In this episode we discuss with Randy Shoup, Distinguished Architect at eBay, about architectural pinciples and patterns used for building the highly scalable eBay infrastructure. The discussion is structured into four main ideas: partition everything, use asynchrony everywhere, automate everything, and design the system keeping in mind that everything fails at some point in a large distributed system.

This is the first part of a two part topic on roles in software engineering. Michael and Markus discuss role definitions in an corporate environment. For several typical roles we give hints on the expected skills, knowledge, and mindset. In this episode we discuss the roles junior developer, senior developer, and software architect.

In this episode we discuss the status of SE Radio today and introduce the team members. Among other things, Markus discusses stats, sound quality, partners, transcripts, and the cooperation with Hillside Europe. Also, the team members introduce themselves with a one to two minute clip.

In this episode we're talking to Anneke Kleppe about model-driven software development and language engineering. We start with her involvement in the creation of the Object Constraint Language (OCL) and discuss the intial expactations, actual experiences, and the place of OCL in the current day. From here, Anneke talks us through her take on the formative years of UML and MDA. From here, we expand to the realm of Domain-Specific Languages and Anneke discusses their place in software engineering in general and why we should expect DSLs in significant numbers to become a common sight.

This episode is a discussion about code and metrics visualization with Michele Lanza. Michele invented the Code Cities idea about which he talks in this episode.

This is a discussion with Eoin Woods about his collection of top 10 software architecture mistakes. Looking at things that don't work is always a good way to learn what you should actually do.

This episode is a conversation with Gilad Bracha about Newspeak, type systems in general and optional/pluggable types in particular. It was recorded during DSL Devcon in the gardens of the Microsoft campus, and thanks to Gilad's "speaking like a book" way of talking it is published completely unedited :-)

In this episode we discuss the current state of the spring framework. We talk about core features (dependency injection, AOP) but also about the spring universe, i.e. some of the more specific frameworks such as Spring Batch.

This episode is a discussion with various authors of patterns reviewed at EuroPLoP 2009. Topics include Product Line Engineering, Distributed Development, Open Source and Embedded Systems

This episode is a conversation with "Uncle Bob" Bob Martin about agile software development and software craftsmanship specifically. We talk about the history of the term, the reasons for coming up with it some of the practices and the relationship to other agile approaches. We conclude our discussion with an outlook on some of todays new and hyped programming languages.

This episode is a conversation with Scott Meyers about the upcoming C++0x standard. We talk a bit about the reasons for creating this new standard and then cover the most important new features, including upport for concurrency, implicitly-typed variables, move semantics, variadic templates, lambda functions, and uniform initialization syntax. We also looked at some new features in the standard library.

This episode is a conversation with Ramnivas Laddad about aspect-oriented programming (AOP), Aspect J, and Spring AOP. We review the fundamental concepts of AOP, discuss AspectJ (an open source compiler that extends java with support for AOP), and cover the Spring Framework's proxy-based AOP system. Laddad also gives his thoughts on the use cases for AOP and where we are in the technology adoption curve, and updates on the state of the AspectJ project itself.

In this episode Michael talks with Bas Vodde about how to apply agile principles to large and distributed development organizations.

Recording Venue: Phone Guest: Steve Will IBM i (formerly known as OS/400) is an advanced object-based operating system by IBM that runs thousands of businesses around the world.  Steve Will, the Chief Architect of IBM i speaks with us about the history, technical features, and underlying architecture discussing the concepts of Single Level Store, integrated […]

In this episode Michael interviews Jurgen Appelo on the topic of leading agile developers.

Recording Venue: WebEx Guest: Christof Ebert Christof Ebert, managing director of Vector Consulting Services talks with Frances Paulisch on his insights to how lean applies to product development. The interview centers around five key principles of lean development, namely end-to-end focus on creating value for the customer, eliminating waste, optimizing value streams, empowering people, and […]

For Episode 200 of Software Engineering Radio, Diomidis Spinellis interviews Markus Völter, the podcast’s founder. Markus works as an independent researcher, consultant, and coach for itemis AG in Stuttgart, Germany. His focus is on software architecture, model-driven software development and domain specific languages as well as on product line engineering. Markus also regularly publishes articles, […]

