Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers

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 start with some general discussion of CI/CD and then consider the three main types of events that drive GitHub actions before digging in to details about fine-grained action events, Action Marketplace, contexts, yaml, docker base images, self-hosted runners, and more. They further explore identity management, permissions, dependency management, saving money, and how to keep your secrets secret.

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 episode examines different types of diagrams through an example application and how it could be built with modern tools such as Streamy to simplify the building, versioning, and maintenance of diagrams.

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 cognitive load on developers by creating golden paths.

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 conversation touches on a set of related topics, including code reviews, feature flags, continuous integration, and testing.

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 quality of Open Telemetry data, how front-end applications are constantly changing and why that makes them hard to instrument. Finally, they discuss how Sentry's architecture has evolved, and why they switched from a permissive license to the Business Source License.

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 with Rust.

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 over time, and latency and access issues. The discussion also explores dataware management and security concerns, as well as the concept of 'data plasticity' as an analogy to neuroplasticity, which is where the nervous system can respond to stimuli such as injuries by reorganizing its structure, functions, or connections.

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, and how Vitess handles large transactions while abstracting complexity from the application layer.

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 the risks, with special emphasis on software bills of materials. He describes future directions, including software policy and laws in the EU, and offers advice for software maintainers to hedge against risks of obsolescence.

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 keep a lot of decisions in your back-end API, Kotlin co-routines, Jetpack and Jetpack Compose, the MVVM design pattern, and threads, as well as activities, fragments, Dagger, room, navigation, Flutter, and improvements in simulators. They also examine details such as IDEs, API selection, how to choose a list of support devices, Java vs Kotlin, handset manufacturers, XML layouts, and why Jetpack is a safe bet for all your future Android development.

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 features, including transforms, filtering, sampling, and rate limiting. They consider a range of topics, starting with alternative topologies with and without the telemetry server, server pipelines, and scaling out the server, as well as a detailed look at extension points and extensions; authentication; adoption; and migration.

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 particularly on how and why senior and expert developers should keep learning, upskilling, and reskilling throughout their careers. Freund offers suggestions on how to face some common challenges, especially for remote or distributed workers, and how and why engineering managers can help enable upskilling for their teams.

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-coordination bottlenecks in code; to drive refactorings guided by data from how the system evolves; and to detect code quality problems before they become maintenance issues. The episode starts with a broad description of the techniques, providing some examples from real projects, and ends with suggestions on how to get started with applying them. During the conversation, Adam and Giovanni touch on a set of related topics, including the applicability of the techniques to legacy, green-, and brown-field projects; ethical and privacy implications; and the importance of context when judging code quality.

Luca Casonato joins SE Radio's Jeremy Jung for a conversation about Deno and Deno Deploy. They start with a look at JavaScript runtimes and their relation to Google's open source JavaScript and WebAssembly engine V8, and why Deno was created. They discuss the WinterCG W3C group for server-side JavaScript, why it's difficult to ship new features in Node, and the benefits of web standards. From there they consider the benefits of creating an all-inclusive toolset like Rust and Go rather than relying on separate solutions, Deno's node compatibility layer, use cases for WebAssembly, benefits and implementation of Deno Deploy, reasons to deploy on the edge, and what's coming next.

Matt Frisbie, author of Building Browser Extensions, speaks with host Kanchan Shringi about browser extensions, including key areas where they've been successful. Based on Matt's experience as a developer working for Google, Doordash, and a startup he founded, they examine tools for building extensions, as well as APIs they have access to. The conversation presents detailed issues such as cross-browser compatibilities to keep in mind when developing extensions and mechanisms in the browser to prevent security vulnerabilities, and finally examines how emerging platforms can help developers take advantage of exciting new possibilities with web extensions.

Vidal Graupera, an Engineering Manager at LinkedIn, speaks with SE Radio's Brijesh Ammanath about the importance of managers' one-on-one meetings with direct reports. They start by considering how a 1:1 meeting differs from other meetings...

