Software Engineering Daily

Traditionally, security checks and testing are performed towards the end of the software development lifecycle. However, discovering vulnerabilities at that stage can be costly and time-consuming. This observation has led to the shift-left movement, which advocates for implementing security testing earlier in the software development process. HoundDog AI is a startup focused on software to enable...

Uber handles billions of trips and deliveries, and tens of billions of financial transactions across earners, spenders, and merchants every quarter. LedgerStore is an immutable storage solution at Uber that provides verifiable data completeness and correctness guarantees to ensure data integrity for its transactions. Kaushik Devarajaiah is the Tech Lead for LedgerStore at Uber. He joins the show t...

One of the fastest areas of growth in observability is frontend observability, or real user monitoring. This is the practice of monitoring and analyzing the performance, behavior, and user experience of web applications from the user's perspective. Purvi Kanal is a Senior Software Engineer at Honeycomb. She joins the podcast to talk about the evolution and status of real user monitoring. This epis...

Inworld is a company that provides tools for game studios to add AI-driven gameplay. They are at the leading edge of using generative AI in game development, and have worked with companies such as Xbox, Ubisoft, and NVIDIA. Igor Poletaev is the VP of AI and Nathan Yu is the Director of Product and GM of Labs at Inward. They join the show to talk about using AI in game development. Gregor Vand is a...

Static analysis is the examination of code without executing the program. It's used to identify potential errors, code quality issues, security vulnerabilities, and adherence to coding best practices. Abbas Sabra is a Principal Engineer at Sonar, which creates tools to help developers produce clean code. Abbas specializes in C++ static analysis, and began his career in the financial industry, wher...

Bison Ventures invests in frontier technology companies that use innovative science and deep technology. A key pillar of their investment portfolio is climate technology. Tom Biegala is a co-founder of Bison Ventures. Prior to starting Bison Ventures, Tom worked at Cascade Asset Management Company, the investment office that manages the assets of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust and Gates...

Luma AI develops technologies at the forefront of AI and graphics. They created a text-to-3D tool that functions like Midjourney but for generating 3D models. Another tool makes photorealistic environments by reconstructing any scene in 3D from just a few photos. Karan Ganesan is a Software Engineer and Barkley Dai is the Product and Growth Lead at Luma AI. They join the show to talk about the ori...

Redis is an in-memory database that can be used for caching, vector search, and as a message broker. Brian Sam-Bodden is a Senior Applied AI Engineer at Redis. He joins the show to talk about his work and AI at the company. Sean's been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from information visualization to quantum computing. Currently, Se...

David Szymanski is a video game developer focused on short retro horror games. He created the hit FPS Dusk, along with Iron Lung, Chop Goblins, and the upcoming Butcher's Creek. He's also involved in the production of the upcoming Iron Lung film. David joins the podcast to talk about his work, how to capture an appealing retro game feel, why he makes short games, developing in Unity, looking beyon...

Retool is a platform to help engineers quickly build internal frontends. It does this by abstracting away repetitive aspects of frontend development. The platform was started in 2017 and has received funding from Sequoia, Stripe Co-Founders, and Nat Friedman. David Hsu is the founder and CEO of Retool. He joins the show to talk about why he started coding, studying philosophy and computer science,...

ChatGPT has been out for more than a year and has since become the centerpiece of intense discussion and debate about AI. Christian Hubicki is a renowned robotics research scientist and an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Florida State University. In 2023, he was a guest on Software Engineering Daily, where he discussed ChatGPT and its implications with Sean Falconer. Christian now...

Databases underpin almost every user experience on the web, but scaling a database is one of the most fundamental infrastructure challenges in software development. PlanetScale offers a MySQL platform that is managed and highly scaleable. Sam Lambert is the CEO of PlanetScale and he joins the show to talk about why he started the platform, scaling databases, using Vitess for SQL shard orchestratio...

