Podcast · Tech & Science

Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

by team@se-radio.net (SE-Radio Team) · English · Tech & Science

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 55 min
Latest: 7 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

7 Oct 2026 · 47 minNew

SE Radio 741: Sahil Walia on Schema Changes and Data Migrations

Shail Walia, a senior technical architect at Snowflake, joins host Robert Blumen for a conversation about schema migration and data migration. Together, they discuss the basics of schema: do all data sets have schema?; what drives schema change?; are data migration and schema migration the same thing? Must they happen at the same time? They then talk about the challenges and failure modes of schema migration, including challenges at scale, migrating without downtime, the concept of "safety" in data migrations, and safety patterns for data migration - double writes, read repair, replication,…

Play episode WhatsApp Download

Earlier episodes 29 most recent

E740 · 30 Sep 2026 · 58 min

SE Radio 740: Raju Dandigam on Building Production AI Agents

Raju Dandigam speaks with host Amey Ambade about building robust AI agents for production. Raju recommends treating an agent as a software subsystem rather than a standalone model call. That means designing decision contracts and tool boundaries, choosing between predictable workflows and multi-agent orchestration, and managing the runtime, state, and streaming that make agents durable. A recurring theme is that the model should not own the system: the right architecture is usually the simplest one that meets the product need while preserving reliability and control, with the language model…
E739 · 23 Sep 2026 · 57 min

SE Radio 739: Erin Catto on Video Game Physics Engines

Erin Catto of Kintsugiyama, veteran video game developer who worked on the Tomb Raider series at Crystal Dynamics and later contributed to Diablo III, Overwatch, and other franchises at Blizzard, discusses video game physics engines with host Jason Davey. Erin created the popular open-source Box2D library used in titles including Angry Birds and Noita, and he released Box3D in 2026, bringing the much-loved physics engine to the third dimension. Underpinning everything from platformers and racing games to industrial robotics simulations, modern physics engines present a host of interesting…
E738 · 16 Sep 2026 · 47 min

SE Radio 738: Milan Milanovic on the Laws of Software Engineering

Milan Milanovic, Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies and author of the book, Laws of Software Engineering, joins host Giovanni Asproni for a conversation based on the content of his book—a collection of 53 empirical and mathematical laws governing modern software engineering. The book includes some well-known laws, such as Conway's and Brooks's laws, as well as other lesser-known but just as important, including Gilb's and Tesler's laws. The episode starts with an introduction to the laws and the criteria that Milan used to choose them. The episode continues with some practical hints on…
E737 · 9 Sep 2026 · 51 min

SE Radio 737: Owen McGirr on Software Accessibility

Owen McGirr , creator of SayIt!, Switchify, and an entrepreneur who builds inclusive technology, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about software accessibility. For this episode, Gavin emailed the questions to Owen, who prepared his answers and generated the audio programmatically using text-to-speech. Owen discusses what accessibility is, different ways a user might interact with software, how accessibility is currently handled between various operating systems, the technical challenges of creating SayIt! and Switchify, plus what developers can do to improve accessibility. This episode…
E736 · 3 Sep 2026 · 51 min

SE Radio 736: Sahil Walia on Apache Iceberg

Sahil Walia , Senior Technical Architect at Snowflake, joins host Robert Blumen for a deep dive into Apache Iceberg. The conversation covers OLAP, data formats, data lakes and lake houses, Iceberg as a data format, columnar storage, use cases, reference implementation, read/write, how Iceberg structures metadata, indexing, query planning and performance issues.
E735 · 26 Aug 2026 · 59 min

SE Radio 735: Vivek Yadav on Regression Testing Microservices

Vivek Yadav, an engineering manager at the payment company Stripe, speaks with host Adi Narayan about building regression testing for microservices. Drawing on his work estimating network costs for card payments, Vivek explains why unit and integration tests fall short when a single transaction's cost can depend on 100+ parameters across card networks, countries, and merchant types. He describes Stripe's approach: structuring services so that core logic is stateless and separated from I/O, then wrapping that logic in an Apache Spark job that replays historical transactions from cold storage…
E734 · 19 Aug 2026 · 43 min

SE Radio 734: Sathiesh Veera on Engineering Data-Protection Guardrails with LLMs

Sathiesh Veera , a GenAI Solutions Architect at At&T, speaks with host Brijesh Ammanath about the data-protection guardrails required when using LLMs. The core issue is that LLMs sit outside the cloud tenant in most enterprise AI deployments, which means that data leaves the company's perimeter with every prompt, RAG retrieval, and tool call. Contractual agreements can restrict the data that LLM vendors are allowed to use for training and audits, but they don't stop prompt injection or unintended exposure as company data is often shared to LLMs via natural language queries, APIs, tool and…
E733 · 13 Aug 2026 · 1 hr

