Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

John Wilkes from Google talks with Charles Anderson about managing large clusters of machines. The discussion starts with Borg, Google's internal cluster management program. John discusses what Borg does and what it provides to programmers and system administrators. He also describes Kubernetes, an open-source cluster management system recently developed by Google using lessons learned from Borg,...

Charles Anderson  talks to John Sonmez , the author of  Soft Skills —"the software developer's life manual." They start out discussing the book and what it covers, which is pretty much everything in a developer's life outside of code. The book contains seven sections; they discuss two of them: "Career" and "Marketing Yourself." John discusses the value of specializing in your career without being...

Gernot Starke talks about arc42: an open-source set of templates he developed to document software architecture based on his practical experience with real projects. Also Gernot and host Eberhard then discuss how documenting architecture fits into agile processes and how to find the right amount of documentation for a system. They walk through the different parts of the arc42 templates covering re...

Slava Akhmechet and Jeff Meyerson discuss RethinkDB, an open source database for the real-time Web. RethinkDB pushes data to the application rather than requiring the application to poll the database for updates. The discussion begins with the question of why databases need to be rethought–why is it better to build JSON-pushing into the database layer rather than the application layer? Slava expla...

Sven Johann talks with Dave Thomas about innovating legacy systems. Dave clarifies first why legacy systems are both valuable and problematic. Next, they discuss bad systemic and good incremental approaches for innovation of legacy systems; why you shouldn't rewrite an old system but rather focus on tactical changes to reduce cost or increase productivity within one quarter; examples of how to mea...

Kyle Kingsbury, known as Aphyr on Twitter and for his blog by the same name, talks to  Stefan Tilkov about consensus in distributed systems and about his experience in testing systems to see how they behave in case of failures. In addition to discussing some of the theoretical foundations, such as the CAP theorem, isolation levels, and consensus protocols, Kyle talks about some specific databases,...

Josh Long talks to Cédric Champeau about the latest and greatest in the Groovy JVM language, how it has evolved over the years, and where it's going. They start by talking about the existing features in the language, the language's history and then move on to discuss where the language is going, how Java 8 changes things, and what the recent move to Apache means for the language and the community.

Josh Long talks to Pivotal's Andrew Clay Shafer about the state of platforms-as-a-service (PaaS; like Cloud Foundry). They cover how pass relates to the fast-evolving container-ready distributed runtimes such as Lattice, Kubernetes and Mesos. The discussion starts with a look at what PaaS means and moves on to how the technology has evolved, the community has grown, and how the community now shape...

SE Radio Editor Robert Blumen  begins with a history of the show, what he has been doing since he became the show editor a year ago, and where he wants the show to go in the future. The remainder of the show is a series of interviews with all of the active hosts, the founder of the show Markus Voelter, the most recent and current  IEEE Software magazine editors Forrest Shull and Diomidis Spinellis...

Johannes Thönes  talks to Linda Rising, author, speaker and independent consultant, about the Agile Brain. They start by talking about the fixed, talent-oriented mindset and then contrast with the learning-oriented mindset. After establishing the terms, Linda explains how we know which mindset we are in currently and how we can change it for us and others, for instance, by offering praise in the r...

Johannes Thönes  talks to Rebecca Parsons , Chief Technology Officer at ThoughtWorks, about evolutionary architecture. The practice of evolutionary software architecture means making decisions as late as possible (last responsible moment) and setting up cross-functional requirements that the architecture has to meet (architectural fitness function). In the beginning, Parsons and Thönes introduce t...

Ben Hindman talks to Jeff Meyerson   about Apache Mesos, a distributed systems kernel. Mesos abstracts away many of the hassles of managing a distributed system. Hindman starts with a high-level explanation of Mesos, explaining the problems he encountered trying to run multiple instances of Hadoop against a single data set. He then discusses how Twitter uses Mesos for cluster management. The conve...

Johannes Thönes  talks to Barry O'Reilly, principal consultant at ThoughtWorks, about his recently published book  Lean Enterprise . A lean enterprise is a large organization that manages to keep innovating while keeping its existing products in the market. O'Reilly talks about the idea of scientific experiments and the build-measure-learn loop popularized by the lean-startup method. He shares his...

