Technical interviews about software topics.
Podcast – Software Engineering Daily

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 The post Developing Multiplayer Games in Godot 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 Apple‘s uncertain path beyond the iPhone. They also discuss Google‘s agentic pivot at Google I/O, a surge in DuckDuckGo The post SED News: Apple’s AI Problem, The Real Business Model of AI, and Token Cost Reckoning appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 The post Web Native Game Development appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 The post The Hardware Bottleneck AI Can’t Fix appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 The post Autonomous Drone Delivery at Scale appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 The post The European Startup Scene appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 The post React Native at Scale appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 The post Formal Methods as Agent Guardrails appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 The post Open Source Sustainability appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 The post Vespa AI and Surpassing the Limits of Vector Search 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 Anthropic's controversial “Mythos” security model and what it means for vulnerability discovery at scale. They also discuss recent layoffs The post SED News: Anthropic's Mythos, Supply Chain Hacks, and the AI Spending Surge appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 The post SmartBear and Multi-Agent QA appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 The post The Ethics of Autonomous Weapons Systems appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 The post Open-Weight AI Models appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 post Hype and Reality of the AI Coding Shift appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 The post Unlocking the Data Layer for Agentic AI with Simba Khadder appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 The post Agentic Mesh with Eric Broda appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 The post New Relic and Agentic DevOps with Nic Benders appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 The post Mobile App Security with Ryan Lloyd appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 The post FastMCP with Adam Azzam and Jeremiah Lowin 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 resurgence of ARM and CPUs as serious compute infrastructure for running local AI agents, a supply chain attack The post SED News: OpenCode, AI Code vs. Shipped Code, and the LiteLLM Breach appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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 The post FreeBSD with John Baldwin appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

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

China’s Great Firewall is often spoken about but is rarely understood. It is one of the most sophisticated and opaque censorship systems on the planet, and it shapes how over a billion people interact with the global internet, influences the design of privacy and proxy tools worldwide, and continues to evolve in ways that challenge The post Inside China's Great Firewall with Jackson Sippe appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

LLM -powered systems continue to move steadily into production, but this process is presenting teams with challenges that traditional software practices don’t commonly encounter. Models and agents are non-deterministic systems, which makes it difficult to test changes, reason about failures, and confidently ship updates. This has created the need for new evaluation tooling designed specifically The post Optimizing Agent Behavior in Production with Gideon Mendels appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

AI-assisted programming has moved far beyond autocomplete. Large language models are now capable of editing entire codebases, coordinating long-running tasks, and collaborating across multiple systems. As these capabilities mature, the core challenge in software development is shifting away from writing code and toward orchestrating work, managing context, and maintaining shared understanding across fleets of agents. The post Gas Town, Beads, and the Rise of Agentic Development with Steve Yegge appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Python 3.14 is here and continues Python's evolution toward greater performance, scalability, and usability. The new release formally supports free-threaded, no-GIL mode, introduces template string literals, and implements deferred evaluation of type annotations. It also includes new debugging and profiling tools, along with many other features. Łukasz Langa is the CPython Developer in Residence at The post Python 3.14 with Łukasz Langa appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Engineering teams often build microservices as their systems grow, but over time this can lead to a fragmented ecosystem with scattered data access patterns, duplicated business logic, and an uneven developer experience. A unified data graph with a consistent execution layer helps address these challenges by centralizing schema, simplifying how teams compose functionality, and reducing The post Airbnb's Open-Source GraphQL Framework with Adam Miskiewicz 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 Starlink's rapid rollout of free, high-speed in-flight internet, Tesla's move to deprecate Autopilot in favor of full self-driving, and The post SED News: Apple Bets on Gemini, Google's AI Advantage, and the Talent Arms Race appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

