Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers - Archive

Sahaj Garg, co-founder and CTO of Wispr, a voice-to-text AI that turns speech into polished writing, talks with host Amey Ambade about designing systems for the ambiguity that's inherent in human input (text, voice, multimodal). Sahaj focuses on concrete architectural and training strategies for building robust AI systems. This episode examines the problem of ambiguity, where it shows up, building robust systems, personalization, communicating uncertainty, and evaluation. The conversation starts by exploring the difference between inherent and reducible ambiguity, major categories of ambiguity including lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic, and the additional

Costa Alexoglou, co-founder of the open source Hopp pair-programming application, talks with host Brijesh Ammanath about remote pair programming. They start with a quick introduction to pair programming and its importance to software development before discussing the various problems with the current toolset available and the challenges that tool developers face for enabling pair programming. They consider the key features necessary for a good pair-programming tool, and then Costa describes the journey of building Hopp and the challenges faced while building it.

Héctor Ramón Jiménez, creator of iced, an Elm-inspired, cross-platform GUI toolkit for Rust, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about building a GUI library in Rust. Héctor discusses why he created iced, what was needed, the process required to paint on the screen across different operating systems, how multi-operating systems are handled, and what the iced testing ecosystem is like. This episode explores the Elm architecture, how iced compares to other frameworks, what the core components of iced are, Elements, asynchronous functions, state, threads, 3d rendering, headless mode testing, end-to-end

Dan Lorenc, co-founder and CEO of Chainguard, joins host Priyanka Raghavan to explore Sigstore and its role in securing the software supply chain. They unpack the challenges of supply chain security, including verifying the origin and integrity of software artifacts, and explain the problems Sigstore is designed to solve. The conversation goes under the hood to examine how Sigstore works, covering key components such as code signing, verification, the certificate authority model, and transparency logs—often compared conceptually to blockchain for their auditability. The episode also highlights real-world adoption, community resources for

Scott Hanselman, the VP of Developer Community at Microsoft, speaks with host Jeremy Jung about AI-assisted coding. They start by considering how the tools are a progression from syntax highlighting and autocomplete. Scott describes the ambiguity and non-determinism of agentic loops, why vague high-level prompts usually don't give good results, and the need to express intent and steer the models. He explains how knowing fundamentals helps you create better plans and know what to ask the models, and how to treat agents differently based on your knowledge level. He discusses his

Marc Brooker, VP and Distinguished Engineer at AWS, joins host Kanchan Shringi to explore specification-driven development as a scalable alternative to prompt-by-prompt "vibe coding" in AI-assisted software engineering. Marc explains how accelerating code generation shifts the bottleneck to requirements, design, testing, and validation, making explicit specifications the central artifact for maintaining quality and velocity over time. He describes how specifications can guide both code generation and automated testing, including property-based testing, enabling teams to catch regressions earlier and reason about behavior without relying on line-by-line code review. The conversation examines how

Bryan Cantrill, the co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer company, speaks with host Jeremy Jung about challenges in deploying hardware on-premises at scale. They discuss the difficulty of building up Samsung data centers with off-the-shelf hardware, how vendors silently replace components that cause performance problems, and why AWS and Google build their own hardware. Bryan describes the security vulnerabilities and poor practices built into many baseboard management controllers, the purpose of a control plane, and his experiences building one in NodeJS while struggling with the runtime's future during his time at

Jens Gustedt, author of Modern C, senior scientist at the French National Institute for Computer Science and Control (INRIA), deputy director of the ICube lab, and former co-editor of the ISO C standard, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about the past 5 years in C, C2Y, and C23. They discuss what has happened in the C world since we last spoke 5 years ago, including how the latest C standard is going and what to expect. Jens discusses how the latest changes in the Modern C book apply to

In this episode, Subhajit Paul joins SE Radio host Kanchan Shringi to discuss how enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems work in practice and where machine learning and generative AI are beginning to fit into real-world ERP environments. Subhajit grounds the conversation in ERP fundamentals, explaining core business flows such as order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and plan-to-produce, and why ERP systems are central to running large enterprises. He then walks through the realities of ERP implementation, sharing examples of both successful and failed projects and highlighting common challenges around testing, process coverage, integrations, and

Yechezkel "Chez" Rabinovich, CTO and co-founder at Groundcover, joins SE Radio host Brijesh Ammanath to discuss the key challenges in migrating observability toolsets. The episode starts with a look at why customers might seek to migrate their existing Observability stack, and then Chez explains some approaches and techniques for doing so. The discussion turns to OpenTelemetry, including what it is and how Groundcover helps with the migration of dashboards, monitors, pipelines, and integrations that are proprietary to vendor products. Chez describes methods for validating a successful migration, as well as metrics

Murat Erder, CTO for Financial Services at Valtech in Europe, and Eoin Woods, independent consultant in the field of software architecture, join host Giovanni Asproni to talk about Continuous Architecture—an approach to software design where architectural decisions are made and refined continuously throughout the lifecycle of a system, instead of up front in a big design phase. The show starts with a definition of Continuous Architecture and a description of the six principles underpinning it. Following that is an explanation of the main reasons and advantages of this approach, which finishes

Sriram Panyam returns to the show to discuss the system design interview (SDI) with host Robert Blumen. This challenging part of the hiring process is included in the interview loop for many jobs across tech, including management and for all levels from entry to senior. The conversation starts with a look at what the SDI is, who will face it, and how critical this interview is for hiring and leveling. Sriram shares some common system design questions and what the interviewers are generally looking for, including stated versus unstated requirements and

In this episode, Sahaj Garg, CTO of wispr.ai, joins SE Radio host Robert Blumen to talk about the challenges of building low-latency AI applications. They discuss latency's effect on consumer behavior as well as interactive applications. The conversation explores how to measure latency and how scale impacts it. Then Sahaj and Robert shift to themes around AI, including whether "AI" means LLMs or something broader, as they look at latency requirements and challenges around subtypes of AI applications. The final part of the episode explores techniques for managing latency in AI:

