Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

Donny Nadolny of PagerDuty joins Robert Blumen to tell the story of debugging an issue that PagerDuty encountered when they set up a Zookeeper cluster that spanned across two geographically separated datacenters in different regions.

Edaena Salinas talks with James Whittaker about Career Strategy in the technology field. James is a Distinguished Technical Evangelist at Microsoft and author of "How Google Tests Software" and the viral blog post "Why I left Google". Topics include: Career Management, the role of mentors and managers in your career, a discussion on 1:1 meetings, job specialization and advice on when to switch job...

Host Marcus Blankenship talks with Gerald Weinberg about his new book, Errors: Bugs, Boo-boos, and Blunders, focusing on why programmers make errors, how teams can improve their software, and how management should think of and discuss errors.

Eberhard talks with Florian Gilcher about the programming language Rust. Rust originates from Mozilla research. Its focus is on system programming and it is often used to replace C or C++. Topics include the concepts behind Rust; concurrent and safe programming; advanced and unique features like ownership and borrowing; the rust type system (which supports other features like traits, generics and...

Felienne talks with Peter Hilton on how to name things. The discussion covers: why naming is much harder than we think, why naming matters in programming and program comprehension, how to create good names, and recognize bad names, and how to improve your naming skills.

Gil Tene joins Robert Blumen for a discussion of tail latency. What is latency? What is "tail latency"? Why are the upper percentiles of latency more relevant to humans? How is human interaction with an application influenced by tail latency? What are the economics of tail latency? What are the origins of tail latency within a system? What is the difference between response time and service time?...

Björn Rabenstein discusses the field of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) with host Robert Blumen. The term SRE has recently emerged to mean Google's approach to DevOps. The publication of Google's book on SRE has brought many of their practices into more public discussion. The interview covers: what is distinct about SRE versus devops; the SRE focus on development of operational software to mini...

Marcus Blankenship talks with Josh Doody about salary negotiation. Topics include a framework for thinking about salary negotiations, how you can know what you're worth, the employers view of salary negotiation, and missed negotiation opportunities. Also discussed are common fears about negotiating and how to overcome them, common mistakes during negotiations, and how negotiation makes your more d...

Felienne talks with Sam Aaron on Sonic Pi about how he designed Sonic Pi, a language, both for professional musicians performing with code as well as for schoolchildren.

Sven Johann talks with Steve McConnell about Software Estimation. Topics include when and why businesses need estimates and when they don't need them; turning estimates into a plan and validating progress on the plan; why software estimates are always full of uncertainties, what these uncertainties are and how to deal with them. They continue with: estimation, planning and monitoring a Scrum proje...

Jeff Meyerson talks with Frances Perry about Apache Beam, a unified batch and stream processing model. Topics include a history of batch and stream processing, from MapReduce to the Lambda Architecture to the more recent Dataflow model, originally defined in a Google paper. Dataflow overcomes the problem of event time skew by using watermarks and other methods discussed between Jeff and Frances. A...

Jeff Meyerson talks to Idit Levine about Unikernels and unik, a project for compiling unikernels. The Linux kernel contains features that may be unnecessary to many application developers--particularly if those developers are deploying to the cloud. Unikernels allow programmers to specify the minimum features of an operating system we need to deploy our applications. Topics include the the Linux k...

Jeff Meyerson talks with Brian Brazil about monitoring with Prometheus, an open source tool for monitoring distributed applications. Brian is the founder of Robust Perception, a company offering Prometheus engineering and consulting. The high level goal of Prometheus is to allow developers to focus on services rather than individual instances of a given service. Prometheus is based off of the Borg...

Eberhard Wolff talks with Phillip Carter about F# - a multi-paradigm programming language supporting object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming paradimgs. Its unique features make it especially fit for parallel programming or DSLs.

Kief Morris talks to Sven Johann about Infrastructure as Code and why it is important in the "Cloud Age". Kief talks about the practices and benefits and why you should treat your servers as cattles, not pets.

Eberhard Wolff talks with Jürgen Höller about Reactive Spring. Reactive programming is a hot topic, but adoption has been slow in the enterprise. Spring 5 incorporates Reactor and the RxJava API to help Java developers build scalable high-performance web applications. The discussion explores architectural challenges, transactions, porting existing applications, and increased code complexity.

Charles Nutter from the JRuby project talks to Charles Anderson about JRuby and the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) as a platform for implementing programming languages. They begin by discussing the Java platform beyond just the Java language. As a case study in implementing a language other than Java on the JVM, they discuss JRuby - what it is and how it's implemented on the JVM. They discuss recent a...

Johannes Thönes talks to Patrick Kua about the role of a technical lead and how to become one. The show starts with introducing the concept of a lead and contrasts the lead role with other roles, such as technical manager, architect and senior developer.  The discussion continues to the responsibilities of a tech lead (supporting engineering practices, managing, resolving conflict, and growing peo...

Charles Anderson talks with James Phillips about service discovery and Consul, an open-source service discovery tool. The discussion begins by defining what service discovery is, what data is stored in a service discovery tool, and some scenarios in which it's used. Then they dive into some details about the components of a service discovery tool and how reliability is achieved as a distributed sy...

Stefan Tilkov talks to Camille Fournier about the challenges developers face when building distributed systems, whether the can avoid building them at all, and what changes occur once they do.

Sven Johann talks with Bill Curtis about Software Quality. They discuss examples of failed systems like Obama Care; the role of architecture; move an org from chaos to innovation; relation between Lean, quality improvement and CMM; Team Software Process.

David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails framework and a partner at the software development company Basecamp, talks to Stefan Tilkov about the state of Ruby on Rails and its suitability for long-term development. He addresses some of its common criticisms, such as perceived usefulness for only simple problems, claimed lack of scalability, and increasing complexity. David also talks...

Jeff Meyerson talks to Haoyuan Li about Alluxio, a memory-centric distributed storage system. The cost of memory and disk capacity are both decreasing every year–but only the throughput of memory is increasing exponentially. This trend is driving opportunity in the space of big data processing. Alluxio is an open source, memory-centric, distributed, and reliable storage system enabling data sharin...

John Purrier talks with Jeff Meyerson about OpenStack, an open-source cloud operating system for managing compute resources. They explore infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, virtualization, containers, and the future of systems development and management.

Robert Blumen talks with Cody Voellinger, the founder of a recruiting firm that specializes in filling software engineer roles for San Francisco-area startups, about how jobs are created and how companies and engineers get matched up. Their discussion covers the entire job search process, from job descriptions to salary negotiations. They look at the job market from both sides: how companies defin...