Software Engineering Daily

Dynamic languages, like Ruby, Python, and JavaScript, determine the types of variables at runtime rather than at compile time. This flexibility allows for rapid development and concise code, but it also makes it harder to catch certain classes of bugs before execution. Type checkers for dynamic languages add structure and safety without compromising their expressive power. Sorbet is a static type...

The rise of language-model coding assistants has led to the creation of the vibe coding paradigm. In this mode of software development, AI agents take a plain language prompt and generate entire applications, which dramatically lowers the barriers to entry and democratizes access to software creation. However, many enterprise environments have large, legacy codebases and these sprawling systems ar...

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 NVIDIA's $5B investment in Intel and $100M stake in OpenAI, Meta’s stumble with its AR glasses demo, and the surprise $50B private equity acquisition of Electronic...

Modern software systems are composed of many independent microservices spanning frontends, backends, APIs, and AI models, and coordinating and scaling them reliably is a constant challenge. A workflow orchestration platform addresses this by providing a structured framework to define, execute, and monitor complex workflows with resilience and clarity. Orkes is an enterprise-scale agentic orchestra...

Vector search has become a foundational technology for AI applications, enabling everything from semantic code search to contextual retrieval for large language models. However, a major challenge with vector databases has been the cost as data storage scales. Turbopuffer is a vector database that focuses on speed, cost and scalability. It was created by Simon Hørup Eskildsen and Justin Li in 2023...

Cassette Beasts is a turn-based monster-battling RPG that lets players record creatures onto cassette tapes and transform into them during battle. The game was an indie hit, and is also one of the most successful games built with the open source Godot Engine. Jay Baylis and Tom Coxon are the creators of Cassette Beasts at Bytten Studio. They join the show with Joe Nash to talk about the developmen...

A challenge in modern frontend application design is efficiently fetching and managing GraphQL data while keeping UI components responsive and maintainable. Developers often face issues like over-fetching, under-fetching, and handling complex query dependencies, which can lead to performance bottlenecks and increased development effort. Relay is a JavaScript framework developed by Meta for managin...

Traditional package management systems for JavaScript have faced several inefficiencies related to dependency storage, resolution, and project performance. pnpm is a fast, disk-efficient package manager for JavaScript and TypeScript projects, serving as an alternative to npm and Yarn. Due to its efficiency and reliability, pnpm is increasingly popular for managing monorepos and large-scale applica...

Modern application development often involves juggling multiple types of databases to handle diverse data models. The lack of unification can lead to complex architectures with attendant security concerns and fragmented development workflows. SurrealDB is an open-source, multi-model database developed in Rust and integrates functionalities of many databases including relational, document, graph, t...

Modern web development faces several challenges, particularly when building scalable, maintainable, and high-performance applications. As applications grow, managing complex user interfaces, and ensuring efficient data handling and modular code structures, becomes increasingly difficult. Angular is a TypeScript-based web framework developed by Google. It’s component-driven and designed for buildin...

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 discuss Perplexity’s headline-grabbing offer to buy Google Chrome, the U.S. government's large stake in Intel, Meta’s abrupt pause on AI hiring, and a reality check on wh...

A common challenge in data-rich organizations is that critical context about the data is often hard to capture and even harder to keep up to date. As more people across the organization use data and data models get more complex, simply finding the right dataset can be slow and create bottlenecks. Select Star is a data discovery and metadata platform that builds a continuously updated knowledge gra...

Data visualization is increasingly important as organizations prioritize data-driven decision-making. Tools that transform complex datasets into intuitive, interpretable visualizations are arguably just as critical as the data itself. Robert Kosara is a Data Visualization Developer at Observable which is a platform for creating interactive data visualizations, and which makes extensive use of the...

Werner Vogels is the Chief Technology Officer at Amazon, where he has played a pivotal role in shaping the company’s technology vision for over two decades. Before joining Amazon in 2004, Werner was a research scientist at Cornell University where he focused on distributed systems and scalability, both of which are concepts that would later influence the design of AWS. He holds a PhD in computer s...

A key challenge with designing AI agents is that large language models are stateless and have limited context windows. This requires careful engineering to maintain continuity and reliability across sequential LLM interactions. To perform well, agents need fast systems for storing and retrieving short-term conversations, summaries, and long-term facts. Redis is an open‑source, in‑memory data store...

Deploying and managing cloud workloads is a complex task that requires developers to handle infrastructure, scaling, CI/CD pipelines, and database hosting. Configuring and maintaining Kubernetes, ensuring smooth deployments, and integrating various services efficiently is a common challenge. Will Stewart is the co-founder and CEO of Northflank, which is a platform focused on streamlining applicati...

Modern software teams typically rely on a patchwork of tools to manage planning, development, feature rollout, and post-release analysis. This fragmentation is a known challenge that can create friction and slow down software development iteration. It's especially problematic for cross-functional teams, where differences in roles, expertise, and work culture can further complicate collaboration. T...

Carbon is a programming language developed by Google as a successor to C++, and it aims to provide modern safety features while maintaining high performance. It's designed to offer seamless interoperability with C++ while addressing shortcomings of C++ such as slow compilation times and lack of memory safety. Carbon also introduces features like a more readable syntax, improved generics, and autom...

Podman is an open-source container management tool that allows developers to build, run, and manage containers. Unlike Docker, it supports rootless containers for improved security and is fully compatible with standards from the Open Container Initiative, or OCI. Brent Baude is a Senior Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat where he works on Podman. In this episode, Brent joins the show to talk a...

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 explore Meta’s bold push into AI with the launch of Meta Superintelligence Labs, the dramatic twists in the Windsurf acquisition saga, Lyft’s re-entry into the autonomous...

Electron is a framework for building cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies like JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. It allows developers to package web apps with a native-like experience by bundling them with a Chromium browser and Node.js runtime. Electron is widely used for apps like VS Code, Discord, and Slack because it enables a single codebase to run on Windows, macOS, and Linux....

Modal is a serverless compute platform that's specifically focused on AI workloads. The company’s goal is to enable AI teams to quickly spin up GPU-enabled containers, and rapidly iterate and autoscale. It was founded by Erik Bernhardsson who was previously at Spotify for 7 years where he built the music recommendation system and the popular Luigi workflow scheduler. In this episode, Erik joins Se...

RxJS is an open-source library for composing asynchronous and event-based programs. It provides powerful operators for transforming, filtering, combining, and managing streams of data, from user input and web requests to real-time updates. Ben Lesh is the creator of RxJS. He joins Josh Goldberg to talk about his path into engineering and the RxJS library. Josh Goldberg is an independent full time...

JigsawStack is a startup that develops a suite of custom small models for tasks such as scraping, forecasting, vOCR, and translation. The platform is designed to support collaborative knowledge work, especially in research-heavy or strategy-driven environments. Yoeven Khemlani is the Founder of JigsawStack and he joins the podcast with Gregor Vand to talk about making use of small models for diver...

Railway is a software company that provides a popular platform for deploying and managing applications in the cloud. It automates tasks such as infrastructure provisioning, scaling, and deployment and is particularly known for having a developer-friendly interface. Jake Cooper is the Founder and CEO at Railway. He joins the show to talk about the company and its platform. Sean's been an academic,...