Fail loudly, fail fast, fail in production

More from The BugBash Podcast All episodes →

1. 

   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…

2. 

   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…

3. 

   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…

4. 

   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…

5. 

   S1 · E4 · 3 Sep 2025 · 53 min

   Every map is wrong, but we made one anyway

   Every map of a complex territory is inherently wrong, but without one, we're completely lost. So what happens when the territory is the vast, ever-changing landscape of distributed systems? In this episode, David Wynn sits down with Kyle Kingsbury, the renowned researcher behind Jepsen, to discuss a monumental effort to chart this landscape: the new Distributed Systems Reliability Glossary. Kyle explains why he and T.W. Lim from Antithesis felt the need to "put this all in one place," creating a practical roadmap for testers and engineers navigating the field. They explore the challenge of…

6. 

   S1 · E2 · 6 Aug 2025 · 1 hr 8 min

   Scaling Correctness: Marc Brooker on a Decade of Formal Methods at AWS

   How do you prove the correctness of services that underpin a huge portion of the internet? At the scale of Amazon Web Services, traditional testing falls short. In this episode, Antithesis’ own Will Wilson and Ben Collins talk with Marc Brooker, a Distinguished Engineer who has spent nearly 17 years building core AWS infrastructure like S3, Lambda, and Aurora Serverless. Marc gives us the inside story on AWS's decade-long journey with formal methods, from the early days of using complex tools like TLA+ to the current focus on "lightweight" approaches that any engineering team can adopt. He…

7. 

   S1 · E1 · 23 Jul 2025 · 40 min

   FoundationDB: From Idea to Apple Acquisition

   The BugBash Podcast kicks off with a bit of pre-history -- the story of FoundationDB, one of the first companies to successfully use deterministic simulation testing to accelerate development, assure reliability, and build something legendary. Today, FoundationDB is the hidden layer in Snowflake, DeepSeek, and many core systems at places like Apple and Goldman Sachs. But it started with some guys in a garage, building a system demo with plywood and lightbulbs...