J.R. Storment and Mike Fuller discuss cloud financial operations (FinOps) with host Akshay Manchale. They consider the importance of a financial operations strategy for cloud-based infrastructure. J.R. and Mike discuss the differences between operating your own data center and running in the cloud, as well as the problems that doing so creates in understanding and forecasting cloud spend. Mike details the Cloud FinOps lifecycle by first attributing organizational cloud spend through showbacks and chargebacks to individual teams and products. JR describes the two levers available for optimization once an organization understands where they're spending their cloud budget. They discuss complexities that arise from virtualized infrastructure and techniques to attribute cloud usage to the correct owners, and close with some recommendations for engineering leaders who are getting started on cloud FinOps strategy.

William Falcon of Lighting AI discusses how to optimize deep learning models using the Lightning platform, optimization is a necessary step towards creating a production application. Philip Winston spoke with Falcon about PyTorch, PyTorch Lightning...

Alex Hidalgo, principal reliability advocate at Nobl9 and author of Implementing Service Level Objectives, joins SE Radio's Robert Blumen for a discussion of service-level objectives (SLOs) and error budgets. The conversation covers the meaning...

Nicholas Manson, a SaaS Architect with more than 2 decades of experience building cloud applications, speaks with host Kanchan Shringi about identity and access management requirements for cloud applications. They begin by examining what a digital...

Nikhil Krishna speaks with Dietrich Ayala about IPFS in depth. They cover what it is, how it works in detail and how one could leverage IPFS and libp2p in one's own application or to host one's content. The discussion goes into the IPFS ecosystem...

We talk with John deVadoss about the philosophies underlying the development of .NET and Azure software. We discuss the "Fiefdoms and Emissaries" concept of building loosely coupled systems, talk about strengths and drawbacks and how to build services...

Ganesh Datta, CTO and cofounder of Cortex, joins SE Radio's Priyanka Raghavan to discuss site reliability engineering (SRE) vs DevOps. They examine the similarities and differences and how to use the two approaches together to build better software...

Jon Smart, author of the book Sooner Safer Happier: Patterns and Antipatterns for Business Agility, discusses patterns and anti-patterns for the success of enterprise software projects. Host Brijesh Ammanath speaks with him about the various common...

Brendan Callum, engineering manager for the Pinterest developer platform team, discusses the "spec first" approach to API development and how it's different from "API first." Brendan speaks with host Kanchan Shringi about the challenges and advantages...

Open source developers Jordan Harband and Donald Fischer join host Robert Blumen for a conversation about securing the software supply chain, especially open source. They start by reviewing supply chain security concepts, particularly as related to open..

Joe Nash of Twillio's TwilioQuest discusses the role of developer relations/advocate, which is a role at tech companies in-between developers, marketing, sales, and HR. Host Felienne speaks with Nash about the skills people need if they want to become...

Adam Dymitruk, CEO and founder of Adaptech Group, joins host Jeff Doolittle for an exploration of the event modeling approach to discovering requirements and designing software systems. Adam explains how the structured approach eliminates the specifics of implementation details and technology decisions, enabling clearer communication for all stakeholders while keeping conversations focused on the business opportunity. Using concrete examples of event modeling in practice, they examine event modeling in the context of other related approaches and methodologies, including event sourcing, event storming, CQRS, and domain-driven design.

Roberto Di Cosmo, Computer Science professor at University Paris Diderot and founder of the Software Heritage initiative, discusses how to protect against sudden loss from the collapse of a "free" source code repository provider, how to protect...

Adam Warski, the co-founder and CTO of SoftwareMill, discusses Scala programming and the Tapir library. Scala is a general-purpose JVM language, and Tapir is a back-end library used to describe HTTP API endpoints as immutable Scala values. Host Philip Winston speaks with Warski about the implications of Scala being a JVM language, the Scala type system, the Scala community's view of functional vs. object-oriented programming, and the transition of the ecosystem from Scala 2 to Scala 3. The Tapir discussion explores why Tapir is a library and not a framework, how server interpreters work in Tapir, how interceptors work, and what observability features are included with Tapir.

Ryan Magee, postdoctoral scholar research associate at LIGO Laboratory – Caltech, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about how software is used by scientists in physics research. The episode begins with a discussion of gravitational waves...

