Software Engineering Daily

Surveillance technology is advancing faster than the laws meant to govern it. Across the United States, police departments are deploying automated license plate readers, facial recognition tools, and predictive systems that quietly log the daily movements of millions of people. These tools promise efficiency and safety, but critics argue that they represent a form of warrantless mass surveillance,...

Modern software development is evolving rapidly. New tools, processes, and AI-powered systems are reshaping how teams collaborate and how engineers find satisfaction in their craft. At the same time, developer experience has become a critical function for helping organizations balance agility, security, and scale while maintaining the creativity and flow that make top tier engineering possible. Ca...

Modern software development is more complex than ever. Teams work across different operating systems, chip architectures, and cloud environments, each with its own dependency quirks and version mismatches. Ensuring that code runs reproducibly across these environments has become a major challenge that’s made even harder by growing concerns around software supply chain security. Nix is a powerful o...

Visual Studio Code has become one of the most influential tools in modern software development. The open-source code editor has evolved into a platform used by millions of developers around the world, and it has reshaped expectations for what a modern development environment can be through its intuitive UX, rich extension marketplace, and deep integration with today’s tooling landscape. Now, in an...

Blender Studio is the creative arm of the Blender Foundation and it’s dedicated to producing films, games, and other projects that showcase the full potential of Blender. The studio functions as both an art and technology lab and pushes the boundaries of 3D animation through open productions. All of their assets, production files, and workflows are shared publicly, which gives artists and develope...

JavaScript has grown far beyond the browser. It now powers millions of backend systems, APIs, and cloud services through Node.js, which is one of the most widely deployed runtimes on the planet. Keeping such a critical piece of infrastructure fast, secure, and stable is a massive engineering challenge, and the work behind it is often invisible. Rafael Gonzaga is a Principal Open Source Engineer at...

Zachtronics is a legendary independent game studio known for creating intricate, engineering-focused puzzle games that merge logic, creativity, and code. The studio was founded by Zach Barth in 2011, and it has become a cult favorite among programmers and tinkerers alike with titles such as SpaceChem, Infinifactory, TIS-100, and Shenzhen I/O. Most recently, Zachtronics released Kaizen: A Factory S...

Rivals of Aether and Rivals of Aether II are indie fighting games that combine fast-paced platform combat with elemental-themed characters. The game takes inspiration from Super Smash Bros. and emphasizes skillful movement, tight controls, and competitive balance, making it popular in the fighting game community. Dan Fornace is a game director and designer at Aether Studios, the developer of Rival...

Aviation cybersecurity is becoming an urgent priority as modern aircraft increasingly rely on complex digital systems for navigation, communication, and engine performance. These systems were once isolated but are now interconnected and vulnerable to cyber threats ranging from GPS spoofing to ransomware attacks on airline infrastructure. As nation-state actors and criminal groups grow more sophist...

Modern software relies heavily on open source dependencies, often pulling in thousands of packages maintained by developers all over the world. This accelerates innovation but also creates serious supply chain risks as attackers increasingly compromise popular libraries to spread malware at scale. Feross Aboukhadijeh is the founder and CEO of Socket which is a security platform designed to protect...

Python’s popularity in data science and backend engineering has made it the default language for building AI infrastructure. However, with the rapid growth of AI applications, developers are increasingly looking for tools that combine Python’s flexibility with the rigor of production-ready systems. Pydantic began as a library for type-safe data validation in Python and has become one of the langua...

SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this episode, they cover Jeff Bezos’s unexpected return to the CEO seat with  Project Prometheus, the growing debate over whether AI investments are sustainable, and the ecosystem forming a...

PICO-8 is a software-based gaming console for making, sharing, and playing small games with a retro aesthetic. It emulates the look and feel of 8-bit consoles, providing limited color palettes, screen resolutions, and memory constraints. The PICO-8 dev environment uses Lua and is focused on being accessible to developers while offering depth for complex projects. Johan Peitz is a games industry ve...

Doom has seemingly been ported to every electronic device imaginable, including picture frames, lamps, and coffee machines. The meme of “it runs Doom” has become so widespread that it spawned the r/itrunsdoom sub-Reddit. Recently, Doom made headlines again for being ported to TypeScript. The project involved representing Doom entirely in TypeScript, three and a half trillion lines of types, 90 GB...

Simon Shuster is a journalist who has reported on Russia and Ukraine for over 15 years, most of that time as a staff correspondent for TIME Magazine. He was born in Moscow, and he and his family came to the United States as refugees from the Soviet Union when he was six years old. After graduating from Stanford University in 2005, Simon returned to Moscow to work as a reporter for The Moscow Times...

Radix UI is an open-source library of React components. Its “headless” primitives handle the complex logic and accessibility concerns—like dialogs, dropdowns, and tabs—while leaving styling completely up to the developer. The project emphasizes usability, accessibility, and composability and has become a vital part of modern web dev, in part because it forms the foundation of shad/cn UI. Chance St...

The Stack Overflow Developer Survey is an annual survey conducted by Stack Overflow that gathers comprehensive insights from developers around the world. It offers a valuable snapshot of the global developer community, covering a wide range of topics such as preferred programming languages, tools, and technologies. Jody Bailey is the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Stack Overflow and Erin...

Byran Huang is a full stack developer who recently made headlines in the hacker space when he created the anyon_e, which is a highly integrated, open source laptop. The effort was a massive undertaking and showcased great design, hardware, and software. In this episode, Byran joins the show with Gregor Vand to talk about his work on the anyon_e laptop. Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologis...

The modern internet is a vast web of independent networks bound together by billions of routing decisions made every second. It’s an architecture so reliable we mostly take it for granted, but behind the scenes it represents one of humanity’s greatest engineering achievements. Today’s internet is also dramatically more complex and capable than in its early years. Erik Seidel is a Network Engineer...

SED News is a monthly podcast from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer unpack the biggest stories shaping software engineering, Silicon Valley, and the broader tech industry. In this episode, they cover the $1.7B acquisition of Security AI, LangChain’s massive valuation, and the surprise $300M funding” round for Periodic Labs. They also break down the massive AWS o...

Most AI agent frameworks are backend-focused and written in Python, which introduces complexity when building full-stack AI applications with JavaScript or TypeScript frontends. This gap makes it harder for frontend developers to prototype, integrate, and iterate on AI-powered features. Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework focused on building AI agents and has primitives such as agents, t...

X-Plane is a popular flight simulator developed by Laminar Research. It features a first-principles physics engine, realistic aircraft systems, and a wide variety of aircraft. We wanted to understand the engineering that goes into creating a flight simulator so we invited Ben Supnik. Ben is a software engineer at Laminar and he’s been working on X-Plane for the past 20 years. He joins the show wit...

A common challenge in software development is creating and maintaining robust development environments. The rise of AI agents has amplified this complexity by adding new demands around permission controls, environment isolation, and resource management. Ona is a platform for AI-native software development and engineering agents. The platform combines autonomous agents with secure, standardized env...

Homebrew is a widely used package manager that simplifies the installation of open-source software on macOS. It was created in response to the growing demand for a lightweight, developer-friendly tool suited to an increasingly Mac-centric development ecosystem. Today, Homebrew is a near-essential part of the macOS software development toolkit. Mike McQuaid joined the project early on and collabora...

Modern software platforms are increasingly composed of diverse microservices, third-party APIs, and cloud resources. The distributed nature of these systems makes it difficult for engineers to gain a clear view of how their systems behave, which can slow down troubleshooting and increase operational risk. groundcover is an observability platform that uses eBPF sensors to capture logs, metrics, and...