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).

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.

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,

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.

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 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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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...

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...

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)...

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

Sam Procter of the SEI discusses architecture design languages, specifically Architecture Analysis and Design Language, and how we can leverage the formal modeling process to improve the security of our application design and improve applications overall.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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, as well as shift security left. Bennetts also considers what it takes to build a successful open source project before spending time on ZAP’s ability to script to provide richer results. Finally, the conversation ends with some questions on ZAP’s future in this AI-powered world of bots.

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 establish foundations for rolling out SRE, as well as how to overcome challenges they might face in adopting. Vlad also recommends steps that organizations can take to sustain and advance their SRE transformation beyond the foundations.

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 config, and interoperability with YAML. They examine jsonnet details, including the command line, constrained capabilities of the language, and objects and inheritance, and then consider the toolchain: compiler, formatter, and linter, as well as test frameworks and testing, package management, and the language’s performance. Barzowski describes four implementations -- go, C++, Rust, and Scala -- as well as popular libraries and the standard library.

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 governance, regulatory compliance, and data locality as drivers of where enterprises want to run their workload. They explore use cases for multi-cloud, and discuss architectural challenges in migrating to kubernetes, as well as issues with networking, security, and identity management with multi-cloud architectures. Finally, they discuss running public cloud compute on on-prem resources with Anthos, Outback, and related technologies.

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 tests can hinder continuous integration and continuous development by undermining trust in the CI/CD environment. This episode examines sources of flaky tests, including physical factors such as CPU or memory changes, as well as program-related factors such as performance issues. Gregory also describes some common areas that are prone to flaky tests and ways to detect them. They discuss tooling to detect and automatically mark flaky tests, as well as how to tackle these issues to make tests more reliable and even ways to write code so that it's less susceptible to flaky tests.

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 out how the end-to-end principle emphasizes full flexibility for end hosts, but the TCP implementation in the OS kernel as well as in “middle boxes” such as ISPs contributes to the constraints of ossification by blocking certain types of traffic. Further, the development of new protocols is challenging due to the need for backward compatibility with existing protocols. They discuss Google’s efforts – and the challenges it has faced – in working to move the HTTP protocol forward. The role of standards bodies such as the IETF and collaboration between industry stakeholders is crucial for the evolution of internet protocols, requiring a balance between maintaining backward compatibility and introducing new protocols such as QUIC and HTTP/3 to address existing constraints and improve internet performance and security. indeed, QUIC includes features that seek to actively avoid ossification and encourage evolution.

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 practice and are often unaware of resources such as the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK). Among the many topics explored in this episode are design methodologies such as volatility-based decomposition and the work of David Parnas, as well as important topics such as quality, how to address complexity, designing for change, and the role of the chief engineer. This episode is sponsored by ClickSend. SE Radio listeners can get a $50 credit by following the link.

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 concept of "zero new hardcoded secrets," as well as some ways to protect GitHub repositories, and Nir shares examples of how a pipelineless approach could help in these scenarios. They then discuss false positives and handling developer fatigue in dealing with alerts. The show ends with some discussion around the product that Arnica offers and how it implements the pipelineless methodology.

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 as dependencies, just like packages, the episode explores BFF patterns and use cases, as well as the future potential emergence of a “git for APIs” standard. This episode is sponsored by ClickSend. 

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 maintainable code, these qualities being the main focus of Clean Code. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

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 managing these sensitive data, particularly given the complexities of doing so on a large scale in substantial organizations. They discuss the necessity for a secure system for managing secrets, highlighting key features such as access policies, audit capabilities, and visualization tools. Ori introduces the concept of distributed fragment cryptography, which boosts security by ensuring that the entire secret is never known to any single entity. The episode explores encryption and decryption and the importance of key rotation, as they consider the challenges and potential solutions in secrets management.

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 Intel, Amazon, and Apple. They then consider how the principles can be applied to closed-source software within a company. Finally, they discuss some of the benefits that Intel has gained from more than 20 years of open source contributions and look at the company’s plan for the year ahead. SE Radio is rought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society.