Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

In this episode, Ori Mankali , senior VP of engineering at cloud security startup Akeyless, speaks with SE Radio's Nikhil Krishna about secrets management and the innovative use of distributed fragment cryptography (DFC). In the context of enterprise IT, 'secrets' are crucial for authentication in providing access to internal applications and services. Ori describes the unique challenges of managi...

Casey Muratori caused some strong reactions with a blog post and an associated video in which he went through an example from the "Clean Code" book by Robert Martin to demonstrate the negative impact that clean code practices can have on performance. In this episode, he joins SE Radio's Giovanni Asproni to talk about the potential trade-offs between performance and the qualities that make for main...

Jens Neuse , founder of Wundergraph, joins SE Radio host  Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about back ends for front ends, or BFF. Jens begins by explaining how a heavy integration burden is often placed on front-end development teams. When multiple APIs must be integrated, it can be challenging for client development in web, mobile, and desktop environments. Explaining how APIs should be treated...

Nir Valtman , co-Founder and CEO at Arnica, discusses pipelineless security with SE Radio host Priyanka Raghavan . They start by defining pipelines and then consider how to add security. Nir lays out the key challenges in getting good code coverage with the pipeline-based approach, and then describes how to implement a pipelineless approach and the advantages it offers. Priyanka quizzes him on the...

Chad Michel , Senior Software Architect at Don't Panic Labs and co-author of Lean Software Systems Engineering for Developers , joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about treating software development as an engineering discipline. They begin by discussing the need for engineering rigor in the software industry. Chad points out that many developers lack awareness of good engineering practic...

In this episode, Varun Singh , Chief Products and Technology Officer at Daily.co , speaks with host Nikhil Krishna about the 30-year evolution of web protocols. In particular, they explore the impact of protocol ossification, which has supported the Internet's success but also limits the flexibility of evolving protocol suites such as TCP/IP and UDP by constraining future development. Varun points...

Gregory Kapfhammer , associate professor at Allegheny College, discusses the common problem of 'flaky tests' with SE Radio's Nikhil Krishna . Flaky tests are test cases that unreliably pass or fail even when no changes are made to the source code under test or to the test suite itself, which means that developers can't tell whether the failures indicate bugs that needs to be resolved.   Flaky test...

Jeroen Mulder , author of Multi-Cloud Strategy for Cloud Architects , joins host Robert Blumen for a discussion of public cloud, private cloud, and multi-cloud computing architectures and trends. They start by considering what defines cloud computing and what differentiates the major cloud providers, including whether they are more alike or different in the services they offer.  Jeroen discusses g...

Stanisław Barzowski of XTX Markets and a committer on the jsonnet project joins SE Radio's Robert Blumen for a conversation about the jsonnet programming language. A superset of JSON, jsonnet adds programming language capabilities, particularly to address the need to handle large but mostly repetitive JSON configurations. They discuss the project's history, use cases for Grafana and Kubernetes con...

Vladyslav Ukis , author of the book Establishing SRE Foundations: A Step-by-Step Guide to Introducing Site Reliability Engineering in Software Delivery Organizations , discusses how to roll out SRE in an enterprise. SE Radio host Brijesh Ammanath speaks with Vlad about the origins of SRE and how it complements ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library). They examine how firms can establi...

Simon Bennetts , a distinguished engineer at Jit, discusses one of the flagship projects of OWASP: the Zed Attack Proxy (ZAP) open source security testing tool. As ZAP's primary maintainer, Simon traces the tool's origins and shares some anecdotes with SE Radio host Priyanka Raghavan on why there was a need for it. They take a deep dive into ZAP's features and its ability to integrate with CI/CD,...

Dave Cross , owner of Magnum Solutions and author of GitHub Actions Essentials (Clapham Technical Press), speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about GitHub actions, the value they provide, and the best practices for using them in your projects. Cross describes the vast range of things that developers can do with GitHub Actions, including some use cases you might never have thought about. They sta...

