Software Engineering Daily

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]

Python is the dominant language for AI and data science applications, but it lacks the performance and low-level control needed to fully leverage GPU hardware. As a result, developers often rely on NVIDIA’s CUDA framework, which adds complexity and fragments the development stack. Mojo is a new programming language designed to combine the simplicity of Python with the performance of C and the safety of Rust. It also aims to provide a vendor-independent approach to GPU programming. Mojo is being developed by Chris Lattner, a renowned systems engineer known for his seminal contributions to computer science, including LLVM, the Clang compiler, and the Swift programming language. Chris is the CEO and Co-Founder of Modular AI, the company behind Mojo. In this episode, he joins the show to discuss his engineering journey and his current work on AI infrastructure and the Mojo 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]

PostgreSQL is an open-source database known for its robustness, extensibility, and compliance with SQL standards. Its ability to handle complex queries and maintain high data integrity has made it a top choice for both start-ups and large enterprises. Heikki Linnakangas is a leading developer for the PostgreSQL project, and he's a co-founder at Neon, which provides a serverless platform for spinning up Postgres databases. In this episode, he joins Kevin Ball to talk about why PostgreSQL has become so popular, why he founded Neon, Postgres Core vs. Extensions, the pgvector similarity search for AI applications, and much 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. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Cryptocurrency exchanges face unique security challenges that require specialized threat assessments and planning. Coinbase is a cryptocurrency exchange based in the United States. It was founded in 2012 and has evolved alongside cryptocurrency as a technology. Philip Martin is the Chief Security Officer at Coinbase. Prior to Coinbase, Philip built and led the Incident Response and Security Engineering teams at Palantir and was a US Army counterintelligence agent and Arabic linguist. In this episode, Philip joins the podcast with Gregor Vand to talk about his career and security at Coinbase. 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 Model Context Protocol, or MCP, is a new open standard that connects AI assistants to arbitrary data sources and tools, such as codebases, APIs, and content repositories. Instead of building bespoke integrations for each system, developers can use MCP to establish secure, scalable connections between AI models and the data they need. By standardizing this connection layer, MCP enables models to access relevant information in real time, leading to more accurate and context-aware responses. David Soria Parra is a Member of the Technical Staff at Anthropic, where he co-created the Model Context Protocol. He joins the podcast to talk about his career and the future of context-aware AI. 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]

Grand Theft Auto III is a 2001 an open-world action-adventure game developed by Rockstar Games and it had a profound impact on both gaming and popular culture. Its success cemented video games as a dominant form of entertainment and storytelling, and paved the way for future blockbuster franchises. The game was also a technological milestone that redefined what was possible in open-world game design. It was one of the first fully 3D open-world games to offer seamless exploration, blending mission-based gameplay with a living, breathing city. The game was originally released on PlayStation 2 and PC but never had an official Sega Dreamcast version. However, the homebrew community embarked on the goal of porting the game to the Dreamcast, and recently released the port to much acclaim. Falco Girgis and Stef Kornilios Mitsis Poiitidis are developers on the GTA3 Dreamcast port. They join the podcast to talk about the Dreamcast hardware and the heroic task of porting GTA3 to the console. 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]

Polypane is a specialized web development browser that simplifies creating and testing modern websites. A key feature is that it provides multiple screen sizes at once, with synchronized scrolling and interactions, so developers can test different layouts and breakpoints simultaneously. Polypane also focuses on accessibility tools, real-time previews, and debugging features. Kilian Valkhof is the Founder of Polypane which develops the Polypane browser. In this episode he speaks with Josh Goldberg about his career and the creation of his browser. 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]

LiveKit is a platform that provides developers with tools to build real-time audio and video applications at scale. It offers an open-source WebRTC stack for creation of live, interactive experiences like video conferencing, streaming, and virtual events. LiveKit has gained significant attention for its partnership with OpenAI for the Advanced Voice feature. Russ d’Sa is the Founder of LiveKit and has an extensive career in startups. In this episode he joins Sean Falconer to talk about his startup journey, the early days of Y Combinator, LiveKit, WebRTC, LiveKit’s partnership with OpenAI, voice and vision as the future paradigm for computer interaction, 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]