Derick Schaefer, author of CLI: A Practical Guide to Creating Modern Command-Line Interfaces, talks with host Robert Blumen about command-line interfaces old and new. Starting with a short review of the origin of commands in the early unix systems, they trace the evolution of commands into modern CLIs. Following the historic rise, fall, and re-emergence of CLIs, they consider innovative examples such as git, github, WordPress, and warp. Schaefer clarifies whether commands are the same as CLIs and then discusses a range of topics, including implementation languages, packages in the golang

Max Geurnsey III and Luniel de Beer, co-authors of the book Ready: Why Most Software Projects Fail and How to Fix It, discuss the concept of readiness in software engineering with host Brijesh Ammanath. Although Agile workflows and technical practices help delivery, many software efforts still struggle to achieve desired outcomes. Rework, shifting requirements, delays, defects, and mounting technical debt can plague software delivery and impede or altogether halt progress toward goals. The problem is often that implementation begins prematurely, before the team is properly set up for success. A strict

Mojtaba Sarooghi, a Distinguished Product Architect at Queue-it, speaks with host Jeremy Jung about virtual waiting rooms for high-traffic events such as concerts and limited-quantity product releases. They explore using a virtual queue to prevent overloading systems, how most traffic is from bots, using edge workers to reduce requests to the customer's origin servers, and strategies for detecting bots in cooperation with vendors. Mojtaba discusses using AWS services like Elastic Load Balancing, DynamoDB, and Simple Notification Service, and explains why DynamoDB's eventual consistency is a good fit for their domain. To

In this episode, Benjamin Brial, CEO and co-founder of Cycloid, speaks with host Sriram Panyam about internal developer platforms (IDPs) and internal developer portals. The conversation explores how these platforms address the growing challenges of DevOps scalability, multi-cloud complexity, and cloud waste, all of which organizations face as they grow. Benjamin begins by framing the core problems that IDPs solve: DevOps struggling to scale beyond small teams, the complexity of managing hybrid environments across on-premises, public cloud, and private cloud infrastructure, and the significant issue of cloud waste (averaging 35-45% according

In this episode of Software Engineering Radio, Srujana Merugu, an AI researcher with decades of experience, speaks with host Priyanka Raghavan about building LLM-based applications. The discussion begins by clarifying essential concepts like generative vs. predictive AI, pre-training vs. fine-tuning, and the transformer architecture that powers modern LLMs. Srujana explains diffusion models and vision transformers, highlighting how multimodal AI is reshaping content creation. The conversation then moves to practical aspects—where LLMs make sense, where they don't, and a decision framework for evaluating use cases. They explore common application patterns such as

Philip Kiely, software developer relations lead at Baseten, speaks with host Jeff Doolittle about multi-agent AI, emphasizing how to build AI-native software beyond simple ChatGPT wrappers. Kiely advocates for composing multiple models and agents that take action to achieve complex user goals, rather than just producing information. He explains the transition from off-the-shelf models to custom solutions, driven by needs for domain-specific quality, latency improvements, and economic sustainability, which introduces the engineering challenge of inference engineering. Kiely stresses that AI engineering is primarily software engineering with new challenges, requiring robust observability

Flavia Saldanha, a consulting data engineer, joins host Kanchan Shringi to discuss the evolution of data engineering from ETL (extract, transform, load) and data lakes to modern lakehouse architectures enriched with vector databases and embeddings. Flavia explains the industry's shift from treating data as a service to treating it as a product, emphasizing ownership, trust, and business context as critical for AI-readiness. She describes how unified pipelines now serve both business intelligence and AI use cases, combining structured and unstructured data while ensuring semantic enrichment and a single source of truth.

Dave Thomas, author of The Pragmatic Programmer, The Manifesto for Agile Software Development, Programming Ruby, Agile Web Development with Rails, Programming Elixir, Simplicity, and co-founder of the Pragmatic Bookshelf, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about building infrastructure for eBooks. They discuss what an eBook is, the various formats, what infrastructure is needed to build them, how an author writes an book, the history of the Pragmatic Bookshelf, how they have evolved, how to handle links within eBooks, why humans are so important in the writing process, and why AI

Jennings Anderson, a Software Engineer with Meta Platforms, and Amy Rose, the Chief Technology Officer at Overture Maps Foundation, speak with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the Overture Maps project, which creates reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data. After exploring the foundations of geospatial information systems, Gregory and his guests dive deep into the implementation of Overture Maps through features like the Global Entity Reference System (GERS). In addition to discussing the organizational structure of the Overture Maps Foundation and the need for a unified database of geospatial data, Jennings

Mark Williamson, CTO of Undo, joins host Priyanka Raghavan to discuss AI-assisted debugging. The conversation is structured around three main objectives: understanding how AI can serve as a debugging assistant; examining AI-powered debugging tools; exploring whether AI debuggers can independently find and fix bugs. Mark highlights how AI can support debugging with its ability to analyze vast amounts of data, narrow down issues, and even generate tests. From there, the discussion turns to AI debugging tools, with a particular look at ChatDBG's strengths and limitations, with a peek at time travel

Sourabh Satish, CTO and co-founder of Pangea, speaks with SE Radio's Brijesh Ammanath about prompt injection. Sourabh begins with the basic concepts underlying prompt injection and the key risks it introduces. From there, they take a deep dive into the OWASP Top 10 security concerns for LLMs, and Sourabh explains why prompt injection is the top risk in this list. He describes the $10K Prompt Injection challenge that Pangea ran, and explains the key learnings from the challenge. The episode finishes with discussion of specific prompt-injection techniques and the security guardrails

