Erika Hokanson 🐕

Load testing measures performance of a system undergoing a large volume of requests. Before an application is pushed to production, engineers will often load test their software to ensure it is resilient in the face of high traffic. As web applications have changed, the requirements around load testing have changed as well. External APIs, internal undocumented APIs, and proprietary databases...

There is too much mobile engineering work to be done and not enough mobile engineers. As a result, a talented mobile engineer will often make more money than a similarly talented web developer. There are many other disconnects between the world of mobile engineering and the world of backend and web development. We have reported on web development far more than mobile on Software Engineering...

Thursday February 23rd was a big day in security news: details were published about the Cloudbleed bug, which leaked tons of plaintext requests from across the Internet into plain view. On the same day, the first collision attack against SHA-1 was demonstrated by researchers at Google, foretelling the demise of SHA-1 as a safe hashing function. What does this mean for the average engineer? What...

Manufacturing electronics is not a simple task and because of its complexity it is also quite expensive. Companies like Apple are able to pull their costs down through economies of scale. Since Apple is always placing huge bulk orders on chips, sensors, and other components, the company can get lower prices for those components than an individual hardware hacker that wants to build a prototype....

When an engineer is offered a job a tech company, their compensation is often partly in cash and partly in equity–shares of the company. How should an engineer evaluate that offer? How should they negotiate? In the world of equity compensation, costly and avoidable mistakes are routine, and this hurts both companies and employees. Josh Levy was on Software Engineering Daily previously to talk...

Parse was a backend as a service company built in 2011 before being acquired by Facebook in 2013. Building a backend as a service for developers requires walking a thin line between giving engineers lots of control and preventing those engineers from shooting themselves in the foot. While she was at Parse, Charity Majors learned about the operational burdens of managing a service with high...

When an application is using all of its available resources, that application needs to be scaled. Scaling an application means giving it more resources–typically servers. Autoscaling is an engineering practice where an application is automatically given more or less resources based on how healthy the application performance is at a given time. Applications on Heroku have access to autoscaling....

In the mid 90s, data warehousing might have meant “using an Oracle database.” Today, it means a wide variety of things. You could be stitching together a big data pipeline using Kafka, Hadoop, and Spark. You could be using managed tools like BigQuery from Google. How did we get from the simple days of Oracle databases to the wealth of options available today? Mark Rittman writes and podcasts...

At the first Software Engineering Daily Meetup, the speakers explored a range of topics. A few weeks ago, we published Courtland Allen’s talk about how to build a small software business. In today’s episode, we are publishing Haseeb Qureshi’s talk, called “Everything That Rises Must Converge: Why Engineers Disagree About Everything (And Why Fraudsters Do Too).” This talk explores philosophy,...

Security vulnerabilities are an important concern in systems. When we specify that we want certain information hidden, for example our phone number or our date of birth, we expect the system to hide the information. However, this doesn’t always happen due to human error in the code because programmers have to write checks and filters across the program. In this episode, Edaena Salinas...