Podcasting
Episodes featuring Kevin Ball
I’m a host on Software Engineering Daily. I previously hosted JSParty and Human Skills (both now ended).
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Software Engineering Daily episodes
31 episodes found.
WebAssembly 3.0 with Andreas Rossberg
WebAssembly, or WASM, has grown from a low-level compilation target for C and C++ into one of the most influential technologies in modern computing. It now powers browser applications, edge compute platforms, embedded systems, and a growing ecosystem of lan...
America Under Surveillance with Michael Soyfer
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 o...
Flox, Nix, and Reproducible Software Systems with Michael Stahnke
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 e...
VS Code and Agentic Development with Kai Maetzel
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 devel...
Drone Warfare in Ukraine with Simon Shuster
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 wh...
The X-Plane Flight Simulator with Ben Supnik
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 simulato...
Turning Agent Autonomy into Productivity with Chris Weichel
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...
Homebrew and macOS Package Management with Mike McQuaid
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 ecosys...
Engineering in the Age of Agents with Yechezkel Rabinovich
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 do...
Scaling AI in Enterprise Codebases with Guy Gur-Ari
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 ...
SurrealDB 3.0 and Building Event-Driven AI Applications with Tobie Morgan Hitchcock
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 a...
A Conversation with Amazon CTO Werner Vogels
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 focuse...
Empowering Cross-Functional Product Teams with Tobias Dunn-Krahn and Doug Peete
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 esp...
Carbon and Modernizing C++ with Chandler Carruth
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...
Building Open Infrastructure for AI with Illia Polosukhin
Illia Polosukhin is a veteran AI researcher and one of the original authors of the landmark Transformer paper, Attention is All You Need, which he co-authored during his time at Google Research. He has a deep background in machine learning and natural langu...
AI at Anaconda with Greg Jennings
Anaconda is a software company that’s well-known for its solutions for managing packages, environments, and security in large-scale data workflows. The company has played a major role in making Python-based data science more accessible, efficient, and scala...
ByteDance’s Container Networking Stack with Chen Tang
ByteDance is a global technology company operating a wide range of content platforms around the world, and is best known for creating TikTok. The company operates at a massive scale, which naturally presents challenges in ensuring performance and stability ...
CodeRabbit and RAG for Code Review with Harjot Gill
One of the most immediate and high-impact applications of LLMs has been in software development. The models can significantly accelerate code writing, but with that increased velocity comes a greater need for thoughtful, scalable approaches to codereview. I...
Emulating Retro Games on Modern Consoles with Robin Lavallée and Bill Litshauer
Emulating retro games on modern consoles is a growing trend, and allows players to experience classic titles with improved performance, enhanced resolution, and added features like save states and rewinding. However, this process raises many challenging tec...
Chip Design in the AI Era with Thomas Andersen
Synopsys is a leading electronic design automation company specializing in silicon design and verification, as well as software integrity and security. Their tools are foundational to the creation of modern chips and embedded software, powering everything f...
Mojo and Building a CUDA Replacement with Chris Lattner
Python is the dominant language for AI and data science applications, but it lacks the performance and low-level control needed to fully leverage GPU hardware. As a result, developers often rely on NVIDIA’s CUDA framework, which adds complexity and fragment...
Building PostgreSQL for the Future with Heikki Linnakangas
PostgreSQL is an open-source database known for its robustness, extensibility, and compliance with SQL standards. Its ability to handle complex queries and maintain high data integrity has made it a top choice for both start-ups and large enterprises. Heikk...
Grand Theft Auto III on the Dreamcast with Falco Girgis and Stef Kornilios Mitsis Poiitidis
Grand Theft Auto III is a 2001 an open-world action-adventure game developed by Rockstar Games and it had a profound impact on both gaming and popular culture. Its success cemented video games as a dominant form of entertainment and storytelling, and paved ...
Vibe Coding at Heroku with Vish Abrams
AI tools are transforming how developers write code, and although it’s difficult to pinpoint how much code is now AI-generated code, estimates suggest it’s between 20% and 40%, and this figure is poised to grow in the coming years. This evolution has given ...
Prometheus and Open-Source Observability with Eric Schabell
Modern cloud-native systems are highly dynamic and distributed, which makes it difficult to monitor cloud infrastructure using traditional tools designed for static environments. This has motivated the development and widespread adoption of dedicated observ...
Turing Award Special: A Conversation with David Patterson
David A. Patterson is a pioneering computer scientist known for his contributions to computer architecture, particularly as a co-developer of Reduced Instruction Set Computing, or RISC, which revolutionized processor design. He has co-authored multiple book...
Turing Award Special: A Conversation with John Hennessy
John Hennessy is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and academic known for his significant contributions to computer architecture. He co-developed the RISC architecture, which revolutionized modern computing by enabling faster and more efficient processors...
Turing Award Special: A Conversation with Jeffrey Ullman
Jeffrey Ullman is a renowned computer scientist and professor emeritus at Stanford University, celebrated for his groundbreaking contributions to database systems, compilers, and algorithms. He co-authored influential texts like Principles of Database Syste...
Knowledge Graphs as Agentic Memory with Daniel Chalef
Contextual memory in AI is a major challenge because current models struggle to retain and recall relevant information over time. While humans can build long-term semantic relationships, AI systems often rely on fixed context windows, leading to loss of imp...
Quantum Computing at Rigetti with David Rivas
Rigetti Computing is an American company specializing in quantum computing, founded in 2013. The company develops quantum processors and hybrid quantum-classical computing systems, and aims to make quantum computing more accessible for research and commerci...
Vercel’s Developer Frameworks with Ary Khandelwal and Max Leiter
The availability of high-quality AI model APIs has drastically lowered the barriers developing AI applications. These tools abstract away complex tasks such as model deployment, scaling, data retrieval, natural language processing, and text generation. Verc...