goel

2021-12-12T19:33:00.001-08:00

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As cloud providers enable greater levels of specificity and control, they empower compliance-driven enterprise companies. This level of parameterization is downright inhospitable to a new software engineer and can be a cognitive barrier to entry for a senior professional with a great idea but limited time. Developers want to focus on their code, algorithms, front end, and user experience.

These concerns have created a huge vacuum in the market that companies like Render are filling. Render is a unified cloud experience to build and run all your apps and websites. It can auto-deploy for git and offers some really novel developer ergonomics. In this episode, I interview Anurag Goel, Founder, and CEO of Render.com about their approach to delivering a developer-centric all-in-one cloud solution.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post Render with Anurag Goel appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here

The 3 Security Trends Impacting Engineering Workflows

2021-12-11T19:54:00.001-08:00

There are a variety of new and upcoming security trends that will have a direct impact on software engineering workflows in 2022. In this article we’ll look at three emerging security approaches, and how new technologies–such as strongDM– can potentially help organizations become more secure.

1. Zero Trust

The Zero Trust model was created by John Kindervag, vice president and principal analyst for market research company Forrester Research. It is based on the idea that trust of everything and everyone inside an organization’s network is a vulnerability. Zero Trust is an attractive security model in an era when employees are often working remotely and using multiple devices and increasingly sophisticated attacks are often aimed at locations separate from the point of infiltration.

Barriers to Implementing a Zero Trust Model

While a Zero Trust model may seem attractive, there are several barriers to its adoption. Modern organizations have highly complex and distributed infrastructures, and it’s often challenging to configure legacy or third-party applications with Zero Trust without having to rebuild them. Furthermore, many organizations have complex configurations that require a combination of several tools to support a Zero Trust model. And finally, building a Zero Trust framework touches nearly everyone in an organization, so requires an organization-wide mindset shift.

Zero Trust architectures

A well-implemented Zero Trust model not only provides security but also enables businesses to operate more effectively, with secure and granular access for everyone, based on their roles and needs. strongDM supports Zero Trust by integrating out-of-the-box with any identity provider via OpenID Connect (OIDC) protocols, and delivering secure and easy access to backend infrastructure. strongDM’s architecture creates a software-defined network (SDN) that proxies client traffic through a centralized gateway to manage access to resources. Admins can easily create and define roles to defined groups of users as well as audit usage.

strongDM architecture creates a software-defined network (SDN) that proxies client traffic through a centralized gateway to monitor and manage access to resources

2. Access Management

Identity and access management (IAM) strategies dictate how general access to resources such as devices, applications, network files, and environments are managed. IAM sees the end of shared accounts and requires each individual user to have their own digital identity, such as a username and password. Within IAM lies privileged access management (PAM), giving privileged users the authority to make changes to a network, device or application.

Often, IAM and PAM approaches have a major gap–automating access to backend infrastructure. Similar to internal and web applications, sensitive data and critical infrastructure must also be accounted for when addressing access management, including observability, automation, and fine-grained authentication and authorization.

Tracking User Access

Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) provides the ability to monitor and audit access to data, increasing visibility and helping organizations meet their compliance requirements. IGA tracks user access and helps ensure that IAM protocols are properly implemented.

IAM Cloud Misconfigurations

Access solutions are facing an ever-increasing complexity of needs. They must be flexible enough to handle the adoption of new technology, the changing nature of cloud infrastructure, as well as potentially rapid scaling of organizations. While cloud-managed access management solutions offer answers to many of these challenges, organizations must avoid falling into common pitfalls of misconfigurations, such as not using the full functionality of tools such as role-based access controls (RBAC) and multi-factor authentication.

Principle of Least Privilege

Another common mistake that admins make is to default to setting access controls to the most permissive settings. This eases friction with colleagues and can be seen as a time-saving decision, as overly restricted access can be cumbersome. The challenge, however, is they are sacrificing security for convenience.

Understanding the principle of least privilege is important here. Organizations must find a compromise between ease and security. If access is too restrictive, employees won’t be able to do their jobs. Too lax, and the door to attack is open. Using the right level of restriction can — perhaps counter-intuitively — improve operational performance: it improves workforce productivity, bolsters system stability, and enhances fault tolerance. It reduces system downtime that might otherwise occur as a result of a breach, malware spread, or incompatibility issues between applications.

Applying the principle of least privilege means that admins grant both machines (applications, networks, databases, and so on) and humans only the required level of access, nothing more. It counteracts privilege creep, where rights that are only required temporarily are never revoked, and are instead accumulated over time. It also reduces the likelihood of a successful phishing attack, as fewer employees have access to superuser privileges.

Privileged Access Management

Privileged access management strategies enforce the principle of least privilege, restricting access of each user to the minimal level required for them to do their job. This helps prevent the spread of malware, decreases cyber attack surface, improves workforce productivity, and helps demonstrate compliance.