Fangjin Yang, creator of the Druid real-time analytical database, talks with  Robert Blumen . They discuss the OLAP (online analytical processing) domain, OLAP concepts (hypercube, dimension, metric, and pivot), types of OLAP queries (roll-up, drill-down, and slicing and dicing), use cases for OLAP by organizations, the OLAP store's position in the enterprise workflow, what "real time" means in th...

Stefan Tilkov talks to Mark Nottingham, chair of the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) HTTP Working Group and Internet standards veteran, about HTTP/2, the new version of the Web's core protocol. The discussion provides a glimpse behind the process of building standards. Topics covered include the history of HTTP versions, differences among those versions, and the relation of HTTP/2 to Google...

Joshua Suereth  and  Matthew Farwell  discuss SBT (Simple Build Tool) and their new book  SBT in Action . They first look at the factors creating a need for build systems and why they think SBT—a new addition to this area—is a valuable contribution in spite of the vast number of existing build tools. Host  Tobias Kaatz , Joshua, and Matthew then discuss how parallel execution of highly customizabl...

Shubhra Kar of StrongLoop talks to  Jeff Meyerson about Node.js. Node allows for server-side JavaScript. Shubra and Jeff explore why Node is so important from three standpoints: isomorphic JavaScript, the single-threaded-concurrency model, and the "API economy." Isomorphic JavaScript apps have their own control and viewing logic, but they share the state and specification of the models between cli...

Flavio Junqueira is the author of  Zookeeper: Distributed Process Coordination . Flavio and  Jeff Meyerson begin by defining ZooKeeper and talking about what ZooKeeper is and isn't. ZooKeeper can be thought of as a patch against certain fallacies of distributed computing: that the network is secure, has zero latency, has infinite bandwidth, and so on. With ZooKeeper, a programmer can be insulated...

Simon Brown, author of Software Architecture for Developers, talks with  Sven Johann   about using simple sketches to visualize, communicate and document software architecture. The show starts with a consideration of why sketches are more useful than UML and then continues with the explanation of the C4 model (context, containers, components and classes) and how it fits Shneiderman's mantra. Next...

Robert Blumen talks with Eric Brewer, who discovered the CAP (consistency, availability, partition tolerance) theorem. The first part of the show focuses on Brewer's original thesis presented at the 2000 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC): What set of problems motivated the formulation of CAP? How was it understood at the time? What are the three types of systems that can...

Eberhard Wolff talks with Eric Evans , the founder of domain-driven design (DDD), about its impact after 10 years. DDD consists of domain-modelling patterns; it has established itself as a sound approach for designing systems with complex requirements. The show covers an introduction to DDD, how the community's understanding of DDD has changed in the last 10 years, the often overlooked component—s...

Senior performance architect and author of *Systems Performance*  Brendan Gregg  talks with  Robert Blumen  about systems performance: how the hardware and OS layers affect application behavior. The discussion covers the scope of systems performance, systems performance in the software life cycle, the role of performance analysis in architecture, methodologies for solving performance problems, dyn...

In this episode,  Sven Johann  and  Eberhard Wolff talk about technical debt and how to handle it. They begin by defining external and internal quality and then talk about technical debt as a metaphor for discussing quality with management. They then consider whether technical debt is bad and how to handle it by using Eric Evan's strategic design. The show explores the reasons for technical debt;...

Josh Long talks to Activiti cofounder Joram Barrez about the wide world of (open source) workflow engines, the Activiti BPMN2 engine, and what workflow implies when you're building process-driven applications and services. Joram was originally a contributor to the jBPM project with jBPM founder Tom Baeyens at Red Hat. He cofounded Activiti in 2010 at […]

Nathan Marz is the creator of Apache Storm, a real-time streaming application. Storm does for stream processing what Hadoop does for batch processing. The project began when Nathan was working on aggregating Twitter data using a queue-and-worker system he had designed. Many companies use Storm, including Spotify, Yelp, WebMD, and many others. Jeff and Nathan […]