Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

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...

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,...