Recording Venue: University of Passau Guest: Sven Apel Host: Stefan In this second episode on Feature-Oriented Software Development (FOSD), Sven Apel gives us an overview of programming language and tool support for FOSD. He introduces the Eclipse-based FeatureIDE which covers important phases of the FOSD process, namely domain implementation as well as configuration and generation. […]

Guest: Wilbert Albers Host: Markus In this episode we take a look at microchip production, with a special focus on waferscanners. To do this, we talked with Wilbert Albers of ASML, the leading waferscanner manufacturer in the world. In the episode, we talk about the overall chip production process (from silicon sand over wafer cutting […]

In this episode we talk with Rini van Solingen about scrum and agile software development in distributed settings.

Recording Venue: MongoSF, San Francisco Guest: Dwight Merriman As application data size and throughput have outgrown the processing and storage needs of commodity servers, replication has become an increasingly important strategy. In this episode, Robert talks with Dwight Merriman about database replication. Topics covered include replication basics, master-slave versus master-master, failure and recovery, replication versus […]

Recording Venue: Skype Guest: Eric Lubow Eric Lubow and Robert discuss polyglot persistence, a term used to describe systems that incorporate multiple specialized persistent stores rather than a single general-purpose database.  Eric provides insights into the forces driving this trend:  including diverse data usage patterns, low latency, and increasing volumes of data.  The emergence of […]

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 […]

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 […]

Adrian Cockcroft discusses the challenges in creating a dynamic, flexible, cloud-based platform with SE Radio host Stefan Tilkov. After briefly discussing the definition of “cloud computing,” Adrian explains the history behind Netflix’s move to the cloud (which he led). After highlighting some of the differences that have developers and architects must face, Adrian talks about […]

Johannes Thönes talks to Axel Rauschmayer about JavaScript and ECMAScript 6. They talk about the origin and version history. Then they dive into key JavaScript concepts and explain the features coming into the language with ECMAScript 6.

Robert Blumen talks to Christopher Meiklejohn about conflict-free replicated data types. The discussion covers consistency in distributed systems, CRDTs, and their use in NoSQL databases.

John Purrier talks with Jeff Meyerson about OpenStack, an open-source cloud operating system for managing compute resources. They explore infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, virtualization, containers, and the future of systems development and management.

Stefan Tilkov talks to Camille Fournier about the challenges developers face when building distributed systems, whether the can avoid building them at all, and what changes occur once they do.

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.

Kief Morris talks to Sven Johann about Infrastructure as Code and why it is important in the “Cloud Age”. Kief talks about the practices and benefits and why you should treat your servers as cattles, not pets.

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.

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.

Eberhard talks with Florian Gilcher about the programming language Rust. Rust originates from Mozilla research. Its focus is on system programming and it is often used to replace C or C++. Topics include the concepts behind Rust; concurrent and safe programming; advanced and unique features like ownership and borrowing; the rust type system (which supports other features like traits, generics and macros). The show finishes with: the evolution of Rust based, features of libraries, and how the community works.

Donny Nadolny of PagerDuty joins Robert Blumen to tell the story of debugging an issue that PagerDuty encountered when they set up a Zookeeper cluster that spanned across two geographically separated datacenters in different regions.

James Cowling of Dropbox tells Robert Blumen about their massive migration from Amazon’s S3 to their own distributed storage system.

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.

Edwin Brady speaks to Matthew Farwell about Type Driven Development and the Idris Programming language. The show covers: what a type is; static vs dynamic types in programming languages; dependent types; the Idris programming language; why Idris was created. Type safe printf modelling state in Idris modelling protocols in Idris modelling concurrency in Idris type driven development and how it changes the development process.

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.

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.

Kishore Bhatia talks with Conor Delanbanque about DevOps Hiring, building and retaining top talent in the DevOps space. Topics include DevOps as a special Engineering skill, building DevOps mindset and culture, challenges in hiring and retaining top talent and building teams and best practices for DevOps engineers and employers hiring for these skills.

Scott Piper and Kim Carter discuss Cloud Security. The Shared Responsibility Model, assets, risks, and countermeasures, evaluation techniques for comparing the security stature of CSPs. Scott discusses his FLAWS CTF engine. Covering tools Security Monkey and StreamAlert.

Kishore Bhatia talks with Travis Kimmel about Engineering Impact: In the age of data-driven decision making, how does one go about measuring, communicating, and improving engineering productivity? We’ll learn from Travis’ experience building data analytics tools in this space, with insights and best practices for engineering teams and business stakeholders for measuring value and productivity.

Edaena Salinas talks with Tammy Butow about Chaos Engineering. Tammy is a Principal Site Reliability Engineer at Gremlin. The discussion covers: how Chaos Engineering emerged, the types of chaos that can be introduced to a system, and how to structure...

Felienne interviews Marian Petre & André van der Hoek on their book ‘Software Design Decoded’, which contains 66 scientifically backed insights for the design process.

Edaena Salinas talks with Maria Gorlatova about Edge Computing. Maria Gorlatova is an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University Department of Electrical Engineering. The discussion covers: IoT, edge computing, the architecture of edge computing, running a machine learning model on the edge, and the benefits of edge computing.

Saša Jurić, author of Elixir in Action, explains the Elixir programming language and how it unlocks the benefits of the Erlang ecosystem, revealing the “sweet spot” for Elixir programs: highly scalability and fault tolerant systems with a simple arc

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

Peter Zaitsev explains: avoiding vendor lock-in, judging what databases are bad at, why not to copy the big players, when to "go with the crowd", when to use cloud services vs. running your own infrastructure, and the role of containerization.

The use of distributed and remote software teams have grown dramatically in the past five years, presenting new challenges for managers and engineers alike. Bryan Helmig talks about the best practices his company, Zapier, uses to manage remote software...

Chris Richardson of microservices.io and author of the book Microservice Patterns discuss microservice patterns which constitute a set of best practices and building-block solutions to problems inherent microservice architecture.

Gabriel Gonzalez, the creator of Dhall the programmable configuration language, discusses configuration, why it is important and how we can make it better. Adam Gordon Bell spoke Gonzalez about Dhall, yaml, total functional programming and dealing...

Justin Richer, lead author of the OAuth2 In Action book discusses the key technical features of the OAuth2 authorization protocol and the current best practices for selecting the right parts of it for your use case.

Heidi Howard, a researcher in the field of distributed systems, discusses distributed consensus. Heidi explains when we need it, when we don't need and the algorithms we use to achieve it.