Greatest Hits – Software Engineering Daily: Recent Episodes
Greatest Hits – Software Engineering Daily
SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer break down the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry.
In this episode, Gregor and Sean dig into a wave of “runaway AI” stories, including Anthropic and OpenAI disclosing that their models accessed outside organizations during cyber evaluations, and Amazon reporting a staggering budget overrun blamed on bad agent loops. They explore why most of these incidents trace back to human decisions rather than models breaking free, and the awkward reality that today’s systems can bill you for tokens without reliably counting them.
They also talk about the “Kimi moment.” Moonshot AI‘s open weight model has closed the gap with frontier models like ChatGPT and Claude at a remarkable pace, and the hosts unpack what it means for open weight strategies and how chip scarcity is pushing Chinese labs to innovate.
As always, the episode wraps up with a few standout Hacker News threads, including a JetBrains test of a “caveman speak” skill that promised big token savings, how refactoring can cut input token costs, the release of CodePen 2.0, and a build of Doom that renders through SQL queries.
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The terminal has been a constant in software development for decades. It has remained largely unchanged while everything around it transformed. However, as AI agents have become central to the developer workflow, the terminal is emerging as a natural home for agentic development, and a new category of tooling is forming around it.
Warp is a popular Rust-based terminal and agentic development environment. The company recently open-sourced its codebase and launched Oz, its cloud agent infrastructure product aimed at helping enterprises automate software development at scale.
Zach Lloyd is the co-founder and CEO of Warp, and a former principal engineer at Google where he led engineering on the Google Docs suite. In this episode, Zach joins Gregor Vand to discuss how Warp has evolved over the years, why the terminal is better suited than the IDE for agentic development, how Oz approaches the governance and auditability challenges enterprises face with AI agents, and more.
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Open source software underpins virtually every modern application. That ubiquity is a superpower for developers, but it is also an expanding attack surface. Software supply chain attacks were once rare but are now happening daily, with malicious actors exploiting the trust developers place in public registries, package managers, and CI/CD pipelines.
Chainguard is a secure software supply chain platform. The company started with hardened container images and has expanded to cover domains including VMs, language libraries, GitHub Actions, and agent skills.
Matt Moore is a co-founder and CTO of Chainguard, and a veteran of Google’s open source, container, and security infrastructure work. In this episode, Matt joins Gregor Vand to discuss lessons from recent supply chain attacks, why CI/CD pipelines are now a primary attack surface, the challenge of meaningful software inventories, the EU Cyber Resilience Act, and what the arrival of Anthropic’s Mythos model means for the pace of vulnerability discovery and the urgency of patching at machine speed.
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The most useful coding agents can mutate their environments by downloading packages, writing files, and connecting to services across the network. However, that freedom also presents dangers, and promises to usher in a new wave of security threats.
Docker recently announced Docker Sandboxes, which give each agent its own isolated micro VM while preserving the familiar ergonomics of a container. A standard container shares the host’s kernel, but a micro VM emulates hardware and runs its own kernel, giving a stronger security boundary around code that cannot be trusted.
Mark Cavage is the President and COO of Docker, and he previously worked at companies including Stripe, AWS and Oracle. In this episode, Mark joins Gregor Vand for a wide-ranging conversation that includes why agents break the immutability assumptions containers were built on, how micro VMs differ from both containers and traditional VMs, and the still-unsolved challenge of giving agents scoped, trustworthy access to sensitive services and data.
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Golden Gate Ventures is one of Southeast Asia’s most established early-stage venture firms, having backed companies across the region since 2011. They have invested in companies that are now household names in the region. Examples include Gojek, which started as a motorcycle taxi service in Indonesia and grew into a super app spanning payments, food delivery, and logistics, and Grab, which began as a ride-hailing service in Singapore and similarly expanded across Southeast Asia into food delivery and financial services.
Jeffrey Paine is a co-founder and partner at Golden Gate Ventures. In this episode, Jeffrey joins Gregor Vand to discuss how the Southeast Asian startup ecosystem has evolved, why the regional copycat model is giving way to globally ambitious technical founders, what companies like Manus and Supabase reveal about Singapore’s emerging role in the global tech landscape, and what advice Jeffrey gives founders today who want to build something that matters beyond their home market.
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AI agents have shown remarkable potential to function as persistent digital assistants that are capable of monitoring data, managing communications, and taking action autonomously over long periods. OpenClaw was one of the first serious attempts to fulfill that vision, connecting frontier coding agents to messaging platforms like Slack and WhatsApp and letting them run continuously in the background. However, OpenClaw largely set aside questions of security to pursue that vision, leaving credentials exposed in the agent’s environment and giving agents broad access to data and services far beyond what any given task required.
NanoClaw is an open source project that takes a zero trust approach to agent orchestration. Rather than relying on instructions to constrain agent behavior, it isolates each agent in its own Docker container, keeps credentials entirely outside the agent’s environment, and enforces human-in-the-loop approval for sensitive actions.
Gavriel Cohen is the founder of NanoClaw and he joins Kevin Ball to discuss the security architecture behind NanoClaw, how the agent sandbox and proxy model work in practice, how agents communicate with each other and with the host orchestration process, how the project approaches context window management and long-lived agent sessions, and more.
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AI agents have become capable of reasoning across large amounts of data, calling tools, and taking sequences of actions autonomously. These qualities make them well suited to some of the most persistent pain points in DevOps, including the on-call engineer woken at 3 AM to diagnose an incident, the build failure that takes hours to trace back to a root cause, and the operational toil of modern software delivery. Agentic DevOps is the emerging paradigm that applies these capabilities to the full software lifecycle, with the goal of matching the velocity of modern software delivery with an equally capable operational layer.
Neha Gaswamy leads Agentic DevOps at AWS and has been at Amazon for over twenty years. In this episode, she joins Matt Merrill to discuss the AWS approach to agentic DevOps, how Amazon dogfoods its own DevOps tooling, how their DevOps agent works from alarm to root cause, why determinism still matters in an agentic world, creative MCP integrations customers are building, and what the future holds for SRE engineers as agents take on more of the operational work.
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AI agents have transformed how software gets written, but the operational side of running software in production has not yet experienced a similar revolution. The same teams responsible for keeping systems healthy, investigating incidents, and managing reliability are still doing much of that work manually.
Mezmo is a Production AI company that makes autonomous operations fast, efficient, and safe. Their open source project, AURA, is a declarative agent framework specifically designed for SRE and platform engineering workflows. It takes a Kubernetes-inspired approach where teams define what they want agents to do rather than scripting every step of how to do it.
Andre Elizondo is the head of product at Mezmo, and he has a background in systems engineering, SRE, and observability. In this episode, Andre joins Kevin Ball to discuss what makes SRE agent workflows fundamentally different from coding agents, how AURA handles context engineering, AURA’s declarative configuration model, the spectrum of agent autonomy, and where the role of the SRE is headed as agents take on more of the operational work.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Mezmo.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post AURA and Open-Source Agents for Production Operations appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup method and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, which transformed how a generation of founders and engineers think about building products. It introduced concepts like the MVP, the pivot, and build-measure-learn that are now so widely adopted they feel obvious. Over two decades of working with founders, CEOs, and investors, Eric has observed that some companies built on those principles eventually betray the very customers and engineers who made them great. His new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Companies Stay Great, is his attempt to answer the question of whether it is possible to build a company that resists that fate.
In this episode, Eric joins Gregor Vand for a wide-ranging discussion about why so many great companies lose their way, and what software engineers and founders can do today to build or find companies that are genuinely resistant to corruption.
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SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer break down the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry.
In this episode, Gregor and Sean dig into the growing tension around restricted AI models, including Anthropic‘s Fable being pulled from the Claude platform days after launch. They explore what Sean calls “vibe regulations” and the risk foreign governments and enterprises face when a model they depend on can be cut off. They also cover the FT’s reporting on London’s “DeepMind mafia,” a vibe-coding clone controversy involving YC-backed Corgi and Papermark, SpaceX‘s acquisitions of Cursor and Mesh, and Anthropic’s launch of Claude Science.
They also take on the latest round of the IDE wars, and explore who owns your dev toolchain, the vendor lock-in that now comes from context and memory rather than the model itself, and the widening cost gap between frontier tools and open weight models. As always, the episode wraps up with a few standout Hacker News threads.
The post SED News: Restricted Models, IDE Wars, and the DeepMind Mafia appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Advanced software systems have long been more complex than any single engineer can fully understand. Observability is the established solution to this problem, but with AI agents now generating code, deploying changes, and operating autonomously, the challenge of understanding large software systems is entering a new dimension.
Grafana is an open source observability platform, and one of the most widely used in the world. The company builds tools that help teams collect, visualize, and act on telemetry data across logs, metrics, and traces. They are now extending that capability into the agentic era with AI-powered investigation and monitoring tools.
Anthony Woods is a co-founder of Grafana Labs. In this episode, he joins Matt Merrill to discuss how AI-generated code is straining software operations, why telemetry data volume has become as much a problem as a solution, how Grafana is adapting to a world where agents are the primary consumers of observability data, and what keeps him up at night about where the industry is headed.
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The post Grafana’s Approach to AI-Native Observability appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Building great software always involves technical problem solving, but the best software goes beyond function. It feels fluid, coherent, and genuinely fun to use. This quality lives at the intersection of engineering and design, and very few teams know how to reliably produce it.
Metalab is an engineering and design studio that has worked with some of the most successful companies in tech, including Apple, Slack, Uber, and Instacart. The studio is known for bringing together software engineering and design craft in a way that few studios can match.
Wesley Yu is the VP of Engineering at Metalab, where he leads the teams that design and build digital products for early-stage companies. In this episode, Wesley joins Josh Goldberg to discuss how Metalab approaches tech stack selection for client projects, why agency work demands a bias toward boring and stable technology, how iterative development and deliberately ugly apps lead to better final products, and how AI tools are changing the boundary between design and engineering.
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The post Building Software That People Love appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Yacht Club Games is the studio behind the acclaimed Shovel Knight franchise. Their latest release is Mina the Hollower, which is a top-down action RPG inspired by classic Zelda and Castlevania titles. After many years in development, the game recently launched to widespread critical acclaim.
David D’Angelo is a lead programmer at Yacht Club Games. In this episode, David joins Joe Nash to discuss the custom C++ engine built for Mina the Hollower, how the team approached Game Boy Color art constraints and audio in a modern rendering pipeline, the game’s Castlevania-inspired combat philosophy, how the open world manages saving and collision without load screens, and more.
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Predictive modeling is a core element in modern systems, and powers capabilities such as fraud detection, loan approvals, and recommendation systems. These systems typically operate on structured, relational data stored in enterprise databases, with rows, columns, and interlinked tables. While computer vision and natural language processing have undergone a neural network revolution, the tabular data layer underpinning predictive modeling still largely relies on manual feature engineering and task-specific models.
Relational deep learning proposes a new approach. It treats databases as graphs and applies transformer-style attention mechanisms directly over structured relational data. Researchers are now building foundation models for tabular data that aim to generalize across predictive tasks without painstaking feature engineering.
Jure Leskovec is a Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and he previously served as Chief Scientist at Pinterest and was an investigator at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub. Most recently, he co-founded the machine learning startup, Kumo.AI.
In this episode, Jure joins Sean Falconer to discuss the limitations of traditional predictive modeling, why structured enterprise data requires its own modality-specific neural architectures, how graph transformers generalize attention to relational databases, and more.
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Modern web development requires an ever-growing collection of tools including formatters, linters, bundlers, and plugins. Each tool typically has its own configuration, dependencies, and performance cost. As applications grow more complex, the overhead of maintaining this toolchain becomes a real burden.
Biome is an open source toolchain for web projects that brings formatting and linting together in a single fast, opinionated tool. It’s built in Rust and is designed to be a drop-in replacement for Prettier and ESLint, with sensible defaults, minimal configuration, and consistent behavior across the CLI and editor environments. Biome also introduces a module graph that enables cross-file analysis, and type-aware lint rules that don’t require the TypeScript compiler.
Emanuele Stoppa, known as Ema, is a Senior Systems Engineer at Cloudflare, a lead at Astro, and the creator and lead maintainer of Biome. In this episode, Ema joins Josh Goldberg to discuss the history of Biome, how linters and formatters work under the hood, what makes Biome’s architecture fundamentally different from the tools it replaces, and what’s coming next for the project and its community.
Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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The post Biome and the Future of JavaScript Tooling appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Most of the cryptography securing the internet today rests on mathematical problems that classical computers cannot solve in any reasonable timeframe. That assumption is now being tested. Recent advances in quantum computing have dramatically compressed timelines, and many in the industry have set a target of full post-quantum security by 2029, meaning a complete migration to algorithms designed to remain secure against quantum attacks.
Bas Westerbaan is a cryptography engineer at Cloudflare, where he leads the company’s efforts to migrate to post-quantum cryptography. In this episode, Bas joins Kevin Ball to discuss how quantum computers threaten public key cryptography, what post-quantum algorithms actually are and how they work, the timeline shifts that have made quantum readiness feel so urgent, and what software engineers need to do now to prepare their systems.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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Multiplayer games are among the hardest software systems to build, requiring developers to synchronize state across unreliable networks while maintaining fairness, performance, and a responsive player experience. Latency, cheating, server costs, and debugging distributed game logic all introduce complexity that single-player games never encounter.
Dome Keeper is a minimalist tower defense game with roguelike elements where players must protect a fragile glass dome from relentless waves of alien attackers. The game was developed with the Godot Engine and released in 2022. More recently, the development team embarked on the challenge of adding multiplayer to the game.
René Habermann is the founder of Bippinbits and the creator of Dome Keeper. Chris Ridenour is the founder of KAR Games, which is Godot focused studio that developed Drift: Space Survival. Chris is now working with the Dome Keeper team to bring multiplayer to the game. René and Chris join the show to talk about the origins of Dome Keeper, developing the game, and the process of adding multiplayer to a Godot game.
Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry’s Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry.
In this episode, they cover Apple‘s uncertain path beyond the iPhone. They also discuss Google‘s agentic pivot at Google I/O, a surge in DuckDuckGo traffic following Google’s default switch to AI mode, and payroll platform Remote surpassing 300 million in ARR with flat headcount.
Gregor and Sean also dig into why consumer subscriptions don’t seem to correspond to actual costs, how enterprise is quietly subsidizing the AI economy, why the true moat has shifted from model quality to context management and agentic harness, and what the coming wave of token cost optimization might look like as companies start scrutinizing their AI bills.
Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News including Doom running on a travel router touchscreen, a viral post asking whether AI productivity gains should translate to a day off, YouTube‘s move to automatically label AI-generated content, and SimCity 3000 running in 4K.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post SED News: Apple’s AI Problem, The Real Business Model of AI, and Token Cost Reckoning appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
The web has quietly become one of the most capable platforms for game development. Advances in WebAssembly, WebGL, and WebGPU have given developers tools that rival native desktop performance, while game engines like Unity and Godot have added robust web export pipelines. However, building games for the browser comes with its own set of constraints including file size, browser compatibility, and the need to quickly capture and maintain the player’s attention.
Erik Dubbelboer is a Principal Engineer at Poki which is a web games platform serving over 100 million monthly users. He’s also a game developer himself, with titles including Silly Skies and Village Builder. His unusual position building developer tools that power the platform, while also shipping games on it, gives him a rare perspective on what it actually takes to succeed in web game development.
In this episode, Erik joins Joe Nash to discuss the history of web games from the Flash era to today’s renaissance, how WebAssembly and WebGPU have transformed what is possible in the browser, the tradeoffs between different game engines for web publishing, and more.
Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry’s Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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Software engineering has developed powerful tools for observability, data management, and continuous testing, but hardware engineering has largely not kept pace. The feedback loops, tooling, and infrastructure that software engineers take for granted simply do not exist in most hardware programs.
Nominal is a data platform built to help hardware organizations move at the same speed as software teams. It manages the hardware data supply chain end to end, from ingesting high-frequency sensor data off physical assets to enabling real-time control room monitoring, post-test analysis, and simulation correlation.
Jason Hoch is the co-founder and CTO of Nominal, and he has a background spanning distributed data systems at Palantir and cloud infrastructure at Vercel. In this episode, Jason joins Kevin Ball to discuss why hardware engineering has lagged so far behind software in tooling and observability, the unique data challenges of working with high-frequency time series sensor data, how Nominal handles both real-time control room workflows and post-test analysis, why AI agents are transforming software development but have not yet made the same leap in hardware, and what it would take to close that gap.
