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.
SE Radio 600: William Morgan on Kubernetes Sidecars and Service Mesh
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.
SE Radio 599: Jason C. McDonald on Quantified Tasks
Jason C. McDonald, author of the book Dead Simple Python, speaks with host Samuel Taggart about leveraging quantified tasks to improve estimation, particularly across projects. They discuss the origin of the concept and its relationship with story points, and Jason offers examples to show how quantified tasks can capture nuances in software tasks that are often lost with story points. He also points to the ability to compare them across projects as a major advantage of quantified tasks. Among other topics, they consider also how to use quantified tasks to analyze the stability of a codebase. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 598: Jonathan Crossland on the AMMERSE Framework
Jonathan Crossland, software architect, author, and business owner, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about the AMMERSE framework of design principles. They start by discussing the agile manifesto as a statement of values, and Jonathan shares his perspective based on his experience as a software developer and business owner. They then explore the three layers of the AMMERSE framework and how they help business and engineering leaders to align their values, thereby improving their ability to collaborate and reach common goals. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 597: Coral Calero Muñoz and Félix García on Green Software
Coral Calero Muñoz and Felix Garcia, professors at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, speak with host Giovanni Asproni about green and sustainable software—an approach to software development aimed at creating software systems that consume less energy and produce less CO2 during their entire lifetimes with minimal impact on their functionality and other qualities. The episode starts by describing why green software matters, particularly in the context of global warming, and introducing the key concepts. Continues discussing the current status of the field, in both academia and industry, and finishes with hints and tips that can be readily applied by development teams to make their systems greener. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 596: Maxim Fateev on Durable Execution with Temporal
Maxim Fateev, the CEO of Temporal, speaks with SE Radio's Philip Winston about how Temporal implements durable execution. They explore concepts including workflows, activities, timers, event histories, signals, and queries. Maxim also compares deployment using self-hosted clusters or the Temporal Cloud.
SE Radio 595: Llewelyn Falco on Approval Testing
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.
SE Radio 594: Sean Moriarity on Deep Learning with Elixir and Axon
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.
SE Radio 593: Eric Olden on Identity Orchestration
Eric Olden talks with host Giovanni Asproni about identity orchestration, a software approach for managing distributed identity and access management (IAM) and integrating multiple identity systems or providers (IDPs) to make them look like a single system from a user perspective. The episode starts with a refresher in identity and access management, then introduces identity orchestration and some of the challenges it helps to address, such as integrating disparate identity management systems after company mergers or acquisitions; managing identities in situations where some of the IAM systems are unreachable; and implementing more secure identity management in legacy applications. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 592: Jaxon Repp on Distributed Data Infrastructure
Jaxon Repp of HarperDB speaks with Brijesh Ammanath about distributed data infrastructure, including what it is and why it's important. They discuss the key factors that make distributed data infrastructure attractive, as well as challenges to implementing it. The episode explores the architecture and design principles, the key security considerations, and the transition factors for distributed data Infrastructure. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software.
SE Radio 591: Yechezkel Rabinovich on Kubernetes Observability
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.
SE Radio 590: Andy Suderman on Standing Up Kubernetes
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.
SE Radio 589: Zac Hatfield-Dodds on Property-Based Testing in Python
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.
SE Radio 588: José Valim on Elixir, Machine Learning, and Livebook
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.
SE Radio 587: M. Scott Ford on Managing Dependency Freshness
M. Scott Ford, the CTO of Corgibytes and host of the Legacy Code Rocks podcast, discusses managing dependency freshness. SE Radio’s Sam Taggart speaks with him about why dependency freshness is important to ensure that your code has all the latest bug fixes, how exactly to measure dependency freshness, and some of the insights that teams can gain from monitoring freshness over time. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software Magazine.
SE Radio 586: Nikhil Shetty on Virtual Private Cloud
Nikhil Shetty, an expert in networking and distributed systems, speaks with SE radio's Kanchan Shringi about virtual private cloud (VPC) and related technologies. They explore how VPC relates to public cloud, private cloud, and virtual private networks (VPNs). The discussion delves into why VPC is fundamental to building on the cloud, as well as configuring a VPC, subnets, and the address space that can be assigned to the VPC. During this episode they look into route tables, network address translation, as well as security groups, network access control lists, and DNS. Finally, Nikhil helps compare VPC offerings from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).