Ganesh Datta, co-founder of Cortex.io, joins host Robert Blumen for a conversation about production readiness. The conversation covers the history of production readiness; its relationship to microservice architecture; the Google SRE model's impact on production readiness; production readiness checklists; the process; and production readiness transparency.

Simon Wijckmans, founder of c/side -- a company that focuses on monitoring, securing, and optimizing third-party JavaScript -- joins SE Radio host Kanchan Shringi for a conversation about the security risks posed by third-party browser scripts. Through real-world examples and insights drawn from his work in web security, Simon highlights the dangers, including malicious attacks such as the recent Polyfill.io incident. He emphasizes the need for vigilant monitoring, as these third-party...

Catherine Nelson, author of the new O’Reilly book, Software Engineering for Data Scientists, discusses the collaboration between data scientists and software engineers -- an increasingly common pairing on machine learning and AI projects. Host Philip Winston speaks with Nelson about the role of a data scientist, the difference between running experiments in notebooks and building an automated pipeline for production, machine learning vs. AI, the typical pipeline steps for machine learning,...

Jonathan Horvath of Z-bit discusses physical access control systems (PACS) with host Jeremy Jung. They start with an overview of PACS components and discuss the proprietary nature of the industry, the slow pace of migration to open standards, and why Windows is commonly used. Jonathan describes the security implications of moving from isolated networks to the cloud, as well as credential vulnerabilities, encryption using symmetric keys versus asymmetric keys, and the risks related to cloning...

Cody Ebberson, CTO of Medplum, joins host Sam Taggart to discuss the constraints that working in regulated industries add to the software development process. They explore some general aspects of developing for regulated industries, such as healthcare and finance, as well as a range of specific considerations that can add complexity and effort. Cody describes how translating regulatory requirements into test specifications and automating those tests can help streamline software development in...

Nick Tune and Jean-Georges Perrin join host Giovanni Asproni to talk about their proposed approach to modernizing legacy systems. The episode starts with some high-level perspective to set context for the approach described in their book, Architecture Modernization (Manning, 2024). From there, the discussion turns to important details, including criteria for deciding which aspects to revisit; some of the activities, processes, and tools; and the importance of data engineering in modernization...

Steve Smith, founder and principal architect at Nimble Pros, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about software quality. The episode begins with a discussion of why software quality matters for businesses, customers, and developers. Steve explains some patterns and practices that help teams design for quality. They discuss in detail the practices of testing and quality assurance, and the conversation wraps up with suggestions for fostering a culture of quality in teams and...

Sriram Panyam, CTO at DagKnows, discusses SaaS Control Planes with SE Radio host Brijesh Ammanath. The discussion starts off with the basics, examining what control planes are and why they're important. Sriram then discusses reasons for building a control plane and the challenges in designing one. They explore design and architectural considerations when building a SaaS control plane, as well as the key differences between a control plane and a data plane. This episode is sponsored by QA Wolf.

Stevie Caldwell, Senior Engineering Technical Lead at Fairwinds, joins host Priyanka Raghavan to discuss zero-trust network reference architecture. The episode begins with high-level definitions of zero-trust architecture, zero-trust reference architecture, and the pillars of Zero Trust. Stevie describes four open-source implementations of the Zero Trust Reference Architecture: Emissary Ingress, Cert Manager, LinkerD, and the Policy Engine Polaris. Each component is explored to help clarify...

Jim Bugwadia, CEO of Nirmata and a committer to the Kyverno projects, joins host Robert Blumen for a discussion of policy-as-code and the open source Kyverno project. The discussion covers the nature of policies; policies and security; policies and compliance to standards; security scans that generate reports compared to tools that allow or deny operations at run time; Kyverno as a kubernetes service; the Kyverno helm charts; the components of Kyverno; bootstrapping a kubernetes cluster with...

Itamar Friedman, the CEO and co-founder of CodiumAI, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about how to use generative AI techniques to support automated software testing. Their discussion centers around the design and use of Cover-Agent, an open-source implementation of the automated test augmentation tool described in the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) paper entitled “Automated Unit Test Improvement using Large Language Models at Meta“ by Alshahwan et al. The episode explores...

Goran Petrovic, a Staff Software Engineer at Google, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about how to perform mutation testing on large software systems. They explore the design and implementation of the mutation testing infrastructure at Google, discussing the strategies for ensuring that it enhances both developer productivity and software quality. They also investigate the findings from experiments that quantify how mutation testing enables software engineers at Google to write better...

