Software Engineering Daily

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. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk. 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: [email protected]

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. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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. 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. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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. 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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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. This episode is hosted by Josh Goldberg, an independent full-time open-source developer. Josh works on projects in the TypeScript ecosystem, most notably TypeScript ES Slint, the tooling that enables ES Slint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh is also the author of the O'Reilly Learning TypeScript book, a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies, and a live code streamer on Twitch. Find Josh on Bluesky, Mastodon, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, and .com as Joshua K. Goldberg. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk. 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: [email protected]

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, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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 Neon. 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. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by SurrealDB. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk. 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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

Podman is an open-source container management tool that allows developers to build, run, and manage containers. Unlike Docker, it supports rootless containers for improved security and is fully compatible with standards from the Open Container Initiative, or OCI. Brent Baude is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat where he works on Podman. In this episode, Brent joins the show to talk about the project. 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 Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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 explore Meta’s bold push into AI with the launch of Meta Superintelligence Labs, the dramatic twists in the Windsurf acquisition saga, Lyft’s re-entry into the autonomous vehicle race, and how new UK online safety rules have fueled a surge in VPN use. They also dive into standout discussions from Hacker News, including students hacking a smart washing machine to send Discord alerts, a fully air‑gapped Jira alternative for regulated industries, and fresh insights on how variable naming impacts AI coding tools like Copilot. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk. 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: [email protected]

Electron is a framework for building cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It allows developers to package web apps with a native-like experience by bundling them with a Chromium browser and Node.js runtime. Electron is widely used for apps like VS Code, Discord, and Slack because it enables a single codebase to run on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Shelley Vohr is a Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft where she works on Electron. She joins the podcast with Josh Goldberg to talk about her work on the Electron 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: [email protected]

Modal is a serverless compute platform that's specifically focused on AI workloads. The company’s goal is to enable AI teams to quickly spin up GPU-enabled containers, and rapidly iterate and autoscale. It was founded by Erik Bernhardsson who was previously at Spotify for 7 years where he built the music recommendation system and the popular Luigi workflow scheduler. In this episode, Erik joins Sean Falconer to talk about the motivation for founding his company, the market gap in ML and AI tooling, optimizing container cold start, Modal's interface design, and more. 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: [email protected]

RxJS is an open-source library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs. It provides powerful operators for transforming, filtering, combining, and managing streams of data, from user input and web requests to real-time updates. Ben Lesh is the creator of RxJS. He joins Josh Goldberg to talk about his path into engineering and the RxJS library. 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: [email protected]

JigsawStack is a startup that develops a suite of custom small models for tasks such as scraping, forecasting, vOCR, and translation. The platform is designed to support collaborative knowledge work, especially in research-heavy or strategy-driven environments. Yoeven Khemlani is the Founder of JigsawStack and he joins the podcast with Gregor Vand to talk about making use of small models for diverse applications. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Railway is a software company that provides a popular platform for deploying and managing applications in the cloud. It automates tasks such as infrastructure provisioning, scaling, and deployment and is particularly known for having a developer-friendly interface. Jake Cooper is the Founder and CEO at Railway. He joins the show to talk about the company and its platform. 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: [email protected]

Illia Polosukhin is a veteran AI researcher and one of the original authors of the landmark Transformer paper, Attention is All You Need, which he co-authored during his time at Google Research. He has a deep background in machine learning and natural language processing, and has spent over a decade working at the intersection of AI and decentralized technologies. His current venture is called NEAR AI, and He's focused on building open-source infrastructure, tools, and products for Agentic, privacy-preserving AI systems. He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to discuss his journey, the origins of the Transformer model, the vision for user-owned AI, document-oriented development, 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: [email protected]

TypeScript is a statically typed superset of JavaScript that adds optional type annotations and modern language features to improve developer productivity and code safety. The TypeScript compiler performs type checking at compile time, catching errors before code is run, and also transforms TypeScript code into clean, standards-compliant JavaScript. Jake Bailey is Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft where he works on TypeScript, and has made major contributions to the TypeScript compiler. Jake joins the podcast with Josh Goldberg to talk about TypeScript and his work. 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: [email protected]

