Modern web development requires an ever-growing collection of tools including formatters, linters, bundlers, and plugins. Each tool typically has its own configuration, dependencies, and performance cost. As applications grow more complex, the overhead of maintaining this toolchain becomes a real burden. Biome is an open source toolchain for web projects that brings formatting and linting together in a single fast, opinionated tool. It’s built in Rust and is designed to be a drop-in replacement ...
Jun 18, 2026•1 hr 3 min
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 timelines, and many in the industry have set a target of full post-quantum security by 2029, meaning a complete migration to algorithms designed to remain secure against quantum attacks. Bas Westerbaan is a cryptography engineer at Cloudflare , w...
Jun 16, 2026•46 min
Multiplayer games are among the hardest software systems to build, requiring developers to synchronize state across unreliable networks while maintaining fairness, performance, and a responsive player experience. Latency, cheating, server costs, and debugging distributed game logic all introduce complexity that single-player games never encounter. Dome Keeper is a minimalist tower defense game with roguelike elements where players must protect a fragile glass dome from relentless waves of alien ...
Jun 11, 2026•47 min
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 Apple ‘s uncertain path beyond the iPhone. They also discuss Google ‘s agentic pivot at Google I/O, a surge in DuckDuckGo traffic following Google’s default switch to AI mode, and payroll platform Remote surpassing 300 million in ARR with flat headcount. Gregor an...
Jun 09, 2026•51 min
The web has quietly become one of the most capable platforms for game development. Advances in WebAssembly, WebGL, and WebGPU have given developers tools that rival native desktop performance, while game engines like Unity and Godot have added robust web export pipelines. However, building games for the browser comes with its own set of constraints including file size, browser compatibility, and the need to quickly capture and maintain the player’s attention. Erik Dubbelboer is a Principal Engin...
Jun 04, 2026•54 min
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 do not exist in most hardware programs. Nominal is a data platform built to help hardware organizations move at the same speed as software teams. It manages the hardware data supply chain end to end, from ingesting high-frequency sensor data ...
Jun 02, 2026•53 min
Autonomous drone delivery has long been the stuff of science fiction, but ongoing advances have moved the space from experimental to operational. Zipline is one of the leading companies in this space, with drones that charge between missions and fly autonomously to deliver packages directly to customers. Kyle Madonia is the VP of Application Software and IT at Zipline , and she previously spent a decade as an engineer at SpaceX. In this episode, Kyle joins Gregor Vand to discuss how Zipline’s so...
May 28, 2026•51 min
Europe’s startup ecosystem is maturing rapidly, with companies like Revolut, Lovable, and Legora demonstrating that world-class technology businesses can be built and scaled on the continent. While the US remains the dominant force in venture-backed software as home to the largest markets, the deepest capital pools, and the most ambitious exit culture, a growing number of European founders are choosing to build at home. Edward Keelan is a Partner at Octopus Ventures , one of Europe’s largest and...
May 26, 2026•49 min
React Native is an open source framework developed by Meta that allows engineers to build mobile applications for both iOS and Android using a single JavaScript codebase. The framework bridges the gap between web development and native mobile, which lets teams ship to both platforms simultaneously without sacrificing the look and feel of a truly native app. Manjiri Moghe is a Staff Software Engineer at Coinbase , where she has spent five years building and scaling one of the world’s most demandi...
May 21, 2026•46 min
Formal methods are a branch of mathematics and computer science focused on proving the correctness of systems, and they have long promised a more rigorous foundation for software. However, their complexity has kept them confined to a small community of specialists. That is now changing as agentic AI systems take on increasingly autonomous roles. The question of how to define, enforce, and verify what those agents are allowed to do has become urgent, and automated reasoning is emerging as a criti...
May 19, 2026•49 min
Open source software underpins nearly every modern application, including frameworks powering the most popular websites, to the libraries securing financial backend systems. However, while open source drives collaboration and innovation at a global scale, it also faces deep challenges in sustainability, community health, and long-term maintenance. Many of the world’s most critical dependencies are still maintained by just a handful of volunteers. Abby Cabunoc Mayes leads Open Source Maintainer P...
May 14, 2026•59 min
Vector search has risen to become a foundational tool in modern search and retrieval systems, including the RAG pipelines that power many AI applications. However, the demands on retrieval systems are growing more sophisticated, which is revealing the limits of relying on a single vector similarity score. Vespa is a popular open source search and data serving engine. Central to Vespa’s architecture is tensor-based retrieval, which is an approach that represents data as tensors rather than simple...
May 12, 2026•39 min
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 Anthropic ’s controversial “Mythos” security model and what it means for vulnerability discovery at scale. They also discuss recent layoffs at Snap and Meta , and how AI investment pressures are reshaping hiring, organizational priorities, and the economics of big...
May 07, 2026•53 min
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 designed for a world where a single engineer can generate thousands of lines of code in a day. SmartBear is a software quality platform spanning test automation, API lifecycle management, and observability. The company recently launched an AI-n...
May 05, 2026•55 min
Artificial intelligence is transforming warfare faster than the legal and ethical frameworks designed to govern it. Militaries around the world are deploying AI-powered decision support systems to identify targets, assess proportionality, and direct weapons. The gap between what is technically possible and what international law can effectively regulate is widening by the day. Yuval Shany is a law professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a research fellow at the Oxford Ethics in AI Instit...
