Whether you love them or hate them, share them or ignore them, you encounter memes all over the internet.  Those that are popular can often take off and spawn a long history of remixes, variants, derivatives, and inspired works. In this episode, we interview Johan Unger, the founder of meme.com.  They’re creating a platform for Meme Explorers to track these Memes and earn rewards along the way. Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Meme.com with Johan Unger appeared first on Software Engineering Daily ..read more

Apple operating systems are closed source. This closed source nature gives Apple an extremely successful business model–and a very different software developer ecosystem than Linux-based systems. Since Linux is open source, the information on how to manipulate the system at a low level is very public. The lack of information about low-level programming in Apple operating systems has led to a large community of “jailbreaking”–where people try to reverse engineer how the closed source systems function. In today’s episode, Max Bazaliy joins the show to describe how he reverse engineered an Apple ..read more

If you operate a restaurant, you want to know how many people are inside your restaurant at any given time. You also want to be able to know your occupancy if you operate a movie theater, coffee shop, or apparel store. Knowing how many people are in your building can answer several business-related questions. Do you need to unlock an additional entrance? Should you open another store? Do you really need a building this big? This might sound like a simple question, but how do you solve the problem of counting people inside of a building? A naive approach to counting people is to use video came ..read more

Napster, Kazaa, and Bittorrent are peer-to-peer file sharing systems. In these P2P systems, nodes need to find each other. Users need to be able to search for files that exist across the system. P2P systems are decentralized, so these routing problems must be solved without a centralized service in the middle. Without a centralized service that has all the information in one place, how can you solve these problems of node discovery and file lookup? This is the central question that Petar Maymounkov sought to answer with Kademlia. Kademlia is a peer-to-peer distributed hash table. Kademlia imp ..read more

Crocodile Browser is a fast browser built by Osine and Anesi Ikhianosime, a pair of brothers from Nigeria. I interviewed them 3 years ago, and in this episode I caught up with Osine to learn what he and his brother have been working on since then. Osine and Anesi have become friends of mine since we had a conversation several years ago. I met Osine for the first time at the Facebook F8 conference last year, and it was one of the first times I had met someone from another continent on the Internet, then got to hang out with them in person. There were some issues with network connectivity, so I ..read more

In the tech industry, we have all grown to fear “lock-in.” Lock-in is a situation in which you have no choice but to pay a certain provider for some aspect of your computer services. Since computers are so fundamental to our lives, we sometimes have no choice but to pay the provider of that lock-in service. Think of a few service providers in your life who have no serious competition. What is your relationship to that service provider? Do you feel like you are paying too much money? Do you wish that you could switch? This is how many people feel about their Internet service provider. An Inter ..read more

Ad blockers in the browser protect us from the most annoying marketing messages that the Internet tries to serve to us. But we still pay a price for these ads. We pay the bandwidth costs of requesting these pages. Our browsers are slowed down by these extra requests. Pi Hole is a hardware based ad blocker. Pi Hole acts as a DNS server for all of the traffic that makes its way onto your network. Pi Hole has a blacklist of all the URLs to block–including tracking systems and ad networks. Pi Hole stops these URLs from communicating with all the devices on your network–including your cell phone ..read more

Functional programming can improve the overall design of an application architecture. Runar Bjarnason has been exploring how writing in a functional style increases modularity and compositionality of software for many years. He is co-author of Functional Programming in Scala, a book that explores the relationship between functional programming and software design. In this interview with guest host Adam Bell, Runar explains how writing in a functional style involves limiting side effects, avoiding exceptions and using higher order abstractions. Writing in this style places constraints on what ..read more

Originally published October 22, 2015 “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. Tarn Adams works on Dwarf Fortress with his brother Zach. Questions What is the objective of Dwarf Fortress? Does the way you’ve designed the gameplay reflect any philosophy about life that you have? What language is Dwarf Fortress written in ..read more

Originally published January 6, 2016 “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.” Brian Kernighan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and the author of several books, including The Go Programming Language and The C Programming Language, a book more commonly referred to as K&R. Professor Kernighan also worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed to the develop ..read more