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.

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.

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.

Dr. Daniel Zingaro and Dr. Leo Porter, co-authors of the book Learn AI-Assisted Python Programming, speak with host Jeremy Jung about teaching programming with the aid of large language models (LLMs). They discuss writing a book to use in Leo's introductory CS class and explore how GitHub Copilot de-emphasizes syntax errors, reduces the need to memorize APIs, and why they want students to write manual test cases. They also discuss possible ethical concerns of relying on commercial tools, their impact on coursework, and why they aren't worried about students cheating with LLMs.

Charles Weir—developer, security researcher, and Research Fellow at Security Lancaster—joins host Giovanni Asproni to discuss an approach that development teams can use to create secure systems without wasting effort on unnecessary security work. The episode starts with a broad description of the approach, which is based on Weir's research and on a free Developer Security Essentials workshop he created. Charles presents some examples from real-world projects, his view on AI's impact on security, and information about the workshop and where to find the materials. During the conversation, they consider several related topics including the concept of "good enough" security; security as a product decision; risk assessment, classification, and prioritization; and how to approach security in startups, greenfield, and legacy systems.

Adam Frank, SVP of Product and Marketing at Armory.io, speaks with SE Radio’s Kanchan Shringi about continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment – and how they differ. Frank suggests that organizations begin by identifying how the CI/CD process aligns best with their unique goals, noting that such goals might be different for B2C versus B2B SAAS (software as a service). They also discuss how the process can differ for monoliths compared to microservices-based products. Finally, they talk about continuous deployment as a service and some unique aspects of Armory’s approach.

José Valim, creator of the Elixir programming language, Chief Adoption Officer at Dashbit, and author of three programming books, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about what Elixir is today, what Livebook is, the five spearheads of the new machine learning ecosystem for Elixir, and how they all fit together. Valim describes why he created Elixir, what “the beam” is, and how he pitches it to new users. This episode examines things you can do with Livebook and how it is well-aligned with machine learning, as well as why immutability is important and how it works. They take a detailed look at a range of topics, including tensors with Nx, traditional machine learning with Scholar, data munging with Explorer, deep learning and neural networks with Axon, Bumblebee and Huggingface, and model creation basics. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Zac Hatfield-Dodds, the Assurance Team Lead at Anthropic, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about property-based testing techniques and how to use them in an open-source tool called Hypothesis. They discuss how to define properties for a Python function and implement a test case in Hypothesis. They also explore some of the advanced features in Hypothesis that can automatically generate a test case and perform fuzzing campaigns.

Yeckezkel Rabinovich, CTO of Groundcover, speaks with host Philip Winston about observability and eBPF as it applies to Kubernetes. Rabinovich was previously the chief architect at the healthcare security company CyberMDX and spent eight years in the cyber security division of the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office. This episode explores the three pillars of observability, extending the Linux Kernel with eBPF, the basics of Kubernetes, and how Groundcover uses eBPF as the basis for its observability platform.

Sean Moriarity, creator of the Axon deep learning framework, co-creator of the Nx library, and author of Machine Learning in Elixir and Genetic Algorithms in Elixir, published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about what deep learning (neural networks) means today. Using a practical example with deep learning for fraud detection, they explore what Axon is and why it was created. Moriarity describes why the Beam is ideal for machine learning, and why he dislikes the term “neural network.” They discuss the need for deep learning, its history, how it offers a good fit for many of today’s complex problems, where it shines and when not to use it. Moriarity goes into depth on a range of topics, including how to get datasets in shape, supervised and unsupervised learning, feed-forward neural networks, Nx.serving, decision trees, gradient descent, linear regression, logistic regression, support vector machines, and random forests. The episode considers what a model looks like, what training is, labeling, classification, regression tasks, hardware resources needed, EXGBoost, Jax, PyIgnite, and Explorer. Finally, they look at what’s involved in the ongoing lifecycle or operational side of Axon once a workflow is put into production, so you can safely back it all up and feed in new data. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine. This episode sponsored by Miro.

