Our guest Johan Bezem explains the idea behind and the benefits of MISRA. MISRA defines guidelines for C and C++ programming in order to ensure quality. While it got started for embedded automotive development, it is more generally applicable.

In this episode we talk with Kent Beck about automated unit testing and JUnit.

This episode is about being a consultant in the software business.

In this episode, Markus talk with Martin Fowler and Rebecca Parsons about domain-specific languages.

SE Radio will continue producing podcasts under the wings of IEEE Software, a respected magazine published by the IEEE Computer Society.

Recording Venue: WebEx Guest: Jim Benson Jim Benson is CEO of Modus Cooperandi, a collaborative management consultancy in Seattle, Washington. After being steeped in Agile for many years, Jim started working with Kanban and Lean thinking in 2005. In 2008, he started taking this idea further with Personal Kanban, which brings flow based work to the […]

Ben Hindman talks to Jeff Meyerson about Apache Mesos, a distributed systems kernel. Mesos abstracts away many of the hassles of managing a distributed system. Hindman starts with a high-level explanation of Mesos, explaining the problems he encountered trying to run multiple instances of Hadoop against a single data set. He then discusses how Twitter uses Mesos for cluster management. The conversation evolves into a more granular discussion of the abstractions Mesos provides and different ways to leverage those abstractions.

John Wilkes from Google talks with Charles Anderson about managing large clusters of machines. The discussion starts with Borg, Google’s internal cluster management program. John discusses what Borg does and what it provides to programmers and system administrators. He also describes Kubernetes, an open-source cluster management system recently developed by Google using lessons learned from Borg, Mesos, and Omega

Monica Beckwith joins Robert Blumen for a discussion of java garbage collection. What is garbage collection? GC algorithms; history of GC in the java language; fragmentation and compaction; generational strategies; causes of pauses; impact of pauses on application performance; tuning GC; GC on multi-core and large memory machines; should production servers be implemented in non-GC languages?; going off heap and other programming techniques to avoid garbage; the future of java GC.

Johannes Thönes talks to Patrick Kua about the role of a technical lead and how to become one. The show starts with introducing the concept of a lead and contrasts the lead role with other roles, such as technical manager, architect and senior developer.  The discussion continues to the responsibilities of a tech lead (supporting engineering practices, managing, resolving conflict, and growing people). The discussion continues on to talk about the challenges of becoming a tech lead and how to overcome them and closes with the question: “how can you tell if you are succeeding as a tech lead”?

Jeff Meyerson talks with Frances Perry about Apache Beam, a unified batch and stream processing model. Topics include a history of batch and stream processing, from MapReduce to the Lambda Architecture to the more recent Dataflow model, originally defined in a Google paper. Dataflow overcomes the problem of event time skew by using watermarks and other methods discussed between Jeff and Frances. Apache Beam defines a way for users to define their pipelines in a way that is agnostic of the underlying execution engine, similar to how SQL provides a unified language for databases. This seeks to solve the churn and repeated work that has occurred in the rapidly evolving stream processing ecosystem.

Björn Rabenstein discusses the field of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) with host Robert Blumen. The term SRE has recently emerged to mean Google's approach to DevOps. The publication of Google's book on SRE has brought many of their practices into more public discussion. The interview covers: what is distinct about SRE versus devops; the SRE focus on development of operational software to minimize manual tasks; the emphasis on reliability; Dickerson's hierarchy of reliability; how reliability can be measured; is there such a thing as too much reliability?; can Google's approach to SRE be applied outside of Google?; Björn's experience in applying SRE to Soundcloud - what worked and what did not; how can engineers best apply SRE to their organizational situation?; the importance of monitoring; monitoring and alerting; being on call, responding to incidents; the importance of documentation for responding to problems; they wrap up with a discussion of why people from non-computer science backgrounds are often found in devops and SRE.

Host Marcus Blankenship talks with Gerald Weinberg about his new book, Errors: Bugs, Boo-boos, and Blunders, focusing on why programmers make errors, how teams can improve their software, and how management should think of and discuss errors.

Edaena Salinas talks with Charlie Berger about Predictive Applications. The discussion begins with an overview of how to build a Predictive Application and the role of Machine Learning. It then explores different Machine Learning algorithms that can be implemented natively in a database.

Edaena Salinas talks with Nicole Hubbard at KubeCon 2017. They discuss why WP engine is migrating from VMs to Kubernetes and how the migration is structured. Nicole explained the VM infrastructure at WP Engine and why there was a need to move...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Adar Leiber-Dembo talks to SE Radio’s Akshay Manchale about Apache Kudu, a system for fast analytics in a column-based storage system. They explore how to leverage Kudu for data analytics, as well as its rich feature set and integration options with other SQL and analytical engines.

Bert Hubert, author of the open source PowerDNS nameserver discusses DNS security and all aspects of the Domain Name System with its flaws and history.

Yevgeniy Brikman, author of Terraform: Up & Running: Writing Infrastructure as Code and co-founder of Gruntwork talks with host Robert Blumen about how to apply best practices from software engineering to the development of infrastructure as code...