Martin Thompson, proprietor of the blog Mechanical Sympathy, founder of the LMAX disruptor open source project, and a consultant and frequent speaker on high performance computing talks with Robert about computer program performance. Martin explains the meaning of the term “mechanical sympathy,” derived from auto racing, and its relevance to program performance: the importance of […]

Andrew Gerrand works on the Go programming language at Google. His conversation with Jeff begins with a history of the language, including the details behind how Go was conceived and how the open source community contributes to it. Andrew explains how Go intends to simplify problems which have been motifs as Google has scaled. The […]

Leslie Lamport won a Turing Award in 2013 for his work in distributed and concurrent systems. He also designed the document preparation tool LaTex. Leslie is employed by Microsoft Research, and has recently been working with TLA+, a language that is useful for specifying concurrent systems from a high level. The interview begins with a […]

Robert talks to Dr. Anil Madhavapeddy of the Cambridge University (UK) Systems research group about the OCaml language and the Mirage cloud operating system, a microkernel written entirely in OCaml. The outline includes: history of the evolution from dedicated servers running a monolithic operating system to virutalized servers based on the Xen hypervisor to micro-kernels; […]

Eberhard Wolff talks with Martin Lippert of Pivotal about the Eclipse Flux project. This projects is in its early stages — and has a very interesting goal: It aims to put software development tools into the cloud. It is a lot more than just an IDE (integrated development environment) in a browser. Instead the IDE […]

Johannes Thönes talks to Dr. Ken Collier, Director of Agile Analytics at ThoughtWorks about Agile Analytics. The outline includes: descriptive analytics, predictive analytic and prescriptive analytics; artificial intelligence, machine learning, data mining and statistics; collaborative filtering; data science and data scientists; data warehousing and business intelligence; online analytical processing (OLAP), extract transform load (ETL), feature […]

Charles Anderson talks to Mitchell Hashimoto about the Vagrant open source project, which can be used to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments. Vagrant aims to make new developers on a project productive within minutes of joining the project instead of spending hours or days setting up the developer’s workstation. The outline […]

With this episode, Software Engineering Radio begins a series of interviews on social/nontechnical aspects of working as a software engineer as Tobias Kaatz talks to Randy Shoup, former CTO at KIXEYE, about hiring in the software industry. Prior to KIXEYE, Randy worked as director of engineering at Google for the Google App Engine and as […]

Josiah Carlson discusses Redis, an in-memory single-threaded data structure server. A Redis mailing list contributor and author, Josiah talks with Robert about the differences between Redis and a key-value store, client-side versus server-side data structures, consistency models, embedding Lua scripts within the server, what you can do with Redis from an application standpoint, native locking […]

Micro services is an emerging trend in software architecture that focuses on small, lightweight applications as a means to avoid large, unmaintainable, monolithic systems. This approach allows for individual technology stacks for each component and more resilient systems. Micro services uses well-known communication schemes such as REST but also require new technologies for the implementation. […]

Johannes Thönes talks with Erich Gamma, Ralph Johnson and Richard Helm from the Gang of Four about the 20th anniversary of their book Design Patterns. They discuss the following topics: the definition of a design pattern and each guest’s favorite design pattern; the origins of the book in architecture workshops; the writing of the book […]

Robert Blumen talks to Jon Gifford of Loggly about logging and logging infrastructure. Topics include logging defined, purposes of logging, uses of logging in understanding the run-time behavior of programs, who produces logs, who consumes logs and for what reasons, software as the consumer of logs, log formats (structured versus free form), log meta-data, logging […]

Alex Budzier of the Oxford Saïd Business School and Jürgen Laartz of McKinsey Berlin join Robert Blumen to talk about the their research on large IT project failures. Why do large projects fail and to what extent are these failures avoidable?

Jeff Meyerson talks to Haoyuan Li about Alluxio, a memory-centric distributed storage system. The cost of memory and disk capacity are both decreasing every year–but only the throughput of memory is increasing exponentially. This trend is driving opportunity in the space of big data processing. Alluxio is an open source, memory-centric, distributed, and reliable storage system enabling data sharing across clusters at memory speed. Alluxio was formerly known as Tachyon. Haoyuan is the creator of Alluxio. Haoyuan was a member of the Berkeley AMPLab, which is the same research facility from which Apache Mesos and Apache Spark were born. In this episode, we discuss Alluxio, Spark, Hadoop, and the evolution of the data center software architecture.