Welcome to the pilot episode of SED News, a new podcast series from Software Engineering Daily. Join hosts Gregor Van and Sean Falconer as they break down the week's most important stories in software engineering, machine learning, and developer culture. In this episode, Gregor and Sean discuss the CoreWeave IPO and the company's recent acquisition of weights and biases, dig into Anthropics model context protocol, surface highlights rom hacker news, and reflect on Microsoft turning 50. We'd love to hear what you think of the format. Reach out on BlueSky at @SoftwareDaily or on X at @Software _Daily, @GregorVand, or @seanfalconer. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

AI tools are transforming how developers write code, and although it’s difficult to pinpoint how much code is now AI-generated code, estimates suggest it’s between 20% and 40%, and this figure is poised to grow in the coming years. This evolution has given rise to a new coding paradigm in which developers act as directors, guiding and refining AI-generated solutions rather than manually writing every line of code. This approach was recently termed “vibe coding” by Andrej Karpathy, and it shifts the programmer’s role from detailed coding to overseeing and enhancing AI-produced code. It emphasizes collaborative interaction with AI, blending human creativity with machine efficiency to solve complex problems. Vish Abrams is the Chief Architect atHeroku and previously worked at Oracle and NASA, among other organizations. In this episode, Vish joins the show with Kevin Ball for a wide-ranging conversation about the state of AI-based tools, whether there are limits to vibe coding, AI tools for individuals vs. AI tools for teams, the Model Context Protocol, Heroku’s managed inference service, and much more. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Heroku (Caffelli) 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]

Glean is a workplace search and knowledge discovery company that helps organizations find and access information across various internal tools and data sources. Their platform uses AI to provide personalized search results to assist members of an organization in retrieving relevant documents, emails, and conversations. The rise of LLM-based agentic reasoning systems now presents new opportunities to build advanced functionality using an organization's internal data. Eddie Zhou is a founding engineer at Glean and previously worked at Google. He joined Sean Falconer to discuss the engineering and design considerations around building agentic tooling to enhance productivity and decision-making. 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]

Martin Hellman is an American cryptographer known for co-inventing public-key cryptography with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle in the 1970s. Their groundbreaking Diffie-Hellman key exchange method allowed secure communication over insecure channels, laying the foundation for modern encryption protocols. Hellman has also contributed to cybersecurity policy and ethical discussions on nuclear risk. His work has had a lasting impact on cryptography, internet security, and global information protection. Martin received the 2015 Turing Award together with Whitfield Diffie "for inventing and promulgating both asymmetric public-key cryptography, including its application to digital signatures, and a practical cryptographic key-exchange method. " In this episode he joins Gregor Vand to talk about his life and career. 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]

Modern cloud-native systems are highly dynamic and distributed, which makes it difficult to monitor cloud infrastructure using traditional tools designed for static environments. This has motivated the development and widespread adoption of dedicated observability platforms. Prometheus is an open-source observability tool designed for cloud-native environments. Its strong integration with Kubernetes and pull-based data collection model have driven its popularization in DevOps. However, a common challenge with Prometheus is that it struggles with large data volumes and has limited cost-optimization capabilities. This raises the question of how best to handle Prometheus deployments at large scale. Eric Schabell works in DevRel at Chronosphere where he’s the Director of Community and Developer. He is also a CNCF Ambassador. Eric joins the show with Kevin Ball to talk about metrics collection, time series data, managing Prometheus at scale, tradeoffs between self-hosted vs. managed observability, and more. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Chronosphere. 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]

David A. Patterson is a pioneering computer scientist known for his contributions to computer architecture, particularly as a co-developer of Reduced Instruction Set Computing, or RISC, which revolutionized processor design. He has co-authored multiple books, including the highly influential Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach. David is a UC Berkeley Pardee professor emeritus, a Google distinguished engineer since 2016, the RIOS Laboratory Director, and the RISC-V International Vice-Chair. He received the 2017 Turing Award together with John L. Hennessy "for pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures with enduring impact on the microprocessor industry." In this episode he joins Kevin Ball to talk about his life and career. 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]

