Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers

Howard Chu, CTO of Symas Corp and chief architect of the OpenLDAP Project, discusses the key technical features of the Lightning Memory-mapped Database (LMDB) that make it one of the fastest, most efficient and safest embedded data stores in the world.

Chris Richardson of microservices.io and author of the book Microservice Patterns discuss microservice patterns which constitute a set of best practices and building-block solutions to problems inherent microservice architecture.

Learn how to simplify your application architecture with the introduction of a messaging system. You'll hear how different messaging patterns can make your application more flexible, easier to maintain, and improve its performance.

The use of distributed and remote software teams have grown dramatically in the past five years, presenting new challenges for managers and engineers alike. Bryan Helmig talks about the best practices his company, Zapier, uses to manage remote software...

Felienne talks to Diomidis Spinellis about different forms of debugging. From using print-statements to version-control systems and operating system tools. We also discuss debugging strategies for different types of programming systems.

Arnon Axelrod speaks with SE Radio's Simon Crossley about test automation, a large complex subject that most listeners will have at least some familiarity with. Axelrod has worked in software engineering and test automation in several high-tech companie...

Today's guest is Thorsten Ball, author of Writing an interpreter in Go as well as its sequel Writing a Compiler in Go. Thorsten lives near Frankfurt, Germany. Thorsten loves to deep dive into programming topics like programming languages, interpreters...

Peter Zaitsev explains: avoiding vendor lock-in, judging what databases are bad at, why not to copy the big players, when to "go with the crowd", when to use cloud services vs. running your own infrastructure, and the role of containerization.

Jonathan Boccara, author of The Legacy Code Programmer's Toolbox discusses understanding and working with legacy code. Working with legacy code is a key skill of professional software development that is often neglected.

Simon Riggs, founder and CTO of 2nd Quadrant, discusses the advanced features of the Postgres database, that allow developers to focus on applications whilst the database does the heavy lifting of handling large and diverse quantities of data.

Daniel Berg, a distinguished Engineer at IBM cloud unit, talks with host Nishant Suneja, about Istio service mesh and how it lets developers deploy microservices into the cloud in a secure, efficient fashion by taking away the burden of devops...

Pete Koomen, Co-founder and CTO at Optimizely discusses A/B testing. Edaena Salinas spoke with Pete about how A/B testing is used in software products, and how A/B tests can be written. Pete explained the components of A/B testing and lessons learned from running over 200,000 A/B tests.

How can you scale an engineering organization when you haven’t already experienced rapid growth? Jean-Denis Greze of Plaid explains how to proactively enhance team capabilities and readiness by “leveling up” through a maturity map.

Dr. Andrii Gakhov, author of the book Probabilistic Data Structures and Algorithms for Big Data Applications talks about probabilistic data structures and their application to the big data domain with host Robert Blumen.

Felienne interviews Adam Barr about code quality? Why do programmers pick up bad habits about programming and what can be done to improve that?

Tim Coulter, the founder of Truffle (Ethereum DApp development framework) discusses the Truffle framework for Ethereum SmartContracts and Decentralized App development. Kishore Bhatia spoke with Tim Coulter about: Ethereum Decentralized Apps (DApps)...

Randy Shoup talks with SE-Radio's Travis Kimmel about how to scale technology and organizations together, so that an organization can move faster as they grow (and not slow down). Their discussion covers how to effectively scale culture, process...

Avi Kivity of Scylladb deep dives into the internals of Scylladb and what makes it a high performant version of Cassandra, a distributed key-value datastore. The discussion covers the architecture of Scylladb, its relationship with high performance...

Max Neunhoffer of ArangoDB discusses about multi-model databases in general, and open source ArangoDB, in specific, with show host Nishant Suneja. The show discussion covers motivation behind deploying a multi-model database in an enterprise setting, and deep dives into ArangoDB internals.

