Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

Dave Cross , owner of Magnum Solutions and author of GitHub Actions Essentials (Clapham Technical Press), speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about GitHub actions, the value they provide, and the best practices for using them in your projects. Cross describes the vast range of things that developers can do with GitHub Actions, including some use cases you might never have thought about. They sta...

Ashley Peacock , author of the book Creating Software with Modern Diagramming Techniques , speaks with SE Radio host Akshay Manchale about diagrams in software engineering. They discuss the power of diagramming and some reasons we don't fully use it as often as we should. Ashley contrasts historical use of UML diagrams versus modern diagrams, which don't have hard rules about representations. The...

Luca Galante , head of product at Humanitec, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about platform engineering. They begin by defining platform engineering and its relationship to, and distinction from, DevOps. Tracing platform engineering's history, Luca describes how internal developer platforms are fundamental, and then explores the goals of addressing complexity and reducing the cognitiv...

Paul Hammant , independent consultant, joins host Giovanni Asproni to speak about trunk-based development—a version control management practice in which developers merge small, frequent updates to a core "trunk" or main branch. The episode explores the technique in some detail, including its pros and cons and some examples from real projects, and offers suggestions on how to get started. The conve...

In this episode, David Cramer , co-founder and CTO of Sentry, joins host Jeremy Jung for a conversation about error tracking. The discussion starts with treating performance problems as errors, why you might not need logs, and how most applications share the same problems. From there they consider other topics including capturing information by hooking into runtimes and frameworks, issues with the...

Bastian Gruber , author of the book Rust Web Development , speaks with host Philip Winston about creating server-based web applications with Rust. They explore Rust language features, tooling, and web frameworks such as Warp and Tokio. From there, they examine the steps to build a simple web server and a RESTful API, as well as modules, logging and tracing, and other aspects of web development wit...

Dan DeMers of Cinchy.com joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about data collaboration and dataware. Dataware platforms leverage an operational data fabric to liberate data from apps and other silos and connect it together in real-time data networks. They explore a range of key topics, including zero-copy integration, encapsulation and information hiding, handling changes to data models ov...

Sugu Sougoumarane discusses how to face the challenges of horizontally scaling MySQL databases through the Vitess distribution engine and Planetscale, a service built on top of Vitess. The journey began with the growing pains of scale at YouTube around the time of Google's acquisition of the video service. This episode explores ideas about topology management, sharding, Paxos, connection pooling,...

Ross John Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at University of Cambridge, discusses software obsolescence with host Priyanka Raghavan . They examine risks associated with software going obsolete and consider several examples of software obsolescence, including how it can affect cars. Prof. Anderson discusses policy and research in the area of obsolescence and suggests some ways to mitigate...

Michael Fazio , Engineering Manager (Android) at Albert and author of Kotlin and Android Development featuring Jetpack from the Pragmatic Programmers, speaks with SE Radio's Gavin Henry about how the Android ecosystem looks today, and why it's an excellent time to write native Android apps. They explore a wide range of topics about modern Android development, including when to go native, how to ke...

Timothy Beamish of BenchSci discusses React and Next.js, two of today's most popular front-end frameworks. Host Philip Winston speaks with Beamish about components, routing, JSX, client-side and server-side rendering, single-page applications, automatic code-splitting, image optimization, and more. Beamish also details his experience moving a real-world application to Next.js.  

Software engineer Alex Boten , author of Cloud Native Observability with Open Telemetry, joins SE Radio host  Robert Blumen for a conversation about software telemetry and the OpenTelemetry project. After a brief review of the topic and the OpenTelemetry project's origins rooted in the need for interoperability between telemetry sources and back ends, they discuss the open telemetry server and its...

On Freund , founder of Wilco and former VP of Engineering at WeWork, speaks with SE Radio's Brijesh Ammanath about "upskilling" – going deeper or increasing the breadth of your skills . On has years of experience in helping developers master the skills needed to advance in their careers. This episode explores the importance of upskilling in a constantly evolving tech landscape. They focus particul...

Adam Tornhill , founder and CTO of CodeScene, joins host Giovanni Asproni to speak about behavioral code analysis. Behavioral code analysis is a set of practical techniques aimed at identifying patterns in how a development organization interacts with the codebase they're building. It can be used to prioritize technical debt to maximize return on investment; to identify communication and team-coor...

Luca Casonato joins SE Radio's Jeremy Jung for a conversation about Deno and Deno Deploy. They start with a look at JavaScript runtimes and their relation to Google's open source JavaScript and WebAssembly engine V8, and why Deno was created. They discuss the WinterCG W3C group for server-side JavaScript, why it's difficult to ship new features in Node, and the benefits of web standards. From ther...

Matt Frisbie , author of Building Browser Extensions , speaks with host Kanchan Shringi about browser extensions, including key areas where they've been successful. Based on Matt's experience as a developer working for Google, Doordash, and a startup he founded, they examine tools for building extensions, as well as APIs they have access to. The conversation presents detailed issues such as cross-...

Vidal Graupera , an Engineering Manager at LinkedIn, speaks with SE Radio's Brijesh Ammanath about the importance of managers' one-on-one meetings with direct reports. They start by considering how a 1:1 meeting differs from other meetings...

J.R. Storment and Mike Fuller discuss cloud financial operations (FinOps) with host Akshay Manchale. They consider the importance of a financial operations strategy for cloud-based infrastructure. J.R. and Mike discuss the differences between operating your own data center and running in the cloud, as well as the problems that doing so creates in understanding and forecasting cloud spend. Mike det...

William Falcon of Lighting AI discusses how to optimize deep learning models using the Lightning platform, optimization is a necessary step towards creating a production application. Philip Winston spoke with Falcon about PyTorch, PyTorch Lightning...

Alex Hidalgo, principal reliability advocate at Nobl9 and author of Implementing Service Level Objectives, joins SE Radio's Robert Blumen for a discussion of service-level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets. The conversation covers the meaning...

Nicholas Manson, a SaaS Architect with more than 2 decades of experience building cloud applications, speaks with host Kanchan Shringi about identity and access management requirements for cloud applications. They begin by examining what a digital...

Nikhil Krishna speaks with Dietrich Ayala about IPFS in depth. They cover what it is, how it works in detail and how one could leverage IPFS and libp2p in one's own application or to host one's content. The discussion goes into the IPFS ecosystem...

We talk with John deVadoss about the philosophies underlying the development of .NET and Azure software. We discuss the "Fiefdoms and Emissaries" concept of building loosely coupled systems, talk about strengths and drawbacks and how to build services...

Ganesh Datta, CTO and cofounder of Cortex, joins SE Radio's Priyanka Raghavan to discuss site reliability engineering (SRE) vs DevOps. They examine the similarities and differences and how to use the two approaches together to build better software...

Jon Smart, author of the book Sooner Safer Happier: Patterns and Antipatterns for Business Agility, discusses patterns and anti-patterns for the success of enterprise software projects. Host Brijesh Ammanath speaks with him about the various common...