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The post The Hardware Bottleneck AI Can’t Fix appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Autonomous drone delivery has long been the stuff of science fiction, but ongoing advances have moved the space from experimental to operational. Zipline is one of the leading companies in this space, with drones that charge between missions and fly autonomously to deliver packages directly to customers.
Kyle Madonia is the VP of Application Software and IT at Zipline, and she previously spent a decade as an engineer at SpaceX. In this episode, Kyle joins Gregor Vand to discuss how Zipline’s software stack powers end-to-end autonomous delivery, the engineering challenges of managing drone fleets at scale, and how the team approaches software releases for safety-critical systems.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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Europe’s startup ecosystem is maturing rapidly, with companies like Revolut, Lovable, and Legora demonstrating that world-class technology businesses can be built and scaled on the continent. While the US remains the dominant force in venture-backed software as home to the largest markets, the deepest capital pools, and the most ambitious exit culture, a growing number of European founders are choosing to build at home.
Edward Keelan is a Partner at Octopus Ventures, one of Europe’s largest and most active venture capital firms, where he has spent over 16 years leading the B2B software and enterprise AI fund. His portfolio spans seed through Series C, with a focus on European founders building in AI, vertical SaaS, and enterprise software. This long-view experience gives him a rare perspective on what it takes to build enduring technology companies in Europe.
In this episode, Edward joins Elena Boroda to discuss what separates great founders from the rest, how AI is reshaping the software landscape and threatening established players, the state of the European startup ecosystem and what it needs to compete globally, and what engineers and founders should be thinking about as the industry enters a new era.
Elena Boroda focuses on GTM for developer tools and AI startups, with experience in observability and building tools for MCP servers. She is based in Berlin.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/elena-boroda
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React Native is an open source framework developed by Meta that allows engineers to build mobile applications for both iOS and Android using a single JavaScript codebase. The framework bridges the gap between web development and native mobile, which lets teams ship to both platforms simultaneously without sacrificing the look and feel of a truly native app.
Manjiri Moghe is a Staff Software Engineer at Coinbase, where she has spent five years building and scaling one of the world’s most demanding React Native applications. Her work spans performance optimization, reliability engineering, and the developer tooling that keeps large engineering teams moving quickly without sacrificing quality.
In this episode, Manjiri joins Josh Goldberg to discuss why React Native has become the framework of choice for high-velocity mobile teams, how Coinbase measures app health, how to handle data fetching and loading in production, how AI coding agents are changing the day-to-day workflow for mobile engineers, and more.
Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post React Native at Scale appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Formal methods are a branch of mathematics and computer science focused on proving the correctness of systems, and they have long promised a more rigorous foundation for software. However, their complexity has kept them confined to a small community of specialists. That is now changing as agentic AI systems take on increasingly autonomous roles. The question of how to define, enforce, and verify what those agents are allowed to do has become urgent, and automated reasoning is emerging as a critical part of the answer.
Byron Cook is a VP and Distinguished Scientist at AWS, a professor at University College London, and a program manager at DARPA. He founded the Automated Reasoning Group at AWS over a decade ago, where his team built the foundations behind products like IAM Access Analyzer, VPC Reachability Analyzer, and Bedrock Guardrails.
In this episode, Byron joins Sean Falconer to discuss how automated reasoning works and why it scales so well with AI, the rise of neurosymbolic approaches that combine formal logic with large language models, what it means to formally specify agent behavior using temporal logic, and why the convergence of agentic AI and formal methods may represent one of the most significant shifts in how software is built and verified.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post Formal Methods as Agent Guardrails appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Open source software underpins nearly every modern application, including frameworks powering the most popular websites, to the libraries securing financial backend systems. However, while open source drives collaboration and innovation at a global scale, it also faces deep challenges in sustainability, community health, and long-term maintenance. Many of the world’s most critical dependencies are still maintained by just a handful of volunteers.
Abby Cabunoc Mayes leads Open Source Maintainer Programs at GitHub, and Brian Muenzenmeyer is a Principal Engineer, Node.js maintainer, and author of the book, Approachable Open Source. Abby and Brian join Josh Goldberg to talk about what it means to build and sustain healthy open source projects, how maintainers can foster inclusive communities, the evolving role of open source in the workplace, and how AI is reshaping the way we collaborate.
Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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Vector search has risen to become a foundational tool in modern search and retrieval systems, including the RAG pipelines that power many AI applications. However, the demands on retrieval systems are growing more sophisticated, which is revealing the limits of relying on a single vector similarity score.
Vespa is a popular open source search and data serving engine. Central to Vespa’s architecture is tensor-based retrieval, which is an approach that represents data as tensors rather than simple vectors. Tensor-based retrieval enables richer mathematical operations and more flexible ranking functions that can surmount the limitations of a single vector similarity score.
Radu Gheorghe is a software engineer at Vespa with a background spanning nearly 12 years of consulting and training on Elasticsearch and Solr. In this episode, Radu joins Sean Falconer to discuss why vector similarity alone falls short in production, how tensor-based retrieval generalizes to support richer ranking functions, the trade-offs in chunking and multi-stage re-ranking architectures, and where AI search is headed next.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Vespa.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post Vespa AI and Surpassing the Limits of Vector Search appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry.
In this episode, they cover Anthropic’s controversial “Mythos” security model and what it means for vulnerability discovery at scale. They also discuss recent layoffs at Snap and Meta, and how AI investment pressures are reshaping hiring, organizational priorities, and the economics of big tech.
Gregor and Sean then zoom out to examine the massive wave of AI infrastructure spending—hundreds of billions in capex across Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Meta, and what it signals about the future of cloud platforms, model providers, and the engineers who build on top of them. They explore the emerging entanglement between model labs and infrastructure providers, the evolving role of engineers in an AI-native world, and the growing gap between rapid AI adoption and security readiness.
Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News, including creative uses of AI coding tools to revive abandoned side projects, new approaches to training smaller yet highly capable models, surprising demographic data visualizations, and even the mathematics of “cheating” at Tetris.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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AI coding tools have dramatically accelerated the pace of development, and the bottleneck in the software development lifecycle has shifted to code validation and testing. However, the conventional tools and workflows that QA teams have relied on were not designed for a world where a single engineer can generate thousands of lines of code in a day.
SmartBear is a software quality platform spanning test automation, API lifecycle management, and observability. The company recently launched an AI-native QA platform called BearQ, which deploys autonomous agents that explore web applications, learns their structure and behavior, and authors and maintains test cases continuously.
Fitz Nowlan is the VP of AI and Architecture at SmartBear and the co-founder of Reflect, which is a web testing platform acquired by SmartBear in 2024. In this episode, Fitz joins Kevin Ball to discuss why web UI testing is uniquely challenging, how BearQ’s multi-agent architecture coordinates exploration and testing, why test data management becomes a hard distributed systems problem at scale, and what agentic development means for the future of QA.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by SmartBear.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
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Artificial intelligence is transforming warfare faster than the legal and ethical frameworks designed to govern it. Militaries around the world are deploying AI-powered decision support systems to identify targets, assess proportionality, and direct weapons. The gap between what is technically possible and what international law can effectively regulate is widening by the day.
Yuval Shany is a law professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a research fellow at the Oxford Ethics in AI Institute. He also served on the UN Human Rights Committee, where he first encountered the legal and ethical challenges posed by autonomous weapons systems. His research focuses on the intersection of international humanitarian law, human rights, and emerging military technologies.
In this episode, Yuval joins Matt Merrill for a wide-ranging conversation. They cover topics including how close we are to fully autonomous lethal weapons, the accountability gap that AI-mediated warfare creates, and what lessons software engineers can draw from these challenges when building consequential AI systems of any kind.
Matt Merrill is a software engineering leader with over 20 years of experience building and scaling software teams across enterprise and product-focused organizations. His background is in backend development, cloud architecture, and distributed systems design. He currently architects and delivers software products and leads a team of engineers at DEPT® Agency. You can learn more about his work at code.theothermattm.com.
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Open-weight models are AI systems whose trained parameters are publicly released, which allows developers to run, fine-tune, and deploy them independently rather than accessing them only through a hosted API. While closed-weight models from companies like OpenAI or Anthropic are delivered as managed services, open-weight models give organizations direct control over how the models are deployed and used. Importantly, the performance of these models is steadily improving and they’ve become credible alternatives for production workloads, with advantages in customization and data privacy.
Fireworks AI is building a platform focused on serving and customizing open-weight models at scale. The platform includes optimized inference infrastructure, multi-hardware support across NVIDIA and AMD, and reinforcement fine-tuning capabilities.
Benny Chen is a Co-Founder of Fireworks AI. In this episode, he joins Gregor Vand to discuss his path from Meta’s ML infrastructure teams to co-founding Fireworks AI, why open-weight models are becoming increasingly competitive, how custom kernels and speculative decoding improve performance, reinforcement fine-tuning, and much more.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
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AI coding tools have gone from novelty to core infrastructure in under three years. Today, many devs use AI daily, a substantial share of new code is AI-generated, and expectations for automation are rapidly increasing.
Sonar is a company specializing in analysis of code quality and security, and they recently released a new survey – the State of Code Developer Survey. The survey provides a deep examination of how developers are using AI in real production environments, and where the real-world gaps and risks still exist.
Chris Grams is the CVP of Corporate Marketing at Sonar, and Manish Kapur is the VP of Product Marketing and Developer Relations at Sonar. In this episode, they join Matt Merrill to discuss what the survey reveals about AI-assisted development, why 96% of developers still don’t fully trust AI-generated code, how deterministic verification layers fit into agent-driven workflows, and what engineering leaders should prioritize as AI shifts from experimentation to production infrastructure.
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AI agents are increasingly capable of reasoning and performing autonomous work over long periods. However, as agents take on more complex, longer-horizon tasks, keeping them supplied with the right information becomes the core engineering challenge. The industry is moving away from pre-loading context upfront toward a model where agents dynamically navigate and retrieve the data they need, when they need it.
Redis is approaching context management using a context engine, which is an architecture built around four pillars: on-demand context retrieval, data that is always current, fast retrieval, and a memory layer that improves over time. In practice this means building materialized views of data with a semantic layer on top, rather than giving agents direct access to production databases. A memory system sits alongside this, extracting and compacting information asynchronously as the agent works.
Simba Khadder leads AI strategy at Redis, and he previously co-founded the feature store platform FeatureForm, which was acquired by Redis in 2025. In this episode, Simba joins Kevin Ball to discuss why context has become the defining challenge in agentic AI, how context engines differ from traditional RAG architectures, how materialized views underpin reliable agent data pipelines, how memory systems can improve through async extraction and compaction, and how engineering teams need to adapt their practices as AI-driven development accelerates.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Redis.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
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AI agents are evolving from individual productivity tools into distributed systems components inside enterprises. The next frontier is coming into focus, and it involves large-scale ecosystems of collaborating agents embedded directly into business processes. However, multi-agent architectures introduce serious challenges around orchestration, state management, trust, governance, and observability.
Eric Broda is a veteran of the software industry, and he’s the co-author of the new O’Reilly book, Agentic Mesh: The GenAI-Powered Autonomous Agent Ecosystem.
In this episode, Eric joins Sean Falconer to discuss the architectural challenges of deploying agents as core infrastructure, how distributed computing principles apply to multi-agent systems, why trust and explainability are foundational, and what enterprises may look like as agents become full participants in business processes.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
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Observability emerged from the need to understand complex software systems, and involves tracking metrics, logs, and traces so engineers can detect and diagnose problems before they affect users. However, modern applications often encompass hundreds of services, containers, and dependencies, generating more observability data than dashboards and alerts alone can effectively surface.
New Relic is a leading observability platform, with a history that spans the full arc of modern software operations. Today they are working to apply AI to move observability beyond passive monitoring toward active intelligence, where systems can surface what matters, reduce alert noise, and ultimately take autonomous action before problems reach engineers or users.
Nic Benders is the Chief Technology Strategist at New Relic, where he has worked for 16 years. In this episode, Nic joins Lee Atchison to discuss the evolution of observability from dashboards and alerts to AI-driven intelligence, how LLMs and statistical tools work together to surface meaningful signals from massive datasets, the emerging challenge of observing AI systems themselves, and what the rise of AI means for the future of software engineering as a profession.
This episode is hosted by Lee Atchison. Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, and thought leader on cloud computing and application modernization. His best-selling book, Architecting for Scale (O’Reilly Media), is an essential resource for technical teams looking to maintain high availability and manage risk in their cloud environments.Lee is the host of his podcast, Modern Digital Business, an engaging and informative podcast produced for people looking to build and grow their digital business with the help of modern applications and processes developed for today’s fast-moving business environment. Listen at mdb.fm. Follow Lee at softwarearchitectureinsights.com, and see all his content at leeatchison.com.
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Mobile apps have become a primary interface for critical services, including banking, payments, and healthcare. Unlike web applications, much of the logic and intellectual property in a mobile app lives directly on the user’s device, which is an environment the developer doesn’t control. That makes mobile apps uniquely exposed to reverse engineering, runtime manipulation, and fraud.
As more critical functionality shifts to mobile, the need to harden apps against sophisticated attackers continues to grow. Guardsquare builds tools to protect and test mobile applications against both static and dynamic threats. Its platform has features including layered code obfuscation, runtime application self-protection, mobile-specific security testing, threat monitoring, and API attestation.
Ryan Lloyd is the Chief Product Officer at Guardsquare. In this episode, he joins Gregor Vand to discuss why mobile security differs from desktop and web security, how reverse engineering tools have evolved, the role of compiler-based obfuscation and runtime protections, common mobile app vulnerabilities, and how LLMs are reshaping the attacker landscape.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Guardsquare.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
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The Model Context Protocol, or MCP, gives developers a common way to expose tools, data, and capabilities to large language models, and it has quickly become an important standard in agentic AI. FastMCP is an open source project stewarded by the team at Prefect, which is an orchestration platform for AI and data workflows. The FastMCP project builds on MCP to provide high-level, ergonomic abstractions for Python developers to rapidly build and deploy MCP servers and applications.
Jeremiah Lowin is the founder and CEO of Prefect, and Adam Azzam is the VP of Product at the company. In this episode, Jeremiah and Adam join Gregor Vand to discuss the origin story of FastMCP, the three pillars of the framework, the architectural decisions behind FastMCP 3.0, and much more.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
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SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry.
In this episode, they cover the resurgence of ARM and CPUs as serious compute infrastructure for running local AI agents, a supply chain attack on LiteLLM that exposed API credentials across thousands of developer environments, and the arrival of OpenCode as a fully open source alternative to Claude Code and Codex. They also discuss the diverging strategies of Anthropic and OpenAI following the Pentagon contract controversy, and what it signals about where each company is positioning itself in the enterprise and government markets. Gregor and Sean then dive deep into what the AI coding boom actually means for shipping software.
Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News, including Doom running entirely over DNS, the psychology of seafoam green in Cold War-era control rooms, a Tesla Model 3 computer assembled from salvaged crash components, and Apple’s quiet discontinuation of the Mac Pro.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
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The post SED News: OpenCode, AI Code vs. Shipped Code, and the LiteLLM Breach appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
FreeBSD is one of the longest-running and most influential open-source operating systems in the world. It was born from the Berkeley Software Distribution in the early 1990s, it has powered everything from high-performance networking infrastructure to game consoles and content delivery networks. Over three decades, it has evolved through major architectural shifts, from symmetric multiprocessing and kernel scalability to modern storage systems and predictable release engineering.
John Baldwin has spent more than 25 years working on FreeBSD as a developer, contributor, and consultant. In this episode, John joins Gregor Vand to discuss the origins of FreeBSD, how its governance model differs from other open-source projects, its role inside systems like Netflix’s CDN and the PlayStation 4, the challenges of maintaining a 30-year-old codebase, and much more.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
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Modern cloud-native systems are built on highly dynamic, distributed infrastructure where containers spin up and down constantly, services communicate across clusters, and traditional networking assumptions break down. Linux networking was designed decades ago around static IPs and linear rule processing, which makes it increasingly difficult to achieve scale in Kubernetes environments. At the same time, modifying the Linux kernel to keep up with these demands is slow, risky, and impractical for most organizations.
The Extended Berkeley Packet Filter, or eBPF, is a Linux kernel technology that allows sandboxed programs to run safely inside the kernel without modifying kernel source code or loading kernel modules. Cilium is an open-source, cloud-native networking platform that’s built on eBPF, and provides, secures, and observes connectivity between workloads in Kubernetes and other distributed environments.