Kacper Łukawski, a Senior Developer Advocate at Qdrant, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the Qdrant vector database and similarity search engine. After introducing vector databases and the foundational concepts undergirding similarity search, they dive deep into the Rust-based implementation of Qdrant. Along with comparing and contrasting different vector databases, they also explore the best practices for the performance evaluation of systems like Qdrant. Kacper and Gregory also discuss topics such as the steps for using Python to build an AI-powered application that uses Qdrant. Brought to you by IEEE

Florian Gilcher, co-founder of Ferrous Systems and the Rust Foundation, speaks with host Giovanni Asproni about the application of Rust in mission- and safety-critical systems. The discussion starts with a brief overview of such systems, and an introduction to Rust, emphasizing aspects that make it well-suited for critical environments. Florian and Giovanni then discuss how Rust compares to C and C++ — two widely used languages in this sector. They proceed to outline important factors that companies should consider when assessing whether to move from C or other languages to Rust.

Amey Desai, the Chief Technology Officer at Nexla, speaks with host Sriram Panyam about the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and its role in enabling agentic AI systems. The conversation begins with the fundamental challenge that led to MCP's creation: the proliferation of "spaghetti code" and custom integrations as developers tried to connect LLMs to various data sources and APIs. Before MCP, engineers were writing extensive scaffolding code using frameworks such as LangChain and Haystack, spending more time on integration challenges than solving actual business problems. Desai illustrates this with concrete examples,

Daniel Stenberg, Swedish Internet protocol expert and founder and lead developer of the Curl project, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about removing Rust from Curl. They discuss why Hyper was removed from curl, why the last five percent of making it a success was difficult, what the project gained from the 5-year attempt to tackle bringing Rust into a C project, lessons learned for next time, why user support is critical, and the positive long-lasting impact this attempt had. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software

Elizabeth Figura, a Wine Developer at CodeWeavers, speaks with SE Radio host Jeremy Jung about the Wine compatibility layer and the Proton distribution. They discuss a wide range of details including system calls, what people run with Wine, how games are built differently, conformance and regression testing, native performance, emulating a CPU vs emulating system calls, the role of the Proton downstream distribution, improving Wine compatibility by patching the Linux kernel and other related projects, Wine's history and sustainment, the Crossover commercial distribution, porting games without source code, loading executables and

François Daoust, W3C staff member and co-chair of the Web Developer Experience Community Group, discusses the origins of the W3C, the browser standardization process, and how it relates to other organizations like TC39, WHATWG, and IETF. This episode covers a lot of ground, including funding through memberships, royalty-free patent access for implementations, why implementations are built in parallel with the specifications, why requestVideoFrameCallback doesn't have a formal specification, balancing functionality with privacy, working group participants, and how certain organizations have more power. François explains why the W3C hasn't specified a video

In this episode, Will Wilson, CEO and co-founder of Antithesis, explores Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST) with host Sriram Panyam. Wilson was part of the pioneering team at FoundationDB that developed this revolutionary testing approach, which was later acquired by Apple in 2015. After seeing that even sophisticated organizations lacked robust testing for distributed systems, Wilson co-founded Antithesis in 2018 to make DST commercially available. Deterministic simulation testing runs software in a fully controlled, simulated environment in which all sources of non-determinism are eliminated or controlled. Unlike traditional testing or chaos engineering,

Daniel Deogun and Dan Bergh Johnsson -- two of the co-authors of the book, Secure by Design -- discuss the intersection of good software design and security with host Sam Taggart. They describe how following certain software design principles can help developers create secure software without needing to become security experts. They talked about how this is the continuation of developers taking on more responsibilities: Agile asked developers to become responsible for testing their code. DevOps asked developers to work together with operations in deploying their code. Secure by Design asks

Artie Shevchenko, author of Code Health Guardian, speaks with host Jeff Doolittle about the crucial role of human programmers in the AI era, emphasizing that humans must excel at managing code complexity. Shevchenko discusses these concepts and key takeaways from his book, including the three problems caused by complexity: change amplification, cognitive load, and the most severe, unknown unknowns. He suggests that maintaining code health should be viewed pragmatically as a productivity question, requiring an ownership mentality and product focus to balance short-term delivery with long-term maintainability. The episode also covers

Duncan McGregor and Nat Pryce, co-authors of Java to Kotlin: Refactoring Guidebook, speak with host Giovanni Asproni about their hands-on experiences migrating Java codebases. The episode starts by highlighting Kotlin's seamless interoperability with Java, allowing teams to incrementally adopt Kotlin without disrupting existing Java code. Duncan and Nat then describe some of the benefits of using Kotlin — including stronger type safety, non-nullable types, and better support for immutability — and some of the gotchas when refactoring from Java to Kotlin due to the different idioms supported by the two languages.

Qian Li of DBOS, a durable execution platform born from research by the creators of Postgres and Spark, speaks with host Kanchan Shringi about building durable, observable, and scalable software systems, and why that matters for modern applications. They discuss database-backed program state, workflow orchestration, real-world AI use cases, and comparisons with other workflow technologies. Li explains how DBOS persists not just application data but also program execution state in Postgres to enable automatic recovery and exactly-once execution. She outlines how DBOS uses workflow and step annotations to build deterministic, fault-tolerant

Luke Hinds, CTO of Stacklok and creator of Sigstore, speaks with SE Radio's Brijesh Ammanath about the privacy and security concerns of using AI coding agents. They discuss how the increased use of AI coding assistants has improved programmer productivity but has also introduced certain key risks. In the area of secrets management, for example, there is the risk of secrets being passed to LLMs. Coding assistants can also introduce dependency-management risks that can be exploited by malicious actors. Luke recommends several tools and behaviors that programmers can adopt to ensure

