Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

Rishi Singh , founder and CEO at Sapient.ai, speaks with SE radio's Kanchan Shringi about using generative AI to help developers automate test code generation. They start by identifying key problems that developers are looking for in an automated test-generation solution. The discussion explores the capabilities and limitations of today's large language models in achieving that goal, and then delv...

Nicolas Carlo talks with host Sam Taggart about Nicolas's recent book, Legacy Code First Aid Kit . They start by defining legacy code and the general issues that developers face when dealing with it. Nicolas describes some of the tools in his book and provides examples of where he has found them useful. The episode also touches briefly on the role of AI and some other tools Nicolas has discovered...

Han Yuan , an accomplished Chief Product and Technology Officer, joins host Priyanka Raghavan to discuss reorganizations. The conversation starts with a broad discussion of reorganizations and reasons that companies choose to undertake them. They then consider organizational behavior and topics such as Conway's law and the theory of constraints. Han offers some advice on key steps to take when pla...

William Morgan , founder of the Linkerd service mesh and CEO of Bouyant, joins SE Radio's Robert Blumen for a discussion of sidecars, service mesh, and a forthcoming enhancement to kubernetes to support sidecars natively. The conversation explores the origin of sidecars, sidecars and service mesh, and migrating service mesh to kubernetes. They take a deep dive into some aspects of running service...

Jason C. McDonald , author of the book Dead Simple Python , speaks with host Samuel Taggart about leveraging quantified tasks to improve estimation, particularly across projects. They discuss the origin of the concept and its relationship with story points, and Jason offers examples to show how quantified tasks can capture nuances in software tasks that are often lost with story points. He also po...

Jonathan Crossland , software architect, author, and business owner, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about the AMMERSE framework of design principles. They start by discussing the agile manifesto as a statement of values, and Jonathan shares his perspective based on his experience as a software developer and business owner. They then explore the three layers of the AMMERSE framework a...

Coral Calero Muñoz  and Felix Garcia , professors at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, speak with host Giovanni Asproni about green and sustainable software—an approach to software development aimed at creating software systems that consume less energy and produce less CO2 during their entire lifetimes with minimal impact on their functionality and other qualities. The episode starts by descri...

Maxim Fateev , the CEO of Temporal, speaks with SE Radio's Philip Winston about how Temporal implements durable execution. They explore concepts including workflows, activities, timers, event histories, signals, and queries. Maxim also compares deployment using self-hosted clusters or the Temporal Cloud.

Llewelyn Falco , creator approval tests, talks with SE Radio host Sam Taggart about testing code in general and the various types of testing that developers perform. Llewelyn elaborates on how approval tests can help test code at a higher level than traditional unit tests. They also discuss using approval tests to help get legacy code under test. This episode sponsored by Data Annotation .

Sean Moriarity , creator of the Axon deep learning framework, co-creator of the Nx library, and author of  Machine Learning in Elixir  and  Genetic Algorithms in Elixir,  published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf, speaks with SE Radio host  Gavin Henry about what deep learning (neural networks) means today. Using a practical example with deep learning for fraud detection, they explore what Axon is and...

Eric Olden talks with host Giovanni Asproni about identity orchestration, a software approach for managing distributed identity and access management (IAM) and integrating multiple identity systems or providers (IDPs) to make them look like a single system from a user perspective. The episode starts with a refresher in identity and access management, then introduces identity orchestration and some...

Jaxon Repp of HarperDB speaks with Brijesh Ammanath about distributed data infrastructure, including what it is and why it's important. They discuss the key factors that make distributed data infrastructure attractive, as well as challenges to implementing it. The episode explores the architecture and design principles, the key security considerations, and the transition factors for distributed da...

Yeckezkel Rabinovich , CTO of Groundcover, speaks with host Philip Winston about observability and eBPF as it applies to Kubernetes. Rabinovich was previously the chief architect at the healthcare security company CyberMDX and spent eight years in the cyber security division of the Israeli Prime Minister's Office. This episode explores the three pillars of observability, extending the Linux Kernel...

