Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

Shail Walia, a senior technical architect at Snowflake, joins host Robert Blumen for a conversation about schema migration and data migration. Together, they discuss the basics of schema: do all data sets have schema?; what drives schema change?; are data migration and schema migration the same thing? Must they happen at the same time? They then talk about the challenges and failure modes of schem...

Raju Dandigam speaks with host Amey Ambade about building robust AI agents for production. Raju recommends treating an agent as a software subsystem rather than a standalone model call. That means designing decision contracts and tool boundaries, choosing between predictable workflows and multi-agent orchestration, and managing the runtime, state, and streaming that make agents durable. A recurrin...

Erin Catto of Kintsugiyama, veteran video game developer who worked on the Tomb Raider series at Crystal Dynamics and later contributed to Diablo III, Overwatch, and other franchises at Blizzard, discusses video game physics engines with host Jason Davey. Erin created the popular open-source Box2D library used in titles including Angry Birds and Noita, and he released Box3D in 2026, bringing the m...

Milan Milanovic, Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies and author of the book, Laws of Software Engineering, joins host Giovanni Asproni for a conversation based on the content of his book—a collection of 53 empirical and mathematical laws governing modern software engineering. The book includes some well-known laws, such as Conway's and Brooks's laws, as well as other lesser-known but just as...

Owen McGirr , creator of SayIt!, Switchify, and an entrepreneur who builds inclusive technology, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about software accessibility. For this episode, Gavin emailed the questions to Owen, who prepared his answers and generated the audio programmatically using text-to-speech. Owen discusses what accessibility is, different ways a user might interact with software, ho...

Sahil Walia , Senior Technical Architect at Snowflake, joins host Robert Blumen for a deep dive into Apache Iceberg.  The conversation covers OLAP, data formats, data lakes and lake houses, Iceberg as a data format, columnar storage, use cases, reference implementation, read/write, how Iceberg structures metadata, indexing, query planning and performance issues.

Vivek Yadav, an engineering manager at the payment company Stripe, speaks with host Adi Narayan about building regression testing for microservices. Drawing on his work estimating network costs for card payments, Vivek explains why unit and integration tests fall short when a single transaction's cost can depend on 100+ parameters across card networks, countries, and merchant types. He describes S...

Sathiesh Veera , a GenAI Solutions Architect at At&T, speaks with host Brijesh Ammanath about the data-protection guardrails required when using LLMs. The core issue is that LLMs sit outside the cloud tenant in most enterprise AI deployments, which means that data leaves the company's perimeter with every prompt, RAG retrieval, and tool call. Contractual agreements can restrict the data that LLM v...

Max Corbridge, an ethical hacker and red teamer who is co-founder and CEO of Secure Agentics, speaks with SE Radio host Amey Ambade about how AI agents get attacked and what engineers can actually do to defend them. Drawing on years of offensive security work, Corbridge frames agents as a new and largely undefended attack surface: the industry has handed AI systems autonomy and the ability to act...

Jason Gorman , a software development expert and founder of Codemanship, joins host Giovanni Asproni to explore how best to use AI in software development. They start by considering how established technical practices — test-driven development, modularization, continuous integration, and continuous reviews — become more important, not less, when working with AI assistance. These practices help add...

Sonali Varde , Senior Software Engineering Manager at LinkedIn, joins host Kanchan Shringi to discuss how AI is changing the role of the engineering manager. They explore how AI is showing up in day-to-day management work, including operational reviews, planning, communication, workflow automation, and preparation for leadership discussions. The conversation looks at how engineering teams are adop...

Birgitta Boeckeler, a Distinguished Engineer and consultant focused on AI-assisted software delivery at Thoughtworks , joins host Priyanka Raghavan for a deep dive into harnesses for AI agents. The episode begins by unpacking the concept of harnesses and harness engineering before exploring the core building blocks — guides and sensors — that help AI agents operate more reliably in engineering env...

Garth Mollet , Senior Principal Product Security Engineer and Technical Advisor for Product Security at Red Hat, joins host Robert Blumen for a discussion of AI supply chain security. They start with the basics of supply chain security, including the key components of the AI supply chain, and how it differs from the conventional software supply chain. Garth discusses whether the attacks target mod...