Berkay Mollamustafaoglu, founder of Ops Genie, discusses the keys to an effective incident management process. Many aspects of incident management are counter intuitive. Why does increasing the rate of change increase uptime? Why is culture the most...

Andy Powell is the CISO of AP Moller Maersk and discusses the 2017 cyber attack that hit the company and the lessons learned for preventing and recovering from future attacks.

Thomas Graf, Co-Founder of Cilium, discusses eBPF and XDP and how they can be leveraged for a wide variety of use cases across networking, observability, and security.

Nigel Poulton, author of The Kubernetes Book and Docker Deep Dive, discusses Kubernetes fundamentals, why Kubernetes is gaining so much momentum, deploying an example app, and why Kubernetes is considered "the" Cloud OS.

Matt Arbesfeld, cofounder of LogRocket, discusses the benefits and drawbacks of starting a software company as a software engineer, including finding cofounders, fundraising, and determining what ideas are worth pursuing.

Networking researcher Iljitsch van Beijnum discusses internet routing and the border gateway protocol (BGP) with host Robert Blumen.

Dhruba Borthakur, CTO and co-founder of Rockset, discusses the use cases and core requirements of real-time analytics, as well as the evolution from batch to real time and the need for a new architecture with host Kanchan Shringi.

Davide Bedine, a cloud solution architect at Microsoft and professional Dapr enthusiast joined host Jeff Doolittle to discuss his book, Practical Microservices with Dapr and .NET. Dapr, the Distributed Application Runtime, simplifies cloud-native...

Robert Seacord, author of Effective C, The CERT C Coding Standard and Secure Coding in C and C++, discusses why the C programming language can be insecure, the top 5 security issues and the tools and techniques you can employ to write secure code in C.

Robert Seacord, author of Effective C, The CERT C Coding Standard and Secure Coding in C and C++, discusses why the C programming language can be insecure, the top 5 security issues and the tools and techniques you can employ to write secure code in C.

Daniel Stenberg, founder and lead developer of cURL and libcurl, and winner of the Polhem Prize, discusses the history of the project, key events in the project timeline, war stories, favorite command line options and various experiences from 25 years of developing an Open Source project.

Daniel Stenberg, founder and lead developer of cURL and libcurl, and winner of the Polhem Prize, discusses the history of the project, key events in the project timeline, war stories, favorite command line options and various experiences from 25 years of developing an Open Source project.

Tim Post of echoreply.io discusses Rubber Duck Debugging, a way to wrap your head about problems and solutions. Host Felienne spoke with Post about Rubber Duck debugging, and how it can help you to find answers to complex problems.

This week, senior software engineer, instructor, and blogger Swizec Teller spoke with SE Radio's Brijesh Ammanath about the "senior mindset." Becoming a senior engineer is about more than just years of experience but rather about cultivating a different..

Brian Campbell, Distinguished Engineer at Ping Identity discusses cryptographic defences against stolen tokens for the OAUTH2 protocol with host Priyanka Raghavan. The discussion explores various subtopics such as the history of Proof of possession...

Roberto Di Cosmo, Computer Science professor at University Paris Diderot and founder of the Software Heritage initiative, discusses how to protect against sudden loss from the collapse of a "free" source code repository provider, how to protect...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Andy Suderman, CTO of Fairwinds, joins host Robert Blumen to talk about standing up a kubernetes cluster. Their discussion covers build-your-own versus managed clusters provided by cloud services, and how to determine the number of kubernetes clusters an organization needs. Andy describes best practices for automating cluster provisioning, and offers recommendations about customizations and opinionation of cloud service providers, choice of container registry, and whether you should run complementary services such as CI and monitoring on the same cluster. The episode also examines the day 0/day 1/day 2 lifecycle, cluster auto-scaling at the cloud service level, integrating stateful services and other cloud services into your cluster, and kubernetes secrets and alternatives. Finally, they consider the container-network interface (CNI), ingress and load balancers, and provisioning external DNS and TLS certificates for cluster services.

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.

William Morgan, founder of the Linkerd service mesh and CEO of Bouyant, joins SE Radio’s Robert Blumen for a discussion of sidecars, service mesh, and a forthcoming enhancement to kubernetes to support sidecars natively. The conversation explores the origin of sidecars, sidecars and service mesh, and migrating service mesh to kubernetes. They take a deep dive into some aspects of running service mesh on kubernetes, the difficulties in running a sidecar container in a pod, and Kubernetes Enhancement Proposal (KEP) 753, which is intended to provide better native support for sidecar containers. William also gives some thoughts on the continuing relevance of service mesh.

Kent Beck, Chief Scientist at Mechanical Orchard, and inventor of Extreme Programming and Test-Driven Development, joins SE Radio host Giovanni Asproni for a conversation on software design based on his latest book "Tidy First?". The episode starts with exploring the reasons for writing the book, and introducing the concepts of tidying, cohesion, and coupling. It continues with a conversation about software design, and the impact of tidyings. Then Kent and Giovanni discuss how to balance design and code quality decisions with cost, value delivered, and other important aspects. The episode ends with some considerations on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the software developer's job. Brought to you by IEEE Software and IEEE Computer Society.