Llewelyn Falco, creator approval tests, talks with SE Radio host Sam Taggart about testing code in general and the various types of testing that developers perform. Llewelyn elaborates on how approval tests can help test code at a higher level than traditional unit tests. They also discuss using approval tests to help get legacy code under test. This episode sponsored by Data Annotation.

Phillip Carter, Principal Product Manager at Honeycomb and open source software developer, talks with host Giovanni Asproni about observability for large language models (LLMs). The episode explores similarities and differences for observability with LLMs versus more conventional systems. Key topics include: how observability helps in testing parts of LLMs that aren't amenable to automated unit or integration testing; using observability to develop and refine the functionality provided by the LLM (observability-driven development); using observability to debug LLMs; and the importance of incremental development and delivery for LLMs and how observability facilitates both. Phillip also offers suggestions on how to get started with implementing observability for LLMs, as well as an overview of some of the technology's current limitations. This episode is sponsored by WorkOS.

Wouter Groeneveld, author of The Creative Programmer and PhD researcher at KU Leuven, discusses his research related to programming education with host Jeremy Jung. Topics include evaluating projects, constraints, social debt in teams, common fallacies in critical thinking, maintaining flow state, documenting and retaining knowledge, and creating environments that encourage creativity. Brought to you by IEEE Software and IEEE Computer Society.

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 ecosystem they use, and why this would not be possible without PostgreSQL and Elixir. They discuss the lessons learned in the 5 years since the first release, as well as use cases, job throughput, the hardest problem to solve so far, workers, queues, CRON, distributed architectures, retry algorithms, just-once methodologies, the reliability the beam brings, consistency across nodes, how PostgreSQL is vital, telemetry data, best use cases for Oban, and the most common issues that new users face. 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 requirements, why PostgreSQL is the best, Pg callbacks, Pg hooks, C programming, Rust, their open source contributions and projects, data volumes, column-data, indexes, backups, why it is common to have one table for your timeseries data, when not to use timescaledb, IoT data formats, Pg indexes, how Pg works without timescaledb, sharding, and how to manage your upgrades if not using Timescale Cloud. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

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.

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 well as warns about some pitfalls. The episode closes with some discussion on Hans's views on the future of this discipline, as well as some near-term developments and expectations. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

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 their roles in the Zero Trust journey. The episode concludes with a look at the future direction of Zero Trust Network Architecture.

This episode is sponsored by QA Wolf.

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, and the role of software engineering in data science. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

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Examine, investigate

The Philips Performance Wireless TAPH805BK are wireless headphones with battery life that will knock your socks off, but the sound quality has a lot of room for improvement.... [PCSTATS]

Wireless AD networks came and went without as much as a buzz in the consumer space, and yet there is more here to see before completely dismissing it. Millitronic certainly agrees, with their HIVE wireless docking station able to connect a laptop to an external display wirelessly at low latency, while adding some more tricks on top.... [PCSTATS]

AMD just announced today a design win in conjunction with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), win which it will be providing the hardware powering the El Capitan exascale-class supercomputer. What caught our eye about this announcement was not the compute performance -- which will be enormous ... [PCSTATS]

The HT10 True Wireless Bluetooth Earbuds by Lenovo are aimed towards consumers on a tight budget looking to get the best bang for the buck. ... [PCSTATS]

" Writing an entire article on the Apex 3 was a really easy task thanks to the higher actuation point and we did not make any mistakes like on the regular high-speed gaming-only keyboards. This is a good point to recommend when using the keyboard in corporate offices as well: the new SteelSeries domes are silent, while the full-size layout allows ... [PCSTATS]

OWC channels the Mercury Elite lineup with the Elite Pro to offer its storage driven dock solution. Here's our review."... [PCSTATS]

The Corsair Scimitar RGB Elite is a mouse that offers plenty of buttons, turns heads with its MMO and MOBA gaming performance, and excellent build quality.... [PCSTATS]

If you publish an RSS feed, you should do a solid for the developers of RSS readers by including a guid in each item. The guid's job is to be a unique identifier that helps software downloading your feed decide whether it has seen that item before. Here's the guid for an item on the arts and technology blog Laughing Squid:

<guid isPermaLink="false">https://laughingsquid.com/?p=914660</guid>

No other item on Laughing Squid will ever have this guid value. It's a URL that loads a blog post with the title Playful Elephant Pretends to Eat Woman's Hat. If you load the guid's URL https://laughingsquid.com/?p=914660, it redirects to the permanent link of the post. Because the guid is not the permanent link, there's an isPermaLink attribute with a value of false.

