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 has spent more than 25 years working on FreeBSD as a developer, contributor, and consultant. In this episode, John joins Gregor Vand to discuss the origins of FreeBSD, how its governance model differs from other open-source projects, its role inside systems like Netflix’s CDN and the PlayStation 4, the challenges of maintaining a 30-year-old codebase, and much more.

Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

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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 most organizations.

The Extended Berkeley Packet Filter, or eBPF, is a Linux kernel technology that allows sandboxed programs to run safely inside the kernel without modifying kernel source code or loading kernel modules. Cilium is an open-source, cloud-native networking platform that’s built on eBPF, and provides, secures, and observes connectivity between workloads in Kubernetes and other distributed environments.

Bill Mulligan is a maintainer in the Cilium ecosystem and a member of the team at Isovalent, the company behind Cilium. He joins the show with Gregor Vand to discuss how eBPF works under the hood, why Cilium has become one of the most widely adopted Kubernetes networking projects, and how the future of cloud-native infrastructure is being reshaped by programmable kernels.

Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.

Please click here to see the transcript of this episode.

Sponsorship inquiries: [email protected]

The post Cilium, eBPF, and Modern Kubernetes Networking with Bill Mulligan appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 how games are played and experienced, and what makes his games stand out.

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 Games That Push Back with Bennett Foddy appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 spending too much time debating code style instead of building software. It offers a deterministic, opinionated formatter that helped normalize automation as part of everyday development.

James Long is a design and product engineer who has worked at Mozilla and Stripe, and he’s the creator of Prettier. He joins the show with Josh Goldberg to talk about the origins of Prettier, why formatting debates are so emotionally charged, the technical challenges of building formatters, the realities of maintaining popular open-source tools, and how the JavaScript tooling ecosystem continues to evolve.

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 Prettier and Opinionated Code Formatting with James Long appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 of the best games of 2025.

In this episode, Sam joins the show with Joe Nash to talk about developing Skate Story.

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 Skate Story with Sam Eng appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 fully managed RAG system built directly into the Gemini API. File Search abstracts away the retrieval pipeline, allowing developers to upload documents, code, and other text data, automatically generate embeddings, and query their knowledge base. We wanted to understand how the DeepMind team designed a general-purpose RAG system that maintains high retrieval quality.

Animesh Chatterji is a Software Engineer at Google DeepMind and Ivan Solovyev is a Product Manager at DeepMind, and they worked on File Search Tool. They joined the podcast with Sean Falconer to discuss the evolution of RAG, why simplicity and pricing transparency matter, how embedding models have improved retrieval quality, the tradeoffs between configurability and ease of use, and what’s next for multimodal retrieval across text, images, and beyond.

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 DeepMind’s RAG System with Animesh Chatterji and Ivan Solovyev appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 recreate entire environments, limiting interactivity and slowing feedback.

Marimo is an open-source, next-generation Python notebook designed to address these problems directly. Akshay Agrawal is the creator of Marimo and he previously worked at Google Brain. He joins the show with Kevin Ball to discuss the limitations of traditional notebooks, the design of reactive notebooks in Python, how marimo bridges research and production, and where notebooks fit in an increasingly agentic, AI-assisted development world.

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 Reinventing the Python Notebook with Akshay Agrawal appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 architectural decisions were made, and the sources of truth that exist outside of the code base. As teams adopt agentic tools, gaps or inconsistencies in context have emerged as a primary reason why software fails to meet production standards.

Unblocked is a startup focused on solving this context gap. Their context engine aggregates and reasons over organizational knowledge spread across source code, pull requests, documentation, chat systems, and production telemetry. By acting as a context engine for both developers and AI agents, Unblocked aims to improve AI code quality and review, reduce interruptions, accelerate onboarding, and enable safer, more effective agentic workflows.

Dennis Pilarinos is the Founder and CEO of Unblocked. Previously, he helped build Azure at Microsoft, worked at AWS, and co-founded BuddyBuild, which is a mobile CI platform acquired by Apple. Dennis joins Kevin Ball to discuss context engineering, reconciling conflicting sources nof truth, permission to wear AI systems, the shifting bottlenecks in the software development lifecycle, and what it means to be a software engineer in an increasingly agentic world.

Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Unblocked.

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 Organizational Context for AI Coding Agents with Dennis Pilarinos 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 the viral rise of OpenClaw and its founder’s move to OpenAI, OpenAI’s exploration of ads inside ChatGPT, and Alibaba’s push into agent-powered commerce during Lunar New Year. They also discuss Mistral’s acquisition of Koyeb to deepen its compute stack, the growing competition between ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and what these moves signal about monetization, infrastructure, and control in the AI arms race.

Gregor and Sean then dive deep into the rapid acceleration of agentic engineering. They examine how tools like Claude Code and Codex are compressing the idea-to-production cycle, what multi-agent orchestration means for software teams, whether the era of the “10x engineer” is ending, and how organizational structures may need to evolve as coding shifts from manual craft to supervised automation.

Finally, they highlight standout threads from Hacker News, including reverse engineering a 1990 DOS classic, a 3D reimagining of flight tracking data, old-school practical film effects using cloud tanks, and the privacy-focused GrapheneOS mobile operating system.

Gregor Vand is a security-focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at vand.hk or on LinkedIn.

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: OpenClaw Goes Viral, Mistral’s Compute Play, and the Agent Arms Race appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 of intent over long development sessions.

Kiro is an AI-powered IDE that’s built around a spec-driven development workflow. It’s focused on helping developers capture intent up front, translate it into concrete requirements and designs, and systematically validate implementations through tasks, testing, and guardrails. It aims to preserve the creativity of AI-assisted development while producing software that is ready for real-world use.

David Yanacek is a Senior Principal Engineer and a lead advisor on the Agentic AI team at AWS. Today, his work focuses on Kiro, frontier agents, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, and AWS’s operational agents. He joins the show with Kevin Ball to discuss the design of Kiro, how spec-driven development changes the way teams work with AI coding agents, and what the next generation of agentic software development might look like.

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 Amazon’s IDE for Spec-Driven Development with David Yanacek appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Enterprise IT systems have grown into sprawling, highly distributed environments spanning cloud infrastructure, applications, data platforms, and increasingly AI-driven workloads. Observability tools have made it easier to collect metrics, logs, and traces, but understanding why systems fail and responding quickly remains a persistent challenge. As complexity continues to rise, the industry is looking beyond dashboards and alerts toward agentic AI systems that can reason about operational data, reduce toil, and take action when things go wrong.

SolarWinds offers solutions to monitor, understand, and remediate issues across complex, distributed systems. The company began as a leader in network and infrastructure monitoring, and has evolved to support modern applications, cloud environments, containers, and AI workloads, with a growing focus on reducing operational toil.

Krishna Sai is the Chief Technology Officer at SolarWinds. He joins the show with Sean Falconer to discuss how SolarWinds is rethinking observability in the age of AI, what it means to design agentic systems for mission-critical environments, how AI-assisted programming is reshaping engineering workflows, and why the future of operations depends on building platforms where humans and autonomous agents work together.

Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by SolarWinds.

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 Engineering AI Systems for Autonomy and Resilience with Krishna Sai appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.