Andy Suderman , CTO of Fairwinds, joins host Robert Blumen to talk about standing up a kubernetes cluster. Their discussion covers build-your-own versus managed clusters provided by cloud services, and how to determine the number of kubernetes clusters an organization needs. Andy describes best practices for automating cluster provisioning, and offers recommendations about customizations and opini...

Zac Hatfield-Dodds , the Assurance Team Lead at Anthropic, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about property-based testing techniques and how to use them in an open-source tool called Hypothesis. They discuss how to define properties for a Python function and implement a test case in Hypothesis. They also explore some of the advanced features in Hypothesis that can automatically generate a tes...

José Valim , creator of the Elixir programming language, Chief Adoption Officer at Dashbit, and author of three programming books, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about what Elixir is today, what Livebook is, the five spearheads of the new machine learning ecosystem for Elixir, and how they all fit together. Valim describes why he created Elixir, what "the beam" is, and how he pitches it to...

M. Scott Ford , the CTO of Corgibytes and host of the Legacy Code Rocks podcast, discusses managing dependency freshness. SE Radio's Sam Taggart speaks with him about why dependency freshness is important to ensure that your code has all the latest bug fixes, how exactly to measure dependency freshness, and some of the insights that teams can gain from monitoring freshness over time. Brought to yo...

Nikhil Shetty , an expert in networking and distributed systems, speaks with SE radio's Kanchan Shringi about virtual private cloud (VPC) and related technologies. They explore how VPC relates to public cloud, private cloud, and virtual private networks (VPNs). The discussion delves into why VPC is fundamental to building on the cloud, as well as configuring a VPC, subnets, and the address space t...

Adam Frank , SVP of Product and Marketing at Armory.io, speaks with SE Radio's Kanchan Shringi about continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment – and how they differ. Frank suggests that organizations begin by identifying how the CI/CD process aligns best with their unique goals, noting that such goals might be different for B2C versus B2B SAAS (software as a service)....

Charles Weir —developer, security researcher, and Research Fellow at Security Lancaster—joins host Giovanni Asproni to discuss an approach that development teams can use to create secure systems without wasting effort on unnecessary security work. The episode starts with a broad description of the approach, which is based on Weir's research and on a free Developer Security Essentials workshop he c...

Lukas Fittl of pganalyze discusses the performance of Postgres, one of the world's most popular database systems. SE Radio host Philip Winston speaks with Fittl about database indexing, queries, maintenance, scaling, and stored procedures. They also discuss some features of pganalyze, such as the index and vacuum advisors.

Dr. Daniel Zingaro and Dr. Leo Porter , co-authors of the book Learn AI-Assisted Python Programming, speak with host Jeremy Jung about teaching programming with the aid of large language models (LLMs). They discuss writing a book to use in Leo's introductory CS class and explore how GitHub Copilot de-emphasizes syntax errors, reduces the need to memorize APIs, and why they want students to write m...

Zach Lloyd , CEO of Warp.dev, discusses how to implement and effectively use command-line terminals. Host Gregory Kapfhammer speaks with Lloyd about how command-line terminals work and how the Warp terminal uses the GPU and AI to enhance a software developer's productivity. They also discuss the trade-offs associated with using the Rust programming language to implement a command-line terminal. Br...

Josh Doody , author of Mastering Business Email, speaks with host Brijesh Ammanath about how software engineers can master business communication. They begin with an exploration of various communication modes, including Slack, virtual meetings, emails, and presentations. Josh shares several strategies to improve communication skills and cross-cultural communication, but if there's one key take awa...

Arun Gupta , Vice President and General Manager of Open Ecosystem Initiatives at Intel Corporation, discusses open-source strategy and community with SE Radio host Kanchan Shringi . They explore the business case and business model for why and how big tech participates in the open-source ecosystem. Arun describes ways to foster a culture of engagement with open source within companies such as Inte...