Episodes
Apache Iceberg is an open source high-performance format for huge data tables. Iceberg enables the use of SQL tables for big data, while making it possible for engines like Spark and Hive to safely work with the same tables, at the same time. Iceberg was started at Netflix by Ryan Blue and Dan Weeks, and
Published 03/07/24
Godot is a free, open-source game engine that’s growing rapidly in popularity. Ramatak is a new public benefit company founded by Godot engine veterans Hein-Pieter van Braam and Ariel Manzur. The goal of Ramatak is to help make Godot the number one choice for creating, deploying, and monetizing games on iOS and Android. Hein-Pieter joins
Published 03/06/24
NextFlow is a tool for managing scientific computation workflows. It’s increasingly popular for bioinformatics, computational biology, and other life science applications. Evan Floden is the Co-Founder and CEO of Seqera Labs which develops NextFlow. He joins the show today to talk about his background as a scientist and engineer, the modular design of NextFlow pipelines,
Published 03/05/24
Stately is a web-based drag and drop editor for collaboratively developing code, diagrams, and documentation. Laura Kalbag is the Developer Advocate at Stately and she joins the show today to talk about Stately, state machines, building good documentation, and more. Josh Goldberg is an independent full time open source developer in the TypeScript ecosystem. He
Published 02/29/24
The power of 3D graphics hardware and rendering technology is improving at an astonishing pace. To achieve high graphical fidelity, assets that compose 3D worlds must feature an ever-increasing level of detail. Andrew Price is the founder of Poliigon, which is an asset production studio and store. Andrew also runs the highly popular Blender Guru
Published 02/28/24
Antibodies are a type of protein molecule produced by the immune system. They recognize and attach to other molecules with remarkable precision. Typically antibodies target foreign objects, like viruses, to mark them for destruction. However, they can also be engineered to treat diseases like cancer, and they are one of the fastest growing classes of
Published 02/27/24
Portal is a 2007 game developed by Valve, where the player encounters puzzles that must be solved using the “portal gun”, a device that can create inter-spatial portals between surfaces. Portal 64 is an open-source re-write of Portal that can be run on original Nintendo 64 hardware. The game was developed by James Lambert and
Published 02/22/24
Waymo is an autonomous driving company that had its start as the Google Self-Driving Car Project. David Margines is a Director of Product Management at Waymo and he joins the podcast to talk about Waymo today, the sensing technologies underpinning their cars, the huge impact of AI on their systems in recent years, and more.
Published 02/21/24
Recursion is at the leading edge of applying AI and ML to drug development. The company exemplifies a new wave of “techbio” companies, that tightly couple compute and robotics with biology and chemistry. The task of decoding biology requires vast amounts of biological data and innovative strategies to make use of that data. It also
Published 02/20/24
Producing 3D films, games and simulations is a complex process, often involving multiple teams and tools. At Pixar, pipeline engineers needed to write lots of glue code to integrate different workflows and file formats, which was a big challenge, and led them to create the  Universal Scene Description, or OpenUSD. OpenUSD implements abstract data models
Published 02/15/24
SimpleWebAuthn is an open source TypeScript-centric pair of libraries – frontend and backend – that make it easier for devs to implement WebAuthn on the web. Matthew Miller started the project in 2019 and it has grown in tandem with the popularization of WebAuthn. He joins the podcast today to talk about the history of
Published 02/14/24
There is a revolution unfolding in biotech. The confluence of new biological methods like CRISPR, virtually unlimited computational capacity, and machine learning has fundamentally transformed our ability to engineer biology for wide-ranging applications. Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, is a venture capital firm that was founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Vijay Pande is a
Published 02/13/24
oneAPI is an open standard for a unified API to be used across different computing accelerator architectures. This including GPUs, AI accelerators, and FPGAs. The goal of oneAPI is to eliminate the need for developers to maintain separate code bases, multiple programming languages, tools, and workflows for each architecture. James Reinders is an engineer at
Published 02/08/24
A game engine is a system used to build and run games. Game engines let the programmer work at a high level of abstraction by providing interfaces for graphics, physics, and scripting. Godot is an open source and free to use game engine, which makes it unusual. Its first release was in 2014 and its
Published 02/07/24
Starburst is a data lake analytics platform. It’s designed to help users work with structured data at scale, and is built on the open source platform, Trino. Adam Ferrari is the SVP of Engineering at Starburst. He joins the show to talk about Starburst, data engineering, and what it takes to build a data lake.
Published 02/06/24
Chess.com started in 2007 and grew steadily in the years following. The platform exploded in popularity during the pandemic, to the point that their servers struggled with the traffic. It was a great problem to have. Chess.com was instrumental in helping to elevate chess to its current height of mainstream popularity. But how did Chess.com
Published 02/01/24
Mastodon is an open source, decentralized social network. Eugen Rochko started building Mastodon in response to his dissatisfaction with centralized social networks like Facebook and Twitter. In the Mastodon model, users can run their own nodes, and other users can connect to them. You can follow users whose accounts reside in other nodes. Eugen joins
Published 01/31/24
Vercel provides a cloud platform to rapidly deploy web projects, and they develop the highly successful Next.js framework. The company recently made headlines when they announced v0 which is a generative AI tool to create React code from text prompts. The generated code uses open-source tools like Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui. Lee Robinson is the
Published 01/30/24
Blender is a free and open-source 3D graphics tool that was initially released in 1994 and just hit version 4.0. It’s one of the triumphs of open-source software development and is used for creating animated films, art, 3D games, and more. Sybren Stüvel is a Senior Software Developer at Blender. He joins the show today
Published 01/25/24
Netflix needs no introduction and is renowned for its engineering talent. Shaundai Person is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix, blogger, and conference speaker. She joins the show today to talk about getting her position at Netflix, developing internal tools at the company, the value of TypeScript, what makes a great software engineering manager, and
Published 01/24/24
Algolia is a platform that provides search as a service. The company was founded in 2012, was part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2014 class, and has become highly popular for integrating modern search functionality into web-facing services. Sean Mullaney is the CTO of Algolia and has worked at Google X, Stripe, and Zolando. He joins
Published 01/23/24
Software security is a critical issue for everyone, but it takes on an entirely different dimension when your life, or the lives of others, depend on it. Consider the security needs of an environmentalist whistle blower inside a chemical corporation, or a human rights activist in Iran. Hyper-secure and fully anonymous operating systems are vital
Published 01/18/24
Security issues can often be traced back to small misconfigurations in a database or cloud service, or an innocent code commit. OpsHelm is a security platform that’s oriented around identifying and fixing these issues. Kyle McCullough is the Co-Founder and CTO of OpsHelm and he has deep experience in backend and data engineering. He joins
Published 01/17/24
Jodie Burchell is the Data Science Developer Advocate at JetBrains, which makes integrated development environments or, IDEs, for many major languages. After observing the rapid growth of the AI coding assistant landscape, the company recently announced integration of an AI assistant into their IDEs. Jodie joins the show today to talk about why the company
Published 01/16/24
This episode of Software Engineering Daily is part of our on-site coverage of AWS re:Invent 2023, which took place from November 27th through December 1st in Las Vegas. In today’s interview, host Jordi Mon Companys speaks with Mike Miller who is the Director of AWS AI Devices. Jordi Mon Companys is a product manager and
Published 01/12/24