Podcast Archives - Software Engineering Daily

Inside China’s Great Firewall with Jackson Sippe

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 researchers, developers, and policymakers alike. Jackson Sippe is a PhD researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder whose work focuses on uncovering how national-scale censorship systems operate. Jackson recently helped lead a groundbreaking study analyzing a previously undocumented GFW technique that quietly broke fully encrypted proxy protocols across China for more than a year. In this episode, Jackson joins Gregor Vand to discuss how the Great Firewall works at a technical level, the 2021–2023 blocking event, the popcount-based detection algorithm his team reverse-engineered, the cat-and-mouse ecosystem of censorship circumvention, and what these findings mean for the future of the open internet. 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: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Inside China’s Great Firewall with Jackson Sippe appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Optimizing Agent Behavior in Production with Gideon Mendels

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 around the properties of LLMs. Comet is a platform with Roots and MLOps, to the rapidly evolving world of agent-based systems by treating prompts, tools, and workflows as optimizable components that can be evaluated and improved over time. Gideon Mendels is the co -founder and CEO of Comet. He previously worked at Google on hate speech and deception detection, and he founded GroupWise, which trained and deployed NLP models processing billions of chats. In this episode, Gideon joins Kevin Ball to discuss how agent development sits between software engineering and ML, why eVals are the missing foundation for most AI teams, prompt optimization as a search problem, and the future for continuously improving agents in production. Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Comet. 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: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Optimizing Agent Behavior in Production with Gideon Mendels appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Gas Town, Beads, and the Rise of Agentic Development with Steve Yegge

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. Steve Yegge is a software engineer, writer, and industry veteran whose essays have shaped how many developers think about their work. Over the past year, Steve has been exploring the frontier of agentic software development, building tools like Beads and Gas Town to experiment with multi-agent coordination, shared memory, and AI-driven software workflows. In this episode, Steve joins Kevin Ball to discuss the evolution of AI coding from chat-based assistance to full agent orchestration, the technical and cognitive challenges of managing fleets of agents, how concepts like task graphs and Git-backed ledgers change the nature of work, and what these shifts mean for software teams, tooling, and the future of the industry. 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: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Gas Town, Beads, and the Rise of Agentic Development with Steve Yegge appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Python 3.14 with Łukasz Langa

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 Python Software Foundation, and he joins Sean Falconer to discuss the 3.14 release, the future of free threading, type system improvements, Python’s growing role in AI, and how the language continues to evolve while maintaining its commitment to backward compatibility. 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: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Python 3.14 with Łukasz Langa appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.

Airbnb’s Open-Source GraphQL Framework with Adam Miskiewicz

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 operational overhead while preserving performance and reliability. Viaduct is Airbnb’s open-source, data-oriented service mesh and GraphQL platform built around a single, highly connected central schema. It has played a major role in scaling Airbnb’s engineering organization. Adam Miskiewicz is a Principal Software Engineer at Airbnb and he worked on Viaduct. He joins the podcast with Gregor Vand to talk about how Viaduct originated inside Airbnb, the architectural principles that shaped it, the challenges of scaling GraphQL to millions of queries per second, and why the team decided to open-source the platform. They also discuss the future of backend development in an AI-driven world and how unified data layers may influence the next generation of engineering systems. 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: sponsor@softwareengineeringdaily.com The post Airbnb’s Open-Source GraphQL Framework with Adam Miskiewicz appeared first on Software Engineering Daily.