At Coinbase, security is more important than anything else. Coinbase is a company that allows for storage and exchange of cryptocurrencies. Protecting banking infrastructure is difficult, but in some ways the stakes are higher with Coinbase, because bitcoin is fundamentally unregulated. If a hacker were able to syphon all of the money out of Coinbase accounts, Coinbase would have no recourse–which means this is a more sensitive problem than the
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Coinbase is a platform for buying and selling digital currency: bitcoin, ethereum, and litecoin. Every payments company deals with fraud, but a cryptocurrency company has a harder job than most payments companies, because bitcoin transactions are anonymous and non-reversible. This is in contrast to a bank, which deals with a regulated, reversible transaction system. Soups Ranjan is the director of data science at Coinbase. In this episode, he walks through
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Cryptocurrencies have seen a surge of value recently. People are starting to see that bitcoin, ethereum, and other currencies are not just for speculation. At worst, they are a store of value–like digital gold. At best, they are a tool for micropayments, smart contracts, and an entire decentralized financial platform. Coinbase is a company for buying and selling cryptocurrencies. This episode is the first of three interviews with different members
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Software deployment evolves over time. In the 90s, a “deployment” might have meant issuing a new edition of your software via CD-ROM. Today, a deployment is often a multi-stage process. A new software build will undergo automated unit tests and integration tests, before being deployed to users. The deployment might only go out to a small percentage of total users initially, with that percentage going up as the deployment proves
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Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed streaming platform. Kafka was originally developed at LinkedIn, and the creators of the project eventually left LinkedIn and started Confluent, a company that is building a streaming platform based on Kafka. Kafka is very popular, but is not easy to deploy and operationalize. That is why Confluent has built a Kafka-as-a-service product, so that managing Kafka is not the job of an on-call DevOps
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A cryptocurrency exchange faces a uniquely difficult fraud problem. A hacker who steals my credentials can initiate a transfer of all my bitcoin to another wallet, and it is a non-reversible, non-identifiable payment. So it is really important to prevent those kinds of fraudulent transactions. At the third Software Engineering Daily Meetup, Coinbase director of data science Soups Ranjan explained how Coinbase stays ahead of fraudsters, and he describes some
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Airbnb is a company that is driven by design. New user interfaces are dreamed up by designers and implemented for web, iOS, and Android. This implementation process takes a lot of resources, but it used to take even more before the company started using React Native. React Native allows Airbnb to reuse components effectively. React Native works by presenting a consistent model for the user interface regardless of the underlying
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React Native allows developers to reuse components from one user interface on multiple platforms. React Native was introduced by Facebook to reduce the pain of teams who were rewriting their user interfaces for web, iOS, and Android. Nader Dabit hosts React Native Radio, a podcast about React Native. Nader also trains companies to user React Native through his company React Native Training. In this episode, we explore what a developer
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Listeners have had difficulty finding the Software Engineering Daily content they want to listen to. We are creating new podcast feeds to address this. The content on each podcast feed is mutually exclusive from the other feeds, except for the main feed and “Greatest Hits.” You can now find the following podcast feeds in iTunes and Google Play: Software Engineering Daily (main feed): the classic Software Engineering Daily feed–we recently
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“Culture fit” is a term that is used to describe engineers that have the right personality for a given company. In the hiring process, “lack of culture fit” is used to turn away engineers who are good enough at coding but just don’t seem right for the company. As today’s guest Ammon Bartram says, “lack of culture fit” usually means “lack of enthusiasm for what a company does.” Ammon is
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