Clare Liguori , a Senior Principal Engineer who works on developer tooling and agentic AI at Amazon Web Services, speaks with host Sri Panyam about the Amazon Strands Agents SDK. This episode explores the philosophy, design decisions, and emerging patterns behind building production-grade AI agents. Clare frames any agent as three core components: a model, a set of tools, and a prompt. During this...

Jeroen Janssens , a senior developer relations engineer at Posit, and Thijs Nieuwdorp , a developer relations engineer at Polars, speak with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about Polars, a Python package for transforming, analyzing, and visualizing data. After discussing the key features, they explore the implementation and use of the expressions data type provided by Polars. Along with comparing Polar...

Scott Kingsley, a VP of Engineering at SmartBear, speaks with host Gregory Kapfhammer about the Swagger ecosystem. They discuss the user interface, editor, and Swagger CodeGen and how these tools support the creation and documentation of OpenAPI-compatible APIs. Scott describes how Swagger fits into frameworks like FastAPI, as well as how Swagger APIs can be exposed through the Model Context Proto...

Danny Yang and Sam Goldman, both Software Engineers at Meta, speak with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the Rust-based Pyrefly type checker for Python. After a look at the foundational concepts for annotating and checking types for Python programs, Danny and Sam present a deep dive of the implementation of Pyrefly. While comparing and contrasting against various type checkers, they also describe...

Jure Leskovec , Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and Chief Scientist at Kumo.ai, speaks with host Sriram Panyam about relational and graph language models and their transformative impact on enterprise decision-making and predictive modeling. Jure begins by establishing the critical importance of predictive modeling across industries - from fraud detection in financial instituti...

Dave Airlie , a Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about Linux kernel maintenance. After over-viewing the scale and structure of the Linux kernel, they dive deep into the review and validation of kernel patches, drawing on examples from the GPU subsystem. After discussing the features and benefits of the Linux kernel's maintenance model, they also explore ker...

Dwayne McDaniel , developer advocate at GitGuardian.com , joins host Priyanka Raghavan to talk about the engineering challenges of secrets management. They explore what "secrets" really are in modern systems—far beyond passwords—including API keys, tokens, certificates, and machine identities, and how "secret sprawl" emerges across the SDLC. Drawing on reports from GitGuardian and Verizon, they di...

In this episode, Rob Moffat , author of Risk-First Software Development and chief technical architect at the FinTech Open Source Software Foundation (FINOS), speaks with host Brijesh Ammanath about how all of software development is actually risk management. Rob introduces the concept of 'risk-first software development,' which sits in the context of existing methodologies like scrum and kanban. S...

Martin Dilger , founder and CEO of Nebuilt GmbH, speaks with host Giovanni Asproni about event sourcing -- a software architecture pattern in which, rather than storing just the current state of your data, you store a sequence of events that represents every change that has ever happened in the system. This episode starts by introducing the vocabulary around event sourcing, highlighting its relati...

Birol Yildiz, CEO and co-founder of iLert, joins host Kanchan Shringi to explore how iLert built an AI SRE — an autonomous agent for handling production incidents — and what the experience revealed about building AI agents in the real world. Birol explains why incident response is a fundamentally agentic problem, where the unpredictability of novel incidents makes rule-based runbooks insufficient...

Will Sentance , educator and co-founder of Codesmith, joins SE Radio's Adi Narayan to discuss the evolution of JavaScript and modern best practices. They begin with JavaScript's origins as a simple scripting language and its growth into the backbone of modern web development, highlighting the core theme of the "don't break the web" constraint. The requirement that JavaScript must remain backward-c...

In this episode, host Amey Ambade sits with Eric Tschetter , co-founder of Apache Druid and Chief Architect at Imply, to dissect the critical move toward Decoupling Observability . To begin, they define three pillars—logs, metrics, and traces—and consider why the rise of microservices has made traditional, tightly coupled stacks a major source of pain. Such coupled systems can lead to issues such...