Wiz is a cloud security platform that helps organizations identify and remediate risks across their cloud environments. The company’s platform scans layers of the cloud stack, including virtual machines, containers, and serverless configurations, to detect vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in context. The Model Context Protocol, or MCP, is emerging as a potential standard for connecting LLM applications to external data sources and tools. It has rapidly gained traction across the industry with broad backing from companies such as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. While the protocol offers great opportunities, it also introduces certain security risks. Rami McCarthy is a Principal Security Researcher at Wiz. He joins the podcast with Gregor Vand to talk about security research, AI and secrets leakage, MCP security, supply chain attacks, career advice, and more. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Welcome back to SED News, a podcast series from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer break down the latest stories in software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the wider tech industry. In this episode, Gregor and Sean dig into Meta’s legal battle over AI training data, discuss the strategic implications of Meta’s $14 billion stake in Scale AI, and examine how competition in the AI space is reshaping relationships between tech giants like Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google. They also highlight some of the most interesting stories from Hacker News, including a solar-powered iPhone turned OCR server, and a provocative case for why some AI agents should really just be SQL queries. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk. 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: [email protected]

Anaconda is a software company that's well-known for its solutions for managing packages, environments, and security in large-scale data workflows. The company has played a major role in making Python-based data science more accessible, efficient, and scalable. Anaconda has also invested heavily in AI tool development. Greg Jennings is the VP of Engineering and AI at Anaconda. He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to talk about the tooling ecosystem around AI app development, the Anaconda Toolbox, the rapidly evolving role of AI in engineering, and 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: [email protected]

ByteDance is a global technology company operating a wide range of content platforms around the world, and is best known for creating TikTok. The company operates at a massive scale, which naturally presents challenges in ensuring performance and stability across its data centers. It has over a million servers running containerized applications, and this required the company to find a networking solution that could handle high throughput while maintaining stability. eBPF is a technology for dynamically and safely reprogramming the Linux kernel. ByteDance leveraged eBPF to successfully implement a decentralized networking solution that improved efficiency, scalability, and performance. Chen Tang is an engineer at ByteDance, where he worked on redesigning the company's container networking stack using eBPF. In this episode, Chen joins the show with Kevin Ball to talk about eBPF, the problems it solves, and how it was used at ByteDance. 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: [email protected]

WayForward is a renowned video game studio that was founded in 1990. The company has developed games for publishers such as Capcom, Konami, and Nintendo and has released their games across major hardware platforms from the last 35 years. They are also the creators of the Shantae series of 2D platformers. WayForward recently developed the latest game in the storied Contra series, called Operation Galuga, which is a reimagining of the original Contra from 1987. Voldi Way is the founder and CEO of WayForward, and Tomm Hulett is a Director at WayForward. They join the show to talk about the history of their studio and developing Contra: Operation Galuga. 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: [email protected]

One of the most immediate and high-impact applications of LLMs has been in software development. The models can significantly accelerate code writing, but with that increased velocity comes a greater need for thoughtful, scalable approaches to codereview. Integrating AI into the development workflow requires rethinking how to ensure quality,security, and maintainability at scale. CodeRabbit is a startup that brings generative AI into the code review process. It evaluates code quality and security directly within tools like GitHub and VS Code, acting as an AI reviewer that complements existing CI/CD pipelines. Harjot Gill is the founder and CEO of CodeRabbit. He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to discuss CodeRabbit's architecture. Its multi-model LLM strategy, how it tracks the reasoning trail of agents, managing context windows, lessons from bootstrapping the company, and much more. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by CodeRabbit. 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: [email protected]

Emulating retro games on modern consoles is a growing trend, and allows players to experience classic titles with improved performance, enhanced resolution, and added features like save states and rewinding. However, this process raises many challenging technical questions related to hardware compatibility, performance optimization, rendering, and state management. Implicit Conversions is a company focused on emulating retro PlayStation games on modern consoles. Robin Lavallée is the CEO and Bill Litshauer is the COO at the company. They join the show to talk about the engineering that’s needed to emulate and enhance retro games. 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: [email protected]