Bill Mulligan is a maintainer in the Cilium ecosystem and a member of the team at Isovalent, the company behind Cilium. He joins the show with Gregor Vand to discuss how eBPF works under the hood, why Cilium has become one of the most widely adopted Kubernetes networking projects, and how the future of cloud-native infrastructure is being reshaped by programmable kernels.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
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Bennett Foddy is a legendary game designer known for creating wholly distinctive games such as QWOP, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, and the recently released Baby Steps. He’s also a former professor at the NYU Game Center, where he taught game design alongside developing his own experimental work.
In this episode, Bennett joins Joe Nash to discuss his systems-driven approach to game design, why frustration and difficulty are often misunderstood, how streaming and speedrunning have reshaped how games are played and experienced, and what makes his games stand out.
Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry’s Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.
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Developer tooling shapes how software gets written day to day, but the best tools often disappear into the background once they succeed. Formatting, linting, and build systems can either create friction and endless debate, or quietly remove entire classes of problems from a team’s workflow. Over the past decade, the JavaScript ecosystem has wrestled with both extremes as it scaled rapidly and accumulated complexity.
Prettier emerged as a response to the surprisingly human problem of engineers spending too much time debating code style instead of building software. It offers a deterministic, opinionated formatter that helped normalize automation as part of everyday development.
James Long is a design and product engineer who has worked at Mozilla and Stripe, and he’s the creator of Prettier. He joins the show with Josh Goldberg to talk about the origins of Prettier, why formatting debates are so emotionally charged, the technical challenges of building formatters, the realities of maintaining popular open-source tools, and how the JavaScript tooling ecosystem continues to evolve.
Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.
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Skateboarding games have long balanced technical precision with a sense of flow and expression, but Skate Story takes the genre in a radically different direction. It has a distinct vaporwave vibe and blends fluid skate mechanics with exploration, puzzles, and an existential narrative about freedom, pain, and obsession.
The game was created by indie developer Sam Eng, who previously released Zarvot for the Nintendo Switch. Skate Story launched to critical acclaim and was widely regarded as one of the best games of 2025.
In this episode, Sam joins the show with Joe Nash to talk about developing Skate Story.
Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry’s Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.
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Retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, has become a foundational approach to building production AI systems. However, deploying RAG in practice can be complex and costly. Developers typically have to manage vector databases, chunking strategies, embedding models, and indexing infrastructure. Designing effective RAG systems is also a moving target, as techniques and best practices evolve in step with rapidly advancing language models.
Google DeepMind recently released the File Search Tool, a fully managed RAG system built directly into the Gemini API. File Search abstracts away the retrieval pipeline, allowing developers to upload documents, code, and other text data, automatically generate embeddings, and query their knowledge base. We wanted to understand how the DeepMind team designed a general-purpose RAG system that maintains high retrieval quality.
Animesh Chatterji is a Software Engineer at Google DeepMind and Ivan Solovyev is a Product Manager at DeepMind, and they worked on File Search Tool. They joined the podcast with Sean Falconer to discuss the evolution of RAG, why simplicity and pricing transparency matter, how embedding models have improved retrieval quality, the tradeoffs between configurability and ease of use, and what’s next for multimodal retrieval across text, images, and beyond.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
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Interactive notebooks were popularized by the Jupyter project and have since become a core tool for data science, research, and data exploration. However, traditional, imperative notebooks often break down as projects grow more complex. Hidden state, non-reproducible execution, poor version control ergonomics, and difficulty reusing notebook code in real software systems make it hard to move from exploration to production. At the same time, sharing results often requires collaborators to recreate entire environments, limiting interactivity and slowing feedback.
Marimo is an open-source, next-generation Python notebook designed to address these problems directly. Akshay Agrawal is the creator of Marimo and he previously worked at Google Brain. He joins the show with Kevin Ball to discuss the limitations of traditional notebooks, the design of reactive notebooks in Python, how marimo bridges research and production, and where notebooks fit in an increasingly agentic, AI-assisted development world.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
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AI agents have taken on a growing share of software development work, so much so that the hardest problems are shifting away from code generation towards something new, context. The challenge is now contextualizing why systems work the way they do, how architectural decisions were made, and the sources of truth that exist outside of the code base. As teams adopt agentic tools, gaps or inconsistencies in context have emerged as a primary reason why software fails to meet production standards.
Unblocked is a startup focused on solving this context gap. Their context engine aggregates and reasons over organizational knowledge spread across source code, pull requests, documentation, chat systems, and production telemetry. By acting as a context engine for both developers and AI agents, Unblocked aims to improve AI code quality and review, reduce interruptions, accelerate onboarding, and enable safer, more effective agentic workflows.
Dennis Pilarinos is the Founder and CEO of Unblocked. Previously, he helped build Azure at Microsoft, worked at AWS, and co-founded BuddyBuild, which is a mobile CI platform acquired by Apple. Dennis joins Kevin Ball to discuss context engineering, reconciling conflicting sources nof truth, permission to wear AI systems, the shifting bottlenecks in the software development lifecycle, and what it means to be a software engineer in an increasingly agentic world.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Unblocked.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
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Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry.
In this episode, they cover the viral rise of OpenClaw and its founder’s move to OpenAI, OpenAI’s exploration of ads inside ChatGPT, and Alibaba’s push into agent-powered commerce during Lunar New Year. They also discuss Mistral’s acquisition of Koyeb to deepen its compute stack, the growing competition between ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and what these moves signal about monetization, infrastructure, and control in the AI arms race.
Gregor and Sean then dive deep into the rapid acceleration of agentic engineering. They examine how tools like Claude Code and Codex are compressing the idea-to-production cycle, what multi-agent orchestration means for software teams, whether the era of the “10x engineer” is ending, and how organizational structures may need to evolve as coding shifts from manual craft to supervised automation.
Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News, including reverse engineering a 1990 DOS classic, a 3D reimagining of flight tracking data, old-school practical film effects using cloud tanks, and the privacy-focused GrapheneOS mobile operating system.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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The post SED News: OpenClaw Goes Viral, Mistral’s Compute Play, and the Agent Arms Race appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
AI-assisted coding tools have made it easier than ever to spin up prototypes, but turning those prototypes into reliable, production-grade systems remains a major challenge. Large language models are non-deterministic, prone to drift, and often lose track of intent over long development sessions.
Kiro is an AI-powered IDE that’s built around a spec-driven development workflow. It’s focused on helping developers capture intent up front, translate it into concrete requirements and designs, and systematically validate implementations through tasks, testing, and guardrails. It aims to preserve the creativity of AI-assisted development while producing software that is ready for real-world use.
David Yanacek is a Senior Principal Engineer and a lead advisor on the Agentic AI team at AWS. Today, his work focuses on Kiro, frontier agents, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, and AWS’s operational agents. He joins the show with Kevin Ball to discuss the design of Kiro, how spec-driven development changes the way teams work with AI coding agents, and what the next generation of agentic software development might look like.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
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Enterprise IT systems have grown into sprawling, highly distributed environments spanning cloud infrastructure, applications, data platforms, and increasingly AI-driven workloads. Observability tools have made it easier to collect metrics, logs, and traces, but understanding why systems fail and responding quickly remains a persistent challenge. As complexity continues to rise, the industry is looking beyond dashboards and alerts toward agentic AI systems that can reason about operational data, reduce toil, and take action when things go wrong.
SolarWinds offers solutions to monitor, understand, and remediate issues across complex, distributed systems. The company began as a leader in network and infrastructure monitoring, and has evolved to support modern applications, cloud environments, containers, and AI workloads, with a growing focus on reducing operational toil.
Krishna Sai is the Chief Technology Officer at SolarWinds. He joins the show with Sean Falconer to discuss how SolarWinds is rethinking observability in the age of AI, what it means to design agentic systems for mission-critical environments, how AI-assisted programming is reshaping engineering workflows, and why the future of operations depends on building platforms where humans and autonomous agents work together.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by SolarWinds.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
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China’s Great Firewall is often spoken about but is rarely understood. It is one of the most sophisticated and opaque censorship systems on the planet, and it shapes how over a billion people interact with the global internet, influences the design of privacy and proxy tools worldwide, and continues to evolve in ways that challenge researchers, developers, and policymakers alike.
Jackson Sippe is a PhD researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder whose work focuses on uncovering how national-scale censorship systems operate. Jackson recently helped lead a groundbreaking study analyzing a previously undocumented GFW technique that quietly broke fully encrypted proxy protocols across China for more than a year.
In this episode, Jackson joins Gregor Vand to discuss how the Great Firewall works at a technical level, the 2021–2023 blocking event, the popcount-based detection algorithm his team reverse-engineered, the cat-and-mouse ecosystem of censorship circumvention, and what these findings mean for the future of the open internet.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
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LLM -powered systems continue to move steadily into production, but this process is presenting teams with challenges that traditional software practices don’t commonly encounter. Models and agents are non-deterministic systems, which makes it difficult to test changes, reason about failures, and confidently ship updates. This has created the need for new evaluation tooling designed specifically around the properties of LLMs.
Comet is a platform with Roots and MLOps, to the rapidly evolving world of agent-based systems by treating prompts, tools, and workflows as optimizable components that can be evaluated and improved over time.
Gideon Mendels is the co -founder and CEO of Comet. He previously worked at Google on hate speech and deception detection, and he founded GroupWise, which trained and deployed NLP models processing billions of chats. In this episode, Gideon joins Kevin Ball to discuss how agent development sits between software engineering and ML, why eVals are the missing foundation for most AI teams, prompt optimization as a search problem, and the future for continuously improving agents in production.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Comet.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
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AI-assisted programming has moved far beyond autocomplete. Large language models are now capable of editing entire codebases, coordinating long-running tasks, and collaborating across multiple systems. As these capabilities mature, the core challenge in software development is shifting away from writing code and toward orchestrating work, managing context, and maintaining shared understanding across fleets of agents.
Steve Yegge is a software engineer, writer, and industry veteran whose essays have shaped how many developers think about their work. Over the past year, Steve has been exploring the frontier of agentic software development, building tools like Beads and Gas Town to experiment with multi-agent coordination, shared memory, and AI-driven software workflows.
In this episode, Steve joins Kevin Ball to discuss the evolution of AI coding from chat-based assistance to full agent orchestration, the technical and cognitive challenges of managing fleets of agents, how concepts like task graphs and Git-backed ledgers change the nature of work, and what these shifts mean for software teams, tooling, and the future of the industry.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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Python 3.14 is here and continues Python’s evolution toward greater performance, scalability, and usability. The new release formally supports free-threaded, no-GIL mode, introduces template string literals, and implements deferred evaluation of type annotations. It also includes new debugging and profiling tools, along with many other features.
Łukasz Langa is the CPython Developer in Residence at the Python Software Foundation, and he joins Sean Falconer to discuss the 3.14 release, the future of free threading, type system improvements, Python’s growing role in AI, and how the language continues to evolve while maintaining its commitment to backward compatibility.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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Engineering teams often build microservices as their systems grow, but over time this can lead to a fragmented ecosystem with scattered data access patterns, duplicated business logic, and an uneven developer experience. A unified data graph with a consistent execution layer helps address these challenges by centralizing schema, simplifying how teams compose functionality, and reducing operational overhead while preserving performance and reliability.
Viaduct is Airbnb’s open-source, data-oriented service mesh and GraphQL platform built around a single, highly connected central schema. It has played a major role in scaling Airbnb’s engineering organization.
Adam Miskiewicz is a Principal Software Engineer at Airbnb and he worked on Viaduct. He joins the podcast with Gregor Vand to talk about how Viaduct originated inside Airbnb, the architectural principles that shaped it, the challenges of scaling GraphQL to millions of queries per second, and why the team decided to open-source the platform. They also discuss the future of backend development in an AI-driven world and how unified data layers may influence the next generation of engineering systems.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
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SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry.
In this episode, they cover Starlink’s rapid rollout of free, high-speed in-flight internet, Tesla’s move to deprecate Autopilot in favor of full self-driving, and Apple’s reported decision to power Siri with Google’s Gemini models. They also discuss Meta’s $2B acquisition of Manus, Waymo’s growing pains as autonomous vehicles scale, and the competitive shockwaves triggered by Google’s advances in custom AI hardware.
Gregor and Sean then dive deep into the state of the tech job market, examining OpenAI’s decision to eliminate vesting cliffs, the escalating war for elite AI talent, and what recent layoffs really say about the future of software engineering. They explore how AI coding tools are reshaping the balance between junior and senior engineers, why fundamentals still matter, and what developers should focus on heading into 2026.
Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News, including Doom running on wireless earbuds, the enduring appeal of wildly over-engineered side projects, and why hacking for fun still matters in an age of industrial-scale AI.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post SED News: Apple Bets on Gemini, Google’s AI Advantage, and the Talent Arms Race appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
AI coding agents are rapidly reshaping how software is built, reviewed, and maintained. As large language model capabilities continue to increase, the bottleneck in software development is shifting away from code generation toward planning, review, deployment, and coordination. This shift is driving a new class of agentic systems that operate inside constrained environments, reason over long time horizons, and integrate across tools like IDEs, version control systems, and issue trackers.
OpenAI is at the forefront of AI research and product development. In 2025, the company released Codex, which is an agentic coding system designed to work safely inside sandboxed environments while collaborating across the modern software development stack.
Thibault Sottiaux is the Codex engineering lead and Ed Bayes is the Codex product designer. In this episode, they join Kevin Ball to discuss how Codex is built, the co-evolution of models and harnesses, multi-agent futures, Codex’s open-source CLI, model specialization, latency and performance considerations, and much more.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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Engineering teams around the world are building AI-focused applications or integrating AI features into existing products. The AI development ecosystem is maturing, which is accelerating how quickly these applications can be prototyped. However, taking AI applications to production remains a notoriously complex process. Modern AI stacks demand LLMs, embeddings, vector search, observability, new caching layers, and constant adaptation as the landscape shifts week to week. Increasingly, the data layer has become both the foundation and the bottleneck to AI app productionization.
MongoDB has been expanding beyond its core document database into a full AI-ready database platform with integrated capabilities for operational data, search, real-time analytics, and AI-powered data retrieval. The company also recently acquired Voyage AI to provide accurate and cost-effective embedding models and rerankers to its users.
Fred Roma is a veteran engineer and is currently the SVP of Product and Engineering at MongoDB. He joins the show with Kevin Ball to talk about the state of AI application development, the role of vector search and reranking, schema evolution in the LLM era, the Voyage AI acquisition, how data platforms must evolve to keep up with AI’s breakneck pace, and more.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by MongoDB.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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Package management sits at the foundation of modern software development, quietly powering nearly every software project in the world. Tools like npm and Yarn have long been the core of the JavaScript ecosystem, enabling developers to install, update, and share code with ease. But as projects grow larger and the ecosystem more complex, this older infrastructure is beginning to show its limits with performance bottlenecks, dependency conflicts, and growing concerns around supply chain security.
Darcy Clarke and Ruy Adorno are veterans of this ecosystem. Both spent years maintaining the npm CLI and helping guide the Node.js project, where they saw firsthand the technical debt and design tradeoffs that define modern JavaScript tooling. Now they’re building vlt, a new package manager and registry that rethinks performance, security, and developer experience from the ground up.
In this episode, Darcy and Ruy join Josh Goldberg to discuss how vlt works, why they believe package management needs a server-side reboot, what lessons they’ve drawn from npm’s evolution, and how features like declarative querying, self-hosted registries, and real-time security scanning could reshape how developers build and share JavaScript in the years ahead.
Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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WebAssembly, or WASM, has grown from a low-level compilation target for C and C++ into one of the most influential technologies in modern computing. It now powers browser applications, edge compute platforms, embedded systems, and a growing ecosystem of languages targeting a portable and secure execution model.
Andreas Rossberg is a programming languages researcher and former member of the V8 team at Google. Andreas helped architect WebAssembly from its earliest concepts through its most recent milestone releases, including the groundbreaking 3.0 spec that introduces garbage collection, richer reference types, and major steps toward multi-language interoperability.
In this episode, Andreas joins Kevin Ball to explore the history of WebAssembly, the constraints that shaped its earliest design, the major turning points in versions 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, and what’s coming next for WebAssembly.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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Surveillance technology is advancing faster than the laws meant to govern it. Across the United States, police departments are deploying automated license plate readers, facial recognition tools, and predictive systems that quietly log the daily movements of millions of people. These tools promise efficiency and safety, but critics argue that they represent a form of warrantless mass surveillance, and raise deep constitutional questions about privacy, accountability, and the limits of government power in the digital age.