Travis Kimmel talks with Johnathan Nightingale about scaling engineering management. Their discuss when to hire additional engineering managers and how to set them up for success, how leaders can prepare for "growing pains" as an organization scales,

Bernd Rücker, who has contributed to multiple open source workflow management projects, discusses orchestrating microservices with workflow management. As distributed systems evolve into a family of microservices that must handle long-running stateful processes with time-dependent actions, events, multiple paths through the system, and complex rollbacks, the workflow management model provides a way to ensure clear modeling, correctness, and separation of concerns. Rücker recommends a federated model in which each microservice is paired with its own workflow to handle retries and other policies and failure modes around that service. Robert Blumen spoke with Rücker about microservice architecture, event-driven systems, long-running stateful processes versus synchronous request/response, event handling, time-outs, and handling exceptional conditions with compensating transactions. Rücker compares the choreography versus orchestration models for collaboration and discusses why orchestration provides a better separation of concerns. The discussion delves into the implementation of workflow management systems including persistence, scaling, event handling, timers and scheduling, and similarities to CQRS. The discussion wraps up with monitoring and visualization.

Vivek Ravisankar, the CEO and founder of HackerRank spoke with SE Radio's Kishore Bhatia about automated coding skills assessments and the HackeRank platform. Topics include: HackerRank as a coding skills assessment platform and how such platforms help in skills assessments and coding interviews - both for developers and employers. The interview also covers the journey from developer learning to getting assessed & recruited through these platforms. Learning from Vivek's experience giving coding interviews and automating the process of technical screening for Hiring Software Engineers.

Gary Rennie, a core contributor to Phoenix and Plug, discusses the Phoenix, a web framework for Elixir. Host Nate Black talks with Gary about the parts of Phoenix, writing a Phoenix application, and troubleshooting performance issues.

Felienne interviews Riccardo Terrell on his book ‘Concurrency in .NET: Modern patterns of concurrent and parallel programming’ on concurrency, parallelism and immutability and common issues that developers run into when solving concurrent problems.

Guest Daniel Corbett discusses how to scale your application with the help of load balancing. Hear details on HAProxy and the load balancing ecosystem as a whole.

Edaena Salinas talks with Stephen Ewen about streaming architecture. Stephen is one of the original creators of Apache Flink. Topics discussed: stream processing vs batch processing, architecture components of stream architectures, Apache Flink...

Learn how to protect and speed up your application with the help of a Content Delivery Network. You'll also hear about advancements in CDNs that allow you to handle application logic and dynamic content at the edge.

Edaena Salinas talks with Pat Helland about Web Scale. Pat is a Principal Software Architect at Salesforce where he works on a cloud based multi-tenant database technology. The discussion covers: Datacenters and hardware, DevOps, developing at scale, stateless vs stateful services, preparing a system for failures and sql vs nosql databases.

Kishore Bhatia discussed Ethereum and Smart Contracts with John Crain. Topics include: understanding the motivations for a decentralized computing model, Application architecture on Ethereum, development frameworks and tools. John's experience developing and launching his own product Pixura on Ethereum mainnet, approaches,

István Lam of Tresorit talks with host Kim Carter about GDPR (the EU General Data Protection Regulation, which has been described as "the most important change in data privacy regulation in 20 years.") The discussion covers terminology, planning, implementation, users' rights regarding their personal data, managing personally identifiable information (PII) across an organization, and required documentation. István talks about establishing the intent of different types of PII; when data can be shared or sold, when PII can be stored; storage of backups, and the ability to reveal, modify, or remove all of a customer's PII.

Michael Hausenblas talks with host Kim Carter about topics covered in Michael's ebook Container Networking, such as single vs. multi-host container networking, orchestration, Kubernetes, service discovery, and many more. Michael and Kim also discuss the roles that IPTables plays, how the allocation of IP addresses is handled, along with the assignment of ports. Overlay networks are covered along with topics such as the open Container Network Interface (CNI).

