Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

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 f...

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 r...

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...

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,...

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...

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 hig...

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 spea...

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 sugges...

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 t...

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 specificati...

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...

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"...

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 li...

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 effec...

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 ado...

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 experien...

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...

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: mu...

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 strideGP...

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,...

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...

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 optimizatio...

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 explain...

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...