Michael Soyfer is an attorney at the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm focused on defending individual rights. His work centers on the Fourth Amendment and the growing use of surveillance technologies by local governments. Michael joins the show with Kevin Ball to discuss the rise of Flock Safety cameras, the Institute for Justice’s lawsuit against the City of Norfolk, how decades-old legal precedents struggle to keep up with modern technology, and what citizens, technologists, and policymakers can do to protect privacy in an era of pervasive data collection.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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Modern software development is evolving rapidly. New tools, processes, and AI-powered systems are reshaping how teams collaborate and how engineers find satisfaction in their craft. At the same time, developer experience has become a critical function for helping organizations balance agility, security, and scale while maintaining the creativity and flow that make top tier engineering possible.
Capital One is continuously transforming its developer culture, with a focus on faster development cycles, reducing operational overhead, and boosting productivity across the organization.
Catherine McGarvey is the SVP of Developer Experience at Capital One. She joins the podcast with Sean Falconer to talk about what developer enablement means at enterprise scale, measuring developer productivity, being agile in a regulated environment, AI in enterprise development, the future for developers, and much more.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Capital One.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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Modern software development is more complex than ever. Teams work across different operating systems, chip architectures, and cloud environments, each with its own dependency quirks and version mismatches. Ensuring that code runs reproducibly across these environments has become a major challenge that’s made even harder by growing concerns around software supply chain security.
Nix is a powerful open-source package manager that builds software in controlled, declarative environments where dependencies are explicitly defined and reproducible. Its functional approach has made it a gold standard for reproducible builds, but it can also be difficult to learn and adopt.
Flox is a company that builds on top of Nix, with increased supply chain security and abstractions that streamline the developer experience.
Michael Stahnke is the VP of Engineering at Flox and formerly worked at companies including Caterpillar, Puppet, and CircleCI. He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to talk about Flox, building on top of Nix, how reproducibility underpins software security, the concept of “secure by construction, how deterministic environments are reshaping both human and AI-driven development, and much more.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Flox.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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Visual Studio Code has become one of the most influential tools in modern software development. The open-source code editor has evolved into a platform used by millions of developers around the world, and it has reshaped expectations for what a modern development environment can be through its intuitive UX, rich extension marketplace, and deep integration with today’s tooling landscape. Now, in an era defined by rapid advances in AI-assisted programming, VS Code is at the center of a profound shift in how software is written.
Kai Maetzel is the Engineering Manager leading the VS Code team at Microsoft. He joins the show with Kevin Ball to talk about the origins of VS Code, how AI has reshaped the editor’s design philosophy, the rise of agentic programming models, and what the future of development might look like.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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Blender Studio is the creative arm of the Blender Foundation and it’s dedicated to producing films, games, and other projects that showcase the full potential of Blender. The studio functions as both an art and technology lab and pushes the boundaries of 3D animation through open productions. All of their assets, production files, and workflows are shared publicly, which gives artists and developers valuable resources to learn from and build upon.
Most recently, Blender Studio released its second game, DOGWALK, where the playable character is a dog exploring snowy winter woods with a child. The project was built entirely with open-source tools including Blender, the Godot engine, Krita for concept art, Kitsu for project management, and Linux.
Simon Thommes is a Lead Technical Artist at Blender Studio and a developer on DOGWALK. He joins the podcast with Joe Nash to talk about Blender Studio, the process behind building DOGWALK, and developing a pipeline between Blender and Godot.
Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry’s Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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The post Blender and Godot in Game Development with Simon Thommes appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
JavaScript has grown far beyond the browser. It now powers millions of backend systems, APIs, and cloud services through Node.js, which is one of the most widely deployed runtimes on the planet. Keeping such a critical piece of infrastructure fast, secure, and stable is a massive engineering challenge, and the work behind it is often invisible.
Rafael Gonzaga is a Principal Open Source Engineer at NodeSource and a member of the Node.js Technical Steering Committee. He’s spent years digging into the performance and security layers of Node’s core, helping shape the direction of the runtime itself. Rafael joins the show to talk about the state of Node.js performance, how benchmarking really works, the balance between speed and stability, and what it means to contribute to one of the world’s most important open-source projects.
Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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Zachtronics is a legendary independent game studio known for creating intricate, engineering-focused puzzle games that merge logic, creativity, and code. The studio was founded by Zach Barth in 2011, and it has become a cult favorite among programmers and tinkerers alike with titles such as SpaceChem, Infinifactory, TIS-100, and Shenzhen I/O. Most recently, Zachtronics released Kaizen: A Factory Story, in which players take on the role of an American engineer hired by a Japanese manufacturing company in the 1980s to design assembly processes for various products.
Zach Barth joins the podcast with Joe Nash to talk about the games he makes.
Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry’s Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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Rivals of Aether and Rivals of Aether II are indie fighting games that combine fast-paced platform combat with elemental-themed characters. The game takes inspiration from Super Smash Bros. and emphasizes skillful movement, tight controls, and competitive balance, making it popular in the fighting game community.
Dan Fornace is a game director and designer at Aether Studios, the developer of Rivals of Aether. He joins the show with Joe Nash to talk about developing platform fighting games.
Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry’s Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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Aviation cybersecurity is becoming an urgent priority as modern aircraft increasingly rely on complex digital systems for navigation, communication, and engine performance. These systems were once isolated but are now interconnected and vulnerable to cyber threats ranging from GPS spoofing to ransomware attacks on airline infrastructure. As nation-state actors and criminal groups grow more sophisticated, the aviation sector faces a rapidly expanding attack surface, with life-or-death consequences. Understanding and addressing these risks is essential not only for passenger safety but for the resilience of global transportation networks.
Serge Christiaans is a former Dutch Air Force pilot with a background in electronic and hybrid warfare. He later flew commercially for Singapore Airlines and is now the Lead Instructor and Program Director at the Aviation Cyber Academy. He joins the podcast with Gregor Vand to discuss the convergence of aviation and cybersecurity, the aircraft as a digital attack surface, hybrid warfare, the urgent need for aviation cyber resilience, and much more.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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Modern software relies heavily on open source dependencies, often pulling in thousands of packages maintained by developers all over the world. This accelerates innovation but also creates serious supply chain risks as attackers increasingly compromise popular libraries to spread malware at scale.
Feross Aboukhadijeh is the founder and CEO of Socket which is a security platform designed to protect software projects from open source supply chain attacks. In this episode he joins Josh Goldberg to talk about his career in open source, open source supply chain attacks, practical security lessons, the expanding attack surface in software development, and more.
Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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Python’s popularity in data science and backend engineering has made it the default language for building AI infrastructure. However, with the rapid growth of AI applications, developers are increasingly looking for tools that combine Python’s flexibility with the rigor of production-ready systems.
Pydantic began as a library for type-safe data validation in Python and has become one of the language’s most widely adopted projects. More recently, the Pydantic team created Pydantic AI, a type-safe agent framework for building reliable AI systems in Python.
Samuel Colvin is the creator of Pydantic and Pydantic AI. In this episode, he joins the podcast with Gregor Vand to discuss the origins of Pydantic, the design principles behind type safety in AI applications, the evolution of Pydantic AI, the LogFire observability platform, and how open-source sustainability and engineering discipline are shaping the next generation of AI tooling.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry.
In this episode, they cover Jeff Bezos’s unexpected return to the CEO seat with Project Prometheus, the growing debate over whether AI investments are sustainable, and the ecosystem forming around OpenAI. They also dig into the surge of Nordic startups, and what it signals about innovation hotspots outside the Bay Area.
Gregor and Sean then dive deep into the idea of technology tipping points, when breakthrough products finally cross the threshold from fringe curiosity to mainstream adoption.
Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News, including moss surviving in outer space, a typographer’s re-creation of San Francisco’s light-rail signage, CERN’s guiding principles for responsible AI adoption, and why classic Pixar films looked better on 35mm than they do in 4K.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post SED News: Bezos Returns to Building, AI’s Reality Check, and Europe’s Cloud Ambitions appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
PICO-8 is a software-based gaming console for making, sharing, and playing small games with a retro aesthetic. It emulates the look and feel of 8-bit consoles, providing limited color palettes, screen resolutions, and memory constraints.
The PICO-8 dev environment uses Lua and is focused on being accessible to developers while offering depth for complex projects.
Johan Peitz is a games industry veteran and developer extraordinaire, having created dozens of games across many platforms. He’s an expert in PICO-8 development, and joins the podcast to talk about creating games for the console.
Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry’s Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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Doom has seemingly been ported to every electronic device imaginable, including picture frames, lamps, and coffee machines. The meme of “it runs Doom” has become so widespread that it spawned the r/itrunsdoom sub-Reddit.
Recently, Doom made headlines again for being ported to TypeScript. The project involved representing Doom entirely in TypeScript, three and a half trillion lines of types, 90 GB of RAM to run, and a full year to complete.
Dimitri Mitropoulos is the engineer who carried out this heroic feat. He’s also a developer at Vercel, the founder of Michigan Typescript, and a co-founder of SquiggleConf. Dimitri joins the podcast with Josh Goldberg to talk about what it took to pull off one of the most mind-bending TypeScript projects to date.
Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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Simon Shuster is a journalist who has reported on Russia and Ukraine for over 15 years, most of that time as a staff correspondent for TIME Magazine. He was born in Moscow, and he and his family came to the United States as refugees from the Soviet Union when he was six years old.
After graduating from Stanford University in 2005, Simon returned to Moscow to work as a reporter for The Moscow Times, Reuters, the Associated Press and other publications. His political coverage of Russia’s descent into authoritarianism included numerous profiles of Vladimir Putin and interviews with top Russian officials. He has also interviewed and profiled the last three presidents of Ukraine.
Simon has spent years covering the war in Ukraine from both sides of the front lines. The year after the annexation of Crimea, Russian authorities deemed Simon a security threat and banned him from entering the country.
Simon is the author of the 2024 book The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky, and he recently wrote the TIME Magazine article “How Ukraine Gamified Drone Warfare.”
He is currently at work on a new book that examines the future of warfare and how the lessons and technologies that emerged from the war in Ukraine are changing warfare and security around the world.
Simon joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to discuss drone warfare, AI-assisted targeting, the gamification of drone combat, the rapid iteration cycle of drone innovation, new ethical dilemmas in warfare, the coming proliferation of war drones, and the shifting balance of global power.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post Drone Warfare in Ukraine with Simon Shuster appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Radix UI is an open-source library of React components. Its “headless” primitives handle the complex logic and accessibility concerns—like dialogs, dropdowns, and tabs—while leaving styling completely up to the developer. The project emphasizes usability, accessibility, and composability and has become a vital part of modern web dev, in part because it forms the foundation of shad/cn UI.
Chance Strickland is a software engineer at WorkOS and a maintainer of Radix UI. Chase joins the show with Nick Nisi to talk about Radix, its primitives, Radix’s relationship with shad/cn UI, the evolution of web primitives, and much more.
Nick Nisi is a conference organizer, speaker, and developer focused on tools across the web ecosystem. He has organized and emceed several conferences and has led NebraskaJS for more than a decade. Nick currently works as a developer experience engineer at WorkOS.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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The Stack Overflow Developer Survey is an annual survey conducted by Stack Overflow that gathers comprehensive insights from developers around the world. It offers a valuable snapshot of the global developer community, covering a wide range of topics such as preferred programming languages, tools, and technologies.
Jody Bailey is the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Stack Overflow and Erin Yepis is a Research Manager at Stack Overflow. They join the show with Sean Falconer to talk about the results of the 2025 Developer Survey, which was recently released.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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The post The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey with Jody Bailey and Erin Yepis appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Byran Huang is a full stack developer who recently made headlines in the hacker space when he created the anyon_e, which is a highly integrated, open source laptop. The effort was a massive undertaking and showcased great design, hardware, and software.
In this episode, Byran joins the show with Gregor Vand to talk about his work on the anyon_e laptop.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
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The post Building an Open-Source Laptop with Byran Huang appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
The modern internet is a vast web of independent networks bound together by billions of routing decisions made every second. It’s an architecture so reliable we mostly take it for granted, but behind the scenes it represents one of humanity’s greatest engineering achievements. Today’s internet is also dramatically more complex and capable than in its early years.
Erik Seidel is a Network Engineer at Cloudflare, where he focuses on automating global network infrastructure. He joins the show to discuss his unique journey into tech, the fundamentals of how the internet works, the Border Gateway Protocol, peering versus transit, Cloudflare’s architecture, networking in China, and much more.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
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The post The Architecture of the Internet with Erik Seidel appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry.
In this episode, they cover the $1.7B acquisition of Security AI, LangChain’s massive valuation, and the surprise $300M funding” round for Periodic Labs. They also break down the massive AWS outage, Apple’s rare reversal on its glass UI design, and the emerging web of trillion-dollar AI infrastructure deals centered around OpenAI.
Gregor and Sean then dive deep into the world of chipmakers, exploring how Intel is fighting to survive, AMD’s new partnership and 10% investment from OpenAI, Apple’s long-term bet on on-device AI with its M5 chips, and NVIDIA’s push to defend its dominance amid growing custom-chip competition.
Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News, including developers rediscovering the joy of curl, a hacker’s clever teardown of Kindle’s DRM protections, and more.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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The post SED News: AMD’s Big OpenAI Deal, Intel’s Struggles, and Apple’s AI Long Game appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Most AI agent frameworks are backend-focused and written in Python, which introduces complexity when building full-stack AI applications with JavaScript or TypeScript frontends. This gap makes it harder for frontend developers to prototype, integrate, and iterate on AI-powered features.
Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework focused on building AI agents and has primitives such as agents, tools, workflows, and RAG.
Sam Bhagwat and Abhi Aiyer are co-founders at Mastra. They join the podcast with Nick Nisi to talk about this state of frontend tooling for AI agents, AI agent primitives, MCP integration, and more.
Nick Nisi is a conference organizer, speaker, and developer focused on tools across the web ecosystem. He has organized and emceed several conferences and has led NebraskaJS for more than a decade. Nick currently works as a developer experience engineer at WorkOS.
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The post Building AI Agents on the Frontend with Sam Bhagwat and Abhi Aiyer appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
X-Plane is a popular flight simulator developed by Laminar Research. It features a first-principles physics engine, realistic aircraft systems, and a wide variety of aircraft.
We wanted to understand the engineering that goes into creating a flight simulator so we invited Ben Supnik on the show. Ben is a software engineer at Laminar and he’s been working on X-Plane for the past 20 years. He joins the show with Kevin Ball to talk about X-Plane and his career working on the simulator.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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The post The X-Plane Flight Simulator with Ben Supnik appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
A common challenge in software development is creating and maintaining robust development environments. The rise of AI agents has amplified this complexity by adding new demands around permission controls, environment isolation, and resource management.
Ona is a platform for AI-native software development and engineering agents. The platform combines autonomous agents with secure, standardized environments, with a focus on giving enterprises control, security, and productivity so they can scale AI-native engineering without scaling risk.
Chris Weichel has more than two decades of experience spanning software engineering and human–computer interaction. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer at Ona – formerly Gitpod – where he leads the engineering team behind the company’s cloud-native development platform. Chris joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to talk about Ona, the impact of coding with parallel agents, the future of IDEs, choosing agent-friendly languages, code review as a new bottleneck in the software development lifecycle, and much more.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Ona formerly Gitpod.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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The post Turning Agent Autonomy into Productivity with Chris Weichel appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Homebrew is a widely used package manager that simplifies the installation of open-source software on macOS. It was created in response to the growing demand for a lightweight, developer-friendly tool suited to an increasingly Mac-centric development ecosystem. Today, Homebrew is a near-essential part of the macOS software development toolkit.
Mike McQuaid joined the project early on and collaborated closely with its creator, Max Howell. He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to discuss Homebrew’s origins, architecture, its emphasis on automation and CI/CD, long-term sustainability, controversial trade-offs, and much more.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post Homebrew and macOS Package Management with Mike McQuaid appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Modern software platforms are increasingly composed of diverse microservices, third-party APIs, and cloud resources. The distributed nature of these systems makes it difficult for engineers to gain a clear view of how their systems behave, which can slow down troubleshooting and increase operational risk.
groundcover is an observability platform that uses eBPF sensors to capture logs, metrics, and traces directly from the kernel. Critically, groundcover runs on a bring-your-own-cloud model so all data remains within the user’s own environment, which gives increased privacy, security, and cost efficiency.
The company is also focused on adapting to how AI-generated code is changing observability. Code can now be produced at superhuman speed, which increases the challenges for reviewing code before it enters production. This means that observability is likely to play a growing role in code validation and providing guardrails.