SE Radio 733: Max Corbridge on Securing AI Agents

Max Corbridge, an ethical hacker and red teamer who is co-founder and CEO of Secure Agentics, speaks with SE Radio host Amey Ambade about how AI agents get attacked and what engineers can actually do to defend them. Drawing on years of offensive security work, Corbridge frames agents as a new and largely undefended attack surface: the industry has handed AI systems autonomy and the ability to act in the real world while carrying forward prompt injection, a flaw the frontier labs themselves describe as effectively unsolvable. He likens the moment to the early, lawless days of the web, when…
E732 · 5 Aug 2026 · 58 min

SE Radio 732: Jason Gorman on The Effective Use of AI For Software Development

Jason Gorman , a software development expert and founder of Codemanship, joins host Giovanni Asproni to explore how best to use AI in software development. They start by considering how established technical practices — test-driven development, modularization, continuous integration, and continuous reviews — become more important, not less, when working with AI assistance. These practices help address several key limitations of LLMs, including keeping context windows as small as possible. Looking at AI's impact on team productivity, Jason offers some practical advice for teams to introduce…
E731 · 29 Jul 2026 · 51 min

SE Radio 731: Sonali Varde on AI and the Engineering Manager Role

Sonali Varde , Senior Software Engineering Manager at LinkedIn, joins host Kanchan Shringi to discuss how AI is changing the role of the engineering manager. They explore how AI is showing up in day-to-day management work, including operational reviews, planning, communication, workflow automation, and preparation for leadership discussions. The conversation looks at how engineering teams are adopting AI tools and agents, what kinds of skills and practices are becoming more important, and how managers can think about context, review, testing, and operational rigor as AI-assisted development…
E730 · 22 Jul 2026 · 54 min

SE Radio 730: Birgitta Boeckeler on Harness Engineering for AI Agents

Birgitta Boeckeler, a Distinguished Engineer and consultant focused on AI-assisted software delivery at Thoughtworks , joins host Priyanka Raghavan for a deep dive into harnesses for AI agents. The episode begins by unpacking the concept of harnesses and harness engineering before exploring the core building blocks — guides and sensors — that help AI agents operate more reliably in engineering environments. Priyanka and Birgitta discuss practical implementations of harnesses in real-world workflows, including the use of guides with .MD files and sensors with tools such as SonarQube and…
E729 · 15 Jul 2026 · 48 min

SE Radio 729: Garth Mollett on AI Supply Chain Security

Garth Mollet , Senior Principal Product Security Engineer and Technical Advisor for Product Security at Red Hat, joins host Robert Blumen for a discussion of AI supply chain security. They start with the basics of supply chain security, including the key components of the AI supply chain, and how it differs from the conventional software supply chain. Garth discusses whether the attacks target model weights or inference, and describes the most common attacks and what's in it for the attacker, whether exfiltration, credentials, sabotage, or resources. The episode also considers SPIFFE, SPIRE,…
E728 · 8 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 9 min

SE Radio 728: Clare Liguori on AWS Strands SDK for AI Agents

Clare Liguori , a Senior Principal Engineer who works on developer tooling and agentic AI at Amazon Web Services, speaks with host Sri Panyam about the Amazon Strands Agents SDK. This episode explores the philosophy, design decisions, and emerging patterns behind building production-grade AI agents. Clare frames any agent as three core components: a model, a set of tools, and a prompt. During this interview, she describes the origin story of Strands, the model-driven approach vs. workflows and custom orchestration, steering hooks, tools and MCP, sub-agents and multi-agents, memory layers,…
E725 · 2 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 2 min

SE Radio 727: Jeroen Janssens and Thijs Nieuwdorp on Using Polars

Jeroen Janssens , Head of Developer Relations at Posit, and Thijs Nieuwdorp , a developer relations engineer at Polars, speak with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about Polars, a Python package for transforming, analyzing, and visualizing data. After discussing the key features, they explore the implementation and use of the expressions data type provided by Polars. Along with comparing Polars to other data-manipulation packages like Pandas, they also share best practices for performing data analysis in Python with Polars. Jeroen, Thijs, and Gregory also discuss topics such as how to interface…
E726 · 24 Jun 2026 · 53 min