Welcome back to SED News, a podcast series from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer break down the latest stories in software engineering, Silicon Valley, and wider tech world. In this episode, Gregor and Sean unpack what’s going with Deel and Rippling, explore why Databricks and Snowflake are making big bets on Postgres, and reflect on how AI-powered tools like Cursor are reshaping what it means to be a developer today. They also surface highlights from Hacker News, including Claude’s evolving system prompt and a surprising history of transit cards in Japan and Hong Kong. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk. 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: [email protected]

TanStack is an open-source collection of high-performance libraries for JavaScript and TypeScript applications, primarily focused on state management, data fetching, and table utilities. It includes popular libraries like TanStack Query, TanStack Table, and TanStack Router. These libraries emphasize declarative APIs, optimized performance, and developer-friendly features, and they are increasingly popular for modern frontend development. Tanner Linsley is the creator of TanStack and he joins the podcast with Nick Nisi to talk about the project, SSG, type safety, the TanStack Start full-stack React framework, 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: [email protected]

Evaluations are critical for assessing the quality, performance, and effectiveness of software during development. Common evaluation methods include code reviews and automated testing, and can help identify bugs, ensure compliance with requirements, and measure software reliability. However, evaluating LLMs presents unique challenges due to their complexity, versatility, and potential for unpredictable behavior. Ankur Goyal is the CEO and Founder of Braintrust Data, which provides an end-to-end platform for AI application development, and has a focus on making LLM development robust and iterative. Ankur previously founded Impira which was acquired by Figma, and he later ran the AI team at Figma. Ankur joins the show to talk about Braintrust and the unique challenges of developing evaluations in a non-deterministic context. 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: [email protected]

A major challenge with creating distributed applications is achieving resilience, reliability, and fault tolerance. It can take considerable engineering time to address non-functional concerns like retries, state synchronization, and distributed coordination. Event-driven models aim to simplify these issues, but often introduce new difficulties in debugging and operations. Stephan Ewen is the Founder at Restate which aims to simplify modern distributed applications. He is also the co-creator of Apache Flink which is an open-source framework for unified stream-processing and batch-processing. Stephan joins the show with Sean Falconer to talk about distributed applications and his work with Restate. 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: [email protected]

Agentic AI is seen as a key frontier in artificial intelligence, enabling systems to autonomously act, adapt in real-time, and solve complex, multi-step problems based on objectives and context. Unlike traditional rule-based or generative AI, which are limited to predefined or reactive tasks, agentic AI processes vast information, models uncertainty, and makes context-sensitive decisions, mimicking human-like problem-solving. Crew AI is a platform to build and deploy automated workflows using any LLM and cloud platform. The company has rapidly become one of the most prominent in the field of agentic AI. João Moura is the founder at Crew AI and he joins the show with Sean Falconer to talk about his company. 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: [email protected]

Synopsys is a leading electronic design automation company specializing in silicon design and verification, as well as software integrity and security. Their tools are foundational to the creation of modern chips and embedded software, powering everything from smartphones to cars. Chip design is a deeply complex process, often taking months or years and requiring the coordination of thousands of engineers. Now, advances in AI are beginning to transform the field by reducing manual effort, accelerating timelines, and unlocking new design possibilities. Thomas Andersen is the Vice President of AI and Machine Learning at Synopsys, where he has spent over 15 years. He joins the show to talk with Kevin Ball about the evolving role of AI in hardware design, the challenges of training models on tacit, undocumented chip engineering knowledge, the emergence of domain-specific LLMs, and where this fast-moving field is going next. 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: [email protected]

OpenTofu is an open-source alternative to Terraform, designed for managing infrastructure as code. It enables users to define, provision, and manage their cloud and on-premises resources using a declarative configuration language. OpenTofu was created to ensure an open and community-driven approach to infrastructure tooling, and it emphasizes compatibility and extensibility for diverse deployment scenarios. Cory O’Daniel is the CEO of Massdriver and he's a founding member of OpenTofu. Malcolm Matalka is a Co-Founder at Terrateam and he’s also a founding member of OpenTofu. They join the podcast to talk about the OpenTofu project. 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: [email protected]