Yechezkel Rabinovich, or Chez, is the CTO and Co-founder of groundcover. He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to discuss his journey from kernel engineering to building an eBPF-powered observability company. The conversation explores the power of eBPF, the realities of observability in modern systems, the impact of AI on software development and security, and where the future of root-cause analysis is headed.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by groundcover.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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The post Engineering in the Age of Agents with Yechezkel Rabinovich appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Dynamic languages like Ruby, Python, and JavaScript determine the types of variables at runtime rather than at compile time. This flexibility allows for rapid development and concise code, but it also makes it harder to catch certain classes of bugs before execution. Type checkers for dynamic languages add structure and safety without compromising their expressive power.
Sorbet is a static type checker developed by the Stripe team and designed specifically for Ruby. The motivation behind Sorbet stemmed from the growing complexity of production Ruby applications, where developers needed stronger guarantees and more scalable code quality tools than dynamic typing alone could offer.
Jake Zimmerman is a software engineer at Stripe and leads development on Sorbet. He joins the podcast with Josh Goldberg to discuss his background, the challenges of typing in Ruby, the motivation behind Sorbet, its architecture, performance optimizations, and more.
Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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The rise of language-model coding assistants has led to the creation of the vibe coding paradigm. In this mode of software development, AI agents take a plain language prompt and generate entire applications, which dramatically lowers the barriers to entry and democratizes access to software creation.
However, many enterprise environments have large, legacy codebases and these sprawling systems are complex, interdependent, and far less amenable to the greenfield style of vibe coding. Working effectively within them requires deep context awareness, something language models commonly struggle to maintain.
Augment Code is an AI coding assistant that focuses on contextual understanding of large codebases in enterprise settings. It emphasizes tooling to manage large development surface areas while automating PRs and code review.
Guy Gur-Ari is a Co-Founder at Augment. He has a PhD in physics and was previously a Research Scientist at Google where he worked on AI reasoning in math and science. Guy joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to talk about Augment Code, its focus on full context for large enterprise codebases, code review as the new bottleneck in AI-driven development, and much more.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Augment Code.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post Scaling AI in Enterprise Codebases with Guy Gur-Ari appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry.
In this episode, they cover NVIDIA‘s $5B investment in Intel and $100M stake in OpenAI, Meta’s stumble with its AR glasses demo, and the surprise $50B private equity acquisition of Electronic Arts. They also break down Anthropic’s record-setting Series F round and what Google’s Genie 3 “world model” reveals about the next frontier of AI.
Gregor and Sean then zoom things out to debate the future of devices and hardware. They cover Apple’s underwhelming Vision Pro to Snap’s all-in bet on AR specs, and what form factors might actually matter for developers.
Finally, they highlight standout projects from Hacker News, including hosting a website on a disposable vape, playing Snake in your browser’s address bar, and Slack’s six-figure billing fiasco that the community helped reverse.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post SED News: NVIDIA Bets on Intel, Meta’s Demo Crash, and Anthropic’s Explosive Growth appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Modern software systems are composed of many independent microservices spanning frontends, backends, APIs, and AI models, and coordinating and scaling them reliably is a constant challenge. A workflow orchestration platform addresses this by providing a structured framework to define, execute, and monitor complex workflows with resilience and clarity.
Orkes is an enterprise-scale agentic orchestration platform that builds on the open-source Conductor project, which was pioneered at Netflix. The platform coordinates AI agents, humans and APIs, with a focus on scalability, compliance, and trust. It further expands on the Conductor core by adding features like security, governance, and long-running workflows.
Viren Baraiya is the Founder and CTO at Orkes, and he’s the creator of Netflix Conductor. Viren joins the show with Gregor Vand to talk about his building Conductor at Netflix, the challenge of orchestrating microservices, rule-based versus programmatic workflow orchestration, agentic orchestration, MCP integration, and much more.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Orkes.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post Orkes and Agentic Workflow Orchestration with Viren Baraiya appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Vector search has become a foundational technology for AI applications, enabling everything from semantic code search to contextual retrieval for large language models. However, a major challenge with vector databases has been the cost as data storage scales.
Turbopuffer is a vector database that focuses on speed, cost and scalability. It was created by Simon Hørup Eskildsen and Justin Li in 2023 and has seen adoption from high-profile companies such as Cursor and Notion.
Simon joins the podcast with Gregor Vand to discuss the origin of turbopuffer, its unique technical design, the economics of vector storage, and more.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
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The post Turbopuffer with Simon Hørup Eskildsen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Cassette Beasts is a turn-based monster-battling RPG that lets players record creatures onto cassette tapes and transform into them during battle. The game was an indie hit, and is also one of the most successful games built with the open source Godot Engine.
Jay Baylis and Tom Coxon are the creators of Cassette Beasts at Bytten Studio. They join the show with Joe Nash to talk about the development of their game.
Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry’s Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.
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The post Building an Indie Hit in Godot with Jay Baylis and Tom Coxon appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
A challenge in modern frontend application design is efficiently fetching and managing GraphQL data while keeping UI components responsive and maintainable. Developers often face issues like over-fetching, under-fetching, and handling complex query dependencies, which can lead to performance bottlenecks and increased development effort.
Relay is a JavaScript framework developed by Meta for managing GraphQL data in React applications. It’s designed to optimize data fetching by colocating queries with components, ensuring that each part of the UI declares its own data dependencies.
Robert Balicki was on the Relay team at Meta and is now a Staff Software Engineer at Pinterest. He is currently developing Isograph, which provides a declarative and type-safe approach to data fetching.
Robert joins the show to talk about challenges and solutions for managing data in frontend applications.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post Rethinking GraphQL Frontends with Robert Balicki appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Traditional package management systems for JavaScript have faced several inefficiencies related to dependency storage, resolution, and project performance.
pnpm is a fast, disk-efficient package manager for JavaScript and TypeScript projects, serving as an alternative to npm and Yarn. Due to its efficiency and reliability, pnpm is increasingly popular for managing monorepos and large-scale applications.
Zoltan Kochan is a full stack web developer and the creator of pnpm. He joins the show with Josh Goldberg to talk about his background and package management in the web.
Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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Modern application development often involves juggling multiple types of databases to handle diverse data models. The lack of unification can lead to complex architectures with attendant security concerns and fragmented development workflows.
SurrealDB is an open-source, multi-model database developed in Rust and integrates functionalities of many databases including relational, document, graph, time series, search and vector databases. It supports both schema-less and schema-full data models and has a SQL-like query language.
The project has rapidly grown in popularity, and version 3.0 was just released with a focus on enabling AI-powered analysis of unstructured data directly within the database, along with tooling for building event-driven applications.
Tobie Morgan Hitchcock is the CEO and co-founder of SurrealDB. He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to talk about SurrealDB, handling multi-model data, unstructured data processing, building event driven AI applications, coupling databases with AI models, and more.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by SurrealDB.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post SurrealDB 3.0 and Building Event-Driven AI Applications with Tobie Morgan Hitchcock appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Modern web development faces several challenges, particularly when building scalable, maintainable, and high-performance applications. As applications grow, managing complex user interfaces, and ensuring efficient data handling and modular code structures, becomes increasingly difficult.
Angular is a TypeScript-based web framework developed by Google. It’s component-driven and designed for building single-page applications with a strong emphasis on modular architecture and performance optimization. Angular’s scalability, maintainability, and built-in features like modular architecture, TypeScript support, and robust tooling, have made it popular for enterprise applications.
Jessica Janiuk is a Staff Software Engineer at Google where she works on Angular, which just hit version 19 late last year. In this episode, Jessica joins the show with Josh Goldberg to talk about the Angular project.
Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post Angular with Jessica Janiuk appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry.
In this episode, they discuss Perplexity’s headline-grabbing offer to buy Google Chrome, the U.S. government’s large stake in Intel, Meta’s abrupt pause on AI hiring, and a reality check on what “agentic” systems can actually deliver today versus the hype.
They also dive into standout discussions from Hacker News, including a proposal to curb “ghost job” postings with stricter transparency rules, an interactive Big-O explainer, and more.
Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post SED News: Perplexity’s Chrome Play, Meta’s AI Freeze, and Intel Becomes Too Big to Fail appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
A common challenge in data-rich organizations is that critical context about the data is often hard to capture and even harder to keep up to date. As more people across the organization use data and data models get more complex, simply finding the right dataset can be slow and create bottlenecks.
Select Star is a data discovery and metadata platform that builds a continuously updated knowledge graph of an organization’s data by analyzing both its structure and how it’s actually used. It enriches data with context such as popularity, lineage, and semantic models, making it easier for AI and teams to discover, trust, and use the right data. These enriched metadata layers are also highly valuable for large language models, significantly improving the accuracy of generated SQL queries.
Shinji Kim is the founder and CEO of Select Star, and she joins Sean Falconer to discuss solving metadata curation challenges, managing data context at scale, using LLMs for SQL generation, emerging trends in metadata management, and more.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Select Star.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post Context-Aware SQL and Metadata with Shinji Kim appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Data visualization is increasingly important as organizations prioritize data-driven decision-making. Tools that transform complex datasets into intuitive, interpretable visualizations are arguably just as critical as the data itself.
Robert Kosara is a Data Visualization Developer at Observable which is a platform for creating interactive data visualizations, and which makes extensive use of the popular D3 JavaScript library. Robert previously worked at companies including Salesforce and Tableau, and has deep experience in data visualization and data visualization tools. He joins the show to talk about modern data visualization and his work at Observable.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post Modern Data Visualization with Robert Kosara appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Werner Vogels is the Chief Technology Officer at Amazon, where he has played a pivotal role in shaping the company’s technology vision for over two decades. Before joining Amazon in 2004, Werner was a research scientist at Cornell University where he focused on distributed systems and scalability, both of which are concepts that would later influence the design of AWS. He holds a PhD in computer science and has authored numerous academic papers on the reliability and performance of large-scale systems.
As CTO, Werner has been instrumental in guiding Amazon’s transition from an online retailer to a global cloud infrastructure provider. He is one of the key architects behind Amazon’s push into cloud computing, helping to define the new model for delivering infrastructure. He is known for his pragmatic, customer-focused approach to technology and for championing ideas such as “you build it, you run it,” “APIs are forever,” and more recently, Frugal Architecting, which emphasizes cost-effective and sustainable software design.
In this episode, Kevin Ball sits down with Werner for a wide-ranging conversation. They discuss the early days of Amazon, the birth of AWS, the principles of the Frugal Architect, aligning cost to the business, engineering-business collaboration, technical debt, and much more.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post A Conversation with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
A key challenge with designing AI agents is that large language models are stateless and have limited context windows. This requires careful engineering to maintain continuity and reliability across sequential LLM interactions. To perform well, agents need fast systems for storing and retrieving short-term conversations, summaries, and long-term facts.
Redis is an open‑source, in‑memory data store widely used for high‑performance caching, analytics, and message brokering. Recent advances have extended Redis’ capabilities to vector search and semantic caching, which has made it an increasingly popular part of the agentic application stack.
Andrew Brookins is a Principal Applied AI Engineer at Redis. He joins the show with Sean Falconer to discuss the challenges of building AI agents, the role of memory in agents, hybrid search versus vector-only search, the concept of world models, and more.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Redis.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post Redis and AI Agent Memory with Andrew Brookins appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Deploying and managing cloud workloads is a complex task that requires developers to handle infrastructure, scaling, CI/CD pipelines, and database hosting. Configuring and maintaining Kubernetes, ensuring smooth deployments, and integrating various services efficiently is a common challenge.
Will Stewart is the co-founder and CEO of Northflank, which is a platform focused on streamlining application deployment and management.
In this episode, he joins the show to talk about the contemporary challenges and solutions around workload deployment.
Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post Complex Workload Deployment with Will Stewart appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Modern software teams typically rely on a patchwork of tools to manage planning, development, feature rollout, and post-release analysis. This fragmentation is a known challenge that can create friction and slow down software development iteration. It’s especially problematic for cross-functional teams, where differences in roles, expertise, and work culture can further complicate collaboration.
There is growing consensus that successful software product development requires continuous collaboration across functions, including design, engineering and operations.
Tobias Dunn-Krahn is the CTO and Doug Peete is the Chief Product Officer of Atono, which is a software development lifecycle platform focused on cross-functional teams. They join the podcast with Kevin Ball to talk about the challenges of modern product development, the importance of low-friction UX, the role of AI in product tooling, and how to unify product, design, engineering, and operations in a single workflow.
Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Atono.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post Empowering Cross-Functional Product Teams with Tobias Dunn-Krahn and Doug Peete appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Carbon is a programming language developed by Google as a successor to C++, and it aims to provide modern safety features while maintaining high performance. It’s designed to offer seamless interoperability with C++ while addressing shortcomings of C++ such as slow compilation times and lack of memory safety. Carbon also introduces features like a more readable syntax, improved generics, and automatic memory management while still allowing low-level control.
Chandler Carruth is the creator of Carbon, and he leads the C++, C Lang, and LLVM teams at Google, and he also worked on several pieces of Google’s distributed build system. In this episode, he joins Kevin Ball to talk about Carbon and the future of the language.
Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.
Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
The post Carbon and Modernizing C++ with Chandler Carruth appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
C++ is a powerful programming language that has been in use for several decades. Its importance lies in its versatility and efficiency, making it a popular choice for developing software and systems across different domains. The impact of C++ is significant, as it has been used to create numerous high-performance applications, including operating systems, browsers, gaming engines, and financial systems. It has also played a crucial role in the development of the internet and the growth of modern computing.
In a recent development the NSA indirectly asked developers to use memory safe languages whenever possible because hackers frequently exploit memory issues. In this episode, we’ll discuss these safety issues with the creator of C++ Bjarne Stroupstrup.
Jordi Mon Companys is a product manager and marketer that specializes in software delivery, developer experience, cloud native and open source. He has developed his career at companies like GitLab, Weaveworks, Harness and other platform and devtool providers. His interests range from software supply chain security to open source innovation. You can reach out to him on Twitter at @jordimonpmm
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ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence language model developed by OpenAI. It is part of the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) family of models, which are designed to generate human-like text based on input prompts. ChatGPT is specifically trained to carry out conversational tasks, such as answering questions, completing sentences, and engaging in dialogue. It has been pre-trained on a large corpus of text data and fine-tuned on specific tasks to improve its performance. As a result, ChatGPT can generate responses that are often coherent, relevant, and natural-sounding.
Christian Hubicki is an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Department at Florida State University. He joins us today to discuss ChatGPT and its implications. We also discussed the future of Artificial Intelligence in general.
This show is hosted by Sean Falconer. Sean is the Head of Developer Relations and Marketing @Skyflow. Follow Sean at @seanfalconer
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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Comma is a startup aimed at solving self-driving cars. A lot of the new cars in the market have built-in stock Advanced driver assistance systems. Comma takes this system to the next level with Openpilot. Openpilot is an open-source driver assistance system. Currently, with features like Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), Automated Lane Centering (ALC), Forward Collision Warning (FCW), and Lane Departure Warning (LDW), openpilot is one of the most state-of-the-art solutions in the self-driving space. The Comma Three device is designed to live in your car, and purpose built to run openpilot.
In this episode we speak to George Hotz, President of Comma and now an intern at Twitter.
Watch the video on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yi6kwUZDtkw
Sponsorship inquiries: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com
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We’ve been running Software Daily for 6 years.
When we started it back in 2015, the goal was to create a software engineering podcast that was 60% as good as Software Engineering Radio, but aired with 5x the frequency.
5 shows per week, 50 weeks per year, 5 ads per show, means 1,250 advertising spots. We are a two sided marketplace for podcast ads targeted at developers, and our business is successful. We have found our cash cow.
We didn’t think there was a cash cow in this business, but it turns out that podcasting plus software engineering is a peanut butter and chocolate-level pairing.
We are a two sided marketplace for podcast ads targeted at developers. There are limitless adjacencies to such a business. Pulling on business generality, we are a human-and-automation-driven sales and digital supply chain optimization company. Adjacency potential: probably limitless, but certainly gated by capital, and being a bootstrapped business it takes some imagination to think through why or how Software Daily should transform into an enterprise with well-defined incentive and equity structures.
So we are in the process of hiring a CEO for Software Daily. Our prospective CEO candidate has done a great job so far and we are hoping they join full-time. I’m the host of Software Daily, and I’m also working to start other businesses, raise capital, and grow our influence.
