Podcast · Tech & Science

Software Engineering Daily

by Software Engineering Daily · English · Tech & Science

Technical interviews about software topics.

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 52 min
Latest: 6 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

6 Oct 2026 · 50 minNew

Security in the Age of Instant Exploits

In the world of software security, there was historically a comfortable lag between the moment a vulnerability became public and the moment attackers could exploit it. This lag was often measured in months, but AI models can now read a vulnerability report and generate a working exploit almost instantly. They can scan the entire internet for exposed secrets at a scale no human team could match, and surface complex flaws that traditional tools missed for years. However, the same capabilities are just as available to defenders, and there is a case to be made that defenders hold the stronger…

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Earlier episodes 28 most recent

1 Oct 2026 · 52 min

The State of Browser Testing

Automated browser testing is a foundational technology that many web developers rely on. Modern tooling lets a single test drive Chrome, Firefox, and Safari the same way, a triumph of software engineering built on years of standardization work. That standardization emerged from the interplay between open source projects, browser vendors, and standards bodies like the W3C. David Burns is a longtime Selenium and WebDriver contributor, a veteran of Mozilla, and is currently the Head of Developer Advocacy and Open Source at BrowserStack . In this episode, David joins Josh Goldberg to discuss how…
29 Sep 2026 · 1 hr

Cory Doctorow on AI, Work, and Power

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, journalist, and technology activist, and a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He is the author of dozens of books, including the nonfiction Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It and the novel Picks and Shovels. His work spans tech policy books like The Internet Con and Chokepoint Capitalism, the solarpunk novels Walkaway and The Lost Cause, and the bestselling YA Little Brother series. He holds honorary doctorates from York University and the Open University, writes the daily blog…
24 Sep 2026 · 52 min

Chroma and Agentic Retrieval

Data retrieval is a fundamental challenge in AI systems, and the approaches for solving it are still evolving. Vector search was an early answer to the retrieval problem, but the rise of agentic systems has raised the stakes considerably. Agents issue queries at machine speed, decompose complex questions into parallel searches, and require retrieval infrastructure that can keep pace without becoming prohibitively expensive. Chroma is a company building open source infrastructure for AI applications, best known for its widely used database of the same name. The company also published the…
22 Sep 2026 · 48 min

Scaling Time-Series Workloads on Postgres

Many real-world processes produce data as a continuous stream rather than as isolated records. Sensor readings, financial markets, and application telemetry all generate data this way. This kind of time-series data has a distinctive shape. It’s written far more often than it is updated, it accumulates continuously, and it is usually queried across ranges of time. Time-series databases are built specifically for this kind of workload. TimescaleDB is an open source database from Tiger Data that adds time-series capabilities to PostgreSQL. It’s implemented as a Postgres extension, so it…
17 Sep 2026 · 51 min

Scaling Agent Workloads at Vercel

Most AI agent setups today are built around a single session, where one user interacts with one agent at a time. However, that model breaks down when an agent has to serve a business, where thousands of requests can arrive at once and each session needs to be isolated, durable, and recoverable. Getting agents to run reliably at that scale has meant a lot of hand-rolled infrastructure beneath the agent itself. eve is an open source, cloud-native agent framework from Vercel that removes much of the agent scaling burden. In the eve framework, an agent is defined declaratively through…
15 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 18 min

Inside Google’s Database Infrastructure for the AI Era

Historically, databases were responsible for storing data and returning exact results in response to queries. However, AI is now bending that contract in a new direction. Applications increasingly expect structured and unstructured data to come together. This is pushing databases into territory that looks more like search, where relevance and ranking matter and results are no longer strictly exact. Agents are also beginning to write their own queries and even propose their own schemas, which raises new questions about how data should be structured, governed, and trusted. Sailesh…
10 Sep 2026 · 51 min

A Rust Framework to Simplify Distributed Systems

A Rust Framework to Simplify Distributed Systems Building software that runs across many machines is notoriously difficult. Developers have to grapple with problems such as race conditions, partial failures, and message ordering. Notably, one category of distributed software has largely escaped these burdens. A distributed database can spread a single query across thousands of machines, handling the coordination, failure recovery, and ordering internally. This raises a natural question of why general-purpose distributed programming can’t feel the same way. This is a highly practical problem…
8 Sep 2026 · 52 min

SED News: The NVIDIA-Hugging Face Deal, China’s Proxy Economy, the Open Weight Surge

SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer break down the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this end-of-summer episode, Gregor and Sean turn to a busy season of mergers and acquisitions, including NVIDIA ‘s reported $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face , Dynatrace ‘s near-billion-dollar deal for AI observability platform Arize , and Temporal ‘s rumored raise at a $12 billion valuation. They also cover a run of large funding rounds, from AI security startup…
3 Sep 2026 · 56 min

Moving Beyond RAG with Precomputed Context

Retrieval has become one of the central problems in building useful AI systems. The standard approach to grounding a model in one’s own data has been retrieval augmented generation, or RAG, where an agent searches a vector database for relevant information at query time. That pattern works, but it has limitations, such as retrieving information that’s not truly relevant, repeating the same lookup work on every query, and producing inconsistent answers to the same question. Pinecone is a vector database that’s widely used to power semantic search and RAG at scale. The team recently developed…
1 Sep 2026 · 53 min