Wesley Beary of Anchor speaks with host Sam Taggart about designing APIs with a particular emphasis on user experience. Wesley discusses what it means to be an "API connoisseur"— paying attention to what makes the APIs we consume enjoyable or frustrating and then taking those lessons and using them when we design our own APIs. Wesley and Sam also explore the many challenges developers face when designing APIs, such as coming up with good abstractions, testing, getting user feedback, documentation, security, and versioning. They address both CLI and web APIs. This

Chris Love, co-author of the book Core Kubernetes, joins host Robert Blumen for a conversation about kubernetes security. Chris identifies the node layer, secrets management, the network layer, contains, and pods as the most critical areas to be addressed. The conversation explores a range of topics, including when to accept defaults and when to override; differences between self-managed clusters and cloud-service provider-managed clusters; and what can go wrong at each layer -- and how to address these issues. They further discuss managing the node layer; network security best practices; kubernetes secrets

Jacob Visovatti and Conner Goodrum of Deepgram speak with host Kanchan Shringi about testing ML models for enterprise use and why it's critical for product reliability and quality. They discuss the challenges of testing machine learning models in enterprise environments, especially in foundational AI contexts. The conversation particularly highlights the differences in testing needs between companies that build ML models from scratch and those that rely on existing infrastructure. Jacob and Conner describe how testing is more complex in ML systems due to unstructured inputs, varied data distribution, and real-time use

Samuel Colvin, the CEO and founder of Pydantic, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the ecosystem of Pydantic's Python frameworks, including Pydantic, Pydantic AI, and Pydantic Logfire. Along with discussing the design, implementation, and use of these frameworks, they dive into the refactoring of Pydantic and the follow-on performance improvements. They also explore ways in which Python programmers can use these three frameworks to build, test, evaluate, and monitor their own applications that interact with both local and cloud-based large language models. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and

Brian Demers, Developer Advocate at Gradle, speaks with host Giovanni Asproni about the importance of having observability in the toolchain. Such information about build times, compiler warnings, test executions, and any other system used to build the production code can help to reduce defects, increase productivity, and improve the developer experience. During the conversation they touch upon what is possible with today's tools; the impact on productivity and developer experience; and the impact, both in terms of risks and opportunities, introduced by the use of artificial intelligence. Brought to you by

Vilhelm von Ehrenheim, co-founder and chief AI officer of QA.tech, speaks with SE Radio's Brijesh Ammanath about autonomous testing. The discussion starts by covering the fundamentals, and how testing has evolved from manual to automated to now autonomous. Vilhelm then deep dives into the details of autonomous testing and the role of agents in autonomous testing. They consider the challenges in adopting autonomous testing, and Wilhelm describes the experiences of some clients who have made the transition. Toward the end of the show, Vilhelm describes the impact of autonomous testing on

In this episode of Software Engineering Radio, Abhinav Kimothi sits down with host Priyanka Raghavan to explore retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), drawing insights from Abhinav's book, A Simple Guide to Retrieval-Augmented Generation. The conversation begins with an introduction to key concepts, including large language models (LLMs), context windows, RAG, hallucinations, and real-world use cases. They then delve into the essential components and design considerations for building a RAG-enabled system, covering topics such as retrievers, prompt augmentation, indexing pipelines, retrieval strategies, and the generation process. The discussion also touches on critical aspects like

Luca Palmieri, author of Zero to Production in Rust and Principal Engineering Consultant at MainMatter, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about Rust in production. They discuss what production Rust means, how to get Rust code into production, specific Rust issues to think about when getting an application into production, what Rust profiles are, expected performance, telemetry options, error handling and what parts of Rust to use and avoid. Palmieri discusses docker containers, tracing, robust Rust error handling, how performant Rust is in the real world, p50, p99, docker build

In this episode, SE Radio host Sriram Panyam explores HTMX with its creator, Carson Gross, who is also creator of Hyperscript, the mind behind the Grug Brained Developer, a professor of software engineering at Montana State University, and co-author of Hypermedia Systems. HTMX is a modern JavaScript library that allows developers to access AJAX, WebSockets, CSS Transitions, and Server-Sent Events directly in HTML using attributes. It represents a return to hypermedia-driven application architecture while supporting modern user experiences. The episode starts with a look at the current complexity in web development

Matthias Endler, Rust developer, open-source maintainer, and consultant through his company Corrode, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about prototyping in Rust. They discuss prototyping and why Rust is excellent for prototyping, and Matthias recommends a workflow for it, including what parts of Rust to use, and what parts to avoid at this stage. He describes the key components that Rust provides to help us validate ideas via prototypes, as well as tips and tricks to reach for. In addition, the conversation explores type inference, unwrap(), expect(), anyhow crate, bacon

Will McGugan, the CEO and founder of Textualize, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about how to use packages such as Rich and Textual to build text-based user interfaces (TUIs) and command-line interfaces (CLIs) in Python. Along with discussing the design idioms that enable developers to create TUIs in Python, they consider practical strategies for efficiently rendering the components of a TUI. They also explore the subtle idiosyncrasies of implementing performant TUI frameworks like Textual and Rich and introduce the steps that developers would take to create their own CLI or

Steve Summers speaks with SE Radio host Sam Taggart about securing test and measurement equipment. They start by differentiating between IT and OT (Operational Technology) and then discuss the threat model and how security has evolved in the OT space, including a look some of the key drivers. They then examine security challenges associated with a specific device called a CompactRIO, which combines a Linux real-time CPU with a field programmable gate array (FPGA) and some analog hardware for capturing signals and interacting with real-world devices. Brought to you by IEEE

