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 collaborated closely with its creator, Max Howell. He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to discuss Homebrew’s origins, architecture, its emphasis on automation and CI/CD, long-term sustainability, controversial trade-offs, and much more.

Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.

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Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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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 traces directly from the kernel. Critically, groundcover runs on a bring-your-own-cloud model so all data remains within the user’s own environment, which gives increased privacy, security, and cost efficiency.

The company is also focused on adapting to how AI-generated code is changing observability. Code can now be produced at superhuman speed, which increases the challenges for reviewing code before it enters production. This means that observability is likely to play a growing role in code validation and providing guardrails.

Yechezkel Rabinovich, or Chez, is the CTO and Co-founder of groundcover. He joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to discuss his journey from kernel engineering to building an eBPF-powered observability company. The conversation explores the power of eBPF, the realities of observability in modern systems, the impact of AI on software development and security, and where the future of root-cause analysis is headed.

Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by groundcover.

Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post Engineering in the Age of Agents with Yechezkel Rabinovich appeared first on 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 checker developed by the Stripe team and designed specifically for Ruby. The motivation behind Sorbet stemmed from the growing complexity of production Ruby applications, where developers needed stronger guarantees and more scalable code quality tools than dynamic typing alone could offer.

Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post Static Analysis for Ruby with Jake Zimmerman appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 are complex, interdependent, and far less amenable to the greenfield style of vibe coding. Working effectively within them requires deep context awareness, something language models commonly struggle to maintain.

Augment Code is an AI coding assistant that focuses on contextual understanding of large codebases in enterprise settings. It emphasizes tooling to manage large development surface areas while automating PRs and code review.

Guy Gur-Ari is a Co-Founder at Augment. He has a PhD in physics and was previously a Research Scientist at Google where he worked on AI reasoning in math and science. Guy joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to talk about Augment Code, its focus on full context for large enterprise codebases, code review as the new bottleneck in AI-driven development, and much more.

Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Augment Code.

Kevin Ball or KBall, is the vice president of engineering at Mento and an independent coach for engineers and engineering leaders. He co-founded and served as CTO for two companies, founded the San Diego JavaScript meetup, and organizes the AI inaction discussion group through Latent Space.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post Scaling AI in Enterprise Codebases with Guy Gur-Ari appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 Arts. They also break down Anthropic’s record-setting Series F round and what Google’s Genie 3 “world model” reveals about the next frontier of AI.

Gregor and Sean then zoom things out to debate the future of devices and hardware. They cover Apple’s underwhelming Vision Pro to Snap’s all-in bet on AR specs, and what form factors might actually matter for developers.

Finally, they highlight standout projects from Hacker News, including hosting a website on a disposable vape, playing Snake in your browser’s address bar, and Slack’s six-figure billing fiasco that the community helped reverse.

Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post SED News: NVIDIA Bets on Intel, Meta’s Demo Crash, and Anthropic’s Explosive Growth appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 orchestration platform that builds on the open-source Conductor project, which was pioneered at Netflix. The platform coordinates AI agents, humans and APIs, with a focus on scalability, compliance, and trust. It further expands on the Conductor core by adding features like security, governance, and long-running workflows.

Viren Baraiya is the Founder and CTO at Orkes, and he’s the creator of Netflix Conductor. Viren joins the show with Gregor Vand to talk about his building Conductor at Netflix, the challenge of orchestrating microservices, rule-based versus programmatic workflow orchestration, agentic orchestration, MCP integration, and much more.

Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Orkes.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post Orkes and Agentic Workflow Orchestration with Viren Baraiya appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 and has seen adoption from high-profile companies such as Cursor and Notion.

Simon joins the podcast with Gregor Vand to discuss the origin of turbopuffer, its unique technical design, the economics of vector storage, and more.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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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 development of their game.

Joe Nash is a developer, educator, and award-winning community builder, who has worked at companies including GitHub, Twilio, Unity, and PayPal. Joe got his start in software development by creating mods and running servers for Garry’s Mod, and game development remains his favorite way to experience and explore new technologies and concepts.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post Building an Indie Hit in Godot with Jay Baylis and Tom Coxon appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 managing GraphQL data in React applications. It’s designed to optimize data fetching by colocating queries with components, ensuring that each part of the UI declares its own data dependencies.

Robert Balicki was on the Relay team at Meta and is now a Staff Software Engineer at Pinterest. He is currently developing Isograph, which provides a declarative and type-safe approach to data fetching.

Robert joins the show to talk about challenges and solutions for managing data in frontend applications.

Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, and is the founder and CTO of Mailpass. Previously, Gregor was a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He has been based in Asia Pacific for almost a decade and can be found via his profile at vand.hk.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post Rethinking GraphQL Frontends with Robert Balicki appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 applications.

Zoltan Kochan is a full stack web developer and the creator of pnpm. He joins the show with Josh Goldberg to talk about his background and package management in the web.

Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He works on projects that help developers write better TypeScript more easily, most notably on typescript-eslint: the tooling that enables ESLint and Prettier to run on TypeScript code. Josh regularly contributes to open source projects in the ecosystem such as ESLint and TypeScript. Josh is a Microsoft MVP for developer technologies and the author of the acclaimed Learning TypeScript (O’Reilly), a cherished resource for any developer seeking to learn TypeScript without any prior experience outside of JavaScript. Josh regularly presents talks and workshops at bootcamps, conferences, and meetups to share knowledge on TypeScript, static analysis, open source, and general frontend and web development.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post pnpm with Zoltan Kochan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.