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 when he was six years old.

After graduating from Stanford University in 2005, Simon returned to Moscow to work as a reporter for The Moscow Times, Reuters, the Associated Press and other publications. His political coverage of Russia’s descent into authoritarianism included numerous profiles of Vladimir Putin and interviews with top Russian officials. He has also interviewed and profiled the last three presidents of Ukraine.

Simon has spent years covering the war in Ukraine from both sides of the front lines. The year after the annexation of Crimea, Russian authorities deemed Simon a security threat and banned him from entering the country.

Simon is the author of the 2024 book The Showman: Inside the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky, and he recently wrote the TIME Magazine article “How Ukraine Gamified Drone Warfare.”

He is currently at work on a new book that examines the future of warfare and how the lessons and technologies that emerged from the war in Ukraine are changing warfare and security around the world.

Simon joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to discuss drone warfare, AI-assisted targeting, the gamification of drone combat, the rapid iteration cycle of drone innovation, new ethical dilemmas in warfare, the coming proliferation of war drones, and the shifting balance of global power.

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]

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Radix UI is an open-source library of React components. Its “headless” primitives handle the complex logic and accessibility concerns—like dialogs, dropdowns, and tabs—while leaving styling completely up to the developer. The project emphasizes usability, accessibility, and composability and has become a vital part of modern web dev, in part because it forms the foundation of shad/cn UI.

Chance Strickland is a software engineer at WorkOS and a maintainer of Radix UI. Chase joins the show with Nick Nisi to talk about Radix, its primitives, Radix’s relationship with shad/cn UI, the evolution of web primitives, and much more.

Nick Nisi is a conference organizer, speaker, and developer focused on tools across the web ecosystem. He has organized and emceed several conferences and has led NebraskaJS for more than a decade. Nick currently works as a developer experience engineer at WorkOS.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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The Stack Overflow Developer Survey is an annual survey conducted by Stack Overflow that gathers comprehensive insights from developers around the world. It offers a valuable snapshot of the global developer community, covering a wide range of topics such as preferred programming languages, tools, and technologies.

Jody Bailey is the Chief Product and Technology Officer at Stack Overflow and Erin Yepis is a Research Manager at Stack Overflow. They join the show with Sean Falconer to talk about the results of the 2025 Developer Survey, which was recently released.

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 The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey with Jody Bailey and Erin Yepis appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Byran Huang is a full stack developer who recently made headlines in the hacker space when he created the anyon_e, which is a highly integrated, open source laptop. The effort was a massive undertaking and showcased great design, hardware, and software.

In this episode, Byran joins the show with Gregor Vand to talk about his work on the anyon_e laptop.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post Building an Open-Source Laptop with Byran Huang appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

The modern internet is a vast web of independent networks bound together by billions of routing decisions made every second. It’s an architecture so reliable we mostly take it for granted, but behind the scenes it represents one of humanity’s greatest engineering achievements. Today’s internet is also dramatically more complex and capable than in its early years.

Erik Seidel is a Network Engineer at Cloudflare, where he focuses on automating global network infrastructure. He joins the show to discuss his unique journey into tech, the fundamentals of how the internet works, the Border Gateway Protocol, peering versus transit, Cloudflare’s architecture, networking in China, and much more.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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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 $1.7B acquisition of Security AI, LangChain’s massive valuation, and the surprise $300M funding” round for Periodic Labs. They also break down the massive AWS outage, Apple’s rare reversal on its glass UI design, and the emerging web of trillion-dollar AI infrastructure deals centered around OpenAI.

Gregor and Sean then dive deep into the world of chipmakers, exploring how Intel is fighting to survive, AMD’s new partnership and 10% investment from OpenAI, Apple’s long-term bet on on-device AI with its M5 chips, and NVIDIA’s push to defend its dominance amid growing custom-chip competition.

Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News, including developers rediscovering the joy of curl, a hacker’s clever teardown of Kindle’s DRM protections, and more.

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: AMD’s Big OpenAI Deal, Intel’s Struggles, and Apple’s AI Long Game appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Most AI agent frameworks are backend-focused and written in Python, which introduces complexity when building full-stack AI applications with JavaScript or TypeScript frontends. This gap makes it harder for frontend developers to prototype, integrate, and iterate on AI-powered features.

Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework focused on building AI agents and has primitives such as agents, tools, workflows, and RAG.

Sam Bhagwat and Abhi Aiyer are co-founders at Mastra. They join the podcast with Nick Nisi to talk about this state of frontend tooling for AI agents, AI agent primitives, MCP integration, and more.

Nick Nisi is a conference organizer, speaker, and developer focused on tools across the web ecosystem. He has organized and emceed several conferences and has led NebraskaJS for more than a decade. Nick currently works as a developer experience engineer at WorkOS.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post Building AI Agents on the Frontend with Sam Bhagwat and Abhi Aiyer appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 simulator so we invited Ben Supnik on the show. Ben is a software engineer at Laminar and he’s been working on X-Plane for the past 20 years. He joins the show with Kevin Ball to talk about X-Plane and his career working on the simulator.

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 The X-Plane Flight Simulator with Ben Supnik appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 is a platform for AI-native software development and engineering agents. The platform combines autonomous agents with secure, standardized environments, with a focus on giving enterprises control, security, and productivity so they can scale AI-native engineering without scaling risk.

Chris Weichel has more than two decades of experience spanning software engineering and human–computer interaction. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer at Ona – formerly Gitpod – where he leads the engineering team behind the company’s cloud-native development platform. Chris joins the podcast with Kevin Ball to talk about Ona, the impact of coding with parallel agents, the future of IDEs, choosing agent-friendly languages, code review as a new bottleneck in the software development lifecycle, and much more.

Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Ona formerly Gitpod.

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 Turning Agent Autonomy into Productivity with Chris Weichel appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post Homebrew and macOS Package Management with Mike McQuaid appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.