Why is influence so important? Consider the following problems we face as a society:
- most code is closed source
- we do not have transparent, verifiable checks and balances on the power structures of corporations and governments
- we do not have truly free speech anywhere in the world
- we are not providing fellow global citizens with a minimum set of human rights that they need to make life a deterministic enterprise (clean water, basic healthcare, decent political governance and taxation)
- creativity is as important to mind-body health as exercise, yet most people are not able to utilize their endowed talents
- fiat and crypto are as well-integrated as oil and water
- we are delegating our healthcare decisions to opaque advisory systems
These problems can all be fixed within the next decade through straightforward engineering. These problems are global problems.
Until these problems are alleviated, we will be rapidly starting companies, financial groups, and other organizational units to systematically break down and attack each problem.
We have five projects with significant potential:
- Software Daily is being driven by a new CEO who is routinizing existing business lines and evaluating the highest margin opportunities based on characteristics such as risk, team, free cash flow, consistency of vision, digital leverage, and relation to companion organizations. We recently started a YouTube channel and have a Slack channel with 4398 users if you want to join and hang out with us.
- Supercompute is pursuing a redefined computing paradigm with the proposition that the frontier of technology is expanding at a pace that creates more opportunity than humanity can capture. Under such a regime, there is no point in competing, because there will always be unbounded, uncaptured opportunity for all market participants. The supply side of this two dimensional economics 101 diagram is the cloud, and the demand side is the smartphone. Unbounded demand increase meets unbounded supply-side efficiencies leads to unbounded exponential economic expansion. Our first product is a digital collectible card game. Our CEO is a grizzled Sheryl Sandberg-like revenue-driven operator and our CTO is a young, imaginative wizard tinkerer. We are putting together a team of the best software engineers and applied game theoreticians to define the field of crypto-driven incentive science.
- Rectangle is an open source (and open operations) financial services system with Yad Konrad as CEO starting with a dual product development strategy of 1) rapid customer success and product engineering 2) first principles approach to engineering ie what are the “Zapier Zaps for open source fintech” ie how do you have a Twilio-like experience for converting Visa swipes to Bitcoin in merchant account? There are a lot of these kinda Zap things. Rectangle hopes to co-found with Square a CNCF-like pie-growing-media-conference-business with unicorn-tier growth properties called Quadrangle Consortium, a division of the Shapes Consortium. We have nascent ideas for the Hexagon and Septagon business units. Rectangle hopes to partner with Stripe on the Rhombus Initiative, with ordinance towards rapid parallelogram development. Rectangle hopes to partner with PayPal on the Friendly Payments Movement, a watchdog organization promoting high quality user experience and a predictable, steady decrease in transaction costs across all crypto and fiat global asset classes. Rectangle hopes to partner with Amazon on the Open Antifraud Collaboration (OAC), an open source, open data, open operations consortium built on a semi-decentralized corporate and crypto consortium mirrored blockchain system based on federated queueing among Google PubSub, Confluent Kafka, PubNub, Ethereum, Solana, Kinesis, etc with FaaS-driven eventual consistency among these queues
- Some new approaches to venture capital — ie can you do automated fund of funds across emerging managers? If so how do you do dynamic allocation? Can you justify a coin, and do it without legal risk? Is this an internally or externally facing technology platform? How much money does AngelList make? Is Carta better than LTSE? More abstractly–Software Daily was founded with a minimum vision of copying Andreessen Horowitz, but monetizing through media first to add an additional business line and to develop a trusted media source biased more transparently through its sponsorship agreements rather than private investments. We are recruiting GPs for this role so please send me an email if interested and I can forward your resume to our founding partners.
- “pop culture development” which today is mostly just me writing music and producing music videos, but more importantly it feels like pop culture has become a battleground that abides by deterministic probability density functions which can be approached with an attrition-driven strategy. Check out the single I’m working on now.
By the way, if you have a perspective on which of the two choruses from the above songs is better, please tweet at me: twitter.com/the_prion
Each of the above systems is undergoing flywheel installation. As they become self-propagative, we are considering our next enterprise from the following prospectives:
- Quantified self for the post-COVID vaccine decision matrix (personal Palantir for vaccine expected value functions)
- KanyeCloud: the ultimate creator economy talent marketplace and experience platform
- Boot camp + headcount as a service: this was explored in the Move Fast book
- Vertically integrated hospital system—like Forward but applied to hospitals
- Open source crypto vol-arb tools: vol arb tech feels very stale and fragmented, why is there no Kubernetes type community here?
- Music video social network
- Adforprize reboot (get aggressive with sales, raise money this time around)
- FindCollabs reboot (get product development and community management right this time around, it should work; also double down on FindCollabs as hackathon platform)
- Podsheets reboot with a focus on secret confidential product strategy
- Open source open operations YouTube
- Open source open operations Spotify
- Open source closed operations Instacart
- Open operations open source Instagram
- Social network low code building blocks ie how do you build your own Instagram if you are in 3rd grade?
- Github for open operations
- Metaverse casinos for children in maximally exploitative form (to prove a point and drive sensible regulation)
- BitClout with different design paradigm
- General Internet of Money picks and shovels ideas
- New approach to recording studios—franchise model? Digital + physical vertically integrated experience? Beachhead into new kind of interactive DAW ie why is there no Figma DAW? Operational transform log for FL Studio much longer and denser time series data than Figma (though at a fundamental level it is the same problem)
- Bluetooth-like protocol that allows you to write music with Bluetooth headphones (can’t do today because round trip between laptop and bluetooth headset too long…but seems like that just leads to latency that should be bufferable? But then does that mean you are buffering at the Bluetooth headset, or on the output from the DAW? I guess FL Studio doesn’t include such a DAW buffer, and I can’t see the average bluetooth headset having such a buffer, so maybe you just make a bluetooth headset with a buffer, and also design a DAW VST with such a buffer and then you can actually sell bluetooth headsets as a standalone business line? So you don’t actually need to make a Bluetooth protocol. You just make a new kind of headphone business catering to music producers. How big is that market? Seems like it’s every music producer. This is pure software play so you can offer at the price of Amazon’s Choice $25 bluetooth headset, can also do $50 and $100 models with legit improvements in quality so you have triple price point hardware platform that is arguably as compelling as AirPods. And the Airpods business line is the new darling of Apple so that seems like a compelling place to start, plus you have this interesting buffering technology which is actually a platform? Maybe this buffer idea doesn’t actually work. Why doesn’t such a buffering system already exist? Do we call it BlueBuffer?
I think that my best role here is to stay as a podcast/YouTube host and try to situate capital, ideas, and people in productive ways.
I enjoy connecting with people on podcasts and Zoom calls and YouTube has been an interesting new dimension as well.
I’m interested in music—if there’s one zero sum competition I want to win it is to be the top of the Spotify charts, but not clear if that is something I am genetically endowed to do. Maybe team-based approach to digital audio workstation management systems can lead to deterministic outcome in the music production category. More generally speaking—when someone says that you are in a “hits-driven business” it is a useful flag to stop paying attention to them for the next 120 seconds.
I would also like to try to become a top 5 no limit holdem heads up player. After that I’ll try the other poker games. Side note, looking for a coach and someone to stake me in tournaments/cash games. If you are interested please message me.
Last week was my 33rd birthday, and I’m feeling grateful to be alive. I got to spend my first day as a 33-year-old in a recording studio in LA, working with an engineer and a talented female vocalist, which was a dream I first had when I was 13 years old, working in FL Studio on my stepmom’s old Dell laptop.
Software Daily has given me so much. It has only been possible because listeners pay attention to the content, and take us seriously. Listeners buy products using our promo codes and custom URLs. We have pretty good attribution and we think that both sides of our marketplace are helping people.
I really hope that my work has helped you in some meaningful way, and if it hasn’t then I hope it does in the future. I hate having any enemies and if you have ever been offended or disgruntled by something we said as a media organization, I hope you can ping me on Slack and I can apologize.
I feel loved by my family and friends, and I think we live in a special time. Everyone who feels creatively motivated should consider modern technology as a tool to help them realize that creativity. For me, it’s been spiritually helpful and fun.
I’m starting to get too much email to respond regularly, but if you are going through a tough time in your career, and you send me a brief email, I’ll make my best effort to respond when I can. But I do read almost everything I receive.
Check out the Software Daily apps to find all of our content, and if you become a paid subscriber you will have access to additional features.
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Large software companies have become a target for criticism. Google, Facebook, Amazon and other prominent technology giants find themselves under a kind of scrutiny that is reminiscent of banks in 2008 and oil companies in the early 1900s. Across the planet, there is a growing sentiment that “big tech” has too much power, and that
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The a16z Podcast is a show that is produced by Andreessen Horowitz, an investment fund based in Silicon Valley. The a16z Podcast covers topics including software engineering, biology, media, cryptocurrencies and entrepreneurship. A16z is one of the most popular podcasts about technology. Sonal Chokshi is the editor in chief at Andreessen Horowitz and the showrunner
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Software companies such as Slack, Zoom, and Uber have recently gone public. When a company goes public, they issue a document called an S-1. Within the S-1, there is a wealth of information about the company, providing a detailed story about the company’s business model, economics, and future prospects. The S-1 describes the operating model
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Envoy is an open source edge and service proxy that was originally developed at Lyft. Envoy is often deployed as a sidecar application that runs alongside a service and helps that service by providing features such as routing, rate limiting, telemetry, and security policy. Envoy has gained significant traction in the open source community, and
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Facebook has released open source software projects that have changed the industry. The most impactful projects to date are the React frontend user interface tools: ReactJS and React Native. Before React became popular, there were multiple competing solutions for the dominant frontend JavaScript framework. React became the most prominent because of its invention of JSX,
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Facebook was built using PHP, a programming language that was used widely in the late 90s and early 2000s. PHP allows developers to get web applications built quickly and easily, although PHP has a reputation for being difficult to scale. In the early days of Facebook, the company was scaling rapidly on every dimension. New
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Today’s episode is a keynote I gave at Full Stack Tech Radar Day in Tel Aviv. The talk is called “You Are Not a Commodity”. This talk is also available as a YouTube video. The slides can be accessed here. The world of commodity engineering is coming to an end. Developers are becoming more productive,
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Sheng Liang was the lead developer on the original Java Virtual Machine. Today he works as the CEO of Rancher Labs, a company building a platform on top of Kubernetes. Sheng joins the show to discuss his experiences in the technology industry. The container orchestration wars had many victims. The competing standards for how an
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Cloud computing was popularized in 2006 with the launch of Amazon Web Services. AWS allowed developers to use remote server infrastructure with a simple set of APIs. But even with AWS, it was still not simple to deploy and manage a web application. In 2007, Heroku launched a platform built on top of AWS. Heroku
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Software engineering is an art and a science. To manage engineers is to manage artists and scientists. Software companies build practical tools like payment systems, messaging products, and search engines. Software tools are the underpinnings of our modern lives. You might expect this core infrastructure which modern humans rely on to have been constructed with
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A service mesh is an abstraction that provides traffic routing, policy management, and telemetry for a distributed application. A service mesh consists of a data plane and a control plane. In the data plane, a proxy runs alongside each service, with every request from a service being routed through the proxy. In the control plane,
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Google’s codebase is managed in a single monolithic repository. An engineer at Google can explore almost any area of the codebase within the entire company. In order to enable this, Google has built tooling to support the monolithic repo, including a virtual file system and a set of build tools. A monolithic repository is not
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Facebook’s strategy is shaped by long term goals, short term requirements, and the available resources of the company. Long term goals are necessary for thinking through big decisions such as acquisitions, hardware product investments, and open source software ecosystems. To implement long term goals, Facebook needs to communicate the vision of the company and foster
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Software engineering is harder than it should be. There are many people who have an app idea that they are not sure how to build. Some of these people are highly technical professionals like real estate agents, scientists, and accountants. These professionals learn to use spreadsheets in their day-to-day work. Spreadsheets are also used widely
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RECENT UPDATES: FindCollabs is a company I started recently The FindCollabs Podcast is out! FindCollabs is hiring a React developer FindCollabs Hackathon #1 has ended! Congrats to ARhythm, Kitspace, and Rivaly for winning 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place ($4,000, $1000, and a set of SE Daily hoodies, respectively). The most valuable feedback award and the
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RECENT UPDATES: Podsheets is our open source set of tools for managing podcasts and podcast businesses New version of Software Daily, our app and ad-free subscription service Software Daily is looking for help with Android engineering, QA, machine learning, and more FindCollabs Hackathon has ended–winners will probably be announced by the time this episode airs;
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RECENT UPDATES: FindCollabs $5000 Hackathon Ends Saturday April 15th, 2019 New version of Software Daily, our app and ad-free subscription service Software Daily is looking for help with Android engineering, QA, machine learning, and more Haseeb Qureshi is an entrepreneur and investor. As a teenager, Haseeb played poker professionally through the online poker bubble. His
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Upcoming events: A Conversation with Haseeb Qureshi at Cloudflare on April 3, 2019 FindCollabs Hackathon at App Academy on April 6, 2019 Chris Yeh is an entrepreneur, investor, and author. He co-wrote Blitzscaling with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. Blitzscaling is a strategy for growing a company that has found product market fit. Blitzscaling prioritizes speed
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GitLab is an open source platform for software development. GitLab started with the ability to manage git repositories and now has functionality for collaboration, issue tracking, continuous integration, logging, and tracing. GitLab’s core business is selling to enterprises who want a self-hosted git installation, such as banks or other companies who prefer not to use
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Cloud computing started to become popular in 2006 with the release of Amazon EC2, a system for deploying applications to virtual machines sitting on remote data center infrastructure . With cloud computing, application developers no longer needed to purchase expensive server hardware. Creating an application for the Internet became easier, cheaper, and simpler. As the
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Uber manages the car rides for millions of people. The Uber system must remain operational 24/7, and the app involves financial transactions and the safety of passengers. Uber infrastructure runs across thousands of server instances and produce terabytes of monitoring data. The monitoring data is used to understand the health of the software systems as
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Tyler Cowen’s book Stubborn Attachments outlines a framework that individuals can use to make decisions grounded in economic philosophy. In his previous books, Tyler examined recent economic history. Stubborn Attachments gives his perspective for navigating the future. Tyler is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is also the host of Conversations with
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Artificial intelligence is reshaping every aspect of our lives, from transportation to agriculture to dating. Someday, we may even create a superintelligence–a computer system that is demonstrably smarter than humans. But there is widespread disagreement on how soon we could build a superintelligence. There is not even a broad consensus on how we can define
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Mars is a cold, inhospitable planet far from earth. It presents one of the most complex challenges faced by engineers: how can we create a new world? To create a new world, first we have to get there. We can build new rockets with improved propulsion systems. We can build ships that allow us to
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Social media has transformed our lives. It has also transformed how wars are fought. P.W. Singer’s new book “Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media” describes the far-reaching impact of social media on the tactics and strategies used by military, business, and everyday citizens. We have all read about stories such as Russian bots and Cambridge
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Infrastructure software can be a great business. An infrastructure software company sells core technology to a large enterprise such as a bank or insurance company. This software has near zero marginal cost and generates a large annuity for the infrastructure software company. Once a bank has purchased your infrastructure software, the bank is likely to
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Netflix has petabytes of data and thousands of workloads running across that data every day. These workloads generate movie recommendations for users, create dashboards for data analysts to study, and reshape data in ETL jobs, to make it more accessible across the organization. Over the last ten years, data engineering has become a key component
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Serverless computing is a technique for deploying applications without an addressable server. A serverless application is running on servers, but the developer does not have access to the server in the traditional sense. The developer is not dealing with IP addresses and configuring instances of their different services to be able to scale. Just as
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Most applications today are either deployed to on-premise environments or deployed to a single cloud provider. Developers who are deploying on-prem struggle to set up complicated open source tools like Kafka and Hadoop. Developers who are deploying to a cloud provider tend to stay within that specific cloud provider, because moving between different clouds and
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In a cloud infrastructure environment, failures happen regularly. The servers can fail, the network can fail, and software bugs can crash your software unexpectedly. The amount of failures that can occur in cloud infrastructure is one reason why storage is often separated from application logic. A developer can launch multiple instances of their application, with
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When a user makes a request to product like The New York Times, that request hits an API gateway. An API gateway is the entry point for an external request. An API gateway serves several purposes: authentication, security, routing, load balancing, and logging. API gateways have grown in popularity as applications have become more distributed,
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An instruction set defines a low level programming language for moving information throughout a computer. In the early 1970’s, the prevalent instruction set language used a large vocabulary of different instructions. One justification for a large instruction set was that it would give a programmer more freedom to express the logic of their programs. Many
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Open source software powers everything we do on the Internet. Google runs on Linux servers. Content sites are served by WordPress. Our data is queued in Kafka clusters and stored in MongoDB instances. The success of an open source project often leads to the creator of that open source software becoming wealthy. An open source
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Matt Klein has worked for three rapidly growing Internet companies. At AWS, he worked on EC2, the compute-as-a-service product that powers a large percentage of the Internet. At Twitter, he helped scale the infrastructure in the chaotic days before Twitter’s IPO. Today he works at Lyft, building systems to allow for ride sharing infrastructure to
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Google Search allows humans to find and access information across the web. A human enters an unstructured query into the search box, the search engine provides several links as a result, and the human clicks on one of those links. That link brings up a web page, which is a set of unstructured data. Humans
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Google Search is a highly interactive JavaScript application. As you enter a query, results are being automatically suggested to you before you even finish typing. When you press enter, some of your search results may be widgets that represent the weather, the price of a stock, a recipe for green bean soup, or a language
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Google Brain is an engineering team focused on deep learning research and applications. One growing area of interest within Google Brain is that of generative models. A generative model uses neural networks and a large data set to create new data similar to the ones that the network has seen before. One approach to making
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Airbnb began in 2008 as a monolithic Rails application serving the simple purpose of listing homes for rental. Over time, the number of listings increased dramatically, as did the number of people who were renting. With that scale, the Rails app had to be broken into different services, and entire teams were built out to
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GraphQL allows developers to communicate with all of their different data backends through a consistent query interface. A GraphQL query can be translated into queries to MySQL, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, or whatever kind of API or backend is needed to fulfill the GraphQL query. GraphQL users need to set up a GraphQL server to fulfill this
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Stock traders have access to high volumes of information to help them make decisions on whether to buy an asset. A trader who is considering buying a share of Google stock can find charts, reports, and statistical tools to help with their decision. There are a variety of machine learning products to help a technical
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Building software today is much faster than it was just a few years ago. The tools are higher level, and abstract away tasks that would have required months of development. Much of a developer’s time used to be spent optimizing databases, load balancers, and queueing systems in order to be able to handle the load
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In the smartphone market there are two dominant operating systems: one closed source (iPhone) and one open source (Android). The market for self-driving cars could play out the same way, with a company like Tesla becoming the closed source iPhone of cars, and a company like Comma.ai developing the open source Android of self-driving cars.
