Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

Michael Nygard of "Release It!" fame talks with Stefan Tilkov about his experience using the Clojure programming language . Topics include the tool chain and development process, the Clojure learning curve, and on-boarding new developers. Michael explains the similarities and differences compared to typical OO languages when implementing domain logic, and uses both game development and typical web...

Monica Beckwith joins Robert Blumen for a discussion of java garbage collection. What is garbage collection? GC algorithms; history of GC in the java language; fragmentation and compaction; generational strategies; causes of pauses; impact of pauses on application performance; tuning GC; GC on multi-core and large memory machines; should production servers be implemented in non-GC languages?; goin...

Mike Barker talks with Sven Johann about the architecture of the LMAX system. LMAX is a low-latency, high-throughput trading platform. Their discussion begins with what LMAX does; the origins of LMAX; and extreme performance requirements faced by LMAX. They then delve into systems that LMAX communicates with; LMAX users; the two main components of the system (broker and exchange); Mechanical Sympa...

Fred George talks with Eberhard about "Developer Anarchy" - a manager-less development approach Fred has been using very successfully in different organizations - combined with microservices.

Robert Blumen talks to Christopher Meiklejohn about conflict-free replicated data types. The discussion covers consistency in distributed systems, CRDTs, and their use in NoSQL databases.

Martin Klose talks with Eberhard Wolff about Coderetreats - events where developers practice development techniques to become better programmers. He explains how to join such events and what it takes to do your own Coderetreat.

Alex Budzier of the Oxford Saïd Business School and Jürgen Laartz of McKinsey Berlin join Robert Blumen to talk about the their research on large IT project failures. Why do large projects fail and to what extent are these failures avoidable?

SE Radio Host  Stefan Tilkov talks to Vaughn Vernon about the topic of his most recent book, Reactive Messaging Patterns with the Actor Model. Vaughn explains the concepts and history of reactive programming, the actor model and its consequences, actors and their relation to object orientation, a typical approach for designing a system made of actors, Scala/Akka and Erlang, and the role of enterpr...

Johannes Thönes talks to Axel Rauschmayer about JavaScript and ECMAScript 6. They talk about the origin and version history. Then they dive into key JavaScript concepts and explain the features coming into the language with ECMAScript 6.

Sven Johann talks with Andrew Phillips about DevOps. First, they try to define it. Then, they discuss its roots in agile operations, its relationship to lean development and continuous delivery, its goals, and how to get started. They proceed to system thinking and what "You build it, you run it" means for a system when developers have pager duty. They continue with the diversity of DevOps require...

John Wilkes from Google talks with Charles Anderson about managing large clusters of machines. The discussion starts with Borg, Google's internal cluster management program. John discusses what Borg does and what it provides to programmers and system administrators. He also describes Kubernetes, an open-source cluster management system recently developed by Google using lessons learned from Borg,...

Charles Anderson  talks to John Sonmez , the author of  Soft Skills —"the software developer's life manual." They start out discussing the book and what it covers, which is pretty much everything in a developer's life outside of code. The book contains seven sections; they discuss two of them: "Career" and "Marketing Yourself." John discusses the value of specializing in your career without being...

Gernot Starke talks about arc42: an open-source set of templates he developed to document software architecture based on his practical experience with real projects. Also Gernot and host Eberhard then discuss how documenting architecture fits into agile processes and how to find the right amount of documentation for a system. They walk through the different parts of the arc42 templates covering re...

Slava Akhmechet and Jeff Meyerson discuss RethinkDB, an open source database for the real-time Web. RethinkDB pushes data to the application rather than requiring the application to poll the database for updates. The discussion begins with the question of why databases need to be rethought–why is it better to build JSON-pushing into the database layer rather than the application layer? Slava expla...

Sven Johann talks with Dave Thomas about innovating legacy systems. Dave clarifies first why legacy systems are both valuable and problematic. Next, they discuss bad systemic and good incremental approaches for innovation of legacy systems; why you shouldn't rewrite an old system but rather focus on tactical changes to reduce cost or increase productivity within one quarter; examples of how to mea...

Kyle Kingsbury, known as Aphyr on Twitter and for his blog by the same name, talks to  Stefan Tilkov about consensus in distributed systems and about his experience in testing systems to see how they behave in case of failures. In addition to discussing some of the theoretical foundations, such as the CAP theorem, isolation levels, and consensus protocols, Kyle talks about some specific databases,...

Josh Long talks to Cédric Champeau about the latest and greatest in the Groovy JVM language, how it has evolved over the years, and where it's going. They start by talking about the existing features in the language, the language's history and then move on to discuss where the language is going, how Java 8 changes things, and what the recent move to Apache means for the language and the community.

Josh Long talks to Pivotal's Andrew Clay Shafer about the state of platforms-as-a-service (PaaS; like Cloud Foundry). They cover how pass relates to the fast-evolving container-ready distributed runtimes such as Lattice, Kubernetes and Mesos. The discussion starts with a look at what PaaS means and moves on to how the technology has evolved, the community has grown, and how the community now shape...

SE Radio Editor Robert Blumen  begins with a history of the show, what he has been doing since he became the show editor a year ago, and where he wants the show to go in the future. The remainder of the show is a series of interviews with all of the active hosts, the founder of the show Markus Voelter, the most recent and current  IEEE Software magazine editors Forrest Shull and Diomidis Spinellis...

Johannes Thönes  talks to Linda Rising, author, speaker and independent consultant, about the Agile Brain. They start by talking about the fixed, talent-oriented mindset and then contrast with the learning-oriented mindset. After establishing the terms, Linda explains how we know which mindset we are in currently and how we can change it for us and others, for instance, by offering praise in the r...

Johannes Thönes  talks to Rebecca Parsons , Chief Technology Officer at ThoughtWorks, about evolutionary architecture. The practice of evolutionary software architecture means making decisions as late as possible (last responsible moment) and setting up cross-functional requirements that the architecture has to meet (architectural fitness function). In the beginning, Parsons and Thönes introduce t...

Ben Hindman talks to Jeff Meyerson   about Apache Mesos, a distributed systems kernel. Mesos abstracts away many of the hassles of managing a distributed system. Hindman starts with a high-level explanation of Mesos, explaining the problems he encountered trying to run multiple instances of Hadoop against a single data set. He then discusses how Twitter uses Mesos for cluster management. The conve...

Johannes Thönes  talks to Barry O'Reilly, principal consultant at ThoughtWorks, about his recently published book  Lean Enterprise . A lean enterprise is a large organization that manages to keep innovating while keeping its existing products in the market. O'Reilly talks about the idea of scientific experiments and the build-measure-learn loop popularized by the lean-startup method. He shares his...

Fangjin Yang, creator of the Druid real-time analytical database, talks with  Robert Blumen . They discuss the OLAP (online analytical processing) domain, OLAP concepts (hypercube, dimension, metric, and pivot), types of OLAP queries (roll-up, drill-down, and slicing and dicing), use cases for OLAP by organizations, the OLAP store's position in the enterprise workflow, what "real time" means in th...