Travis Kimmel talks with Lara Hogan and Deepa Subramaniam about evidence-based tactics that product and engineering leaders can use to can use to diagnose problems that are holding back their teams, and build healthier, high-performing organizations.

Jafar Soltani of Rare (Microsoft Studios) discusses Continuous Delivery in AAA Games and how it can increase quality, reduce crunch, and deliver games faster. Topics include implementation and architecture, asset and delivery pipelines, and special challenges of games.

Brent Laster, author of a book on Jenkins 2, speaks with host Robert Blumen about the Jenkins 2 build server, CI/CD, DevOps and "pipeline as code".

Ben Sigelman CEO of LightStep and co-author of the OpenTracing standard discusses distributed tracing, a form of event-driven observability for debugging distributed systems, understanding latency outlyers, and delivering "white box" analytics.

Saša Jurić, author of Elixir in Action, explains the Elixir programming language and how it unlocks the benefits of the Erlang ecosystem, revealing the "sweet spot" for Elixir programs: highly scalability and fault tolerant systems with a simple arc

Edaena Salinas talks with Maria Gorlatova about Edge Computing. Maria Gorlatova is an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University Department of Electrical Engineering. The discussion covers: IoT, edge computing, the architecture of edge computing, running a machine learning model on the edge, and the benefits of edge computing.

Jeremy Jung talks with David Calavera about zero-downtime migrations and rollbacks with Kubernetes. In this episode we define migrations, rollbacks, and discuss how Netlify was able to migrate to Kubernetes and roll back off of it multiple times without impacting their users. David explains how developers can run old and new systems simultaneously, the importance of defining errors in your system, and when to apply fixes vs rolling back. We also discuss their decision to move to Kubernetes, and the benefits they received.

Felienne interviews Marian Petre & André van der Hoek on their book 'Software Design Decoded', which contains 66 scientifically backed insights for the design process.

Learn how a business that struggled with outages, performance problems, and an inability to ship overcame their problems by introducing monitoring, docker, continuous integration, and some fresh perspectives.

Travis Kimmel and Kevin Goldsmith discuss the correspondence between organizational design and software architecture. Their conversation covers: what Conway's Law is; Kevin's experiences in different organizational structures (e.g., Avvo, Spotify, Adobe, and Microsoft) and how those structures influenced the software architecture; what the "Reverse Conway Maneuver" is and how organizations can leverage it; how organizations can evolve existing architectures.

Natalie Silvanovich and Kim Carter discuss reducing the attack surface of the software that Engineers are creating today. Code sharing, third-party code, Developer workflow, and a collection of 0 day bugs are all discussed.

Felienne interviews Andreas Stefik about creating programs that are accessible for blind and visually impaired users. How do they consume and create software?

Postgres developer Bruce Momjian joins Robert Blumen for a discussion of the SQL query optimizer in the Postgres RDBMS. They delve into the internals of query planning and look at how developers can make it work for their apps.

Nate Black interviews Glynn Bird on using open source to develop your career or get a job, and how maximize productivity and learning. We discuss how to get your pull request accepted, how to make your own project successful, and how to survive updates.

Dmitry Jeremov and Svetlana Isakova speak to Matthew Farwell about the Kotlin programming language.

Edaena Salinas talks with Tammy Butow about Chaos Engineering. Tammy is a Principal Site Reliability Engineer at Gremlin. The discussion covers: how Chaos Engineering emerged, the types of chaos that can be introduced to a system, and how to structure...

What is code coverage, how can you measure it, and what are the pitfalls of this metric? Diomidis Spinellis talks with Marc Hoffmann, a key developer of the JaCoCo code coverage library for Java, on how code test coverage can improve software reliability

Lin Clark speaks to Matthew Farwell on WebAssembly

Bill Venners speaks to Matthew Farwell about Property Based Tests, how they can be used, when they should not be used. We also cover how to define a property, how to generate the data required for a property based test.