The Death of Online Anonymity

Age verification is reshaping how people access the internet. An ever-growing patchwork of laws can now require government IDs, facial age estimation, or behavioral inference before you can enter digital spaces. Discord, app stores, social media platforms, and AI chatbots are all being pulled into these requirements. Almost always, these measures are enacted under the banner of protecting children. However, beneath that goal lies a set of hard questions about privacy, anonymity, security, and the line between what a private platform may choose to do and what a government may compel. John…
27 Aug 2026 · 57 min

TypeScript 7 and What Comes Next

TypeScript is a programming language that builds on JavaScript by adding a system of types. Those types let developers describe the shape of their data and catch mistakes before code ever runs, while also powering the autocompletion and editor tooling that many developers now rely on every day. It was first released in 2012, and has since become one of the most widely used tools in web development. TypeScript recently underwent one of the most significant changes in its history with the release of version 7. Daniel Rosenwasser is the Principal Product Manager of TypeScript at Microsoft ,…
25 Aug 2026 · 55 min

The Gap Between AI Spending and AI Value

It is widely reported that a gap has emerged between enterprise spending on AI and the durable value captured from that spend. Individual employees have enthusiastically adopted coding assistants and chatbots, yet those gains do not seem to be transforming businesses at an organizational level. One of the most important questions in the tech industry today is understanding why AI is not yet delivering returns that match the investment, and what separates the small number of enterprises succeeding from the many that are not. Scale AI is known for supplying the human-labeled data behind many…
20 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 13 min

AI and the New Global Security Landscape

The conversation about AI often focuses on software, automation, and the race between attackers and defenders in code. However, some of the most consequential risks lie further afield, in domains where a mistake is measured in human lives. Advanced models can now offer step-by-step guidance toward chemical and biological weapons, and militaries are already folding AI into targeting and battlefield assessments. These are no longer speculative fears confined to the AI doomer crowd. They are documented in red team disclosures, government legislation, and events unfolding on real battlefields.…
18 Aug 2026 · 48 min

How LLMs Are Reshaping Recommendation Systems

News feeds and recommendation systems have long relied on deep learning architectures that score each candidate item independently. As LLMs have matured, they have opened up a fundamentally different approach, where a system can reason about content the way it reasons about language. However, that power comes with a fresh set of engineering challenges around cost, scale, and evaluation. LinkedIn recently rebuilt its news feed to treat content recommendation as a sequence modeling problem. The general approach is to predict what a user will want next, much like an LLM predicts the next token…
13 Aug 2026 · 50 min

Rebuilding the Cloud for AI Agent Code

For two decades, the cloud has been shaped by human developers writing code and managing its deployment. Now a growing share of production code is generated by LLMs with little human review. Because that code is not fully trusted, it increasingly runs in isolated, sandboxed environments. Meanwhile, AI agents are starting to operate infrastructure directly, by spinning services up and tearing them down on their own. Together these shifts raise the question of whether the cloud needs to be rebuilt for machine operators rather than humans. Render is a cloud platform designed for application…
11 Aug 2026 · 48 min

SED News: The Kimi Moment, Runaway AI, and Tokenmaxxing

SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer break down the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this episode, Gregor and Sean dig into a wave of “runaway AI” stories, including Anthropic and OpenAI disclosing that their models accessed outside organizations during cyber evaluations, and Amazon reporting a staggering budget overrun blamed on bad agent loops. They explore why most of these incidents trace back to human decisions rather than models breaking free, and the…
6 Aug 2026 · 52 min

The Terminal as an Agentic Interface

The terminal has been a constant in software development for decades. It has remained largely unchanged while everything around it transformed. However, as AI agents have become central to the developer workflow, the terminal is emerging as a natural home for agentic development, and a new category of tooling is forming around it. Warp is a popular Rust-based terminal and agentic development environment. The company recently open-sourced its codebase and launched Oz, its cloud agent infrastructure product aimed at helping enterprises automate software development at scale. Zach Lloyd is the…
4 Aug 2026 · 57 min

AI-Powered Threats to the Software Supply Chain

Open source software underpins virtually every modern application. That ubiquity is a superpower for developers, but it is also an expanding attack surface. Software supply chain attacks were once rare but are now happening daily, with malicious actors exploiting the trust developers place in public registries, package managers, and CI/CD pipelines. Chainguard is a secure software supply chain platform. The company started with hardened container images and has expanded to cover domains including VMs, language libraries, GitHub Actions, and agent skills. Matt Moore is a co-founder and CTO of…
30 Jul 2026 · 51 min

Docker and Sandboxing AI Agents

The most useful coding agents can mutate their environments by downloading packages, writing files, and connecting to services across the network. However, that freedom also presents dangers, and promises to usher in a new wave of security threats. Docker recently announced Docker Sandboxes, which give each agent its own isolated micro VM while preserving the familiar ergonomics of a container. A standard container shares the host’s kernel, but a micro VM emulates hardware and runs its own kernel, giving a stronger security boundary around code that cannot be trusted. Mark Cavage is the…
28 Jul 2026 · 44 min

