Software Engineering Daily

Producing 3D films, games and simulations is a complex process, often involving multiple teams and tools. At Pixar, pipeline engineers needed to write lots of glue code to integrate different workflows and file formats, which was a big challenge, and led them to create the  Universal Scene Description, or OpenUSD. OpenUSD implements abstract data models for producing 3D worlds, and is now an open-...

SimpleWebAuthn is an open source TypeScript-centric pair of libraries - frontend and backend - that make it easier for devs to implement WebAuthn on the web. Matthew Miller started the project in 2019 and it has grown in tandem with the popularization of WebAuthn. He joins the podcast today to talk about the history of the project starting from the first commit, the problems it solves, its design,...

There is a revolution unfolding in biotech. The confluence of new biological methods like CRISPR, virtually unlimited computational capacity, and machine learning has fundamentally transformed our ability to engineer biology for wide-ranging applications. Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, is a venture capital firm that was founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Vijay Pande is a Founding General...

oneAPI is an open standard for a unified API to be used across different computing accelerator architectures. This including GPUs, AI accelerators, and FPGAs. The goal of oneAPI is to eliminate the need for developers to maintain separate code bases, multiple programming languages, tools, and workflows for each architecture. James Reinders is an engineer at Intel and has experience with parallel c...

A game engine is a system used to build and run games. Game engines let the programmer work at a high level of abstraction by providing interfaces for graphics, physics, and scripting. Godot is an open source and free to use game engine, which makes it unusual. Its first release was in 2014 and its features and user base have grown steadily since then. Emilio Coppola is the Executive Director at t...

Starburst is a data lake analytics platform. It's designed to help users work with structured data at scale, and is built on the open source platform, Trino. Adam Ferrari is the SVP of Engineering at Starburst. He joins the show to talk about Starburst, data engineering, and what it takes to build a data lake. Sean's been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a...

Chess.com started in 2007 and grew steadily in the years following. The platform exploded in popularity during the pandemic, to the point that their servers struggled with the traffic. It was a great problem to have. Chess.com was instrumental in helping to elevate chess to its current height of mainstream popularity. But how did Chess.com come to be, and how was the platform created? Our guest to...

Mastodon is an open source, decentralized social network. Eugen Rochko started building Mastodon in response to his dissatisfaction with centralized social networks like Facebook and Twitter. In the Mastodon model, users can run their own nodes, and other users can connect to them. You can follow users whose accounts reside in other nodes. Eugen joins the show today to talk about the engineering b...

Vercel provides a cloud platform to rapidly deploy web projects, and they develop the highly successful Next.js framework. The company recently made headlines when they announced v0 which is a generative AI tool to create React code from text prompts. The generated code uses open-source tools like Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui. Lee Robinson is the VP of Product at Vercel. He helps lead the product te...

Blender is a free and open-source 3D graphics tool that was initially released in 1994 and just hit version 4.0. It's one of the triumphs of open-source software development and is used for creating animated films, art, 3D games, and more. Sybren Stüvel is a Senior Software Developer at Blender. He joins the show today to talk about the history of Blender, its path tracing renderer, managing large...

Netflix needs no introduction and is renowned for its engineering talent. Shaundai Person is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix, blogger, and conference speaker. She joins the show today to talk about getting her position at Netflix, developing internal tools at the company, the value of TypeScript, what makes a great software engineering manager, and more. Josh Goldberg is an independent full...

Algolia is a platform that provides search as a service. The company was founded in 2012, was part of Y Combinator's Winter 2014 class, and has become highly popular for integrating modern search functionality into web-facing services. Sean Mullaney is the CTO of Algolia and has worked at Google X, Stripe, and Zolando. He joins the show today to talk about Algolia, neural search, vector compressio...

Software security is a critical issue for everyone, but it takes on an entirely different dimension when your life, or the lives of others, depend on it. Consider the security needs of an environmentalist whistle blower inside a chemical corporation, or a human rights activist in Iran. Hyper-secure and fully anonymous operating systems are vital for many legitimate use cases. They are a double-edg...