SE Radio 726: Scott Kingsley on the Swagger Ecosystem

Scott Kingsley, a VP of Engineering at SmartBear, speaks with host Gregory Kapfhammer about the Swagger ecosystem. They discuss the user interface, editor, and Swagger CodeGen and how these tools support the creation and documentation of OpenAPI-compatible APIs. Scott describes how Swagger fits into frameworks like FastAPI, as well as how Swagger APIs can be exposed through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). The discussion closes with best practices for designing and testing APIs and the role that APIs play in a landscape in which AI agents are building and interacting with APIs.
E725 · 18 Jun 2026 · 55 min

SE Radio 725: Danny Yang and Sam Goldman on the Pyrefly Type Checker

Danny Yang and Sam Goldman, both Software Engineers at Meta, speak with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the Rust-based Pyrefly type checker for Python. After a look at the foundational concepts for annotating and checking types for Python programs, Danny and Sam present a deep dive of the implementation of Pyrefly. While comparing and contrasting against various type checkers, they also describe how Pyrefly implements the language server protocol (LSP) for Python. The episode explores a range of other topics, including how to balance the features, performance, and language integrations of a…
E724 · 10 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 2 min

SE Radio 724: Jure Leskovec on Relational Graph and Foundational Models

Jure Leskovec , Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and Chief Scientist at Kumo.ai, speaks with host Sriram Panyam about relational and graph language models and their transformative impact on enterprise decision-making and predictive modeling. Jure begins by establishing the critical importance of predictive modeling across industries - from fraud detection in financial institutions to customer churn prediction, lifetime value estimation, product recommendations, and healthcare risk assessment. He notes that while AI has made remarkable advances in natural language…
E723 · 3 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 9 min

SE Radio 723: Dave Airlie on Linux Kernel Maintenance

Dave Airlie , a Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about Linux kernel maintenance. After over-viewing the scale and structure of the Linux kernel, they dive deep into the review and validation of kernel patches, drawing on examples from the GPU subsystem. After discussing the features and benefits of the Linux kernel's maintenance model, they also explore kernel maintenance best practices and the supporting tools for these practices. Dave and Gregory also discuss topics such as the integration of Rust code in the Linux kernel and the ways in which…
E722 · 27 May 2026 · 52 min

SE Radio 722: Dwayne McDaniel on the Engineering Challenges of Secrets Management

Dwayne McDaniel , developer advocate at GitGuardian.com , joins host Priyanka Raghavan to talk about the engineering challenges of secrets management. They explore what "secrets" really are in modern systems—far beyond passwords—including API keys, tokens, certificates, and machine identities, and how "secret sprawl" emerges across the SDLC. Drawing on reports from GitGuardian and Verizon, they discuss the growing scale of secret leaks and why credential abuse and phishing remain dominant attack vectors. They examine common leak points—from code repos and logs to CI/CD pipelines, containers,…
E721 · 20 May 2026 · 53 min

SE Radio 721: Rob Moffat on Risk-First Software Development

In this episode, Rob Moffat , author of Risk-First Software Development and chief technical architect at the FinTech Open Source Software Foundation (FINOS), speaks with host Brijesh Ammanath about how all of software development is actually risk management. Rob introduces the concept of 'risk-first software development,' which sits in the context of existing methodologies like scrum and kanban. Showcasing multiple real-world project patterns to illustrate how things can go wrong when risk is ignored, he makes the case for why risk should be the primary lens behind every development…
E720 · 13 May 2026 · 56 min

SE Radio 720: Martin Dilger on Understanding Eventsourcing

Martin Dilger , founder and CEO of Nebuilt GmbH, speaks with host Giovanni Asproni about event sourcing -- a software architecture pattern in which, rather than storing just the current state of your data, you store a sequence of events that represents every change that has ever happened in the system. This episode starts by introducing the vocabulary around event sourcing, highlighting its relationship with event modeling, event streaming, and event storming. Martin describes some of the pros and cons of the approach, including which systems it is most suitable for. The conversation ends…
E718 · 6 May 2026 · 54 min

SE Radio 719: Birol Yildiz on Building an Agentic AI SRE

Birol Yildiz, CEO and co-founder of iLert, joins host Kanchan Shringi to explore how iLert built an AI SRE — an autonomous agent for handling production incidents — and what the experience revealed about building AI agents in the real world. Birol explains why incident response is a fundamentally agentic problem, where the unpredictability of novel incidents makes rule-based runbooks insufficient and reasoning models essential. He describes how the AI SRE evolved from an early browser-based approach to its current architecture, built around two key ingredients: reasoning models and the Model…
E718 · 29 Apr 2026 · 59 min

