Software Engineering Radio is a podcast targeted at the professional software developer. The goal is to be a lasting educational resource, not a newscast. SE Radio covers all topics software engineering. Episodes are either tutorials on a specific topic, or an interview with a well-known character from the software engineering world. All SE Radio episodes are original content — we do not record conferences or talks given in other venues. Each episode comprises two speakers to ensure a lively listening experience. SE Radio is brought to you by the IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
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SE Radio 702: Derick Schaefer on Modern CLIs
Derick Schaefer, author of CLI: A Practical Guide to Creating Modern Command-Line Interfaces, talks with host Robert Blumen about command-line interfaces old and new. Starting with a short review of the origin of commands in the early unix systems, they trace the evolution of commands into modern CLIs. Following the historic rise, fall, and re-emergence of CLIs, they consider innovative examples such as git, github, WordPress, and warp. Schaefer clarifies whether commands are the same as CLIs and then discusses a range of topics, including implementation languages, packages in the golang ecosystem for CLI development, CLIs and APIs, CLIs and AIs, AI tooling versus MCP, the object-command pattern, command flags, API authentication, whether CLIs should be stateless, and output formats - json, rich text. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 701: Max Guernsey, III and Luniel de Beer on Readiness in Software Engineering
Max and Luniel co-authors of the book - "Ready: Why Most Software Projects Fail and How to Fix It", discuss the concept of Readiness in software engineering with host Brijesh Ammanath. While Agile workflows and technical practices help delivery, many software efforts still struggle to achieve desired outcomes. Rework, shifting requirements, delays, defects, and mounting technical debt plague software delivery and impede or altogether halt progress toward goals. The problem is often that implementation begins prematurely, before the team is properly set up for success. A strict system of explicit readiness work and gating, called Requirements Maturation Flow (RMF), solves this problem in a SDLC-independent way. Teams that have adopted RMF dramatically improve progress toward real goals while reducing stress on engineering teams. In this podcast, Max and Luniel deep dive into Requirements Maturation Flow (RMF) and explain its foundational pillars. Objective - Understand why most software projects fail, what causes rework, under-delivery and delays. What is Requirements Maturation Flow and its 3 foundational practices? Understanding the value of having Readiness as a explicit work item Understanding Definition of Done Understanding Definition of Ready Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 700: Mojtaba Sarooghi on Waiting Rooms for High-Traffic Events
Mojtaba Sarooghi, a Distinguished Product Architect at Queue-it, speaks with host Jeremy Jung about virtual waiting rooms for high-traffic events such as concerts and limited-quantity product releases. They explore using a virtual queue to prevent overloading systems, how most traffic is from bots, using edge workers to reduce requests to the customer's origin servers, and strategies for detecting bots in cooperation with vendors. Mojtaba discusses using AWS services like Elastic Load Balancing, DynamoDB, and Simple Notification Service, and explains why DynamoDB's eventual consistency is a good fit for their domain. To explain the approach, he walks us through how his team resolved an incident in which a traffic spike overloaded their services. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 699: Benjamin Brial on Internal Dev Platforms
In this episode, Benjamin Brial, CEO and co-founder of Cycloid, speaks with host Sriram Panyam about internal developer platforms (IDPs) and internal developer portals. The conversation explores how these platforms address the growing challenges of DevOps scalability, multi-cloud complexity, and cloud waste, all of which organizations face as they grow. Benjamin begins by framing the core problems that IDPs solve: DevOps struggling to scale beyond small teams, the complexity of managing hybrid environments across on-premises, public cloud, and private cloud infrastructure, and the significant issue of cloud waste (averaging 35-45% according to major analysts). IDPs can serve as a bridge between DevOps teams and developers, providing access to tools, cloud resources, and automation for users who aren't DevOps or cloud experts. The technical discussion covers essential IDP components including service catalogs, versioning engines, platform orchestration, asset inventory, and FinOps/GreenOps modules. The episode concludes with Benjamin's practical advice: organizations should focus on understanding their specific pain points rather than following market trends, starting with simple use cases such as landing zones before building complex solutions, and adopt a GitOps-first approach as the foundation for any IDP implementation. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 698: Srujana Merugu on How to build an LLM App
In this episode of Software Engineering Radio, Srujana Merugu, an AI researcher with decades of experience, speaks with host Priyanka Raghavan about building LLM-based applications. The discussion begins by clarifying essential concepts like generative vs. predictive AI, pre-training vs. fine-tuning, and the transformer architecture that powers modern LLMs. Srujana explains diffusion models and vision transformers, highlighting how multimodal AI is reshaping content creation. The conversation then moves to practical aspects—where LLMs make sense, where they don't, and a decision framework for evaluating use cases. They explore common application patterns such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic architectures, breaking down components like planners, orchestrators, memory, and tools. Key considerations for model selection, evaluation metrics, and safety guardrails are discussed in depth. The episode also touches on prompting strategies, automated prompt optimization, and emerging trends like multi-sensory AI and the "Internet of Senses." Finally, Srujana shares tips on staying current in a fast-moving AI landscape and emphasizes lifelong learning and curated knowledge sources.