At Uber, there are many platform teams supporting engineers across the company, and maintaining robust on-call operations is crucial to keeping services functioning smoothly. The prospect of enhancing the efficiency of these engineering teams motivated Uber to create Genie, which is an AI-powered on-call copilot. Genie assists with on-call management by providing real-time responses to queries, streamlining incident resolution, and facilitating team collaboration. Paarth Chothani is a Staff Software Engineer on the Uber AI Gen AI team. Eduards Sidorovics is a Senior Software Engineer on the Uber AI Platform team. In this episode they join the show with Sean Falconer to talk about the challenges that motivated the creation of Uber Genie, the architecture of Genie, 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]

John Hennessy is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and academic known for his significant contributions to computer architecture. He co-developed the RISC architecture, which revolutionized modern computing by enabling faster and more efficient processors. Hennessy served as the president of Stanford University from 2000 to 2016 and later co-founded MIPS Computer Systems and Atheros Communications. Currently, he serves on the board of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and is chair of the board of Alphabet. John received the 2017 Turing Award "for pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures with enduring impact on the microprocessor industry." In this episode he joins Kevin Ball to talk about his life and career. 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]

Jeffrey Ullman is a renowned computer scientist and professor emeritus at Stanford University, celebrated for his groundbreaking contributions to database systems, compilers, and algorithms. He co-authored influential texts like Principles of Database Systems and Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (often called the “Dragon Book”), which have shaped generations of computer science students. Jeffrey received the 2020 Turing Award together with Alfred Aho "for fundamental algorithms and theory underlying programming language implementation and for synthesizing these results and those of others in their highly influential books, which educated generations of computer scientists." In this episode he joins Kevin Ball to talk about his life and career. 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]

Contextual memory in AI is a major challenge because current models struggle to retain and recall relevant information over time. While humans can build long-term semantic relationships, AI systems often rely on fixed context windows, leading to loss of important past interactions. Zep is a startup that’s developing a memory layer for AI agents using temporal Knowledge Graphs, enabling agents to retain long-term contextual information. It was founded in 2023 and was part of the Y Combinator batch of Winter 2024. Daniel Chalef is the Founder of Zep. He joins the show with Kevin Ball to talk about the challenge of contextual memory in AI, temporal knowledge graphs, ambient AI agents, and more. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Zep. 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]

Remix is a full-stack, open-source web framework that was developed by the creators of the popular React Router library. It focuses on features such as server-side rendering and efficient data loading, and it emphasizes developer experience. Ryan Florence is a co-creator of React Remix and in this episode he speaks with Josh Goldberg about the Remix 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]

Jack Dongarra is an American computer scientist who is celebrated for his pioneering contributions to numerical algorithms and high-performance computing. He developed essential software libraries like LINPACK and LAPACK, which are widely used for solving linear algebra problems on advanced computing systems. Dongarra is also a co-creator of the TOP500 list, which ranks the world’s most powerful supercomputers. His work has profoundly impacted computational science, enabling advancements across numerous research domains. Jack received the 2021 Turing Award "for pioneering contributions to numerical algorithms and libraries that enabled high performance computational software to keep pace with exponential hardware improvements for over four decades." He joins the podcast with Sean Falconer to talk about his life and career. 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]

Rigetti Computing is an American company specializing in quantum computing, founded in 2013. The company develops quantum processors and hybrid quantum-classical computing systems, and aims to make quantum computing more accessible for research and commercial applications. David Rivas is the CTO at Rigetti Computing. He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to talk about the company, the fundamentals of quantum computing, the state of the technology, and where we’re headed. 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]

Ethereum is a decentralized blockchain platform that was created by Vitalik Buterin and Gavin Wood in 2015. It uses a cryptocurrency called Ether as its native token to power transactions and operations on the Ethereum network. Ethereum’s proponents envision a future where the network forms the foundation for a second platform layer, called L2, where decentralized applications are run. As we approach the 10th anniversary of Ethereum’s creation we wanted to understand the state of the technology so we spoke with Andrew Koller who is an engineer at Kraken, which is a software company and popular cryptocurrency exchange. In this conversation Andrew talks about Kraken, security considerations at an exchange, the history of Ethereum, L2, and the future of Ethereum. 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]