Even under PAM, the highest-level users connect with non-privileged access most of the time, when carrying out day-to-day activities such as word processing or accessing SaaS tools for communication and project management. They only use privileged accounts to adjust permissions, change critical data, or perform other critical actions.

Privileged accounts occur in both human and machine categories. Privileged human accounts may include root accounts with the ability to execute commands to make changes to a system, or privileged business users who require access to sensitive information in finance, marketing, or human resources. Privileged machine accounts may include application accounts which access databases or run batch scripts and SSH keys.

3. Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)

As organizations have an increasing need for remote users to have uninterrupted and continuous access to their networks, more SaaS applications, and data moving from the data center to cloud services, they require a new approach to network security. Secure access service edge (SASE, pronounced “sassy”) is a cloud architecture model that combines network and security-as-a-service functions to deliver them as a single cloud-based service. SASE sees a move away from perimeter-based security, to enforcing security at user and application endpoints.

Characteristics of SASE

The main characteristics of SASE include:

Combined SD-WAN and security functions
Cloud-native architecture that is scalable, agile, and self-healing
Globally distributed fabric of PoPs to ensure advanced WAN and security capabilities wherever users are located
Identity-driven services that drive real-time context impacting security policy
Equal edge-to-edge support

SASE Benefits

Gartner predicts that by 2025 at least 60% of enterprises will have explicit strategies and timelines for SASE adoption encompassing user, branch, and edge access. This is because the benefits of the approach are numerous, including centralized RBAC which restricts a user’s access depending on their role, straightforward audit trail and reporting mechanisms, and a reduced cost thanks to the elimination of disjointed physical and virtual appliances from multiple vendors.

strongDM

StrongDM’s product is a tool that manages and audits access to servers, databases, data centers, and more. It gives your technical staff frictionless and auditable access to everything they need across your entire stack, in a single place.

For a demo, visit strongdm.com.

The post The 3 Security Trends Impacting Engineering Workflows appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here

Amplemarket with João Batalha

2021-12-10T19:51:00.001-08:00

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The lifeblood of most companies is their sales departments. When you’re selling something other than a commodity, it’s typically necessary to carefully groom the onboarding experience for inbound future customers. Historically, companies approached this in a one-size-fits-all manner, giving all customers a common experience.

In today’s data-driven age, a better experience can be provided that is data-driven, personalized, and automated. Amplemarket leverages machine learning in the development of next-generation sales tools. In this episode, I interview João Batalha, Co-Founder, and CEO of Amplemarket.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post Amplemarket with João Batalha appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here

MemGraph with Dominik Tomicevic

2021-12-10T01:41:00.001-08:00

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Relational databases have been a fixture of software applications for decades. They are highly tuned for performance and typically offer explicit guarantees like transactional consistency. More recently, there’s been a figurative cambrian explosion of other-than-relational databases. Simple key value stores or counters were an early win in this space. Managing a graph data structure is a more challenging task than key value stores. Asking questions of graphs demands a robust query language. Ideally, you’d also want to provide common graph algorithms to users out of box.

MemGraph is an in-memory graph database that seeks to fill this need in a real-time fashion. It’s a performance driven solution that offers developers a mature option for managing and utilizing graph data. In this interview, I speak with Dominik Tomicevic, Founder and CEO of MemGraph. We discuss implementation and adoption details of MemGraph as well as the ways machine learning engineers use it for feature engineering in real time.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post MemGraph with Dominik Tomicevic appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here

Episode Summary: Spacemesh: The Proof of Space and Time

2021-12-08T19:27:00.001-08:00

Spacemesh is an innovative blockchain startup aiming to solve the problem of running smart contracts at scale. A second generation blockchain startup that aims to learn the lessons of past blockchains, Spacemesh aims to make the blockchain better, more usable, more robust, and of course more popular among users. Current blockchains are not scalable both in terms of transaction volume and also the hardware considerations of the blockchains themselves. Bitcoin and other proof of work cryptocurrencies currently consume around two percent of the world’s energy consumption and that figure is only growing. ASICS and CMP graphics cards are effectively e-waste that only serve one purpose and quickly become obsolete once new versions come out. Spacemesh serves to solve this main problem of scalability both from a consensus level and a blockchain architecture level to make Spacemesh the preeminent blockchain for running smart contracts at scale.

At the core of Spacemesh is a new consensus protocol that aims to solve the problems presented by the two incumbent protocols proof-of-work and proof-of-stake.

Proof-of-work in a nutshell requires individuals to secure the blockchain by guessing random numbers and then performing complex calculations that check whether the number is valid or not. Individuals, or miners, race to find a valid number first and once someone does, the consensus resets making all previous calculations invalid and miners race to find a valid number again. This presents two primary problems. The first is that performing these complex calculations takes a considerable amount of energy and as the blockchain grows this energy cost only grows.