Abhay Paroha, an engineering leader with more than 15 years' experience in leading product dev teams, joins SE Radio's Kanchan Shringi to talk about cloud migration for oil and gas production operations. They discuss Abhay's experiences in building a cloud foundation layer that includes a canonical data model for storing bi-temporal data. They further delve into his teams' learnings from using Kubernetes for microservices, the transition from Java to Scala, and use of Akka streaming, along...

Luis Rodríguez, CTO of Xygeni.io, joins host Robert Blumen for a discussion of the recently thwarted attempt to insert a backdoor in the SSH (Secure Shell) daemon. OpenSSH is a popular implementation of the protocol used in major Linux distributions for authentication over a network. Luis describes how a backdoor in a supporting library was recently discovered and removed before the package was published to stable releases of the Linux distros. The conversation explores the mechanism of the...

Emily Bache, founder of the Samman Technical Coaching Society and author of several books about technical agile coaching, talks with SE Radio host Sam Taggart about katas and the importance of practice. They discuss how practicing in a safe environment helps developers to learn new skills and build new habits. They also talk about how Samman coaching combines this sort of deliberate practice with applying the lessons learned in practice to the production code base. They also touch briefly on...

Hans Dockter, the creator of the Gradle build tool and founder of Gradle Inc, the company behind the developer productivity platform Develocity, joins SE Radio host Giovanni Asproni to talk about developer productivity. They start with some definitions and an explanation of the importance of developer productivity, its relationship with cognitive load, and the big impact that development tools have on it. Hans describes how to implement developer productivity metrics in an organization, as...

Chuck Weindorf, a retired IT director and chief engineer with nearly 40 years' experience in software engineering, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about the concepts in Chuck's book, Leaders & Software Engineers. Through personal anecdotes and insights gleaned from his extensive career, Chuck underscores quality assurance's critical role in building trust with users and fostering a proactive culture of defect resolution within development teams. He highlights how ethical...

Ipek Ozkaya, Principal Researcher and Technical Director of the Engineering Intelligent Software Systems group at the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon, discusses generative AI for Software Architecture with SE Radio host Priyanka Raghavan. The episode delves into fundamental definitions of software architecture and explores use cases in which gen AI can enhance architecture activities. The conversation spans from straightforward to challenging scenarios and highlights examples...

Jonathan Schneider, the cofounder of Moderne and the creator of OpenRewrite, talks with SE Radio's Gregory Kapfhammer about automated software maintenance. In addition to exploring the design and implementation of OpenRewrite, Schneider explains how the tool can automatically support software maintenance tasks such as framework migration and security fixes for programs implemented in languages like Java. The episode also explores how OpenRewrite uses the lossless semantic tree to support...

Marcelo Trylesinski, a senior software engineer at Pydantic and a maintainer of open-source Python tools including Starlette and Uvicorn, joins host Gregory M. Kapfhammer to talk about FastAPI. Their conversation focuses on the design and implementation of FastAPI and how programmers can use it to create web-based APIs. They also explore how to create and deploy a FastAPI implemented in the Python programming language. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Michael J. Freedman, the Robert E. Kahn Professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University, as well as the co-founder and CTO of Timescale, spoke with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about TimescaleDB. They revisit what time series data means in 2024, the history of TimescaleDB, how it integrates with PostgreSQL, and they take the listeners through a complete setup. Freedman discusses the types of data well-suited for a timeseries database, the types of sectors that have these...

Wolf Vollprecht, the CEO and founder of Prefix.dev, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about how to implement Python tools, such as package managers, in the Rust programming language. They discuss the challenges associated with building Python infrastructure tooling in Python and explore how using the Rust programming language addresses these concerns. They also explore the implementation details of Rust-based tooling for the Python ecosystem, focusing on the cross-platform Pixi package...

Xe Iaso of Fly.io discusses their hosting platform with host Jeremy Jung. They cover building globally distributed applications with Anycast, using Wireguard to encrypt inter-service communication, writing custom code to handle load balancing and scaling with fly-proxy, why serving EU customers has unique requirements, letting users use docker images without the docker runtime by converting them to firecracker and cloud hypervisor microVMs, the differences between regular VMs and microVMs,...

Shannon Selbert, co-founder of Soren and developer of Oban, and Parker Selbert, creator of the Oban background job framework, chief architect at dscout, and co-founder of Soren, speak with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about robust job processing in Elixir. They explore the reliability, consistency, and observability in relation to job processing, to understand how Oban, Elixir, and PostgreSQL deliver them. The Selberts describe why Oban was created, its history, which parts of the Elixir...