Software Engineering Daily

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]

beeps is a startup focused on building an on-call platform for Next.js. The company is grounded in the key insight that Next.js has become a dominant framework for modern development. A key motivation in leveraging Next.js is to create a developer-first experience for on-call. Joey Parsons is the founder and CEO of beeps, and he previously founded effx which was acquired by Figma in 2021. Joey joins the show to talk about the platform, starting a company without an explicit AI focus, the limitations of current on-call systems, building on Next.js, and more. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Beeps. 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]

Digital forensics is the process of identifying, preserving, analyzing, and presenting electronic data for investigative purposes. It's often related to addressing cybercrime and is crucial in tracing the origin of breaches, recovering lost data, and security hardening. Emre Tinaztepe is the Founder and CEO of Binalyze which is a cybersecurity company specializing in digital forensics and incident response solutions. He joins the podcast with Gregor Vand to talk about his path into engineering, his time in the infantry, Binalyze, digital forensics, 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]

Fallout: London is a 2024 total conversion mod developed by Team FOLON. The mod is based on Fallout 4 by Bethesda Softworks and takes place in a post-apocalyptic rendition of London. The project is remarkable for its ambition and scope, with the small indie team delivering a fully-realized open world RPG. Daniel Morrison Neil led music composition, audio design, and the voice acting department for the project. Jordan Albon was the lead 3D artist and the build master in charge of version control. They join the show with Joe Nash to talk about Fallout: London and its development. 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]

Heroku is a cloud platform-as-a-service that enables developers to build, deploy, and manage applications. It was founded in 2007 and was acquired by Salesforce in 2010. The platform supports multiple programming languages, including Ruby, Python, Node.js, and Java, and has features such as automated scaling, database monitoring tools, and a streamlined deployment workflow. Vish Abrams is the Chief Architect at Heroku and previously worked at Oracle and NASA, among other organizations. He joins the show to talk about the history of Heroku, its role within Salesforce, open-sourcing the Twelve Factor App, the long-standing challenge of credentials management, and much more. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Heroku (Caffelli). 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]

Over the years, Google has released a variety of ML, data science, and AI developer tools and platforms. Prominent examples include Colab, Kaggle, AI Studio, and the Gemini API. Paige Bailey is the Uber Technical Lead of the Developer Relations team at Google ML Developer Tools, working on Gemini APIs, Gemma, AI Studio, Kaggle, Colab and Jax. She joins the podcast to talk about the specialized task of creating developer tools for ML and 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]

Video game emulation is the process of using software to replicate the functionality of gaming hardware. It's a fundamental approach to making older games accessible on modern devices. The Carbon Engine is a tool developed internally at video game publisher and distributor Limited Run Games. It allows a variety of emulators to interface with modern video game hardware, and it supports emulation of SNES, Genesis, PlayStation, Gameboy Advance, and other consoles. Dimitris Giannakis is the Lead Developer of the Carbon Engine. He is known for his many contributions in the hacking, emulation, and game development space, and for his highly popular YouTube channel, Modern Vintage Gamer, or MVG. Dimitris joins the podcast with Joe Nash to talk how he got started in game development, building emulators from scratch, scoping an emulation project, homebrew vs. official SDKs, the Carbon Engine, and more. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry’s Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Serverless computing is a cloud-native model where developers build and run applications without managing server infrastructure. It has largely become the standard approach to achieve scalability, often with reduced operational overhead. However, in banking and financial services, adopting a serverless model can present unique challenges. Brian McNamara is a Distinguished Engineer at Capital One where he works in serverless integration and development. Brian joins the show with Sean Falconer to talk about why Capital One shifted to a serverless approach, how to think about cloud costs, establishing governance controls, tools to stay well-managed, 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]

Teardown is a 2022 sandbox puzzle game developed and published by Tuxedo Labs. The game revolves around the owner of a financially stricken demolition company, who is caught undertaking a questionable job and becomes entangled between helping police investigations and taking on further dubious assignments. The game stands out for its technical achievements, particularly its use of voxel-based rendering, which enables highly interactive and fully destructible environments. Dennis Gustafsson is the Founder of TuxedoLabs and the creator of Teardown, among other games. In today's episode, Dennis speaks with Joe Nash about his 20-year history in game development, his passion for physics in games, Teardown, the advantage of using voxels, and much more. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry’s Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Expo is a development framework that streamlines the process of building cross-platform mobile apps using React Native. It eliminates the need for complex native code setup by providing pre-built APIs for common device features like the camera and GPS, making it easier to access hardware functionality. It also simplifies the deployment process with built-in tools for building and distributing apps. Charlie Cheever and James Ide are the Co-Founders of Expo and they join the podcast to talk about the framework and the problems it solves. 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]

To our Software Engineering Daily listeners - as we wrap up 2024, we want to thank you all for listening to the show. We've had a great time putting together all of our episodes this year, and we're grateful for your support. This year we continued our wide lens coverage of software engineering, and we also expanded our coverage of security, AI, and game development. We want to extend our thanks to all of our fantastic guests for sharing their time and expertise. We're really excited about our 2025 podcast season and we think you're going to love what we have in store. As always, we're committed to bringing you high-caliber experts from across the tech landscape, and we can't wait to explore new topics and perspectives in the coming year. To close out 2024, we'll be pausing releases this week to spend time with our families, but we'll be back with new episodes the first week of January. Please consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify if you haven't yet. We take your feedback very seriously and it helps us improve the show. And, if you have any topics or guests you'd like to hear on the podcast we want to know, and you can send them our way at [email protected]. Thank you again for listening to Software Engineering Daily and we wish you all a happy New Year!

Vulkan is a low-level graphics API designed to provide developers with more direct control over the GPU, reducing overhead and enabling high performance in applications like games, simulations, and visualizations. It addresses the inefficiencies of older APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D and helps solve issues with cross-platform compatibility. Tom Olson is a Distinguished Engineer at ARM, and Ralph Potter is the Lead Khronos Standards Engineer at Samsung. Tom and Ralph are also the outgoing and incoming Chairs of the Vulkan Working Group. They join the podcast to talk about earlier graphics APIs, what motivated the creation of Vulkan, modern GPUs, and more. Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry’s Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts. Please click here to see the transcript of this episode. Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

Deno is a free and open source JavaScript runtime built on Google’s V8 engine, Rust, and Tokio. It's designed to offer a more secure and standardized alternative to Node.js, with native TypeScript support. Deno 2.0 just released and it's a significant update, focusing on improved compatibility with Node.js and addressing developer feedback. Some of the key features are backwards compatibility with Node.js and npm, native support for package.json and node_modules, and a stabilized standard library. Luca Casonato is a Software Engineer for Deno and he spoke about the project on Software Engineering Daily in 2023. We’re excited to have Luca join the show again to talk about the many changes introduced in Deno 2.0. 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]