SE Radio 718: Will Sentance on JS Modernization

Will Sentance , educator and co-founder of Codesmith, joins SE Radio's Adi Narayan to discuss the evolution of JavaScript and modern best practices. They begin with JavaScript's origins as a simple scripting language and its growth into the backbone of modern web development, highlighting the core theme of the "don't break the web" constraint. The requirement that JavaScript must remain backward-compatible has shaped everything from naming decisions (e.g., flat instead of flatten) to the introduction of Symbols as a collision-safe way to extend objects. Will explains how the TC39 group uses…
E717 · 23 Apr 2026 · 1 hr

SE Radio 717: Eric Tschetter on Decoupling Observability

In this episode, host Amey Ambade sits with Eric Tschetter , co-founder of Apache Druid and Chief Architect at Imply, to dissect the critical move toward Decoupling Observability . To begin, they define three pillars—logs, metrics, and traces—and consider why the rise of microservices has made traditional, tightly coupled stacks a major source of pain. Such coupled systems can lead to issues such as vendor lock-in, prohibitive scaling costs, and operational complexity. Drawing parallels to the Business Intelligence world's separation, Tschetter presents an architectural solution with four…
E716 · 15 Apr 2026 · 55 min

SE Radio 716: Martin Kleppmann Local-First Software

Martin Kleppmann , Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge and author of the best-selling O'Reilly book Designing Data-Intensive Applications, talks to host Adi Narayan about local-first collaboration software. They discuss what the term means, how it leads to simpler application architectures compared to the cloud-first model, and the benefits to developers and users from keeping all of their data on their own devices. Martin goes into detail about how applications can synchronize data with and without a server, as well as conflict-resolution techniques, and the open-source…
E715 · 8 Apr 2026 · 48 min

SE Radio 715: Sahaj Garg on Designing for Ambiguity in Human Input

Sahaj Garg, co-founder and CTO of Wispr, a voice-to-text AI that turns speech into polished writing, talks with host Amey Ambade about designing systems for the ambiguity that's inherent in human input (text, voice, multimodal). Sahaj focuses on concrete architectural and training strategies for building robust AI systems. This episode examines the problem of ambiguity, where it shows up, building robust systems, personalization, communicating uncertainty, and evaluation. The conversation starts by exploring the difference between inherent and reducible ambiguity, major categories of…
E724 · 1 Apr 2026 · 51 min

SE Radio 714: Costa Alexoglou on Remote Pair Programming

Costa Alexoglou , co-founder of the open source Hopp pair-programming application, talks with host Brijesh Ammanath about remote pair programming. They start with a quick introduction to pair programming and its importance to software development before discussing the various problems with the current toolset available and the challenges that tool developers face for enabling pair programming. They consider the key features necessary for a good pair-programming tool, and then Costa describes the journey of building Hopp and the challenges faced while building it.
E713 · 25 Mar 2026 · 59 min

SE Radio 713: Héctor Ramón Jiménez on Building a GUI library in Rust

Héctor Ramón Jiménez , creator of iced, an Elm-inspired, cross-platform GUI toolkit for Rust, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about building a GUI library in Rust. Héctor discusses why he created iced, what was needed, the process required to paint on the screen across different operating systems, how multi-operating systems are handled, and what the iced testing ecosystem is like. This episode explores the Elm architecture, how iced compares to other frameworks, what the core components of iced are, Elements, asynchronous functions, state, threads, 3d rendering, headless mode testing,…
E712 · 18 Mar 2026 · 39 min

SE Radio 712: Dan Lorenc on Sigstore

Dan Lorenc, co-founder and CEO of Chainguard, joins host Priyanka Raghavan to explore Sigstore and its role in securing the software supply chain. They unpack the challenges of supply chain security, including verifying the origin and integrity of software artifacts, and explain the problems Sigstore is designed to solve. The conversation goes under the hood to examine how Sigstore works, covering key components such as code signing, verification, the certificate authority model, and transparency logs—often compared conceptually to blockchain for their auditability. The episode also…

About Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

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. SE Radio is brought to you by the IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers is a English tech & science podcast from team@se-radio.net (SE-Radio Team). Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: team@se-radio.net (SE-Radio Team)
Language: English
Category: Tech & Science
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 55 min
Latest episode: 7 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id120906714
Website: se-radio.net
Rights: (c) IEEE. All content is licensed under the Creative Commons 2.5 license

RSS feed Apple Podcasts Website

More English tech & science 6

Take it with you

The Melo app keeps playing with the screen off, works in the car and on your watch, wakes you to your station, and browses the whole catalogue offline. Free, no ads, no account.