Eberhard Wolff talks with Jürgen Höller about Reactive Spring. Reactive programming is a hot topic, but adoption has been slow in the enterprise. Spring 5 incorporates Reactor and the RxJava API to help Java developers build scalable high-performance web applications. The discussion explores architectural challenges, transactions, porting existing applications, and increased code complexity.

Jeff Meyerson talks with Brian Brazil about monitoring with Prometheus, an open source tool for monitoring distributed applications. Brian is the founder of Robust Perception, a company offering Prometheus engineering and consulting. The high level goal of Prometheus is to allow developers to focus on services rather than individual instances of a given service. Prometheus is based off of the Borgmon monitoring tool, widely used at Google, where Brian previously worked. Jeff and Brian discuss the tradeoffs of choosing not to replicate our monitoring data. In some situations, the monitoring system will lose data because of this decision. Other topics that are discussed are distributed consensus tools, integrations with Prometheus, and the broader topic of monitoring itself.

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.

Docker Security Team lead Diogo Mónica talks with SE Radio’s Kim Carter about Docker Security aspects. Simple Application Security, which hasn’t changed much over the past 15 years, is still considered the most effective way to improve security around Docker containers and infrastructure. The discussion explores characteristics such as Immutability, the copy-on-write filesystem, as well as orchestration principles that are baked into Docker Swarm, such as mutual TLS/PKI by default, secrets distribution, least privilege, content scanning, image signatures, and secure/trusted build pipelines. Diogo also shares his thoughts around the attack surface of the Linux kernel; networking, USB, and driver APIs; and the fact that application security remains more important to focus our attention on and get right.

Nate Black talks with Jonathan Stark about platforms for mobile development, making decisions about how to develop mobile apps, how to deploy mobile apps, native apps vs. progressive web apps, React Native, and the future of mobile applications.

Bryan Reinero talks with Jason Hand about handling outages and responding to failures. The episode explores basic problem-solving strategies and diagnostic techniques, organizing teams to address incidents efficiently, communicating with stakeholders, learning from incidents, and managing stress.

1. Founder of Thinkst, Haroon Meer talks with Kim Carter about Network Security. Topics include how attackers are gaining footholds into our networks, moving laterally, and exfilling our precious data, as well as why we care and what software engineers can do about it.

Felienne interviews Zachary Burt about freelancing as a career option. How does freelancing differ from employment? How to do personal marketing and sales? How to find a work-life balance when you are self-employed? We also cover practical tips like deciding on an hourly rate and managing demanding customers.

Felienne talks with Evgeny Shadchnev about Code Schools, programs that prepare people to become a software developer in a few months. This episode explores the idea of code schools. Can we really teach programming in a few months rather than in a few years in university? Who teaches at those programs? Who attends them? What are their business models and should we teach programming online or offline?

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.

Ron Lichty talks with SE Radio’s Nate Black about managing programmers. Topics include: why programming management is hard, what makes a good programming manager, the costs of micromanagement, self-organizing teams, team dynamics and motivation, and product team performance.

Bryan Reinero talks with Harsh Sinha, VP of  Engineering at TransferWise, about Product Management. Mr. Sinha details how requirements are derived from user needs, how to measure product success, and how successful product management is done.

Bryan Reinero talks with Gregor Hohpe about IT Transformation, the process by which organizations adapt and reorganize themselves in response to evolution and how the Enterprise Architect leads that transformation.

Founder of Signal Sciences Zane Lackey talks with Kim Carter about Application Security around what our top threats are today, culture, threat modelling, and visibility, and how we can improve our security stature as Software Engineers.

Kirk Pepperdine talks with Diomidis Spinellis about performance optimization. Topics include development practices, tools, as well as the role of software architecture, programming languages, algorithms, and hardware advances.

Kishore Bhatia discusses with Nate Taggart about Serverless. Topics include: understanding the motivations for this computing model, deep dive learning about Serverless architecture, development frameworks and tools. Learn from Nate’s experience with Serverless paradigm developing Operations tools at Stackery and find out various approaches, challenges and best practices for architecting and building Serverless applications.