Kobe JALT (Kobe Chapter of the Japan Association for Language Teaching). December 8 (Sun), 14:00-15:30 in Kobe, Hyogo. Stephen McNamara (Kwansei Gakuin University).

When Sheridan College launched its Energy and Climate Master Plan, with the goal of cutting campus energy and greenhouse gas emissions by half, they realized that they would need to transform their heating and cooling system.

Colorado researchers found that on average, more than half of the energy consumed by residential air conditioners deals with the humidity on a hot day.

Carrier and Bryant have announced the recipients of the Distributors’ Education Foundation scholarship for the 2024-2025 school year.

The Markham District Energy facility differs from standard applications because instead of relying on conventional energy sources, it captures waste heat from sewage, which enters at about 5°C and is converted into 95°C usable heat.

Advanced electrode boilers are being installed to replace outdated, inefficient fuel-burning equipment in district heating applications as part of a broader effort to meet ambitious International Energy Agency decarbonization goals.

The building, which opened in September, features energy-saving qualities that include insulated walls, occupancy sensors for lighting, and high-efficiency HVAC and boilers.

The event attracted nearly 100 mechanical and electrical contractors from the surrounding area, opening the door for new business avenues both for Republic and its manufacturer partners.

Dynamic Systems Inc.’s l Stand-alone Mobile Inventory Application (SMIBA) uses barcodes to manage inventory and upload the information to any accounting system.

Today, HVACR distributors rely on enterprise resource planning (ERP) software to handle nearly every level of their operations. Vendor data, turns, dead stock, cycle counts, sales margins, and much more can be accessed directly from a computer or, in some cases, a mobile device.

A duct system is the part of an HVAC system that most homeowners don’t consider, yet it determines how well their equipment works.

I strongly believe that there should be more bold and in-your-face advertising campaigns directed towards women in the trades. This marketing strategy needs to drive it home, to everyone, that there are massive and inclusive employment opportunities in the trades.

 “Technology’s not going to solve everything, but you need to know how to use it,” Nelson Valderrama, CEO of Intuilize, told HVACR distribution professionals during the recent Heating, Air-conditioning & Refrigeration Distributors International conference.

The advent of smartphones has made life both simpler and more complicated for people around the world.

Famous Supply is planning a December 17 ribbon-cutting for its new 354,000-square-foot distribution center in Maple Heights, Ohio.

The annual sales growth for the 12 months through September 2024 is an increase of 2.3%. 

Philip Laiche exemplifies the same values that make Malco great: dedication to excellent customer service and going above and beyond to ensure contractors have the Malco tools they need to get the jobs done, a press release from Malco Tools Inc. said.

At the AHR Expo, manufacturers displayed their latest commercial refrigeration equipment, which included condensing units, components, controls, and other solutions.

As HVACR technology advances, contractors often find themselves navigating new learning curves on a regular basis. VRF is no exception.

Catch up on the latest headlines in our NEWSRoom video series.

The pandemic has marked a turning point for an underutilized technology for infectious disease control in buildings.

When it comes to smart thermostats, USACD walks the walk and talks the talk.

HVACR technicians are special individuals. They have the intelligence, aptitude, and knack for problem-solving. In fact, they are expected to know how to diagnose and troubleshoot equipment of all types, sizes, and ages.

Summer cooling season is in full gear, which means that both technicians and their tools are being kept extremely busy.

A visit to an ASHRAE event 30-plus years ago introduced David Heckler to VRF technology, and the distributor was won over. VRF systems now make up about half of his company’s business.

Contractors who are embracing the technological advancements say ignoring a new neighborhood of home automation products could be a big mistake.

Zoning technology has experienced success in both residential and commercial applications of hot water and hydronic systems.

In this Episode we talked about the new POSA 4 book which has recently been published. We talk to two of the authors, Kevlin Henney and Frank Buschmann (the third author, Doug Schmidt was not available - and he had also been on the podcast a couple of times :-)). The book contains a pattern language for distributed systems. It contains 114 patterns that had been published before by many different other authors. The patterns have been rewritten to form a consistent language. We basically talked through the different sections of the book, which gives a really good overview over the challenges and the solutions of building distributed systems. These sections include From Mud to Structure, Distribution Infrastructure, Event Demultiplexing and Dispatching, Interface Partitioning, Component Patitioning, Application Contrl, Concurrency, Synchronization, Object Interaction, Adaptazion and Extension, Modal Behaviour, Resource Management and finally, Database Access. The book references several other previous works (as listed below). Interestingly, many of these referenced works and authors have also been discussed previously on the podcast. Here are the back references:

• Domain Driven Design, Eric Evans
• Messaging Patterns, Gregor Hohpe
• POSA 2 Patterns, Doug Schmidt
• Concurrency: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and the interview with Goetz and Holmes
• Remoting Patterns Part 1 and Part 2
• POSA3, Resource Management

In this episode we talk with Rini van Solingen about scrum and agile software development in distributed settings.