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Chad Fowler was the CTO of Wunderlist prior to its acquisition by Microsoft. Since the acquisition, Chad has become the general manager of developer advocacy at Microsoft. He also works as a venture capitalist at BlueYard Capital, an early stage investment firm. I’ve had a lot of fun talking to Chad, because he can move
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React Native allows developers to reuse frontend code between mobile platforms. A user interface component written in React Native can be used in both iOS and Android codebases. Since React Native allows for code reuse, this can save time for developers, in contrast to a model where completely separate teams have to create frontend logic
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Tim O’Reilly’s book What’s the Future? is an overview of business, technology, and society. As the founder of O’Reilly Media, Tim has been steeped in technology trends for the last 40 years. From his vantage point running conferences and publishing technical content, Tim has been able to make informed predictions about what is coming next.
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Investing is an infinite game. In a game, a player can formulate a strategy based on the available resources, the apparent variance of the environment, and the metagame of the other actors involved. For an investor, the game board includes companies, currencies, and people. A successful game player can model their actions mathematically. They can
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Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit double about every two years. Moore’s Law is less like a “law” and more like an observation or a prediction. Moore’s Law is ending. We can no longer fit an increasing amount of transistors in the same amount of space with a
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When software is performing suboptimally, the programmer can use a variety of tools to diagnose problems and improve the quality of the code. A profiler is a tool for examining where a program is spending time. Every program consists of a set of different functions. These functions call each other. The total amount of time
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Applications of artificial intelligence are permeating our everyday lives. We notice it in small ways–improvements to speech recognition; better quality products being recommended to us; cheaper goods and services that have dropped in price because of more intelligent production. But what can we quantitatively say about the rate at which artificial intelligence is improving? How
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Self-driving, electric cars will someday outnumber traditional automobiles on the road. As transportation becomes autonomous, it is hard to imagine an industry that will not be affected by the downstream effects of this change. These cars will likely be managed by fleet operators like Lyft and Uber. We will need fewer cars, and the amount
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When a user takes a ride on Uber, the app on the user’s phone is communicating with Uber’s backend infrastructure, which is writing to a database that maintains the state of that user’s activity. This database is known as a transactional database or “OLTP” (online transaction processing). Every active user and driver and UberEATS restaurant
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A sample of the human voice is a rich piece of unstructured data. Voice recordings can be turned into visualizations called spectrograms. Machine learning models can be trained to identify features of these spectrograms. Using this kind of analytic strategy, breakthroughs in voice analysis are happening at an amazing pace. Rita Singh researches voice at
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Mesos is a system for managing distributed systems. The goal of Mesos is to help engineers orchestrate resources among multi-node applications like Spark. Mesos can also manage lower level schedulers like Kubernetes. A common misconception is that Mesos aims to solve the same problem as Kubernetes, but Mesos is a higher level abstraction. Ben Hindman
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Technology is pushing us rapidly toward a future that is impossible to forecast. We try to imagine what that future might look like, and we can’t help having our predictions shaped by the media we have consumed. 1984, Terminator, Gattaca, Ex Machina, Black Mirror–all of these stories present a dystopian future. But if you look
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Google’s central system for managing to compute resources is called Borg. On Borg, millions of Linux containers process a wide variety of workloads. When a new application is spun up, Borg provides that application with the resources it needs. Workloads at Google usually fall into one of two distinct categories: long-running application workloads (such as
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Machine learning tools are rapidly maturing. TensorFlow gave developers an open source version of Google’s internal machine learning framework. Cloud computing provides a cost effective, accessible way of training models. Edge computing allows for low latency deployments of models. But even if you are a kid with a laptop who has learned all the machine
The post SafeGraph with Auren Hoffman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
“The Federal Reserve System is fraudulent. Whatever its stated purpose, its effective purpose is to create a mechanism of deficit spending by politicians, through the insidious invisible taxation of monetary debasement (aka inflation).” These are the words of Erik Voorhees, the CEO of crypto financial exchange ShapeShift. Long before he started ShapeShift, Erik was opposed
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Cryptocurrency speculation has pulled in a large population of people who do not know what they are investing in. If you hear about an investment of $1000 turning into $1M, it’s tempting to get sucked in yourself. For most of these everyday people, the game is completely rigged. A large percentage of market activity is
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Joseph Bonneau is co-author of Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies, a popular textbook. At NYU, he works as an assistant professor exploring cryptography and security. His YouTube lessons teaching Bitcoin have hundreds of thousands of views. His material offers clear explanations of how Bitcoin works. Since Joseph has a clear understanding of the objective facts around
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Dogecoin was started in 2013 as a joke. Jackson Palmer forked Bitcoin and created his cryptocurrency as a play-off of the “doge” meme. The currency became popular as a means of Reddit users “tipping” each other. If I made a comment on Reddit that you liked, you might send me some Dogecoin. This use case
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Apache Spark is a system for processing large data sets in parallel. The core abstraction of Spark is the resilient distributed dataset (RDD), a working set of data that sits in memory for fast, iterative processing. Matei Zaharia created Spark with two goals: to provide a composable, high-level set of APIs for performing distributed processing;
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When Box started in 2006, the small engineering team had a lot to learn. Box was one of the earliest cloud storage companies, with a product that allowed companies to securely upload files to remote storage. This was two years before Amazon Web Services introduced on-demand infrastructure, so the Box team managed their own servers,
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Your friends from college are asking you how to buy Bitcoin. Your mom is emailing you articles about the benefits of decentralized peer-to-peer networks. Your shoe shiner is telling you to buy XRP. It is 2018, and cryptocurrencies have become a daily part of news headlines. The general public may not understand how this technology
The post Tether, Ripple, and Blockchain Reporting with Matt Leising appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Kubernetes has become the standard way of deploying new distributed applications. Most new internet businesses started in the foreseeable future will leverage Kubernetes (whether they realize it or not). Many old applications are migrating to Kubernetes too. Before Kubernetes, there was no standardization around a specific distributed systems platform. Just like Linux became the standard
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Kubernetes has become the standard system for deploying and managing clusters of containers. But the vision of the project goes beyond managing containers. The long-term goal is to democratize the ability to build distributed systems. Brendan Burns is a co-founder of the Kubernetes project. He recently announced an open-source project called Metaparticle, a standard library
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You are requesting a car from a ridesharing service such as Lyft. Your request hits the Lyft servers and begins trying to get you a car. It takes your geolocation, and passes the geolocation to a service that finds cars that are nearby, and puts all those cars into a list. The list of nearby
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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? * Do people build constructs in Dwarf Fortress that you would never have expected? * Did your studying complex math at Stanford affect how you’ve developed Dwarf Fortress? * What advice would you give to developers listening that want to create their own game?
Links * Dwarf Fortress * Infiniminer * Tarn on Wikipedia
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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
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Originally published November 18, 2015 “The playing field has never ever been more leveled – that means everything you don’t build is your choice not to build it.” Seth Godin is a writer, speaker, and entrepreneur. He is the author of many books, including most recently, What To Do When It’s Your Turn. Questions How
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Originally published November 10, 2015 “The cloud as an environment – I had thought it was a purely utilitarian kind of thing. What I realized is that it’s a fascinating centralized repository of computation.” Wolfram Research makes computing software powered by the Wolfram language, a knowledge-based programming language that draws from symbolic and functional programming
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Originally published November 17, 2015 “Changing anything changes everything.” Technical debt, referring to the compounding cost of changes to software architecture, can be especially challenging in machine learning systems. D. Sculley is a software engineer at Google, focusing on machine learning, data mining, and information retrieval. He recently co-authored the paper Machine Learning: The High
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There is a quote from Jeff Bezos: “70% of the work of building a business today is undifferentiated heavy lifting. Only 30% is creative work. Things will be more exciting when those numbers are inverted.” That quote is from 2006, before Amazon Web Services had built most of their managed services. In 2006, you had
The post Run Less Software with Rich Archbold appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Automation is changing the labor market. To automate a task, someone needs to put in the work to describe the task correctly to a computer. For some tasks, the reward for automating a task is tremendous–for example, putting together mobile phones. In China, companies like FOXCONN are investing time and money into programming the instructions
The post Training the Machines with Russell Smith appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
A popular software application serves billions of user requests. These requests could be for many different things. These requests need to be routed to the correct destination, load balanced across different instances of a service, and queued for processing. Processing a request might require generating a detailed response to the user, or making a write
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As the gig economy grows, that growth necessitates innovations in the online infrastructure powering these new labor markets. In our previous episodes about Uber, we explored the systems that balance server load and gather geospacial data. In our coverage of Lyft, we studied Envoy, the service proxy that standardizes communications and load balancing among services.
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Imagine that you are a lawyer. Your work involves managing files with dense, technical text. Your co-workers collaborate with you to accomplish a complex goal that can be broken down into smaller pieces. Your work has formal specifications, but there are degrees of freedom in how you express an idea. In all of these ways,
The post Legal Technology with Justin Kan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
An engineer who wants to start a business using investment capital needs to understand the expectations of investors. The market for the business needs to be huge. The team needs to have a differentiated understanding of the market, or a differentiated product. The CEO needs to have the determination to continue operating the company even
The post Early Investments with Semil Shah appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
The Netflix API is accessed by developers who build for over 1000 device types: TVs, smartphontes, VR headsets, laptops. If it has a screen, it can probably run Netflix. On each of these different devices, the Netflix experience is different. Different screen sizes mean there is variable space to display the content. When you open
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In 2003, Paul Martino co-founded Tribe.net, one of the earliest social networking sites. Tribe had significant traction, with hundreds of thousands of users. In the early 2000s, hundreds of thousands of users was enough traffic to pose a company with engineering challenges. Paul had studied computer science, and was able to use his knowledge of
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In the 1960s, advertising agencies were high-dollar creative producers. A client would come to an ad agency and pay millions of dollars for artistic messaging that would convince a consumer to buy a product. How could you measure the success of these advertising campaigns? Maybe you could see success in the sales data. Maybe people
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In America, the tech companies we focus on are commonly known as FAANG: Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google. We all know what these companies do because they impact our daily lives. In Asia, there are three giant tech companies that have similar scale: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, otherwise known as BAT. Technology within a location
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Machines understand the world through mathematical representations. In order to train a machine learning model, we need to describe everything in terms of numbers. Images, words, and sounds are too abstract for a computer. But a series of numbers is a representation that we can all agree on, whether we are a computer or a
The post Word2Vec with Adrian Colyer appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
After raising $18 million, social networking startup Yubl made a series of costly mistakes. Yubl hired an army of expensive contractors to build out its iOS and Android apps. Drama at the executive level hurt morale for the full-time employees. Most problematic, the company was bleeding cash due to a massive over-investment in cloud services.
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Quantum computing is based on the system of quantum mechanics. In quantum computing, we perform operations over qubits instead of bits. A qubit is a vector, which can take on many more values than 0 or 1. The technology used to implement quantum computers is advancing such that it has its own Moore’s Law, but
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Self-driving cars are here. Fully autonomous systems like Waymo are being piloted in less complex circumstances. Human-in-the-loop systems like Tesla Autopilot navigate drivers when it is safe to do so, and lets the human take control in ambiguous circumstances. Computers are great at memorization, but not yet great at reasoning. We cannot enumerate to a
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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
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The history of computing can be thought of as a series of ideas rather than objects. From Aristotle’s formalization of the syllogism, to Alan Turing’s model for an all-purpose computing machine, to Satoshi Nakamoto’s distributed transaction ledger–these breakthroughs did not come in the form of polished, tangible objects. In fact, the objects which end up
The post Computer Logic with Chris Dixon appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Search engines run our lives. The path we take to information is dictated by Google, Facebook, Amazon, and other forms of search. Search engines feel objective and truthful, but are built through ongoing experimentation and subjective decision making. That’s what has kept Danny Sullivan writing about search engines for twenty years. The content Google prioritizes,
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John Looney spent more than 10 years at Google. He started with infrastructure, and was part of the team that migrated Google File System to Colossus, the successor to GFS. Imagine migrating every piece of data on Google from one distributed file system to another. In this episode, John sheds light on the engineering culture
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Social networks like Facebook and Twitter facilitate interactions between individuals. Every message I send to you on Facebook goes through Facebook’s servers before reaching you. This is known as the client-server model. Since the early days of the internet, engineers have always envisioned a peer-to-peer model, where I could communicate to you directly, without a
The post Off-Grid Social Network with Andre Staltz appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Humans have now been defeated by computers at heads up no-limit holdem poker. Some people thought this wouldn’t be possible. Sure, we can teach a computer to beat a human at Go or Chess. Those games have a smaller decision space. There is no hidden information. There is no bluffing. Poker must be different! It
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CRISPR is a technique for altering the human genome. It might be the most powerful tool for biological modification that we have ever discovered. In this episode, we explore CRISPR: how it works, why it exists in the natural world, and the implications for being able to modify DNA so easily. Geoff Ralston is a
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There are certain experiences when a product solves a problem so thoroughly and elegantly that it lifts a weight off of your shoulders that you didn’t even know was there. Dropbox did this with file storage. Slack did this with group collaboration. Zencastr does this for recording podcasts. Before I used Zencastr to record my
The post Zencastr with Josh Nielsen appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
A new programmer learns to build applications using data structures like a queue, a cache, or a database. Modern cloud applications are built using more sophisticated tools like Redis, Kafka, or Amazon S3. These tools do multiple things well, and often have overlapping functionality. Application architecture becomes less straightforward. The applications we are building today
The post Data Intensive Applications with Martin Kleppmann appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
We view our iPhones as inanimate objects. But when we see robots such as the Boston Dynamics machines that move with a motion that seems like an animal, the robot comes alive. We feel more sympathy and connection towards it. Today’s episode is about the distinction between inanimate machines and machines that seem alive. Peeqo
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Facebook’s open source projects include React, GraphQL, and Cassandra. These projects are key pieces of infrastructure used by thousands of developers–including engineers at Facebook itself. These projects are able to gain traction because Facebook takes time to decouple the projects from their internal infrastructure and clean up the code before releasing them into the wild.
