SED News: Corporate Spies, Postgres, and the Weird Life of Devs Right Now

Welcome back to SED News, a podcast series from Software Engineering Daily where hosts Gregor Vand and Sean Falconer break down the latest stories in software engineering, Silicon Valley, and wider tech world.

In this episode, Gregor and Sean unpack what’s going with Deel and Rippling, explore why Databricks and Snowflake are making big bets on Postgres, and reflect on how AI-powered tools like Cursor are reshaping what it means to be a developer today. They also surface highlights from Hacker News, including Claude’s evolving system prompt and a surprising history of transit cards in Japan and Hong Kong.

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.

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.

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