Most guid values in RSS feeds are the permanent link of the item, as in this example from the world news site Semafor:

<guid>https://www.semafor.com/article/07/07/2023/us-jobs-data-what-experts-make-of-the-new-numbers</guid>

A drawback of using the permalink is that if any part of the URL changes -- such as the title text or the domain name -- the guid changes and RSS readers will think this is a new item to show the feed's subscribers, when it's actually a repeat.

A guid doesn't have to be a URL. It can be any string that the feed publisher has chosen to be unique. Here's the guid from the RSS Advisory Board's feed for this blog post:

<guid isPermaLink="false">tag:rssboard.org,2006:weblog.217</guid>

Our guid follows the TAG URI scheme, a simple way to assure uniqueness by putting these five components together in this order:

1. The text "tag"
2. A domain owned by the feed provider
3. A year the provider owned that domain
4. A short name for the feed different from any other feed on the site
5. The internal ID number of the post

There's different punctuation between each component. The year 2006 was when the board began using the domain rssboard.org. No one else used that domain that year, so any feed reader that stores "tag:rssboard.org,2006:weblog.217" as this item's guid should never encounter that value in any other item on any other feed.

To see how RSS 2.0 feeds are using guid, several thousand feeds were downloaded this evening from an RSS aggregator that publicly shares the OPML subscription lists of its users.

The term guid means "globally unique identifier," but RSS 2.0 does not require global uniqueness in guids. Because the TAG URI scheme does a good job of serving that purpose, Blogger, Flickr, MetaFilter, SoundCloud and The Register are among the sites using it in their feeds.

As temperatures continue to rise, California workers, worker protection groups, and state regulators are making progress on implementing heat regulations.

A self-described "climate refugee" deals with the devastation of Hurricane Helene in Asheville, North Carolina.

The United States has historically provided hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid to Israel. The flow of taxpayer funds to Israel’s military has only increased since Israeli forces

A new report by Insurrection Exposed prepares voters on what to expect from Trump’s next effort to steal an election.

An extremely tight race for the presidency is sparking a last-minute, Black-led GOTV effort aimed at Black voters in swing states.

Video now circulating in Israeli media corroborates allegations from Palestinian detainees that Israeli agents at Sde Teiman detention center rape and torture prisoners.

While politicians on both sides of the aisle embrace “tough on immigration” policies, asylum seekers hoping to enter the U.S. are turning to grassroots organizations for information, safety, and dignity

YES! Executive Editor Evette Dionne previews the latest issue of YES! Magazine, themed around "truth."

Project 2025, created by the extremist right-wing Heritage Foundation, takes a colonialist position on U.S. influence at home and abroad. Its authors argue that too much public land is not

Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist long critical of his nation’s apartheid state, offers moral clarity on the first anniversary of the genocide in Gaza.

How will Donald Trump’s re-election impact the Gaza genocide? And did Kamala Harris fail to win over Arab American votes?

Immigrants faced repeated dehumanization on a vast scale during the 2024 election. An organizer reflects on what happened and how to move forward.

In the wake of AIPAC’s ouster of two pro-Palestine congressional Democrats, a Jewish American digs into the reality of Zionist influence in American politics.

The Tony Award-winning play, loosely based on Alicia Keys’ childhood, falls into the same trap much theatre does, failing to depict the nuances of Black trauma.

“We need more white relatives to face their own truth, though doing so may bring immense discomfort,” says Edgar Villanueva.

A new statewide proposal is the latest development in a years-long saga over the voting rights of felons in the Sunshine State.

According to the actor and activist: “The choice is very clear: Do we vote for the future, or do we vote for burning up the planet?”

Communities targeted by escalating right-wing violence are learning from their own histories how to keep each other safe.

Analyst Lindsay Koshgarian counters President Biden’s claim that American interests require funding Israeli militarism.