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Engineers in Silicon Valley see a world of constant progress. Our work is creative and intellectually challenging. We are building the future and getting compensated quite well for it. But what if we are actually achieving far less than what is possible? What if, after so many years of high margins, gourmet lunch, and self-flattery,
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Brendan Eich created the first version of JavaScript in 10 days. Since then JavaScript has evolved, and Brendan has watched the growth of the web give rise to new and unexpected use cases. Today Brendan Eich is still pushing the web forward across the technology stack with his involvement in the WebAssembly specification and the
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Big technology companies have so much going on at any given time that a journalist can tell any type of story they want to about it. Depending on what angle you observe the company from, you can write a story depicting that company as good, evil, growing, or about to crash. The truth only becomes
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Servers in a data center fail. Sometimes entire data centers have a power outage. Bugs in an application make it into production. Human operators make mistakes and cause data to be deleted. Failure is unavoidable. We make backups and replicate our servers so that when a failure occurs, we can quickly respond to it without
The post Failure Injection with Kolton Andrus appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
If you wanted to build a machine learning model to understand human health, where would you get the data? A hospital database would be useful, but privacy laws make it difficult to disclose that patient data to the public. In order to publicize the data safely, you would have to anonymize it, so that a
The post Where Machines Go to Learn with Auren Hoffman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Most tech companies are moving toward a highly distributed microservices architecture. In this architecture, services are decoupled from each other and communicate with a common service language, often JSON over HTTP. This provides some standardization, but these companies are finding that more standardization would come in handy. At the ridesharing company Lyft, every internal service
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Cloud computing has pushed computation away from our own private servers and into virtual machines running on a data center. In the world of cloud computing, processing is centralized in these data centers, and our smartphone and laptop application performance suffers from having high latency between the client and the cloud server. As machine learning
The post The End of Cloud Computing with Peter Levine appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
What is the relationship between your brain and your conscious experiences? This is is the fundamental question of the work of Donald Hoffman, a professor of computer science and cognitive science at UC Irvine. When Hoffman was a child, he wondered whether there was a cognitive dividing line between humans and machines, and that curiosity
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Engineers today have a variety of career options. You could go work for a large corporation, you could raise money and start a startup, you could freelance and move from job to job with freedom–or you could start a business with the goal of quickly becoming profitable. Courtland Allen was a guest on Software Engineering
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In the 1990s, the barriers to starting a company were significant. Not only did you need an idea, you needed $200,000 for servers and Oracle licenses. With cloud computing, the up-front financial costs of getting a company off the ground have been mostly eliminated–but the idea of starting a company is still perceived as risky.
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When a human passes away, we create a tombstone as a memorial. Friends and family visit a grave to remember the times they had with that person while they were still alive. Memorial bots are another way to celebrate the life of someone who has passed away. A memorial bot is created by taking the
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When you are deciding who to marry, you are using an algorithm. The same is true when you are looking for a parking space, playing a game of poker, or deciding whether or not to organize your closet. Algorithms To Live By is a book about the computer science of human decisions. It offers strategies
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You have probably received a parking ticket that you felt was unfair, but instead of fighting it, you paid the expensive price to get rid of it quickly. Fighting a parking ticket sounds like it would be so time consuming that it is a better decision to just pay for it. When Joshua Browder was
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Everyone has debugging stories. We have all had the experience of wrestling with a seemingly impossible bug for days until we finally come to a solution. In today’s episode, Haseeb Qureshi retells some of his favorite debugging stories: The case of the 500-mile email, Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain, and My Hardest Bug Ever.
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Large technology companies have no shortage of data. But raw data itself does not provide a competitive advantage. Many companies are bottlenecked by a shortage of data scientists who can query that data effectively. This results in an organizational dysfunction where people lining up to ask questions of the data science team are unable to
The post Winning With Data with Tomasz Tunguz appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Amazon Web Services changed the economics of building an internet application. Instead of having to invest tens of thousands of dollars up front for hardware, developers can pay for services over time as their application scales. As AWS has grown to be a gigantic platform, the documentation about how to use cloud infrastructure has become
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Ben Northrop was sitting at a tech conference, listening to a presentation about a new piece of technology, when he was struck by the sense that history was repeating itself. For the twenty years that Ben has worked as a software engineer, he has been hearing about new technologies that claim they will be able
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Legacy code is code without automated tests. Most companies have lots of legacy code, and most developers don’t like working on legacy code. Why is that? What is it that makes legacy code so difficult to work with? And why does a large amount of legacy code slow down an organization so severely? Andrea Goulet
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Indie Hackers is a website that profiles independent developers who have made profitable software projects, usually without raising any money. These projects make anywhere from a few hundred dollars a month to more than $100,000 as in the case with park.io, one of the services profiled by Indie Hackers. Courtland Allen is the creator, engineer,
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When Uber’s engineering team published a blog post about moving to MySQL from Postgres, Markus Winand started receiving lots of email. Markus writes about databases on his blog “Use The Index, Luke,” a guide to database performance for developers. The people emailing Markus wanted to know–if Postgres doesn’t work well for Uber, is it safe
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Bot fraud, the New York tech scene, RethinkDB and open source; these topics and more are discussed in today’s episode. Two of the most popular guests return to the show to explore a variety of topics. Ben Halpern is the creator of The Practical Dev, a massively popular Twitter account and blog that you may
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When a user of a social network updates her profile, that profile update needs to propagate to several databases that want to know about such an update–search indexes, user databases, caches, and other services. When Neha Narkhede was at LinkedIn, she helped develop Kafka, which was deployed at LinkedIn to help solve this very problem.
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After nine years at Microsoft, Scott Berkun left to become an author. One of his books on project management was read by Matt Mullenweg, the creator of the WordPress blogging tool that runs a large percentage of the internet (including Software Engineering Daily). Scott became friends with the WordPress founder, who is also the CEO
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Microsoft was the dominant technology company in the 1990’s, until it came under fire for anticompetitive practices. Internet Explorer was tightly coupled to the Windows operating system, which prevented Netscape Navigator–a competing browser–from reaching users on the dominant platform. This episode is about antitrust–what businesses can and cannot do in the name of competition,
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When a company switches the relational database it uses, you wouldn’t expect the news of the switch to go viral. Most engineers are not interested in the subtle differences between MySQL and Postgres, right? Uber recently switched from having Postgres as its main relational database to using MySQL. Evan Klitzke wrote a detailed blog
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Facebook users provide lots of information about the structure of their relationship graph. Facebook uses that information to provide content and services that are expected to be important to users. If Facebook knows who the most important people in my life are, Facebook can use that knowledge to serve me content that is more relevant
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Research in artificial intelligence takes place mostly at universities and large corporations, but both of these types of institutions have constraints that cause the research to proceed a certain way. In a university, basic research might be hindered by lack of funding. At a big corporation, the researcher might be encouraged to study a domain
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Machine learning has become simplified. Similar to how Ruby on Rails made web development approachable, scikit-learn takes away much of the frustrating aspects of machine learning, and lets the developer focus on building functionality with high-level APIs. Per Harald Borgen is a developer at Xeneta. He started programming fairly recently, but has already built
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When you hear about massive data breaches like the recent ones from LinkedIn, MySpace, or Ashley Madison, how can you find out whether your own data was compromised? Troy Hunt created the website HaveIBeenPwned.com to answer this question. When a major data breach occurs, Troy acquires a copy of the stolen data and provides
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Most episodes of Software Engineering Daily are interviews with an expert about a technical software concept. Occasionally I write editorials, and also record them as a podcast. The first editorial was about 10 Philosophies for Engineers, the second was about how poker relates to software engineering, and the third was about music and software engineering. Today’s episode
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Alec Ross worked in the White House as a Senior Policy Advisor to Hillary Clinton. His book Industries of the Future explores the biggest technological opportunities and threats to our society. The industries addressed in his book include robotics, genetics, and cybersecurity. Technological familiarity is increasingly correlated with an individual’s optimism. Cyberwarfare presents attack vectors
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Breakthroughs in modern data research tend to come from companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, with projects like MapReduce, Cassandra, and Dynamo. Twenty years ago, this types of breakthroughs would be happening in academia, which causes today’s guest Peter Bailis to ask: is the academic data community having an identity crisis? Peter is
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EconTalk is a weekly economics podcast that has been going for a decade. On EconTalk, Russ Roberts brings on writers, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs for engaging conversations about the world as seen through the lens of economics. Russ Roberts is today’s guest, and it is a treat because I have been listening to EconTalk since
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Negotiation is an important skill for software engineers. The salary you negotiate at the beginning of your job could be a difference of tens of thousands of dollars over the course of an engineer’s career, but intimidating recruiters and exploding offers scare many engineers from negotiating at all. Today, Haseeb Qureshi returns to the
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Lee Atchison spent seven years at Amazon working in retail, software distribution, and Amazon Web Services. He then moved to New Relic, where he has spent four years scaling the company’s internal architecture. From his decade of experience at fast growing web technology companies, Lee has written the book Architecting for Scale, from O’Reilly. As
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Scheduling is the method by which work is assigned to resources to complete that work. At the operating system level, this can mean scheduling of threads and processes. At the data center level, this can mean scheduling Hadoop jobs or other workflows that require the orchestration of a network of computers. Adrian Cockcroft worked on
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Pieter Hintjens grew up writing software by himself. The act of writing code brought him great pleasure, but the isolated creative process disconnected him from the rest of the world. As his life progressed he became involved in open source communities, and he discovered a passion for human interaction. Open source software succeeds or fails
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Six years ago, Twitter was experiencing outages due to high traffic. Back in 2010 Twitter was built as a monolithic Ruby on Rails application. Twitter migrated to a microservices architecture to fix these problems. During this migration, the engineers at Twitter learned how to build and scale highly distributed microservice architectures. William Morgan was an
The post Scaling Twitter with Buoyant.io’s William Morgan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Most programmers spend lots of their time reading content about software. Since our field changes so rapidly, engineers consume news and editorials voraciously, trying to keep up with the impossibly fast pace. The Practical Dev is a collection of blog posts, editorials, and interviews that was created to help with that end. Ben Halpern is
The post Software Editorialism with Practical Dev’s Ben Halpern appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Coding boot camps are a subject of controversy. Critics of boot camps defend the conventional university system, and argue that boot camp graduates do not have enough experience to write quality software. But the reality is that some boot camp graduates have found success from this new educational path. After graduating high school, Kenny Tran
The post Boot Camps, Mesosphere, and Open-Source with Kenny Tran appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
Dropbox has been storing files on Amazon Web Services for 8 years, and Dropbox’s core business is storing files. For the past three years, Dropbox has been working on a project to migrate its file storage from Amazon Web Services to its own custom-built infrastructure. Magic Pocket is the name of Dropbox’s new infrastructure layer,
The post Dropbox’s Magic Pocket with James Cowling appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
“Seeing stuff happen is exciting in the early days. But when you try to be at the senior level, at the architect level, you have to understand that there is a cost to adopting a higher level abstraction.” Frontend web development was simpler in the past–CSS, HTML, and JavaScript were all you needed to know.
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“The most important thing behind it is to think about developers in the way that product people think about consumers, and that the first time experience of your API needs to be ridiculously simple.” Software developers have been socializing on chat rooms for decades. In the nineties, we began using IRC and AOL instant messenger.
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“In many ways, nature is still the fastest computer we have when it comes to studying disease.” Software engineering is a deterministic field. We write lines of code, and feed data into that code, expecting to get a certain answer. Computing is deterministic because humans developed it–we understand computers from top to bottom. The same
The post Using Software to Discover Rare Diseases with Matt Might appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.
“The geeks won because somehow we tricked everyone into carrying around a computer with them!” Stack Overflow is used by developers to find out how to build software. Stack Overflow is both a tool and a community, and today’s guest Jeff Atwood has made a career out of building tools and communities. As the co-founder
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This episode is a republication from my interview with Leslie Lamport on Software Engineering Radio. 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
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“Its not just that we didn’t have git, we didn’t have Subversion, and before that we didn’t have CVS. Basically all that we had was RCS.” Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox–it’s easy to forget that these modern browsers descended from the war between Microsoft and Netscape. Today, we hear from a software engineer who was
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Following the successful experiment of History of Hadoop, we are doing another Saturday experiment: an editorial podcast. Let us know your thoughts via Slack, Twitter, or email! Our podcast errs on the side of technical rigor. Whether the topic is distributed databases, microservices, Soylent, Uber, or Dwarf Fortress, we try to separate hype from substance, deferring the
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This episode is different from the traditional interview format of Software Engineering Daily, and focuses on the history of Hadoop. Thanks to Marco Bonaci for allowing us to republish this in audio format. You can find the original post here: History of Hadoop If you like this podcast, check out Marko’s book Spark in Action (affiliate
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“Actually it’s more work to turn a table into a chair, than it is to just make a damn chair.”
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“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.”
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Vint Cerf is Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. He contributes to global policy development and continued spread of the Internet. This episode is republished from The Quoracast. Questions: What will the world look like in 5 years? What are the biggest problems associated with rapid spread and development of the Internet? Does blockchain technology present
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“It’s a classic case where you have to be contrarian. It seems like the worst idea in the world to start a cloud hosting business. We didn’t know any better.” Moisey Uretsky is the cofounder of Digital Ocean, a leading cloud hosting provider based in New York. “It’s the usual immigrant story. My parents moved
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“Humans are the most complicated thing out there – judging human skill is extremely hard, there’s all kinds of ways that people can be good.” Triplebyte is a technical hiring platform that vets engineers using a comprehensive evaluation platform and connects them to companies that are interesting in hiring them. Triplebyte was part of the
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“Systems are giving up correctness for latency, and I’m arguing that stream processing systems have to be designed to allow the user to pick the tradeoffs that the application needs."
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“You’ve listened to podcasts where you gotta fast forward 8-9 minutes in before the actual meat happens.”
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“If you can make a system that can survive this random failure testing, then you will more or likely survive whatever other chaotic conditions exist.”
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"Software is this really unique field that is growing so rapidly that people are almost forced to specialize into one subdomain – and that kind of stratification is good for your job and for your employers, but it's not necessarily good for you as an individual trying to grow in the field of software.”
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“Changing anything changes everything.”
Technical debt, referring to the compounding cost of changes to software architecture, can be especially challenging in machine learning systems.
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“The cloud as an environment – I had thought it was a purely utilitarian kind of thing. What I realized is that it’s a fascinating centralized repository of computation.”
Wolfram Research makes computing software powered by the Wolfram language, a knowledge-based programming language that draws from symbolic and functional programming paradigms.
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“Mutable state is the root of all evil.”
Erlang is a functional, concurrent programming language that was originally designed within Ericsson in the 1980's. It was built to support distributed, fault-tolerant, non-stop applications suitable for telecommunications infrastructure.
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“Free Code Camp is my effort to correct the extremely inefficient and circuitous way I learned to code. I’m committing my career and the rest of my life towards making this process as efficient and painless as possible.”
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“If I was trying to learn coding on my own, to the level that App Academy was able to teach me, it definitely would have taken me significantly longer.”
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“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.
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“Creativity never comes to you – she will only meet you halfway.”
Derek Sivers is a programmer, musician, and writer. He has created several companies and products, including CD Baby, which became the largest seller of independent music online.
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“There are a lot more people who have the problem that Hadoop solves than there are people using Hadoop.”
Pachyderm is a containerized data analytics platform that seeks to replace Hadoop.
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"If you focus on improving the developer experience, it will naturally translate into good documentation."
ReadMe is simplifying the process of writing documentation. The platform provides a readymade developer hub with the ability to integrate API endpoints into documentation.
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What is it like to be a young software engineer in Nigeria?
Osine and Anesi Ikhianosime have a deep understanding of the startup tactics that have led to so many successful companies in the Web 2.0 boom.
Their favorite podcast is a16z. Their role models include Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates. They recently worked on a machine learning compression project, inspired by the show Silicon Valley.
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Functional languages encourage practices and patterns that can simplify concurrent programming. Scala, Clojure, and Akka are functional tools built on the Java Virtual Machine.
Jessica Kerr is a functional developer on the JVM. She currently works at Monsanto. At QCon San Francisco, she will be giving a talk called Contracts in Clojure: Settling Types vs. Tests.
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"What we learn again and again is that security is less about what you think of, and more about what you didn't think of."
Bruce Schneier is a security researcher and author of Data and Goliath.
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Container infrastructure has benefits of security, scalability and efficiency. Containers are a central component of the DevOps movement. Joyent provides simple, secure deployment of containers with bare metal speed on container-native infrastructure Bryan Cantrill is the CTO of Joyent, the father of DTrace and an OS kernel developer for 20 years. Questions: Why are containers
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Bitcoin’s cultural implications inform the engineering opportunities and constraints. Andreas Antonopoulos is a bitcoin researcher, journalist, and evangelist. Questions What are the taboo topics within the bitcoin community? What do you think of when people say “we know bitcoin is the first real cryptocurrency, but the big question is whether it will be the last”?
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