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
28 episodes found.
Preparing for Q-Day
Most of the cryptography securing the internet today rests on mathematical problems that classical computers cannot solve in any reasonable timeframe. That assumption is now being tested. Recent advances in quantum computing have dramatically compressed tim...
The Hardware Bottleneck AI Can’t Fix
Software engineering has developed powerful tools for observability, data management, and continuous testing, but hardware engineering has largely not kept pace. The feedback loops, tooling, and infrastructure that software engineers take for granted simply...
SmartBear and Multi-Agent QA
AI coding tools have dramatically accelerated the pace of development, and the bottleneck in the software development lifecycle has shifted to code validation and testing. However, the conventional tools and workflows that QA teams have relied on were not d...
Unlocking the Data Layer for Agentic AI with Simba Khadder
AI agents are increasingly capable of reasoning and performing autonomous work over long periods. However, as agents take on more complex, longer-horizon tasks, keeping them supplied with the right information becomes the core engineering challenge. The ind...
Reinventing the Python Notebook with Akshay Agrawal
Interactive notebooks were popularized by the Jupyter project and have since become a core tool for data science, research, and data exploration. However, traditional, imperative notebooks often break down as projects grow more complex. Hidden state, non-re...
Organizational Context for AI Coding Agents with Dennis Pilarinos
AI agents have taken on a growing share of software development work, so much so that the hardest problems are shifting away from code generation towards something new, context. The challenge is now contextualizing why systems work the way they do, how arch...
Amazon’s IDE for Spec-Driven Development with David Yanacek
AI-assisted coding tools have made it easier than ever to spin up prototypes, but turning those prototypes into reliable, production-grade systems remains a major challenge. Large language models are non-deterministic, prone to drift, and often lose track o...
Optimizing Agent Behavior in Production with Gideon Mendels
LLM -powered systems continue to move steadily into production, but this process is presenting teams with challenges that traditional software practices don’t commonly encounter. Models and agents are non-deterministic systems, which makes it difficult to t...
Gas Town, Beads, and the Rise of Agentic Development with Steve Yegge
AI-assisted programming has moved far beyond autocomplete. Large language models are now capable of editing entire codebases, coordinating long-running tasks, and collaborating across multiple systems. As these capabilities mature, the core challenge in sof...
OpenAI and Codex with Thibault Sottiaux and Ed Bayes
AI coding agents are rapidly reshaping how software is built, reviewed, and maintained. As large language model capabilities continue to increase, the bottleneck in software development is shifting away from code generation toward planning, review, deployme...
Production-Grade AI Systems with Fred Roma
Engineering teams around the world are building AI-focused applications or integrating AI features into existing products. The AI development ecosystem is maturing, which is accelerating how quickly these applications can be prototyped. However, taking AI a...
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 ...