SE Radio 697: Philip Kiely on Multi-Model AI
Philip Kiely, software developer relations lead at Baseten, speaks with host Jeff Doolittle about multi-agent AI, emphasizing how to build AI-native software beyond simple ChatGPT wrappers. Kiely advocates for composing multiple models and agents that take action to achieve complex user goals, rather than just producing information. He explains the transition from off-the-shelf models to custom solutions, driven by needs for domain-specific quality, latency improvements, and economic sustainability, which introduces the engineering challenge of inference engineering. Kiely stresses that AI engineering is primarily software engineering with new challenges, requiring robust observability and careful consideration of trust and safety through evals and alignment. He recommends an approach of iterative experimentation to get started with multi-agent AI systems. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 696: Flavia Saldanha on Data Engineering for AI
Flavia Saldanha, a consulting data engineer, joins host Kanchan Shringi to discuss the evolution of data engineering from ETL (extract, transform, load) and data lakes to modern lakehouse architectures enriched with vector databases and embeddings. Flavia explains the industry's shift from treating data as a service to treating it as a product, emphasizing ownership, trust, and business context as critical for AI-readiness. She describes how unified pipelines now serve both business intelligence and AI use cases, combining structured and unstructured data while ensuring semantic enrichment and a single source of truth. She outlines key components of a modern data stack, including data marketplaces, observability tools, data quality checks, orchestration, and embedded governance with lineage tracking. This episode highlights strategies for abstracting tooling, future-proofing architectures, enforcing data privacy, and controlling AI-serving layers to prevent hallucinations. Saldanha concludes that data engineers must move beyond pure ETL thinking, embrace product and NLP skills, and work closely with MLOps, using AI as a co-pilot rather than a replacement. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 695: Dave Thomas on Building eBooks Infrastructure
Dave Thomas, author of The Pragmatic Programmer, The Manifesto for Agile Software Development, Programming Ruby, Agile Web Development with Rails, Programming Elixir, Simplicity, and co-founder of the Pragmatic Bookshelf, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about building infrastructure for eBooks. They discuss what an eBook is, the various formats, what infrastructure is needed to build them, how an author writes an book, the history of the Pragmatic Bookshelf, how they have evolved, how to handle links within eBooks, why humans are so important in the writing process, and why AI can help with your writing -- once you've written your content. Thomas discusses PDFs, eBooks, Mobi files, ePub files, CI/CD pipelines, WYSWYG, Markdown files, Pragmatic Markup Language, embedding code, AI agents, images, printing PDFs, JVMs, Java, jRuby, and how Markdown won the plain text writing format wars. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 694: Jennings Anderson and Amy Rose on Overture Maps
Jennings Anderson, a Software Engineer with Meta Platforms, and Amy Rose, the Chief Technology Officer at Overture Maps Foundation, speak with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the Overture Maps project, which creates reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data. After exploring the foundations of geospatial information systems, Gregory and his guests dive deep into the implementation of Overture Maps through features like the Global Entity Reference System (GERS). In addition to discussing the organizational structure of the Overture Maps Foundation and the need for a unified database of geospatial data, Jennings and Amy explain how to implement applications using data from Overture Maps. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 693: Mark Williamson on AI-Assisted Debugging
Mark Williamson, CTO of Undo, joins host Priyanka Raghavan to discuss AI-assisted debugging. The conversation is structured around three main objectives: understanding how AI can serve as a debugging assistant; examining AI-powered debugging tools; exploring whether AI debuggers can independently find and fix bugs. Mark highlights how AI can support debugging with its ability to analyze vast amounts of data, narrow down issues, and even generate tests. From there, the discussion turns to AI debugging tools, with a particular look at ChatDBG's strengths and limitations, with a peek at time travel debugging. In the final segment, they consider several real-world scenarios and evaluate the feasibility and practicality of AI acting autonomously in debugging. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 692: Sourabh Satish on Prompt Injection