Ashley Peacock, the author of Serverless Apps on Cloudflare, speaks with host Jeremy Jung about content delivery networks (CDNs). Along the way, they examine dependency injection with bindings, local development, serverless, cold starts, the V8 runtime, AWS Lambda vs Cloudflare workers, WebAssembly limitations, and core services such as R2, D1, KV, and Pages. Ashley suggests why most users use an external database and discusses eventually consistent data stores, S3-to-R2 migration strategies, queues and workflows, inter-service communication, durable objects, and describes some example projects. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and

Eran Yahav, Professor of Computer Science at Technion, Israel, and CTO of Tabnine, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the Tabnine AI coding assistant. They discuss how the design and implementation allows software engineers to use code completion and perform tasks such as automated code review while still maintaining developer privacy. Eran and Gregory also explore how research in the field of natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) has informed the features in Tabnine. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Malcolm Matalka, founder of Terrateam, joins host Giovanni Asproni to talk about the reasoning behind choosing a not-so-widespread language (OCaml) and (almost) totally avoiding frameworks for the development of Terrateam. While discussing the reasons for choosing this specific programming language and the advantages and disadvantages of using external frameworks, they also consider a range of related topics, including static vs. dynamic typing, the use of monorepos, and the advantages of choosing a single language that can be used both for web front ends and server back ends. The episode ends with

Emre Baran, CEO and co-founder of Cerbos, and Alex Olivier, CPO and co-founder, join SE Radio host Priyanka Raghavan to explore "stateless decoupled authorization frameworks. The discussion begins with an introduction to key terms, including authorization, authorization models, and decoupled frameworks. They dive into the challenges of building decoupled authorization, as well as the benefits of this approach and the operational hurdles. The conversation shifts to Cerbos, an open-source policy-based access control framework, comparing it with OPA (Open Policy Agent). They also delve into Cerbos's technical workings, including specification definitions, GitOps

Tyler Flint, CEO of qpoint.io, joins host Robert Blumen for a conversation about managing external vendor dependencies, including several best practices for adoption. They start with a look at internal versus external services, including details such as the footprint of external services within a micro-services application, and difficulties organizations have tracking their service consumption, quantifying service consumption, and auditing external services. Tyler also discusses the security implications of external services, including authentication and authorization. They examine metrics and monitoring, with recommendations on the key metrics to collect, as well as acceptable

Software architect and author Vlad Khononov joins host Jeff Doolittle for a discussion on balancing coupling in software design. They start by examining coupling and its relationship to complexity and modularity. Vlad explains the historical models for assessing coupling and introduces his updated approach, integration strength, which aims to simplify earlier frameworks and adapt them for modern practices. The episode explores three dimensions of coupling: integration strength (knowledge sharing), distance (proximity of components), and volatility (likelihood of change). Vlad illustrates how design decisions can lead systems toward complexity or modularity, and

Sunil Mallya, co-founder and CTO of Flip AI, discusses small language models with host Brijesh Ammanath. They begin by considering the technical distinctions between SLMs and large language models. LLMs excel in generating complex outputs across various natural language processing tasks, leveraging extensive training datasets on with massive GPU clusters. However, this capability comes with high computational costs and concerns about efficiency, particularly in applications that are specific to a given enterprise. To address this, many enterprises are turning to SLMs, fine-tuned on domain-specific datasets. The lower computational requirements and memory

Pete Warden, CEO of Useful Sensors and a founding member of the TensorFlow team at Google, discusses TinyML, the technology enabling machine learning on low-power, small-footprint devices. This innovation opens up applications such as voice-controlled devices, offline translation tools, and smarter embedded systems, which are crucial for privacy and efficiency. SE Radio host Kanchan Shringi speaks with Warden about challenges like model compression, deployment constraints, and privacy concerns. They also explore applications in agriculture, healthcare, and consumer electronics, and close with some practical advice from Pete for newcomers to TinyML development.

Brenden Matthews, a seasoned software engineer, entrepreneur, and author of the Idiomatic Rust and Code Like a Pro in Rust books (both from Manning), speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about Idiomatic Rust. They start with a look at what "idiomatic" means, and then discuss Generics, Traits, common design patterns you'll see in well written Rust code, and anti-patterns to avoid. Matthews suggests some tools that can help you immediately write idiomatic Rust, as well as what building blocks can also help. This episode examines what Generics are and how

Tanya Janca, author of Alice and Bob Learn Secure Coding, discusses secure coding and secure software development life cycle with SE Radio host Brijesh Ammanath. This session explores how integrating security into every phase of the SDLC helps prevent vulnerabilities from slipping into production. Tanya strongly recommends defining security requirements early, and discusses the importance of threat modeling during design, secure coding practices, testing strategies such as static, dynamic, and interactive application security testing (SAST, DAST and IAST), and the need for continuous monitoring and improvement after deployment. This episode is

Hong Minhee, an open source developer and creator of the Fedify ActivityPub library, discusses the ActivityPub protocol and the fediverse with SE Radio's Jeremy Jung. They explore ActivityPub use cases, including microblogging applications such as Mastodon and Misskey, as well as activities built into the specification such as Like, Follow, and Accept. They also discuss extending the specification to include properties like Discoverable and Suspended, how different implementations communicate when they don't implement the same extensions, ND the use of JSON-LD and why it is challenging to implement. Finally, they consider

Ivett Ördög speaks with host Sam Taggart about rewrite versus refactor -- a choice that many projects face as they grow. It's a topic that inspires a lot of dogmatic feelings. They discuss how companies and projects end up at this crossroads and consider some strategies to try to avoid it. Ivett challenges the myth that you should never rewrite but points to two key factors that need to be present for a successful large-scale rewrite or refactor. They end by talking about how to get management on board for such

In this episode, Charles Humble speaks withhost Brijesh Ammanath about skills that can provide developers a grounding in systems thinking. Charles is a 30-year veteran of the IT industry, including as a former software engineer, architect, and CTO, as well as former editor in chief of InfoQ and chief editor for Container Solutions. He has published "Professional Skills for Software Engineers" as a series of 14 O'Reilly shortcuts covering communication, critical thinking, documentation, and networking. Underlying his work is the idea that as complexity increases in IT systems, the roles of