Leslie Lamport won a Turing Award in 2013 for his work in distributed and concurrent systems. He also designed the document preparation tool LaTex. Leslie is employed by Microsoft Research, and has recently been working with TLA+, a language that is useful for specifying concurrent systems from a high level. The interview begins with a […]

Josiah Carlson discusses Redis, an in-memory single-threaded data structure server. A Redis mailing list contributor and author, Josiah talks with Robert about the differences between Redis and a key-value store, client-side versus server-side data structures, consistency models, embedding Lua scripts within the server, what you can do with Redis from an application standpoint, native locking […]

Stefan Tilkov talks to Camille Fournier about the challenges developers face when building distributed systems, whether the can avoid building them at all, and what changes occur once they do.

Charles Anderson talks with James Phillips about service discovery and Consul, an open-source service discovery tool. The discussion begins by defining what service discovery is, what data is stored in a service discovery tool, and some scenarios in which it’s used. Then they dive into some details about the components of a service discovery tool and how reliability is achieved as a distributed system. Finally, James discusses Consul, the functions it provides, and how to integrate it with existing applications, even if they use configuration files instead of a service discovery tool.

Donny Nadolny of PagerDuty joins Robert Blumen to tell the story of debugging an issue that PagerDuty encountered when they set up a Zookeeper cluster that spanned across two geographically separated datacenters in different regions.

James Cowling of Dropbox tells Robert Blumen about their massive migration from Amazon’s S3 to their own distributed storage system.

Ben Sigelman CEO of LightStep and co-author of the OpenTracing standard discusses distributed tracing, a form of event-driven observability for debugging distributed systems, understanding latency outlyers, and delivering "white box" analytics.

Felienne talks to Diomidis Spinellis about different forms of debugging. From using print-statements to version-control systems and operating system tools. We also discuss debugging strategies for different types of programming systems.

The use of distributed and remote software teams have grown dramatically in the past five years, presenting new challenges for managers and engineers alike. Bryan Helmig talks about the best practices his company, Zapier, uses to manage remote software...

Heidi Howard, a researcher in the field of distributed systems, discusses distributed consensus. Heidi explains when we need it, when we don't need and the algorithms we use to achieve it.

Torin Sandall of Styra and Open Policy Agent discussed OPA and policy engines and how they can benefit software projects security and compliance. Host Justin Beyer spoke with Sandall about the benefits of removing authorization logic from your application...

Tug Grall of Redis Labs discusses Redis, its evolution over the years and emerging use cases today,its module based ecosystem and Redis’ applicability in a wide range of applications beyond being a layer for caching data such as search, machine learning

L Peter Deutsch of Aladdin Enterprises and formerly of Sun Microsystems joined host Jeff Doolittle to discuss the fallacies of distributed computing. Peter retold the history and origin of the fallacies and how they have been addressed over...

Davide Bedine, a cloud solution architect at Microsoft and professional Dapr enthusiast joined host Jeff Doolittle to discuss his book, Practical Microservices with Dapr and .NET. Dapr, the Distributed Application Runtime, simplifies cloud-native...

Omer Katz, a software consultant and core contributor to the Celery discusses the Celery task processing framework with host Nikhil Krishna. We discuss in depth, the Celery task processing framework, it's architecture and the underlying messaging...

Sugu Sougoumarane discusses how to face the challenges of horizontally scaling MySQL databases through the Vitess distribution engine and Planetscale, a service built on top of Vitess. The journey began with the growing pains of scale at YouTube around the time of Google’s acquisition of the video service. This episode explores ideas about topology management, sharding, Paxos, connection pooling, and how Vitess handles large transactions while abstracting complexity from the application layer.

Chad Michel, Senior Software Architect at Don’t Panic Labs and co-author of Lean Software Systems Engineering for Developers, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about treating software development as an engineering discipline. They begin by discussing the need for engineering rigor in the software industry. Chad points out that many developers lack awareness of good engineering practice and are often unaware of resources such as the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK). Among the many topics explored in this episode are design methodologies such as volatility-based decomposition and the work of David Parnas, as well as important topics such as quality, how to address complexity, designing for change, and the role of the chief engineer. This episode is sponsored by ClickSend. SE Radio listeners can get a $50 credit by following the link.

In this episode, Ori Mankali, senior VP of engineering at cloud security startup Akeyless, speaks with SE Radio’s Nikhil Krishna about secrets management and the innovative use of distributed fragment cryptography (DFC). In the context of enterprise IT, 'secrets’ are crucial for authentication in providing access to internal applications and services. Ori describes the unique challenges of managing these sensitive data, particularly given the complexities of doing so on a large scale in substantial organizations. They discuss the necessity for a secure system for managing secrets, highlighting key features such as access policies, audit capabilities, and visualization tools. Ori introduces the concept of distributed fragment cryptography, which boosts security by ensuring that the entire secret is never known to any single entity. The episode explores encryption and decryption and the importance of key rotation, as they consider the challenges and potential solutions in secrets management.

Jaxon Repp of HarperDB speaks with Brijesh Ammanath about distributed data infrastructure, including what it is and why it's important. They discuss the key factors that make distributed data infrastructure attractive, as well as challenges to implementing it. The episode explores the architecture and design principles, the key security considerations, and the transition factors for distributed data Infrastructure. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software.