StackHawk is a company that scans and monitors source code to obtain the full scope of an organization's APIs and applications, and runs tests to identify vulnerabilities and address them pre-production. Scott Gerlach is the Co-Founder and Chief Security Officer at StackHawk and previously worked at SendGrid and GoDaddy. He has an extensive background running security operations and engineering and, in this episode, he joins the show to talk about the challenges around API security and leading-edge strategies to address them. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by 10kMedia (StackHawk). 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]

NVIDIA RAPIDS is an open-source suite of GPU-accelerated data science and AI libraries. It leverages CUDA and significantly enhances the performance of core Python frameworks including Polars, pandas, scikit-learn and NetworkX. Chris Deotte is a Senior Data Scientist at NVIDIA and Jean-Francois Puget is the Director and a Distinguished Engineer at NVIDIA. Chris and Jean-Francois are also Kaggle Grandmasters, which is the highest rank a data scientist or machine learning practitioner can achieve on Kaggle, a competitive platform for data science challenges. In this episode, they join the podcast with Sean Falconer to talk about Kaggle, GPU-acceleration for data science applications, where they’ve achieved the biggest performance gains, the unexpected challenges with tabular data, and much 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]

Browser security aims to protect users from cyber threats encountered online, such as phishing, malicious extensions, and malware. It's a complex, multifaceted challenge that's increasingly important as cloud-based tools, SaaS platforms, and collaborative applications become the backbone of modern workflows. Jeswin Mathai is the Chief Architect at SquareX which is a cybersecurity company focused on protecting users and companies from web-based threats. Jeswin joins the podcast to talk about SquareX and modern strategies for browser security. 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]

A distributed system is a network of independent services that work together to achieve a common goal. Unlike a monolithic system, a distributed system has no central point of control, meaning it must handle challenges like data consistency, network latency, and system failures. Debugging distributed systems is conventionally considered challenging because modern architectures consist of numerous microservices communicating across networks, making failures difficult to isolate. The challenges and maintenance burdens can magnify as systems grow in size and complexity. Julia Blase is a Product Manager at Chronosphere where she works on features to help developers troubleshoot distributed systems more efficiently, including Differential Diagnosis, or DDx. DDx provides tooling to troubleshoot distributed systems, and emphasizes automation and developer experience. In this episode Julia joins Sean Falconer to talk about the challenges and emerging strategies to troubleshoot distributed systems. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Chronosphere. 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]

The availability of high-quality AI model APIs has drastically lowered the barriers developing AI applications. These tools abstract away complex tasks such as model deployment, scaling, data retrieval, natural language processing, and text generation. Vercel has developed a complementary set of tools for building AI web applications, including their AI SDK, v0, and the shadcn/ui component framework. Ary Khandelwal and Max Leiter are on the AI team at Vercel. In this episode they join Kevin Ball to talk about the AI SDK, v0, shadcn/ui and the AI tooling ecosystem at Vercel. 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]

They function as trusted artifacts to capture the nature of a commitment and provide clarity and accountability. Software has revolutionized many business functions, including the basic mechanics of digitally signing an agreement. However, the process of managing agreements systematically and at scale with type definitions, programmatic document creation, and storage schemas remains a complex and largely unsolved challenge. Dan Selman is the product architect at DocuSign and was previously co-founder and CTO of the Smart Agreements Platform, Clause. Larry Jin is the VP of Product Management at DocuSign and previously worked at Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. DocuSign recently released a developer API focused on fully modernizing and scaling the agreements process. In this episode, Dan and Larry joined Sean Falconer to talk about the frontier of digital agreements. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Docusign (Archetype). 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]

Subsea cables are high-capacity fiber-optic lines laid along the ocean floor to enable global communication by transmitting data between continents. Spanning thousands of miles, they carry an estimated 95% of international internet, phone, and data transmissions. Critically, these cables are vulnerable to sabotage by state actors, as they form critical infrastructure for global communication and economic stability. Indeed, Russia and China have been implicated in activities targeting subsea cables as recently as November 2024, and experts warn that these networks are likely to be focal points in future conflicts, heightening geopolitical tensions. Josh Dzieza is a reporter for The Verge and has covered the subsea cable industry and the strategic importance of subsea cables. He joins the podcast alongside Gregor Vand to discuss this invisible, and increasingly important, network infrastructure. You can check out Josh’s reporting here. 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]