Chris Patterson, founder and principal architect of MassTransit, joins host Jeff Doolittle to discuss MassTransit, a message bus framework for building distributed systems. The conversation begins with an exploration of message buses, their role in asynchronous and durable application design, and how frameworks like MassTransit simplify event-driven programming in .NET. Chris explains concepts like pub/sub, durable messaging, and the benefits of decoupled architectures for scaling and reliability. The discussion also delves into advanced topics such as sagas, stateful consumers for orchestrating complex processes, and how MassTransit supports patterns like outbox and

Asanka Abeysinghe, CTO at WSO2, joins host Giovanni Asproni to discuss cell-based architecture -- a style that's intended to combine application, deployment, and team architecture to help organizations respond quickly to changes in the business environment, customer requirements, or enterprise strategy. Cell-based architecture is aimed at creating scalable, modular, composable systems with effective governance mechanisms. The conversation starts by introducing the context and some vocabulary before exploring details about the main elements of the architecture and how they fit together. Finally, Asanka offers some advice on how to implement a cell-based

Christian Mesh, tech lead of the OpenTofu project, speaks with host Robert Blumen about OpenTofu. They start with the history of terraform, terraform providers, license changes to open source projects, the origin of OpenTofu as a fork of terraform, and the structure of the OpenTofu organization. They further explore compatibility issues for HCL, providers, and modules, performance issues, and adoption, as well as significant features in the OpenTofu-included dynamic-provider iteration, and the roadmap for the project going forward. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Paul Frazee, CTO of Bluesky, speaks with SE Radio's Jeremy Jung about the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (ATProto) used by the Bluesky decentralized social network. They discuss why ATProto was created, as well as how it differs from the ActivityPub open standard, the scaling limitations of peer-to-peer solutions, cryptographic decentralized identifiers, and creating a protocol based on experience with distributed systems. They also examine the role of personal data servers, relays, and app views, the benefits of using domain names, allowing users to create algorithmic feeds and moderation tools, and the challenges

Robert Seacord, the Standardization Lead at Woven by Toyota, the convenor of the C standards committee, and author of The CERT® C Coding Standard, Effective C, and Secure Coding in C and C++, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about What's New in the C Programming Language. They start with a review of the history of C and why it has a standard, and then they discuss what C23 brings and how programmers can take advantage of it. They consider the sectors in which C is most used and whether

Lukas Gentele, CEO of Loft Labs, joins host Robert Blumen for a discussion of kubernetes vclusters (virtual clusters). A vcluster is a kubernetes cluster that runs kubernetes application on a host kubernetes cluster. The conversation covers: vcluster basics; sharing models; what is owned by the vcluster and what is shared with the host; attached nodes versus shared nodes; the primary use case: multi-tenancy vcluster per tenant; alternatives - namespace per tenant, full cluster per tenant; trade-offs - isolation; less resource use; spin up time; scalability; how many clusters and how many

Matthew Adams, Head of Security Enablement at Citi, joins SE Radio host Priyanka Raghavan to explore the use of large language models in threat modeling, with a special focus on Matthew's work, Stride GPT. The episode kicks off with an overview of threat modeling, its applications, and the stages of the development life cycle where it fits in. They then discuss the STRIDE methodology and strideGPT, highlighting practical examples, the technology stack behind the application, and the tool's inputs and outputs. The show concludes with tips and tricks for optimizing tool

Praveen Gujar, Director of Product at LinkedIn, joins SE Radio host Kanchan Shringi for a discussion on how generative AI (GenAI) is transforming digital advertising technology platforms. The conversation starts with a look at how GenAI facilitates scalable ad content creation, using self-attention mechanisms for customized ad generation. They explore AI's role in simplifying campaign management, automating tasks such as audience targeting and performance measurement. Praveen emphasizes that ad tech platforms use AI models tailored to different needs leveraging both first-party and third-party data sources, with privacy maintained through methods such

Matthew Skelton joins host Giovanni Asproni to talk about team topologies—an approach to organizing teams for fast flow of value. The episode starts with a description of the underlying principles before exploring the approach in more detail. From there, they discuss when to consider implementing the approach; keys to a successful implementation; and some common mistakes to avoid. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Vinay Tripathi, a senior network engineer in Google Backbone Engineering and an 18-year network engineering veteran, discusses BGP optimization, a technique that's critical in achieving top goals in distributed applications. Host Philip Winston speaks with Tripathi about BGP, autonomous systems, peer grouping, router hardware and software, software-defined networks, and shared network optimization and debugging stories. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Tim McNamara, a well-known Rust educator, author of Rust in Action (Manning), and a recipient of a Rust Foundation Fellowship in 2023, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about error handling in Rust. They discuss the errors that Rust prevents, what an error is in Rust, what Tim classes as the "four levels of error handling," and the lifecycle of your journey reaching for them. McNamara explains why Rust handles errors as it does, how it differs from other languages, and what the developer experience is like in dealing with

Ganesh Datta, co-founder of Cortex.io, joins host Robert Blumen for a conversation about production readiness. The conversation covers the history of production readiness; its relationship to microservice architecture; the Google SRE model's impact on production readiness; production readiness checklists; the process; and production readiness transparency.