The second is like any computer process, specialized hardware like ASICS or GPUs, can be used to perform these calculations faster. Not only does this create ewaste that’s only use is to perform these basically useless calculations, but also centralizes mining power in the hands of those who can afford to invest money in huge server farms which is the antithesis of blockchain’s mission to create decentralized trust. Proof-of-stake tries to solve the energy consumption aspect of proof-of-stake by removing the requirement to perform calculations and instead using large amounts of cryptocurrencies. Individuals, or stakers, lock up large amounts of cryptocurrencies for a certain amount of time in order to provide security to the network. However this fails to solve the centralization problem of proof-of-work and in some aspects only makes it worse as only individuals with a large amount of crypto can contribute to the security of the network.

Spacemesh introduces a new consensus protocol called proof-of-space-and-time that requires individuals to reserve a certain amount of space on hard drives to secure the blockchain. This requires less energy than proof-of-stake and solves the centralization problem of both proof-of-stake and proof-of-works as storage is cheap and there are various mediums such as hard drives and SSD that can provide storage at differing price points. This protocol even has some advantages of other proof-of-stake protocols like Chia as it only requires data to be written and read occasionally, reducing wear on the storage medium unlike Chia which requires frequent reads and writes.

Spacemesh is also experimenting with a blockweave or blockmesh to solve the scalability issue of blockchains. Traditional blockchains can only add one block of transactions at a time limiting scalability. Scalability solutions, most commonly referred to as Layer 2 solutions, are being developed for traditional blockchains like Etherum and Bitcoin but they are oftentimes complex and are still a while away from mass adoption. Spacemesh builds scalability into the blockchain architecture itself by allowing multiple blocks to be worked on and validated at once.

Even the company itself is built with scalability in mind. Traditional blockchains need to raise funds and bootstrap the network. The most common way for them to do so was an initial coin offering or ICOs. In 2017 and 2018, there was an ICO boom that had the unfortunate side effect of attracting scammers that would take the funds and run. Spacemesh has a contract that distributes the funds over time ensuring that the company has an incentive to continue development and support the network. Also they bootstrap the network with their own servers and plan to slowly wean over their servers as the blockchain gains more and more participants.

Spacemesh does not see their cryptocurrency called Smesh as becoming the dominant blockchain in the future. Rather they see a variety of blockchains that serve different purposes. Of course some current project will die but there is space for multiple blockchains to exist. Some will focus on privacy, some will focus on speed, some will focus on ledger size. However many there are though, Spacemesh will be there powering the smart contracts of the future.

This summary is based on an interview with Anton Learner, Core Team Lead at Spacemesh. To listen to the full interview, click here.

The post Episode Summary: Spacemesh: The Proof of Space and Time appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here

Render.com with Anurag Goel

2021-12-07T19:33:00.001-08:00

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Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

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* This article was originally published here

Building Go Apps Using Encore with André Eriksson

2021-12-06T19:54:00.001-08:00

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Writing your application’s code is only half the battle. Getting it to run on your machine is a milestone, but it’s far from your code running in a production environment. There are an increasing set of options application designers have for helping to manage deployment, environments, and CI/CD.

Encore is a backend engine for the Go language. One of its core features is the ability to turn any function into an API endpoint with just an annotation. André Eriksson is the founder of Encore. In this episode, we discuss his experience as a developer and explore the features and functionality Encore has to offer.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post Building Go Apps Using Encore with André Eriksson appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here

Simplifying Access to Kubernetes

2021-12-05T19:30:00.001-08:00

Kubernetes is here to stay. The benefits the container-orchestration systems provide to cloud-native applications are incalculable. It has become the de facto standard for automating application deployment, scaling, and management. However as the ecosystem matures, several roadblocks have emerged on the way to a production-ready system. Several issues like high availability and monitoring have been addressed through upgrades to the core software, while others are still unsolved or have a half-baked solution.

When productionizing Kubernetes, one important security consideration to address is authorization. Not every user needs the capabilities to create, modify, and delete resources. Small teams can get away with assigning admin privileges but as the team or the reliance on Kubernetes grows, there is a need for a systematic and programmatic approach to authorization.
Kubernetes has a built-in framework for authorization. Role-Based Access Control ( RBAC) is a fairly simple framework that has been implemented very successfully in cloud environments. Broadly speaking, roles are assigned to users and each role defines what actions a user can take. Some of the default roles include cluster-admin, admin, edit, and view.

Description of Default Roles: Medium

There also exists the functionality to define custom roles detailing access to specific resources.

