From the Lab to Production: Making Cutting-Edge Testing Practical

More from The BugBash Podcast All episodes →

1. 

   S2 · E4 · 11 Mar 2026 · 1 hr 2 min

   From Scale to Rigor: An Engineering Journey at Meta and Oxide

   Today we’re talking with Rain from Oxide Computing, tracing their journey from the massive, data-driven scale of Meta to the high-stakes, air-gapped world of shipping a 'cloud in a box'. We talk about moving from an environment of over 10,000 engineers—where a 10% tooling improvement is worth a thousand people—to a culture where you’re shipping hardware that simply cannot be patched once it leaves the building. Rain shares how they realized that technical writing is a senior engineer’s ultimate force multiplier for justifying complex designs. We also dive deep into the 'invisible superpower'…

2. 

   S2 · E3 · 4 Mar 2026 · 58 min

   Escaping the Spaghetti: How to Test Untestable Codebases

   Everyone wants reliable software. But nobody wants to test messy legacy code. Today, Lewis Campbell from Outdata joins the show to share a practical approach for bringing deterministic simulation testing to existing systems. We get into why React components are terrible for business logic, and why front end static typing stops non-determinism at the door. We also take on non-tech aspects, like the politics of updating old code bases, the danger of hiding data conflicts, and how to ease your team into property-based testing. There’s even an Internet-hungry sheep named Angus.

3. 

   S2 · E2 · 25 Feb 2026 · 52 min

   How rr Became a Protected Species: A Story of Necessary Hacks

   Building the rr replay debugger wasn't about academic purity. It was about survival. Today, creator Rob O'Callahan reveals the "necessary” complexity that makes time-travel debugging possible on Firefox. We dig into the engineering nightmares behind the tool: from patching 2-byte system calls to the constant fear of silent hardware failures. Rob explains how rr became a "protected species" inside the Linux kernel—and why messy, manual hacks often beat six months of theoretical work.

4. 

   S2 · E1 · 18 Feb 2026 · 1 hr 20 min

   Re-Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Shift to Cloud-Native Storage

   It’s been nine years since Designing Data-Intensive Applications became the standard text for distributed systems. Today, Martin Kleppmann and Chris Riccomini join the show to pull back the curtain on the upcoming Second Edition. After all, the era of local disks are giving way to cloud-native object storage. So we discuss why modern databases are being rebuilt entirely on top of S3. From there, we revisit the CAP theorem—and why it might be time to retire it in favor of "offline availability." We also get into a surprisingly practical debate on AI, exploring how LLMs might be terrible at…

5. 

   S1 · E11 · 10 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 19 min

   Hypothesis vs. Hallucinations: Property Testing AI-Generated Code

   Large Language Models can generate code in a flash, but that code is notoriously unreliable. Traditional unit tests often can’t put enough guardrails in place to ensure correctness… even if they’re written by the LLM itself. This is where property-based testing (PBT) becomes essential. Today, we're joined by David R. MacIver, creator of the PBT library Hypothesis, and now an Antithesis employee! We discuss how to build robust feedback loops that are needed to make AI-generated code trustworthy. We'll cover why standard AI coding benchmarks are flawed, how Hypothesis makes PBT approachable,…

6. 

   S1 · E9 · 12 Nov 2025 · 40 min

   Ergonomics, reliability, durability

   Integrating non-deterministic, non-durable elements like AI agents into our workflows tends to lead to a lot of do-overs. But restarting AI processes can be costly, burning through tokens and losing valuable progress. Wouldn’t it be easier if there was always a clear checkpoint to restart a task from? Today I talk with Qian Li, co-founder of the DBOS durable execution engine, about reliability, ergonomics, and actually understanding your software. We discuss the long history of checkpointing, mental models, and how using durable execution allows systems to resume right where they left off…

7. 

   S1 · E8 · 30 Oct 2025 · 55 min

   No actually, you can property test your UI

   How do you test for bugs that only appear when a user clicks frantically, or when asynchronous data loads in an unexpected order? Standard UI tests often miss the subtle stuff that happens all the time in the stateful, dynamic applications. In this episode, Paul Ryan and I sit down with Oskar Wickström, creator of the QuickStrom framework, among other things, to explore how to apply generative testing to the complex world of user interfaces. Oskar argues that you don't need to be a formal methods genius to get real value out of the approach. Even simple properties can uncover deep bugs, like…

8. 

   S1 · E7 · 15 Oct 2025 · 53 min

   Slow down to go fast: TDD in the age of AI with Clare Sudbery

   AI coding assistants promise incredible speed, but what happens when you run straight into a wall of buggy code and technical debt? In this episode, Clare Sudbery, a software engineer with over 25 years of experience, discusses a crucial paradox for modern developers. The secret to harnessing AI's power isn't to move faster, but to slow down. Clare explains why deliberate, rigorous practices like Test-Driven Development (TDD) are the essential "guardrails" needed to guide AI tools toward reliable, high-quality software. You'll learn why "more, smaller steps" is the key to tackling technical…

9. 

   S1 · E6 · 1 Oct 2025 · 1 hr 11 min

   Fixing five "two-year" bugs per day

   Some bugs are so rare, they can take years to track down and fix. What if you could find and fix five of them per day ? For Joran Dirk Greef, the creator of the TigerBeetle database, that's not a wild dream — it's how his team works every day. While most people think building a new database takes a decade, Joran's team built TigerBeetle in just three and a half years. The key is a unique philosophy for writing software called "Tiger Style". Joran joins the show to share the secrets behind their speed and safety. You'll hear why he thinks picking C would have been a "fatal" mistake , how a…

10. 

    S1 · E5 · 18 Sep 2025 · 42 min

    No really, some bugs aren’t real

    When is a bug not really a bug? In this episode, host David Wynn talks with SRE veteran Dan Slimmon about a radical idea: chasing perfect code might not be the best way to make your service reliable. Dan argues that once your code is "good enough," most outages aren't caused by code defects. They're caused by weird interactions between different parts of a system or by users doing things you would never expect. He shares wild stories from his career, including how a tiny database hiccup created a massive, repeating traffic jam and how a single user crashed servers by uploading a 3.2-gigabyte…