Simon Wijckmans, founder of c/side -- a company that focuses on monitoring, securing, and optimizing third-party JavaScript -- joins SE Radio host Kanchan Shringi for a conversation about the security risks posed by third-party browser scripts. Through real-world examples and insights drawn from his work in web security, Simon highlights the dangers, including malicious attacks such as the recent Polyfill.io incident. He emphasizes the need for vigilant monitoring, as these third-party scripts remain essential for website functionalities like analytics, chatbots, and ads, despite their potential vulnerabilities. Simon explores the use of

Catherine Nelson, author of the new O'Reilly book, Software Engineering for Data Scientists, discusses the collaboration between data scientists and software engineers -- an increasingly common pairing on machine learning and AI projects. Host Philip Winston speaks with Nelson about the role of a data scientist, the difference between running experiments in notebooks and building an automated pipeline for production, machine learning vs. AI, the typical pipeline steps for machine learning, and the role of software engineering in data science. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Jonathan Horvath of Z-bit discusses physical access control systems (PACS) with host Jeremy Jung. They start with an overview of PACS components and discuss the proprietary nature of the industry, the slow pace of migration to open standards, and why Windows is commonly used. Jonathan describes the security implications of moving from isolated networks to the cloud, as well as credential vulnerabilities, encryption using symmetric keys versus asymmetric keys, and the risks related to cloning credentials. They also consider several standards, including moving from Wiegand to the Open Supervised Device Protocol

Cody Ebberson, CTO of Medplum, joins host Sam Taggart to discuss the constraints that working in regulated industries add to the software development process. They explore some general aspects of developing for regulated industries, such as healthcare and finance, as well as a range of specific considerations that can add complexity and effort. Cody describes how translating regulatory requirements into test specifications and automating those tests can help streamline software development in these regulated environments. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Nick Tune and Jean-Georges Perrin join host Giovanni Asproni to talk about their proposed approach to modernizing legacy systems. The episode starts with some high-level perspective to set context for the approach described in their book, Architecture Modernization (Manning, 2024). From there, the discussion turns to important details, including criteria for deciding which aspects to revisit; some of the activities, processes, and tools; and the importance of data engineering in modernization efforts. Nick and Jean-Georges describe how to successfully implement an architecture-modernization effort, and how to fit that work with the

Steve Smith, founder and principal architect at Nimble Pros, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about software quality. The episode begins with a discussion of why software quality matters for businesses, customers, and developers. Steve explains some patterns and practices that help teams design for quality. They discuss in detail the practices of testing and quality assurance, and the conversation wraps up with suggestions for fostering a culture of quality in teams and organizations. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Sriram Panyam, CTO at DagKnows, discusses SaaS Control Planes with SE Radio host Brijesh Ammanath. The discussion starts off with the basics, examining what control planes are and why they're important. Sriram then discusses reasons for building a control plane and the challenges in designing one. They explore design and architectural considerations when building a SaaS control plane, as well as the key differences between a control plane and a data plane. This episode is sponsored by QA Wolf.

Stevie Caldwell, Senior Engineering Technical Lead at Fairwinds, joins host Priyanka Raghavan to discuss zero-trust network reference architecture. The episode begins with high-level definitions of zero-trust architecture, zero-trust reference architecture, and the pillars of Zero Trust. Stevie describes four open-source implementations of the Zero Trust Reference Architecture: Emissary Ingress, Cert Manager, LinkerD, and the Policy Engine Polaris. Each component is explored to help clarify their roles in the Zero Trust journey. The episode concludes with a look at the future direction of Zero Trust Network Architecture. This episode is sponsored by

Jim Bugwadia, CEO of Nirmata and a committer to the Kyverno projects, joins host Robert Blumen for a discussion of policy-as-code and the open source Kyverno project. The discussion covers the nature of policies; policies and security; policies and compliance to standards; security scans that generate reports compared to tools that allow or deny operations at run time; Kyverno as a kubernetes service; the Kyverno helm charts; the components of Kyverno; bootstrapping a kubernetes cluster with Kyverno; installing policies; implementing policies; customizing policies; packaging and installing policies; kubernetes dynamic admission controllers;

Itamar Friedman, the CEO and co-founder of CodiumAI, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about how to use generative AI techniques to support automated software testing. Their discussion centers around the design and use of Cover-Agent, an open-source implementation of the automated test augmentation tool described in the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) paper entitled "Automated Unit Test Improvement using Large Language Models at Meta" by Alshahwan et al. The episode explores how large-language models (LLMs) can aid testers by automatically generating test cases that increase the code coverage of an

Goran Petrovic, a Staff Software Engineer at Google, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about how to perform mutation testing on large software systems. They explore the design and implementation of the mutation testing infrastructure at Google, discussing the strategies for ensuring that it enhances both developer productivity and software quality. They also investigate the findings from experiments that quantify how mutation testing enables software engineers at Google to write better tests that can detect defects and increase confidence in software correctness. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE

Abhay Paroha, an engineering leader with more than 15 years' experience in leading product dev teams, joins SE Radio's Kanchan Shringi to talk about cloud migration for oil and gas production operations. They discuss Abhay's experiences in building a cloud foundation layer that includes a canonical data model for storing bi-temporal data. They further delve into his teams' learnings from using Kubernetes for microservices, the transition from Java to Scala, and use of Akka streaming, along with tips for ensuring reliable operations. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE

Luis Rodríguez, CTO of Xygeni.io, joins host Robert Blumen for a discussion of the recently thwarted attempt to insert a backdoor in the SSH (Secure Shell) daemon. OpenSSH is a popular implementation of the protocol used in major Linux distributions for authentication over a network. Luis describes how a backdoor in a supporting library was recently discovered and removed before the package was published to stable releases of the Linux distros. The conversation explores the mechanism of the attack through modifying a function table in the runtime; how the attack was

Emily Bache, founder of the Samman Technical Coaching Society and author of several books about technical agile coaching, talks with SE Radio host Sam Taggart about katas and the importance of practice. They discuss how practicing in a safe environment helps developers to learn new skills and build new habits. They also talk about how Samman coaching combines this sort of deliberate practice with applying the lessons learned in practice to the production code base. They also touch briefly on the advantages of working in an ensemble fashion. Brought to you