Security issues can often be traced back to small misconfigurations in a database or cloud service, or an innocent code commit. OpsHelm is a security platform that's oriented around identifying and fixing these issues. Kyle McCullough is the Co-Founder and CTO of OpsHelm and he has deep experience in backend and data engineering. He joins the show to talk about the challenges of security incident...

Jodie Burchell is the Data Science Developer Advocate at JetBrains, which makes integrated development environments or, IDEs, for many major languages. After observing the rapid growth of the AI coding assistant landscape, the company recently announced integration of an AI assistant into their IDEs. Jodie joins the show today to talk about why the company decided to take this step, the design cha...

This episode of Software Engineering Daily is part of our on-site coverage of AWS re:Invent 2023, which took place from November 27th through December 1st in Las Vegas. In today’s interview, host Jordi Mon Companys speaks with Mike Miller who is the Director of AWS AI Devices. Jordi Mon Companys is a product manager and marketer that specializes in software delivery, developer experience, cloud na...

This episode of Software Engineering Daily is part of our on-site coverage of AWS re:Invent 2023, which took place from November 27th through December 1st in Las Vegas. In today’s interview, host Jordi Mon Companys speaks with Kevin Kelly who is the Director of the AWS Cloud Institute. Jordi Mon Companys is a product manager and marketer that specializes in software delivery, developer experience,...

This episode of Software Engineering Daily is part of our on-site coverage of AWS re:Invent 2023, which took place from November 27th through December 1st in Las Vegas. In today’s interview, host Jordi Mon Companys speaks with Rob Zuber who is the CTO at CircleCI. Jordi Mon Companys is a product manager and marketer that specializes in software delivery, developer experience, cloud native and open...

This episode of Software Engineering Daily is part of our on-site coverage of AWS re:Invent 2023, which took place from November 27th through December 1st in Las Vegas. In today’s interview, host Jordi Mon Companys speaks with Ankur Mehrotra who is the Director and GM of Amazon SageMaker. Jordi Mon Companys is a product manager and marketer that specializes in software delivery, developer experien...

Hypnospace Outlaw is a hit indie game which features an internet and operating system simulator set in a surreal, alternate version of 1999. The game is entirely unique both in its design and aesthetic, and it has an impressive development history. Jay Tholen is the developer of Hypnospace Outlaw and he joins the show to talk about the engineering of the game, the creation of an entire "fake inter...

SQL databases were built for data consistency and vertical scalability. They did this very well for the long era of monolithic applications running in dedicated, single-server environments. However, their design presented a problem when the paradigm changed to distributed applications in the cloud. This shift eventually ushered in the rise of distributed SQL databases. One of the most prominent is...

Software supply chain security is a major challenge in the modern engineering environment. Many teams are working to establish best practices to proactively identify, fix, and prevent risks in their applications. Apiiro is a platform designed to solve this problem and gives risk visibility, prioritization, and remediation. Yonatan Eldar is the Co-Founder and CTO at Apiiro and he joins the podcast...

An embedding is a concept in machine learning that refers to a particular representation of text, images, audio, or other information. Embeddings are designed to make data consumable by ML models. However, storing embeddings presents a challenge to traditional databases. Vector databases are designed to solve this problem. Pinecone has developed one of the most prominent vector databases that is w...

Carlos Sanchez is a Principal Scientist at Adobe where he works on the Adobe Experience Manager. AEM is a content management system, analogous to WordPress, and provides a platform for site creation and content delivery. In addition to his work at Adobe, Carlos has a long history contributing to open source projects, including Apache Maven. He joins the show today to talk about his work at Adobe,...

Building scalable software applications can be complex and typically requires dozens of different tools. The engineering often involves handling many arcane tasks that are distant from actual application logic. In addition, a lack of a cohesive model for building applications can lead to substantial engineering costs. Nathan Marz is the creator of Rama, which is a platform for building end-to-end,...