Sourabh Satish, CTO and co-founder of Pangea, speaks with SE Radio's Brijesh Ammanath about prompt injection. Sourabh begins with the basic concepts underlying prompt injection and the key risks it introduces. From there, they take a deep dive into the OWASP Top 10 security concerns for LLMs, and Sourabh explains why prompt injection is the top risk in this list. He describes the $10K Prompt Injection challenge that Pangea ran, and explains the key learnings from the challenge. The episode finishes with discussion of specific prompt-injection techniques and the security guardrails used to counter the risk. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 691: Kacper Łukawski on Qdrant Vector Database
Kacper Łukawski, a Senior Developer Advocate at Qdrant, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the Qdrant vector database and similarity search engine. After introducing vector databases and the foundational concepts undergirding similarity search, they dive deep into the Rust-based implementation of Qdrant. Along with comparing and contrasting different vector databases, they also explore the best practices for the performance evaluation of systems like Qdrant. Kacper and Gregory also discuss topics such as the steps for using Python to build an AI-powered application that uses Qdrant. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 690: Florian Gilcher on Rust for Safety-Critical Systems
Florian Gilcher, co-founder of Ferrous Systems and the Rust Foundation, speaks with host Giovanni Asproni about the application of Rust in mission- and safety-critical systems. The discussion starts with a brief overview of such systems, and an introduction to Rust, emphasizing aspects that make it well-suited for critical environments. Florian and Giovanni then discuss how Rust compares to C and C++ — two widely used languages in this sector. They proceed to outline important factors that companies should consider when assessing whether to move from C or other languages to Rust. The episode also touches on Ferrocene, an open-source Rust toolchain qualified for safety- and mission-critical systems, which was developed and supported by Ferrous Systems. The conversation ends with some reflections on the future of Rust for mission- and safety-critical applications. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 689: Amey Desai on the Model Context Protocol
Amey Desai, the Chief Technology Officer at Nexla, speaks with host Sriram Panyam about the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and its role in enabling agentic AI systems. The conversation begins with the fundamental challenge that led to MCP's creation: the proliferation of "spaghetti code" and custom integrations as developers tried to connect LLMs to various data sources and APIs. Before MCP, engineers were writing extensive scaffolding code using frameworks such as LangChain and Haystack, spending more time on integration challenges than solving actual business problems. Desai illustrates this with concrete examples, such as building GitHub analytics to track engineering team performance. Previously, this required custom code for multiple API calls, error handling, and orchestration. With MCP, these operations can be defined as simple tool calls, allowing the LLM to handle sequencing and error management in a structured, reasonable manner. The episode explores emerging patterns in MCP development, including auction bidding patterns for multi-agent coordination and orchestration strategies. Desai shares detailed examples from Nexla's work, including a PDF processing system that intelligently routes documents to appropriate tools based on content type, and a data labeling system that coordinates multiple specialized agents. The conversation also touches on Google's competing A2A (Agent-to-Agent) protocol, which Desai positions as solving horizontal agent coordination versus MCP's vertical tool integration approach. He expresses skepticism about A2A's reliability in production environments, comparing it to peer-to-peer systems where failure rates compound across distributed components. Desai concludes with practical advice for enterprises and engineers, emphasizing the importance of embracing AI experimentation while focusing on governance and security rather than getting paralyzed by concerns about hallucination. He recommends starting with simple, high-value use cases like automated deployment pipelines and gradually building expertise with MCP-based solutions. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 688: Daniel Stenberg on Removing Rust from Curl
Daniel Stenberg, Swedish Internet protocol expert and founder and lead developer of the Curl project, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about removing Rust from Curl. They discuss why Hyper was removed from curl, why the last five percent of making it a success was difficult, what the project gained from the 5-year attempt to tackle bringing Rust into a C project, lessons learned for next time, why user support is critical, and the positive long-lasting impact this attempt had. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.