Hans Dockter, the creator of the Gradle build tool and founder of Gradle Inc, the company behind the developer productivity platform Develocity, joins SE Radio host Giovanni Asproni to talk about developer productivity. They start with some definitions and an explanation of the importance of developer productivity, its relationship with cognitive load, and the big impact that development tools have on it. Hans describes how to implement developer productivity metrics in an organization, as well as warns about some pitfalls. The episode closes with some discussion on Hans's views on the

Chuck Weindorf, a retired IT director and chief engineer with nearly 40 years' experience in software engineering, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about the concepts in Chuck's book, Leaders & Software Engineers. Through personal anecdotes and insights gleaned from his extensive career, Chuck underscores quality assurance's critical role in building trust with users and fostering a proactive culture of defect resolution within development teams. He highlights how ethical considerations underpin trust and integrity within the software engineering profession. Chuck and Jeff examine the significance of thorough documentation and the

Ipek Ozkaya, Principal Researcher and Technical Director of the Engineering Intelligent Software Systems group at the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon, discusses generative AI for Software Architecture with SE Radio host Priyanka Raghavan. The episode delves into fundamental definitions of software architecture and explores use cases in which gen AI can enhance architecture activities. The conversation spans from straightforward to challenging scenarios and highlights examples of relevant tooling. The episode concludes with insights on verifying the correctness of output for software architecture prompts and future trends in this domain. Brought to

Jonathan Schneider, the cofounder of Moderne and the creator of OpenRewrite, talks with SE Radio's Gregory Kapfhammer about automated software maintenance. In addition to exploring the design and implementation of OpenRewrite, Schneider explains how the tool can automatically support software maintenance tasks such as framework migration and security fixes for programs implemented in languages like Java. The episode also explores how OpenRewrite uses the lossless semantic tree to support automated refactoring though the use of recipes. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Marcelo Trylesinski, a senior software engineer at Pydantic and a maintainer of open-source Python tools including Starlette and Uvicorn, joins host Gregory M. Kapfhammer to talk about FastAPI. Their conversation focuses on the design and implementation of FastAPI and how programmers can use it to create web-based APIs. They also explore how to create and deploy a FastAPI implemented in the Python programming language. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Michael J. Freedman, the Robert E. Kahn Professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University, as well as the co-founder and CTO of Timescale, spoke with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about TimescaleDB. They revisit what time series data means in 2024, the history of TimescaleDB, how it integrates with PostgreSQL, and they take the listeners through a complete setup. Freedman discusses the types of data well-suited for a timeseries database, the types of sectors that have these requirements, why PostgreSQL is the best, Pg callbacks, Pg hooks, C programming,

Wolf Vollprecht, the CEO and founder of Prefix.dev, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about how to implement Python tools, such as package managers, in the Rust programming language. They discuss the challenges associated with building Python infrastructure tooling in Python and explore how using the Rust programming language addresses these concerns. They also explore the implementation details of Rust-based tooling for the Python ecosystem, focusing on the cross-platform Pixi package management tool, which enables developers to easily and efficiently install libraries and applications in a reproducible fashion. Brought to you

Xe Iaso of Fly.io discusses their hosting platform with host Jeremy Jung. They cover building globally distributed applications with Anycast, using Wireguard to encrypt inter-service communication, writing custom code to handle load balancing and scaling with fly-proxy, why serving EU customers has unique requirements, letting users use docker images without the docker runtime by converting them to firecracker and cloud hypervisor microVMs, the differences between regular VMs and microVMs, challenges of acquiring and serving GPUs to customers. when to use Kubernetes, and dealing with abuse on the platform. Brought to you

Shannon Selbert, co-founder of Soren and developer of Oban, and Parker Selbert, creator of the Oban background job framework, chief architect at dscout, and co-founder of Soren, speak with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about robust job processing in Elixir. They explore the reliability, consistency, and observability in relation to job processing, to understand how Oban, Elixir, and PostgreSQL deliver them. The Selberts describe why Oban was created, its history, which parts of the Elixir ecosystem they use, and why this would not be possible without PostgreSQL and Elixir. They discuss

Infrastructure engineer and Kubernetes ingress-Nginx maintainer James Strong joins host Robert Blumen to discuss the Kubernetes networking layer. The discussion draws on content from Strong's book on the topic and covers a lot of ground, including: the Kubernetes network's use of different IP ranges than the host network; overlay network with its own IP ranges compared to using expanded portions of the host network ranges; adding routes with kernel extension points; programming kernel extension points with IP tables compared to eBPF; how routes are updated as the host network gains or

Andreas Møller, founder of Toddle, a no-code tool for building scalable performant web applications, speaks with SE Radio's Brijesh Ammanath about no-code platforms. They discuss the role of developers in a no-code ecosystem and explore scalability and performance considerations, as well as enterprise adoption of no-code tools. Andreas also expands on why he built Toddle.dev and its unique features. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software.

Frances Buontempo, author of the new book Learn C++ by Example, discusses the C++ programming language, a widely used general-purpose programming language. Host Philip Winston spoke with Buontempo about where C++ fits into the landscape of existing programming languages and how recent C++ standards have changed things. They talk about specific language features such as lambdas, templates, concurrency, ranges, concepts along with tips for learning and using C++. Brought to you by IEEE Software and IEEE Computer Society.

Ori Saporta, co-founder and Systems Architect at vFunction, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about the role of the software architect. The episode begins with Ori's thoughts on what is typically missed or overlooked regarding this role. The conversation then explores aspects of both hard and soft skills required of software architects. Other topics include the relationship of the software architect to other roles, to design and process, and to quality. The show concludes by addressing the importance of dependency management by software architects. Brought to you by IEEE Software