Software Engineering Daily

Online advertising enables free content and services of the Internet. One of the free services that is powered by advertising is the browser. 60% of web browsing is done through Chrome, which is owned by Google, which is powered by advertising.

The application that most of us use to explore the web is made by a company that relies on ads, so it is unsurprising that the default of that browser is to allow close tracking of user behavior. When you hit a website, a variety of trackers are logging your data for the purpose of serving you better ads.

Some people don’t like ads, and they don’t like being tracked–but what is the alternative? How else can we get all the content we want? Since the 90’s, engineers have envisioned an Internet powered by micropayments. A micropayments system in your browser would allow users to pay for content with money instead of adtech.

Brave is a web browser built with a modern view of advertising, privacy, and economics. Brave users can pay for content with their money OR by paying attention to ads. This system is formalized through the Basic Attention Token (BAT), a cryptocurrency that can be used to purchase user attention.

Jonathan Sampson is a senior developer relations specialist with Brave Software. He joins the show to talk about the problems with the browsing experience and what Brave is doing to stop it.

If you like this episode, we have done many other shows about privacy, with guests like Bruce Schneier and Samy Kamkar. Download the Software Engineering Daily app for iOS to hear all of our old episodes, and easily discover new topics that might interest you. You can upvote the episodes you like and get recommendations based on your listening history. With 600 episodes, it is hard to find the episodes that appeal to you, and we hope the app helps with that.

To build the kinds of things developers want to build today, they need better tools.  That’s why Amazon Web Services built Amazon Aurora. A relational database engine that’s compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL, and provides up to five times the performance of standard MySQL—on the same hardware, at a tenth of the cost. Amazon Aurora from AWS can scale up to millions of transactions per minute. Automatically grow your storage up to 64 terabytes. And replicates data to three different Availability Zones. And you don’t have to manage a thing. There are no upfront charges, no commitments—you only pay for what you use. Check it out, at aurora.aws.

Who do you use for log management? I want to tell you about Scalyr, the first purpose built log management tool on the market. Most tools on the market utilize text indexing search, which is great… for indexing a book. But if you want to search logs, at scale, fast… it breaks down. Scalyr built their own database from scratch: the system is fast. Most searches take less than 1 second. In fact, 99% of their queries execute in <1 second.  Companies like OKCupid, Giphy and CareerBuilder use Scalyr. It was built by one of the founders of Writely (aka Google Docs). Scalyr has consumer grade UI, that scales infinitely. You can monitor key metrics, trigger alerts, and integrate with PagerDuty. It’s easy to use and did we mention: lightning fast. Give it a try today. It’s free for 90 days at softwareengineeringdaily.com/scalyr.

The cold email process is what lots of people go through to market a software product, a newsletter, or an online course. Prospect.io is my favorite tool for prospecting. You can find email addresses of people at any company. You can find email addresses of users on LinkedIn. After you find those emails, you can use Prospect.io to manage your prospects, and send emails; see when someone opens your prospecting email; and stop sending them emails when they have signaled that they are not interested. If you are building a product, you have to find customers to sell to. How do you find customers? By prospecting. I’ve tried a ton of prospecting tools–Prospect.io is my favorite. Prospect.io is offering Software Engineering Daily listeners 20% off for your first 2 months. Just mention SEDaily to Prospect.io support after you sign up.

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