Ashley Peacock , author of the book Creating Software with Modern Diagramming Techniques , speaks with SE Radio host Akshay Manchale about diagrams in software engineering. They discuss the power of diagramming and some reasons we don't fully use it as often as we should. Ashley contrasts historical use of UML diagrams versus modern diagrams, which don't have hard rules about representations. The...

Luca Galante , head of product at Humanitec, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about platform engineering. They begin by defining platform engineering and its relationship to, and distinction from, DevOps. Tracing platform engineering's history, Luca describes how internal developer platforms are fundamental, and then explores the goals of addressing complexity and reducing the cognitiv...

Paul Hammant , independent consultant, joins host Giovanni Asproni to speak about trunk-based development—a version control management practice in which developers merge small, frequent updates to a core "trunk" or main branch. The episode explores the technique in some detail, including its pros and cons and some examples from real projects, and offers suggestions on how to get started. The conve...

In this episode, David Cramer , co-founder and CTO of Sentry, joins host Jeremy Jung for a conversation about error tracking. The discussion starts with treating performance problems as errors, why you might not need logs, and how most applications share the same problems. From there they consider other topics including capturing information by hooking into runtimes and frameworks, issues with the...

Bastian Gruber , author of the book Rust Web Development , speaks with host Philip Winston about creating server-based web applications with Rust. They explore Rust language features, tooling, and web frameworks such as Warp and Tokio. From there, they examine the steps to build a simple web server and a RESTful API, as well as modules, logging and tracing, and other aspects of web development wit...

Dan DeMers of Cinchy.com joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about data collaboration and dataware. Dataware platforms leverage an operational data fabric to liberate data from apps and other silos and connect it together in real-time data networks. They explore a range of key topics, including zero-copy integration, encapsulation and information hiding, handling changes to data models ov...

Sugu Sougoumarane discusses how to face the challenges of horizontally scaling MySQL databases through the Vitess distribution engine and Planetscale, a service built on top of Vitess. The journey began with the growing pains of scale at YouTube around the time of Google's acquisition of the video service. This episode explores ideas about topology management, sharding, Paxos, connection pooling,...

Ross John Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at University of Cambridge, discusses software obsolescence with host Priyanka Raghavan . They examine risks associated with software going obsolete and consider several examples of software obsolescence, including how it can affect cars. Prof. Anderson discusses policy and research in the area of obsolescence and suggests some ways to mitigate...

Michael Fazio , Engineering Manager (Android) at Albert and author of Kotlin and Android Development featuring Jetpack from the Pragmatic Programmers, speaks with SE Radio's Gavin Henry about how the Android ecosystem looks today, and why it's an excellent time to write native Android apps. They explore a wide range of topics about modern Android development, including when to go native, how to ke...

Timothy Beamish of BenchSci discusses React and Next.js, two of today's most popular front-end frameworks. Host Philip Winston speaks with Beamish about components, routing, JSX, client-side and server-side rendering, single-page applications, automatic code-splitting, image optimization, and more. Beamish also details his experience moving a real-world application to Next.js.  

Software engineer Alex Boten , author of Cloud Native Observability with Open Telemetry, joins SE Radio host  Robert Blumen for a conversation about software telemetry and the OpenTelemetry project. After a brief review of the topic and the OpenTelemetry project's origins rooted in the need for interoperability between telemetry sources and back ends, they discuss the open telemetry server and its...

On Freund , founder of Wilco and former VP of Engineering at WeWork, speaks with SE Radio's Brijesh Ammanath about "upskilling" – going deeper or increasing the breadth of your skills . On has years of experience in helping developers master the skills needed to advance in their careers. This episode explores the importance of upskilling in a constantly evolving tech landscape. They focus particul...

Adam Tornhill , founder and CTO of CodeScene, joins host Giovanni Asproni to speak about behavioral code analysis. Behavioral code analysis is a set of practical techniques aimed at identifying patterns in how a development organization interacts with the codebase they're building. It can be used to prioritize technical debt to maximize return on investment; to identify communication and team-coor...