LangChain is a popular open-source framework to build applications that integrate LLMs with external data sources like APIs, databases, or custom knowledge bases. It’s commonly used for chatbots, question-answering systems, and workflow automation. Its flexibility and extensibility have made it something of a standard for creating sophisticated AI-driven software. Erick Friis is a Founding Engineer at LangChain and he leads their integrations and open source efforts. Erick joins the podcast to talk about what inspired the creation of LangChain, agentic flows vs. chained flows, emerging patterns of agentic AI design, and much 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]

BlackBerry is a Canadian company known for its pivotal role in the smartphone market during the 2000s. Today, BlackBerry has adopted a major focus on cybersecurity. John Wall is SVP and Head of BlackBerry QNX, overseeing engineering, product and operations. Ismael Valenzuela is Vice President of Threat Research and Intelligence at BlackBerry, where he leads threat research, intelligence, and defensive innovation. John and Ismael join the podcast to talk about cybersecurity at Blackberry, including secure communications in embedded systems. 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]

Caves of Qud is a roguelike game set in a richly detailed, post-apocalyptic world blending science fiction and fantasy. The game is known for its deep lore, emergent gameplay, and wildly creative character customization. It is a massive indie success, and recently hit a major milestone with the release of version 1.0 after 15 years of development. Brian Bucklew is the cofounder of Freehold games which develops Caves of Qud. Brian joins the show to talk about his engineering background and the development of his 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]

Compute optimization in a cloud environment is a common challenge because of the need to balance performance, cost, and resource availability. The growing use of GPUs for workloads, including AI, is also increasing the complexity and importance of optimization given the relatively high cost of GPU cloud computation. Jerzy Grzywinski is a Senior Director of Software Engineering and leads FinOps at Capital One. Brent Segner is a distinguished engineer at Capital One and is focused on performance engineering and cloud cost optimization. Jerzy and Brent joined the show with Sean Falconer to talk about methods to measure compute efficiency, horizontal versus vertical scaling, how to think about adopting new instance types, the effect of different languages on compute efficiency, 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: [email protected]

Docker container vulnerability analysis involves identifying and mitigating security risks within container images. This is done to ensure that containerized applications can be securely deployed. Vulnerability analysis can often be time intensive, which has motivated the use of AI and ML to accelerate the process. NVIDIA Blueprints are reference workflows for agentic and generative AI use cases. One of the most prominent Blueprints is focused on vulnerability analysis for container security. Amanda Saunders is the Director of Enterprise Generative AI Software at NVIDIA, and Allan Enemark works on NVIDIA's Morpheus cybersecurity SDK team. Amanda and Allan join the podcast with Gregor Vand to talk about Blueprints and their application to vulnerability and container security. 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]

Raylib is a lightweight, beginner-friendly, and open-source C library for game development, known for its simplicity and lack of external dependencies. It's designed to streamline the creation of 2D and 3D games, and has an intuitive API for managing graphics, audio, and input. Ramon Santamaria is the Founder and Lead Developer of Raylib. He joins the show with Joe Nash to talk about the Raylib project. 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]

Anduril is a technology defense company with a focus on drones, computer vision, and other problems related to national security. It is a full-stack company that builds its own hardware and software, which leads to a great many interesting questions about cloud services, engineering workflows, and management. Gokul Subramanian is Senior Vice President of Engineering for Software Programs at Anduril Industries. He joins the show to share his knowledge of the national security problem set, how Anduril operates and what the company has built. 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]

QuantStack is an open-source technology software company specializing in tools for data science, scientific computing, and visualization. They are known for maintaining vital projects such as Jupyter, the conda-forge package channel, and the Mamba package manager. Sylvain Corlay is the CEO of QuantStack. He joins the podcast to talk about his company, Conda, Mamba, the new Mamba 2.0 release, software package security, 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]

Ableton is a music software and hardware company based in Germany. The company develops Ableton Live which is a digital audio workstation for both improvisation and traditional arrangements. The software is remarkable for successfully blending good UI design with a powerful feature set. This has made it popular with new musicians as well as professionals such as Tame Impalla, Knxwledge, Mac DeMarco, and Daft Punk, among many others. Tobi Hahn is Ableton's Engineering Manager. He joins the podcast to talk about software engineering for Ableton Live. 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]