The Startup Scene in Southeast Asia

Golden Gate Ventures is one of Southeast Asia’s most established early-stage venture firms, having backed companies across the region since 2011. They have invested in companies that are now household names in the region. Examples include Gojek, which started as a motorcycle taxi service in Indonesia and grew into a super app spanning payments, food delivery, and logistics, and Grab, which began as a ride-hailing service in Singapore and similarly expanded across Southeast Asia into food delivery and financial services. Jeffrey Paine is a co-founder and partner at Golden Gate Ventures. In…
21 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 4 min

NanoClaw and the Rise of Personal AI Agents

AI agents have shown remarkable potential to function as persistent digital assistants that are capable of monitoring data, managing communications, and taking action autonomously over long periods. OpenClaw was one of the first serious attempts to fulfill that vision, connecting frontier coding agents to messaging platforms like Slack and WhatsApp and letting them run continuously in the background. However, OpenClaw largely set aside questions of security to pursue that vision, leaving credentials exposed in the agent’s environment and giving agents broad access to data and services far…
16 Jul 2026 · 52 min

Agentic DevOps at AWS

AI agents have become capable of reasoning across large amounts of data, calling tools, and taking sequences of actions autonomously. These qualities make them well suited to some of the most persistent pain points in DevOps, including the on-call engineer woken at 3 AM to diagnose an incident, the build failure that takes hours to trace back to a root cause, and the operational toil of modern software delivery. Agentic DevOps is the emerging paradigm that applies these capabilities to the full software lifecycle, with the goal of matching the velocity of modern software delivery with an…
14 Jul 2026 · 53 min

AURA and Open-Source Agents for Production Operations

AI agents have transformed how software gets written, but the operational side of running software in production has not yet experienced a similar revolution. The same teams responsible for keeping systems healthy, investigating incidents, and managing reliability are still doing much of that work manually. Mezmo is a Production AI company that makes autonomous operations fast, efficient, and safe. Their open source project, AURA, is a declarative agent framework specifically designed for SRE and platform engineering workflows. It takes a Kubernetes-inspired approach where teams define what…
9 Jul 2026 · 50 min

Eric Ries on Why Good Companies Go Bad

Eric Ries is the creator of the Lean Startup method and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, which transformed how a generation of founders and engineers think about building products. It introduced concepts like the MVP, the pivot, and build-measure-learn that are now so widely adopted they feel obvious. Over two decades of working with founders, CEOs, and investors, Eric has observed that some companies built on those principles eventually betray the very customers and engineers who made them great. His new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How…
7 Jul 2026 · 52 min

SED News: Restricted Models, IDE Wars, and the DeepMind Mafia

SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer break down the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this episode, Gregor and Sean dig into the growing tension around restricted AI models, including Anthropic ‘s Fable being pulled from the Claude platform days after launch. They explore what Sean calls “vibe regulations” and the risk foreign governments and enterprises face when a model they depend on can be cut off. They also cover the FT’s reporting on London’s “DeepMind…
2 Jul 2026 · 48 min

Grafana’s Approach to AI-Native Observability

Advanced software systems have long been more complex than any single engineer can fully understand. Observability is the established solution to this problem, but with AI agents now generating code, deploying changes, and operating autonomously, the challenge of understanding large software systems is entering a new dimension. Grafana is an open source observability platform, and one of the most widely used in the world. The company builds tools that help teams collect, visualize, and act on telemetry data across logs, metrics, and traces. They are now extending that capability into the…
30 Jun 2026 · 46 min

Building Software That People Love

Building great software always involves technical problem solving, but the best software goes beyond function. It feels fluid, coherent, and genuinely fun to use. This quality lives at the intersection of engineering and design, and very few teams know how to reliably produce it. Metalab is an engineering and design studio that has worked with some of the most successful companies in tech, including Apple, Slack, Uber, and Instacart. The studio is known for bringing together software engineering and design craft in a way that few studios can match. Wesley Yu is the VP of Engineering at…
25 Jun 2026 · 44 min

Mina the Hollower

Yacht Club Games is the studio behind the acclaimed Shovel Knight franchise. Their latest release is Mina the Hollower, which is a top-down action RPG inspired by classic Zelda and Castlevania titles. After many years in development, the game recently launched to widespread critical acclaim. David D’Angelo is a lead programmer at Yacht Club Games. In this episode, David joins Joe Nash to discuss the custom C++ engine built for Mina the Hollower, how the team approached Game Boy Color art constraints and audio in a modern rendering pipeline, the game’s Castlevania-inspired combat philosophy,…

About Software Engineering Daily

Technical interviews about software topics.

Software Engineering Daily is a English tech & science podcast from Software Engineering Daily. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Software Engineering Daily
Language: English
Category: Tech & Science
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 52 min
Latest episode: 6 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1019576853
Website: softwareengineeringdaily.com

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