CaSE: Conversations about Software Engineering

Sarah Wells spent years as Technical Director at the Financial Times, wrangling thousands of microservices and the technology decisions that come with them. In this conversation she shares how the FT kept things from spiralling out of control without turning into a bureaucracy. We talk AI tools and shadow IT, why "best tool for the job" can quietly become your worst nightmare, and how a simple two...

Birgitta, Heinrich and Sven look back at the latest developments in AI-assisted development, tools and practices which emerged in 2025 and work for teams. Furthermore they discuss a few topics like "where does the rigor go in AI assistance" from the future of software development retreat in Utah

We want engineering teams to be as autonomous as possible, but also want that every team runs in the same direction. In this episode, Heinrich Hartmann and Sven Johann explore four approaches of guiding, not ruling, governance: golden paths, architecture advice processes, architecture principles and technology radars as practical tools for aligning autonomy with long-term organisational health.

### Description How do teams actually make better architectural decisions—without gatekeepers, power imbalances, or meetings full of opinions instead of insights? In this episode, Andrew, Heinrich, Sven and Alex discuss how the advice process, architecture decision records, and practiced sociotechnics help to make software architecture collaborative and transparent.

Alex, Heinrich and Sven talk with Simon Harrer about his journey to data contracts and marketplaces from being PhD in Software Engineering and Software Engineering consultant. They discuss what a data contract is and how it is build up, can be discovered in a data marketplace and how it relates to a data product. They close with the unavoidable MCP topic in the context of a data marketplace.

The three of us talk with Christoph Windheuser about the styles in data architecture: data mesh, data lake (house) and data warehouse and how to make a decision. In between Christoph explains data quality, data lineage, and data catalog - cornerstones of any modern approach. We end with emerging trends, DuckDB and data governance.

In this episode of the CaSE Podcast, Mirko Novakovic, a seasoned entrepreneur and investor, shares his journey through the waves of technological innovation—from the early days of online banking to the rise of AI and open telemetry. We explore with him how the lessons learned in diverse industries, including the food business, can reshape our approach to software development and architecture, emph...

In this episode of the CaSE Podcast, Sven Johann, Alex Heusingfeld, and Heinrich Hartmann dive into the concept of sensitivity points in software architecture, using the recent Volkswagen data leak as a striking example. They explore how seemingly minor architectural decisions and code changes can carry massive implications when balancing trade-offs like data privacy versus functionality. The trio...

How do you ensure the reliability of your cloud-native applications in an ever-evolving landscape? In this episode of CaSE, we dive deep into the intricate world of cloud-native testing with Ole Lensmar, the mind behind SoapUI, serial entrepreneur and Founder of TestKube. Join us as we explore the challenges of testing in Kubernetes environments, the balance between automation and manual testing,...

Theo Schlossnagle is a world-class software engineer, serial entrepreneur and owner of a butcher shop. In the podcast he unpacks the mindset, practices, and strategies that have shaped his approach to software development. From the power of curiosity to the challenges of debugging distributed systems, we explore what it takes to build resilient, maintainable software in an ever-evolving landscape....

The CaSE Podcast returns with new hosts and a renewed focus on software architecture, reliability engineering, and data engineering. In this episode we start with discussing the cost of observability, sparked by Coinbase’s leaked $65 million Datadog bill, raising questions about how much organizations should spend on monitoring. We also discuss the most important content of observability training...

Aino explains to Sven what skills are required to make meetings more successful. They talk about the different roles of meeting attendees. They continue with the thinking process to organize a meeting: do we need it at all? What is the expected outcome? Who should be invited? How long it should take? Do we need preparation for the attendees? Icebreakers? How do we craft an agenda? Then they discus...

Solid is a specification that lets people store their data securely in decentralized data stores called Pods. But why do we want to keep our data decentralized? What problems does Solid solve? In this episode, Angelo Veltens explains to Lucas Dohmen the advantages (but also potential disadvantages) of this project.

Stefan Tilkov talks to Mark Seemann about his book “Code that fits in your head”, heuristics about software engineering, and the role of craftspeople and engineers. They dive into three selected topics: Vertical slices, triangulation, and rhythm.

How do you enable a developer to quickly start the development of business logic of a new microservice without losing too much time on setting up everything else like monitoring, tracing, dependency management, security, configuration and much more. After the motivation, they move from service templates to service chassis, continue with governance as code and close with the possible need of produc...

Sven Johann talks to Adam Tornhill about the link between how organizations write code and how teams work together. Adam Tornhill can make this link visible to help improve your team’s code and your organization's work. The interview is based on Adam's book "Software Design X-Rays".

Sven Johann talks with Manuel Pais about the challenges of development teams being asked to be responsible for many topics like their problem domain, technology/programming languages, security, infrastructure and operations, UX, etc. Manuel explains what cognitive load is, which types of cognitive load exist and where it can be reduced and where not. They then discuss the four fundamental team top...

Michele shares her journey in the software industry and how she got involved in product development. Customer interviews are not just something for product people -- Michele shares concrete ways that developers can get value from talking to their customers. She also shares a few tips for how to get involved with the customer research process and how to convince stakeholders of the value of the pro...

In this conversation about software engineering, Lucas Dohmen talks with Eric Normand. Eric first explains the origins of his book, Grokking Simplicity. He explains how to think in calculations, actions, and data. Lucas asks him about real-life situations dealing with concurrency and how he would solve them thinking functionally. Then they dive deep into their conversation about immutability, type...

In this episode, web accessibility expert Nicolas Steenhout talks to Stefan Tilkov about ways to improve web sites to make them usable by everyone. They cover the basics of web accessibility, the role of frameworks, common pitfalls and how to overcome them, blueberry muffins, and the perils of snake oil vendor tools.

In this episode of the CaSE Podcast, Lucas Dohmen talks to Joy Heron about Responsible Web Applications. They start talking about responsive web design and how it works nowadays with features like CSS Grid and Flexbox. Then Joy explains how to make a website usable with assistive technologies. Responsive and Accessible — That’s how we can create a responsible web application.

Alex Bramley continuous his conversation with Sven Johann. They begin with how granular you should monitor your user journeys and then discuss error budget policies in depth. They continue on how to iterate on SLIs, SLOs and error budget policies. They close the conversation with SLO alerting.

Alex Bramley continuous his conversation with Sven Johann. They start with what external and internal dependencies do with your availability requirements and how you calculate availability if you have a microservices dependency tree. They look into how you can introduce SLOs to your organisation. After that, they switch to measure user happiness with your monitoring system, measurement windows and...

Alex Bramley talks to Sven Johann about the basics of service level objectives. They begin with terminologies (SLI, SLO, SLA, Error Budget), look at costs of outages and discuss what reliability has to do with customer happiness. They continue with having 100% reliability is the wrong target and what’s possibly the right target. Alex then explains how to get started with collecting data about your...

Simon Brown talks to Stefan Tilkov about software architecture – the importance for developers, its role in agile software development, documentation and tooling, and the importance (or lack of importance) of UML.