Dan Lorenc, CEO of Chainguard, a software supply chain security company, joins SE Radio editor Robert Blumen to talk about software supply chain attacks. They start with a review of software supply chain basics; how outputs become inputs of someone else's supply chain; techniques for attacking the supply chain, including compromising the compilers, injecting code into installers, dependency confusion, and typo squatting. They also consider Ken Thompson's paper on injecting a backdoor into the C compiler. The episode then considers some well-known supply chain attacks: researcher Alex Birsan's dependency confusion attack; the log4shell attack on the Java Virtual Machine; the pervasiveness of compilers and interpreters where you don't expect them; the SolarWinds attack on a network security product; and CodeCov compromising the installer with code to insert exfiltration of environment variables into the installer. The conversation ends with some lessons learned, including how to protect your supply chain and the challenge of dependencies with modern languages.

Andy Dang, Head of Engineering at WhyLabs discusses observability and data ops for AI/ML applications and how that differs from traditional observability. SE Radio host Akshay Manchale speaks with Andy about running an AI/ML model in production and how...

Eddie Aftandilian, Principal researcher at GitHub discusses GitHub copilot and how it can improve developer productivity with host Priyanka Raghavan. The discussion explores various subtopics such as the history of copilot, how it can improve developer...

Peter Wyatt, CTO at PDF Association and project co-Leader of ISO 32000 (the core PDF standard), Duff Johnson CEO at PDF Association and ISO Project co-Leader and US TAG chair for both ISO 32000, discuss the 30 years' history of PDF, how to make a PDF...

Xe Iaso of Tailscale discusses how a VPN can be a useful tool when building software. SE Radio host Jeremy Jung spoke with Iaso about what VPNs are, onboarding, access control, authentication in the network vs individual services, peer-to-peer vs...

Tanmai Gopal, CEO of Hasura.io, joined SE Radio host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about GraphQL. They discussed the history and rationale behind the original conception of GraphQL, as well as some of the use cases it is best suited for...

Jeff Perry, career coach with experience in multiple engineering and technology fields discusses how software engineers can be intentional and proactive in evaluating and pursuing career options, with host Kanchan Shringi.

Jonathan Shariat, coauthor of the book Tragic Design, discusses harmful software design. SE Radio host Jeremy Jung speaks with Shariat about how poor design can kill in the medical industry, accidentally causing harm with features meant to bring joy...

Adrian Kennard and Kevin Hones, Founders of FireBrick routers and firewalls, discuss how to design, build, test and support a hardware router and network operating system from scratch, while sharing the lessons learned. You'll also learn that in certain..

Brian Campbell, Distinguished Engineer at Ping Identity discusses cryptographic defences against stolen tokens for the OAUTH2 protocol with host Priyanka Raghavan. The discussion explores various subtopics such as the history of Proof of possession...

Randy Shoup of eBay discusses the evolution of eBay's tech stack. SE Radio host Jeremy Jung speaks with Shoup about eBay's origins as a single C++ class with an Oracle database, a five-year migration to multiple Java services, sharing a database...

In this episode, Abi Noda, founder of Pull Panda and DX, discusses developer experience with SE Radio host Brijesh Ammanath. They examine the basic concept of DX and its importance before diving into a wide variety of issues, including methodologies...

Jessi Ashdown and Uri Gilad, authors of the book "Data Governance: The Definitive Guide," discuss what data governance entails, why it's important, and how it can be implemented. Host Akshay Manchale speaks with them about why data governance...

Noah Gift, author of "Practical MLOps", discusses MLOps, which are tools are techniques used to operationalize machine learning applications. Host Akshay Manchale spoke to Noah about the foundational aspects such as basic automation through DevOps, data...

Phillip Mayhew of GameDriver discusses test automation for games and game-like applications. Host Philip Winston spoke with Mayhew about the increasing role of test automation in modern game development, the impact on the QA role, how to run tests...

John Ousterhout, professor of computer science at Stanford University, joined SE Radio host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about his book, A Philosophy of Software Design. They discussed the history and ongoing challenges of software system design, especially the nature of complexity and the difficulties handling it. The conversation also explored various design concepts from the book, such as modularity, layering, abstraction, information hiding, maintainability, and readability.

Kumar Ramaiyer, CTO, Planning Business Unit at Workday, discusses the Infrastructure services needed for and the design of Building and lifecycle of supporting a SaaS application.

Karl Wiegers, Principal Consultant with Process Impact and author of 13 books, discusses specific software development practices that can help you make sure that you don't repeat the same problems he sees time and time again with every customer...