Apr 30, 2026•1 hr 7 min
Open-weight models are AI systems whose trained parameters are publicly released, which allows developers to run, fine-tune, and deploy them independently rather than accessing them only through a hosted API. While closed-weight models from companies like OpenAI or Anthropic are delivered as managed services, open-weight models give organizations direct control over how the models are deployed and used. Importantly, the performance of these models is steadily improving and they’ve become credibl...
Apr 28, 2026•50 min
AI coding tools have gone from novelty to core infrastructure in under three years. Today, many devs use AI daily, a substantial share of new code is AI-generated, and expectations for automation are rapidly increasing. Sonar is a company specializing in analysis of code quality and security, and they recently released a new survey – the State of Code Developer Survey. The survey provides a deep examination of how developers are using AI in real production environments, and where the real-world ...
Apr 23, 2026•59 min
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 industry is moving away from pre-loading context upfront toward a model where agents dynamically navigate and retrieve the data they need, when they need it. Redis is approaching context management using a context engine, which is an architecture...
Apr 21, 2026•49 min
AI agents are evolving from individual productivity tools into distributed systems components inside enterprises. The next frontier is coming into focus, and it involves large-scale ecosystems of collaborating agents embedded directly into business processes. However, multi-agent architectures introduce serious challenges around orchestration, state management, trust, governance, and observability. Eric Broda is a veteran of the software industry, and he’s the co-author of the new O’Reilly book,...
Apr 16, 2026•47 min
Observability emerged from the need to understand complex software systems, and involves tracking metrics, logs, and traces so engineers can detect and diagnose problems before they affect users. However, modern applications often encompass hundreds of services, containers, and dependencies, generating more observability data than dashboards and alerts alone can effectively surface. New Relic is a leading observability platform, with a history that spans the full arc of modern software operation...
Apr 14, 2026•46 min
Mobile apps have become a primary interface for critical services, including banking, payments, and healthcare. Unlike web applications, much of the logic and intellectual property in a mobile app lives directly on the user’s device, which is an environment the developer doesn’t control. That makes mobile apps uniquely exposed to reverse engineering, runtime manipulation, and fraud. As more critical functionality shifts to mobile, the need to harden apps against sophisticated attackers continues...
Apr 09, 2026•55 min
The Model Context Protocol, or MCP, gives developers a common way to expose tools, data, and capabilities to large language models, and it has quickly become an important standard in agentic AI. FastMCP is an open source project stewarded by the team at Prefect , which is an orchestration platform for AI and data workflows. The FastMCP project builds on MCP to provide high-level, ergonomic abstractions for Python developers to rapidly build and deploy MCP servers and applications. Jeremiah Lowin...
Apr 07, 2026•1 hr 6 min
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 resurgence of ARM and CPUs as serious compute infrastructure for running local AI agents, a supply chain attack on LiteLLM that exposed API credentials across thousands of developer environments, and the arrival of OpenCode as a fully open source alternative t...
Apr 02, 2026•57 min
FreeBSD is one of the longest-running and most influential open-source operating systems in the world. It was born from the Berkeley Software Distribution in the early 1990s, it has powered everything from high-performance networking infrastructure to game consoles and content delivery networks. Over three decades, it has evolved through major architectural shifts, from symmetric multiprocessing and kernel scalability to modern storage systems and predictable release engineering. John Baldwin ha...
Mar 31, 2026•1 hr 4 min
Modern cloud-native systems are built on highly dynamic, distributed infrastructure where containers spin up and down constantly, services communicate across clusters, and traditional networking assumptions break down. Linux networking was designed decades ago around static IPs and linear rule processing, which makes it increasingly difficult to achieve scale in Kubernetes environments. At the same time, modifying the Linux kernel to keep up with these demands is slow, risky, and impractical for...
Mar 26, 2026•58 min
Bennett Foddy is a legendary game designer known for creating wholly distinctive games such as QWOP, Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, and the recently released Baby Steps. He’s also a former professor at the NYU Game Center, where he taught game design alongside developing his own experimental work. In this episode, Bennett joins Joe Nash to discuss his systems-driven approach to game design, why frustration and difficulty are often misunderstood, how streaming and speedrunning have reshaped ...
Mar 24, 2026•1 hr 7 min
Developer tooling shapes how software gets written day to day, but the best tools often disappear into the background once they succeed. Formatting, linting, and build systems can either create friction and endless debate, or quietly remove entire classes of problems from a team’s workflow. Over the past decade, the JavaScript ecosystem has wrestled with both extremes as it scaled rapidly and accumulated complexity. Prettier emerged as a response to the surprisingly human problem of engineers sp...
Mar 19, 2026•51 min
Skateboarding games have long balanced technical precision with a sense of flow and expression, but Skate Story takes the genre in a radically different direction. It has a distinct vaporwave vibe and blends fluid skate mechanics with exploration, puzzles, and an existential narrative about freedom, pain, and obsession. The game was created by indie developer Sam Eng , who previously released Zarvot for the Nintendo Switch. Skate Story launched to critical acclaim and was widely regarded as one ...
Mar 17, 2026•58 min
Retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, has become a foundational approach to building production AI systems. However, deploying RAG in practice can be complex and costly. Developers typically have to manage vector databases, chunking strategies, embedding models, and indexing infrastructure. Designing effective RAG systems is also a moving target, as techniques and best practices evolve in step with rapidly advancing language models. Google DeepMind recently released the File Search Tool, a ful...
Mar 12, 2026•38 min
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-reproducible execution, poor version control ergonomics, and difficulty reusing notebook code in real software systems make it hard to move from exploration to production. At the same time, sharing results often requires collaborators to recreat...
Mar 10, 2026•46 min