AI coding agents are rapidly reshaping how software is built, reviewed, and maintained. As large language model capabilities continue to increase, the bottleneck in software development is shifting away from code generation toward planning, review, deployment, and coordination. This shift is driving a new class of agentic systems that operate inside constrained environments, reason over The post OpenAI and Codex with Thibault Sottiaux and Ed Bayes appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Engineering teams around the world are building AI-focused applications or integrating AI features into existing products. The AI development ecosystem is maturing, which is accelerating how quickly these applications can be prototyped. However, taking AI applications to production remains a notoriously complex process. Modern AI stacks demand LLMs, embeddings, vector search, observability, new caching layers, The post Production-Grade AI Systems with Fred Roma appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Package management sits at the foundation of modern software development, quietly powering nearly every software project in the world. Tools like npm and Yarn have long been the core of the JavaScript ecosystem, enabling developers to install, update, and share code with ease. But as projects grow larger and the ecosystem more complex, this older The post Next-Gen JavaScript Package Management with Ruy Adorno and Darcy Clarke appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

WebAssembly, or WASM, has grown from a low-level compilation target for C and C++ into one of the most influential technologies in modern computing. It now powers browser applications, edge compute platforms, embedded systems, and a growing ecosystem of languages targeting a portable and secure execution model. Andreas Rossberg is a programming languages researcher and The post WebAssembly 3.0 with Andreas Rossberg appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Surveillance technology is advancing faster than the laws meant to govern it. Across the United States, police departments are deploying automated license plate readers, facial recognition tools, and predictive systems that quietly log the daily movements of millions of people. These tools promise efficiency and safety, but critics argue that they represent a form of The post America Under Surveillance with Michael Soyfer appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Modern software development is evolving rapidly. New tools, processes, and AI-powered systems are reshaping how teams collaborate and how engineers find satisfaction in their craft. At the same time, developer experience has become a critical function for helping organizations balance agility, security, and scale while maintaining the creativity and flow that make top tier engineering The post Developer Experience at Capital One with Catherine McGarvey appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Modern software development is more complex than ever. Teams work across different operating systems, chip architectures, and cloud environments, each with its own dependency quirks and version mismatches. Ensuring that code runs reproducibly across these environments has become a major challenge that's made even harder by growing concerns around software supply chain security. Nix is The post Flox, Nix, and Reproducible Software Systems with Michael Stahnke appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Visual Studio Code has become one of the most influential tools in modern software development. The open-source code editor has evolved into a platform used by millions of developers around the world, and it has reshaped expectations for what a modern development environment can be through its intuitive UX, rich extension marketplace, and deep integration The post VS Code and Agentic Development with Kai Maetzel appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Blender Studio is the creative arm of the Blender Foundation and it's dedicated to producing films, games, and other projects that showcase the full potential of Blender. The studio functions as both an art and technology lab and pushes the boundaries of 3D animation through open productions. All of their assets, production files, and workflows The post Blender and Godot in Game Development with Simon Thommes appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

JavaScript has grown far beyond the browser. It now powers millions of backend systems, APIs, and cloud services through Node.js, which is one of the most widely deployed runtimes on the planet. Keeping such a critical piece of infrastructure fast, secure, and stable is a massive engineering challenge, and the work behind it is often The post Node.js in 2026 with Rafael Gonzaga appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Zachtronics is a legendary independent game studio known for creating intricate, engineering-focused puzzle games that merge logic, creativity, and code. The studio was founded by Zach Barth in 2011, and it has become a cult favorite among programmers and tinkerers alike with titles such as SpaceChem, Infinifactory, TIS-100, and Shenzhen I/O. Most recently, Zachtronics released The post Designing Innovative Puzzle Games with Zach Barth appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Rivals of Aether and Rivals of Aether II are indie fighting games that combine fast-paced platform combat with elemental-themed characters. The game takes inspiration from Super Smash Bros. and emphasizes skillful movement, tight controls, and competitive balance, making it popular in the fighting game community. Dan Fornace is a game director and designer at Aether The post Rivals of Aether with Dan Fornace appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Aviation cybersecurity is becoming an urgent priority as modern aircraft increasingly rely on complex digital systems for navigation, communication, and engine performance. These systems were once isolated but are now interconnected and vulnerable to cyber threats ranging from GPS spoofing to ransomware attacks on airline infrastructure. As nation-state actors and criminal groups grow more sophisticated, The post Aviation Cybersecurity with Serge Christiaans appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.