Detailed Explanation of Custom Roles: Logical Shift

However, though there exists the ability to handle authorization with granularity, as the number of users scale there are several practical challenges that emerge. The foremost is the manual configuration of roles. Kubernetes has no native tools for automatically updating or grating roles. When a new user joins the cluster, admins must manually bind the role for each user. If an existing role needs to be updated, a brand new role must be created to replace the old one. Even something as simple as revoking access requires an admin to manually delete the RoleBinding. Secondary issues like visibility into user access and visibility into cluster configuration ensure that the builtin RBAC framework is clunky to use at scale and in production.

One solution to the problem is to simplify RBAC through the use of Custom Roles and Service Accounts. This approach reduces manual effort by restricting users to a limited set of predefined roles. Instead of assigning a new role to each user, administrators can have sets of predefined permissions and assign a user to one of the existing roles. However, this approach has two major drawbacks. One, it doesn’t remove the configuration challenge. If there are a large set of roles or a need to create custom roles often, then this approach might not be suitable. Two, it doesn’t solve the problems surrounding visibility.

The second solution to managing complicated authorizations is by adopting third-party tools that allow admins to use role templates to automatically update and assign permissions to users. These third-party tools have additional benefits such as integrating with external identity providers, as well as solving core issues by providing a centralized control plane where admins can view user access and cluster configurations, and easily assign roles to users.

StrongDM provides zero trust access to Kubernetes.. It sits between the user and the cluster, providing a single gateway to manage and for access. When the user logs into the cluster, StrongDM leases credentials to the user based on the custom roles that the Admin has set up.

StrongDM Interaction: StrongDM Blog

In essence, StrongDM automates all the tedious work regarding role configuration and enables users to focus on more important things. Furthermore, StrongDM can work for other types of resources as well. SSH servers, databases, and other ephemeral infrastructure are all supported.

StrongDM Product Diagram: StrongDM Website

This approach enables admin to control access to all of their resources in a single centralized plane, eliminating the hassle of multiple authorization systems. This is especially useful in multi-cloud or hybrid cloud scenarios where significant time has to be invested in keeping distinct RBAC systems in sync and updated.

Managing access and authorization in today’s modern production environment is hard. Multiple cloud environments in combination with on-prem infrastructure with differing resource types ensure that maintaining disparate systems is a hair-pulling endeavor. Kubernetes clusters, databases, services, and web apps all have disparate systems that need to be synced and maintained. StrongDM is a proxy that manages and audits access. Admins can handle access through a central UI and developers can access those same resources without the need for a VPN or separate logins.

Sign up for a free, no B.S. demo of strongDM here.

The post Simplifying Access to Kubernetes appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here

Internship Management Solutions with Nikita Gupta from Symba.io

2021-12-04T19:54:00.001-08:00

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Internships can be an incredibly valuable resource to new professionals and are often the first professional work experience for many participants. It’s often the case that internship programs are suboptimal. Employers don’t always provide a clear path to success for the intern. Interns in turn don’t always have a resource to reach out for help or even know that it’s ok to do so.

Nikita Gupta is a Co-Founder & CTO at Symba, a company that provides an all-in-one platform for managing talent development programs. We talk about what makes a good internship, how Symba helps companies facilitate that, and her journey as an entrepreneur.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

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* This article was originally published here

Tetrate Service Bridge with Zack Butcher

2021-12-03T19:36:00.001-08:00

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Microservice architecture has become a ubiquitous design choice. Application developers typically have neither the training nor the interest in implementing low-level security features into their software. For this and many other reasons, the notion of a service mesh has been introduced to provide a framework for service-to-service communication.

Today’s guest is Zack Butcher. While working at Google, he was one of the earliest engineers contributing to Istio, an open platform-independent service mesh that provides traffic management, policy enforcement, and telemetry collection. Today he’s the head of product at Tetrate, working on products like the Tetrate Service Bridge and Tetrate Cloud. We discuss the need and implementation of a service mesh and how companies are leveraging tools like their service bridge.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

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* This article was originally published here

Understandable Software with Kartik Agaram

2021-12-02T19:36:00.001-08:00

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Many software projects run the risk of evolving over time to a complex state that is inhospitable for new contributors to join. This is a dangerous place for a company to be. Either software needs to remain more accessible, or faster paths must be created to help them get on board.

Today’s interview is with Kartik Agaram. We explore some of these topics and software development in general while also discussing some of the low-level software projects Kartik has open-sourced.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

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* This article was originally published here

The Software of Climate Adaptation with Gopal Erinjippurath

2021-12-01T19:45:00.001-08:00

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Climate modeling is increasingly important as supply chains, emergency management, and dozens of other efforts need to make predictions about future conditions and how they will impact business. Analyzing climate data requires geospatial systems, and those systems need a full-stack geospatial technology solution.

Gopal Erinjippurath serves as CTO and Head of Product at Sust Global, a venture focused on geospatial analytics. We discuss the software of climate adaptation.

Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com

The post The Software of Climate Adaptation with Gopal Erinjippurath appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

* This article was originally published here