GV, or Google Ventures, is an independent venture capital firm backed by Alphabet. Erik Norlander is a General Partner at GV and invests across enterprise software and frontier technology, focusing on developer tools, cloud infrastructure and machine learning. He has backed companies like Cockroach, Warp and Neo4j. Prior to joining GV in 2010 and opening up the firm's New York City office, Erik wa...

A common challenge for developers of SaaS products is integrating with existing services, including services that customers might already be using. For example, a SaaS product might need to integrate with customers using Salesforce, HubSpot, or another CRM system. However, this can be demanding for developers when 3rd party APIs are poorly documented or inconsistent. Lauren Long is a co-founder at...

A headless software architecture decouples the frontend, or the "head", from the backend. This separation allows developers to manage the UI layer independently of the backend logic and data management. Hydrogen is Shopify's open-source headless framework for building custom storefronts. It's React-based and is focused on performance and flexible UI components. Ben Sehl is a Senior Product Lead at...

Celeste is a critically acclaimed action platformer developed by Extremely OK Games. They recently released Celeste 64 which is an open source project to commemorate the 6th anniversary of the original Celeste, and development of their next major game, Earthblade, is underway. Noel Berry is a programmer at Extremely OK Games and he joins the show to talk about developing Celeste and Earthblade, ga...

DataStax is a generative AI data company that provides tools and services to build AI and other data-intensive applications. Ed Anuff is the Chief Product Officer at DataStax. He joins the show to talk about making Apache Cassandra accessible, adding vector support at DataStax, envisioning the future application stack for AI, and more. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by DataStax Sean’s...

Kong is a software company that provides open-source platforms and cloud services for managing, monitoring, and scaling APIs and microservices. Marco Palladino is the CTO of Kong, and he joins the podcast to talk about the platform and APIs as the building blocks of the digital world. This episode is hosted by Lee Atchison. Lee Atchison is a software architect, author, and thought leader on cloud...

Bitwarden is an open-source password management service that securely stores passwords, passkeys, website credentials, and other sensitive information Matt Bishop is the Principal Architect at Bitwarden. He joins the show to talk about the platform and his work there. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cyberse...

Codecademy is an online platform that offers classes on languages including Python, Go, JavaScript, C++, and many others. Zoe Bachman is the Senior Curriculum Director at Codecademy and designs courses for the platform. She joins the podcast to talk about her work there. Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help deve...

Akash Network is a decentralized cloud computing platform that leverages unused compute capacity around the world. It makes this capacity available to others, and provides a decentralized peer-to-peer model for managing and paying for these resources in an online marketplace. Greg Osuri is the CEO for OverClock Labs which created Akash Network. He joins the show to talk about Akash. This episode i...

Linting is the process of checking source code for programmatic as well as stylistic errors. Ruff is a highly popular Python linter written in Rust. It was developed by Charlie Marsh, who also founded Astral, which is focused on next-generation Python tooling. Charlie joins the podcast to talk about open source development, Ruff, the UV package installer, and much more. Josh Goldberg is an indepen...

Gabriel Gambetta is a Senior Software Engineer at Google where he works on YouTube. He’s an expect in computer graphics and game development, and is famous for his articles on engineering fast-paced multiplayer games. Gabriel joins the show to talk about his history with game development, client-server game architecture, rubber-banding, raytracing, rasterizers, and much more. Joe Nash is a develop...

The U.S. government recently released a report calling on the technical community to proactively reduce the attack surface area of software infrastructure. The report emphasized memory safety vulnerabilities, which affect how memory can be accessed, written, allocated, or deallocated. The report cites this class of vulnerability as a common theme in the some of the most infamous cyber events, such...

Figma is a cloud-based design and prototyping tool that is widely used in UI and UX work. It allows users to collaborate in real-time, a key feature that has helped drive its popularity. Figma is an impressive engineering feat, in part because of how far it pushes what’s possible in a web browser. Abhi Mathur is the VP of Engineering at Figma. He joins the show today to talk about his path to Figm...