Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

se-radio@computer.org

Software Engineering Radio is a podcast targeted at the professional software developer. The goal is to be a lasting educational resource, not a newscast. SE Radio covers all topics software engineering. Episodes are either tutorials on a specific topic, or an interview with a well-known character from the software engineering world. All SE Radio episodes are original content — we do not record conferences or talks given in other venues. Each episode comprises two speakers to ensure a lively listening experience. SE Radio is brought to you by the IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine. read less

Our Editor's Take

From IEEE Computer Society comes Software Engineering Radio -The Podcast for Professional Software Developers. Its creators are clear on their mission. They want this podcast viewed as a tool for software developers. Listeners also hear conversations and analyses about the latest news in the industry.

This podcast is for software engineer professionals. It's also great for listeners who enjoy software engineering as a hobby. A unique facet of this podcast is that there is no regular host. Listeners can expect well-known educators from the industry in every segment. Listeners will sometimes hear a tutorial on software topics. Other times, they'll listen to an incisive dialogue about the industry.

The podcast welcomes a variety of guest speakers. They range from start-up founders and professors to career coaches and authors. They provide useful advice and discuss their roles and the industry. Their tone is dynamic and informative. They create a compelling back-and-forth dialogue. What's the future of software automation? Is machine learning a crucial factor in software engineering methodologies? This podcast answers these questions and more.

New episodes of this podcast drop about once per week. Listeners can expect episodes to run under one hour. Complete with details and discussion, these thorough sessions will delight software enthusiasts. With over 500 episodes to listen to, the archives of this podcast are extensive. Listeners can start from the beginning or select particular episode titles that interest them. Audiences can hear this podcast now on Amazon Music.

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Start Here
SE Radio 566: Ashley Peacock on Diagramming in Software Engineering
3d ago
SE Radio 566: Ashley Peacock on Diagramming in Software Engineering
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.
SE Radio 566: Ashley Peacock on Diagramming in Software Engineering
3d ago
SE Radio 566: Ashley Peacock on Diagramming in Software Engineering
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.
SE Radio 565: Luca Galante on Platform Engineering
May 23 2023
SE Radio 565: Luca Galante on Platform Engineering
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.
SE Radio 564: Paul Hammant on Trunk-Based Development
May 17 2023
SE Radio 564: Paul Hammant on Trunk-Based Development
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.
SE Radio 563: David Cramer on Error Tracking
May 10 2023
SE Radio 563: David Cramer on Error Tracking
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.
SE Radio 562: Bastian Gruber on Rust Web Development
May 3 2023
SE Radio 562: Bastian Gruber on Rust Web Development
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.
SE Radio 561: Dan DeMers on Dataware
Apr 27 2023
SE Radio 561: Dan DeMers on Dataware
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.
SE Radio 560: Sugu Sougoumarane on Distributed SQL with Vitess
Apr 19 2023
SE Radio 560: Sugu Sougoumarane on Distributed SQL with Vitess
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.
SE Radio 559: Ross Anderson on Software Obsolescence
Apr 12 2023
SE Radio 559: Ross Anderson on Software Obsolescence
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.
SE Radio 558: Michael Fazio on Modern Android Development
Apr 5 2023
SE Radio 558: Michael Fazio on Modern Android Development
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.
SE Radio 557: Timothy Beamish on React and Next.js
Mar 28 2023
SE Radio 557: Timothy Beamish on React and Next.js
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.
SE Radio 556: Alex Boten on Open Telemetry
Mar 23 2023
SE Radio 556: Alex Boten on Open Telemetry
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.
SE Radio 555: On Freund on Upskilling
Mar 15 2023
SE Radio 555: On Freund on Upskilling
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.
SE Radio 554: Adam Tornhill on Behavioral Code Analysis
Mar 8 2023
SE Radio 554: Adam Tornhill on Behavioral Code Analysis
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.
SE Radio 553: Luca Casonato on Deno
Mar 1 2023
SE Radio 553: Luca Casonato on Deno
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.
SE Radio 552: Matt Frisbie on Browser Extensions
Feb 23 2023
SE Radio 552: Matt Frisbie on Browser Extensions
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.
Episode 551: Vidal Graupera on Manager 1-1 with Direct Reports
Feb 15 2023
Episode 551: Vidal Graupera on Manager 1-1 with Direct Reports
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...
Episode 550: J.R. Storment and Mike Fuller on Cloud FinOps (Financial Operations)
Feb 9 2023
Episode 550: J.R. Storment and Mike Fuller on Cloud FinOps (Financial Operations)
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.
Episode 549: William Falcon Optimizing Deep Learning Models
Feb 3 2023
Episode 549: William Falcon Optimizing Deep Learning Models
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...
Episode 548: Alex Hidalgo on Implementing Service Level Objectives
Jan 25 2023
Episode 548: Alex Hidalgo on Implementing Service Level Objectives
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...
Episode 547: Nicholas Manson on Identity Management for Cloud Applications
Jan 18 2023
Episode 547: Nicholas Manson on Identity Management for Cloud Applications
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...