Software Engineering Daily

A financial exchange is an operationally intensive business. You have customers making a high volume of transactions, your service has to be low latency and highly available, and you are dealing with a lot of money. A cryptocurrency exchange has all of the complexity of a typical financial exchange–and then some additional complexity.

Shapeshift is a cryptocurrency exchange that allows users to buy and sell digital assets–Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and lots of other currencies. Shapeshift also has a set of tools and APIs that allow developers to build higher level applications that transact in cryptocurrencies. Shapeshift’s CEO is an early cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Erik Voorhees, who will appear on the show in the near future.

Today’s guest Jon is the COO of Shapeshift–he handles the operations of the company. He prefers not to use his last name, because Shapeshift is particularly sensitive to social engineering attacks. We’ll get into why that is in the episode–and explore lots of other topics too. How to scale a cryptocurrency exchange, the products Shapeshift offers, and some of the near-death experiences that Shapeshift has had. After all–it is a startup, and every startup has moments where it seems like the company will die.

Meetups for Software Engineering Daily are being planned! Go to softwareengineeringdaily.com/meetup if you want to register for an upcoming Meetup. In March, I’ll be visiting Datadog in New York and Hubspot in Boston, and in April I’ll be at Telesign in LA.

If you are looking for all 700 episodes of Software Engineering Daily, check out our apps on the iOS or Android app store. We’ve got tons of episodes on blockchains, business, distributed systems, and tons of other topics. If you want to become a paid subscriber to Software Engineering Daily, you can hear all of our episodes without ads–you can subscribe at softwaredaily.com. And all of the code for our apps is open source. If you are looking for an open source community to be a part of, come check out github.com/softwareengineeringdaily.

Transcript provided by We Edit Podcasts. Software Engineering Daily listeners can go to weeditpodcasts.com/sed to get 20% off the first two months of audio editing and transcription services. Thanks to We Edit Podcasts for partnering with SE Daily. Please click here to view this show’s transcript.

Users have come to expect realtime. They crave alerts that their payment is received. They crave little cars zooming around on the map. They crave locking their doors at home when they’re not at home. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to making your app “realtime.” PubNub makes it simple, enabling you to build immersive and interactive experiences on the web, on mobile phones, embedded into hardware, and any other device connected to the Internet. With powerful APIs, and a robust global infrastructure, you can stream geolocation data, send chat messages, turn on your sprinklers, or rock your baby’s crib when they start crying (PubNub literally powers IoT cribs). 70 SDKs for web, mobile, IoT, and more means you can start streaming data in realtime without a ton of compatibility headaches, and no need to build your own SDKs from scratch. And lastly, PubNub includes a ton of other realtime features beyond realtime messaging, like presence for online/offline detection, and access manager to thwart trolls and hackers. Go to PubNub.com/sedaily to get started. They offer a generous sandbox tier that’s free forever (until your app takes off).

Sumo Logic is a cloud-native, machine data analytics service that helps you Run and Secure your Modern Application. If you are feeling the pain of managing your own log, event, and performance metrics data, check out sumologic.com/sedaily. Even if you have tools already, it’s worth checking out Sumo Logic and seeing if you can leverage your data even more effectively, with real-time dashboards and monitoring, and improved observability – to improve the uptime of your application and keep your day-to-day runtime more secure. Check out sumologic.com/sedaily for a free 30-day Trial of Sumo Logic, to find out how Sumo Logic can improve your productivity and your application observability–wherever you run your applications. That’s sumologic.com/sedaily.

Do you think blockchain technology is only used for cryptocurrency? Think again. ConsenSys develops tools and infrastructure to enable a decentralized future built on Ethereum, the most advanced blockchain development platform. ConsenSys has hundreds of web3 developers that are building decentralized applications, focusing on world-changing ideas like creating a system for self-sovereign identity, managing supply chains, developing a more efficient electricity provider and much more. Listeners, why continue to build the internet of today when you can build the internet of the future on the blockchain? ConsenSys is actively hiring talented software developers to help build the decentralized web. Learn more about Consensys projects and open source jobs at consensys.net/sedaily.

The octopus: a sea creature known for its intelligence and flexibility. Octopus Deploy: a friendly deployment automation tool for deploying applications like .NET apps, Java apps and more. Ask any developer and they’ll tell you it’s never fun pushing code at 5pm on a Friday then crossing your fingers hoping for the best. That’s where Octopus Deploy comes into the picture. Octopus Deploy is a friendly deployment automation tool, taking over where your build/CI server ends. Use Octopus to promote releases on-prem or to the cloud. Octopus integrates with your existing build pipeline–TFS and VSTS, Bamboo, TeamCity, and Jenkins. It integrates with AWS, Azure, and on-prem environments. Reliably and repeatedly deploy your .NET and Java apps and more. If you can package it, Octopus can deploy it! It’s quick and easy to install. Go to Octopus.com to trial Octopus free for 45 days. That’s Octopus.com