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

More from Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

1. 

   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…

2. 

   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…

3. 

   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,…

4. 

   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…

5. 

   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…

6. 

   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…

7. 

   E741 · 7 Oct 2026 · 47 min

   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,…

8. 

   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…

9. 

   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…

10. 

    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…

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