Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

Bryan Cantrill, the co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer company, speaks with host Jeremy Jung about challenges in deploying hardware on-premises at scale. They discuss the difficulty of building up Samsung data cen...

Jens Gustedt, author of Modern C, senior scientist at the French National Institute for Computer Science and Control (INRIA), deputy director of the ICube lab, and former co-editor of the ISO C standard, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about the past 5 years in C, C2Y, and C23. They discuss what has happened in the C world since ...

In this episode, Subhajit Paul joins SE Radio host Kanchan Shringi to discuss how enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems work in practice and where machine learning and generative AI are beginning to fit into real-world ERP environments.

Subhajit grounds the conversation in ERP fundamentals, explaining core business flows such as order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and plan-to-produce, and why ERP systems are central to running larg...

Yechezkel "Chez" Rabinovich, CTO and co-founder at Groundcover, joins SE Radio host Brijesh Ammanath to discuss the key challenges in migrating observability toolsets. The episode starts with a look at why customers might seek to migrate their existing Observability stack, and then Chez explains some approaches and techniques for doing so. The discussion turns to OpenTelemetry, including what it is and how Groundcover helps with th...

Murat Erder, CTO for Financial Services at Valtech in Europe, and Eoin Woods, independent consultant in the field of software architecture, join host Giovanni Asproni to talk about Continuous Architecture—an approach to software design where architectural decisions are made and refined continuously throughout the lifecycle of a system, instead of up front in a big design phase. The show starts with a definition of Continuous Archit...

Sriram Panyam returns to the show to discuss the system design interview (SDI) with host Robert Blumen. This challenging part of the hiring process is included in the interview loop for many jobs across tech, including management and for all levels from entry to senior. The conversation starts with a look at what the SDI is, who will face it, and how critical this i...

In this episode, Sahaj Garg, CTO of wispr.ai, joins SE Radio host Robert Blumen to talk about the challenges of building low-latency AI applications. They discuss latency's effect on consumer behavior as well as interactive applications. The conversation explores how to measure latency and how scale impacts it. Then Sahaj and Robert shift to themes around AI, including whether "AI" means LLMs or something broader, as they look at l...

Derick Schaefer, author of CLI: A Practical Guide to Creating Modern Command-Line Interfaces, talks with host Robert Blumen about command-line interfaces old and new. Starting with a short review of the origin of commands in the early unix systems, they trace the evolution of commands into modern CLIs. Following the historic rise, fal...

Max Geurnsey III and Luniel de Beer, co-authors of the book Ready: Why Most Software Projects Fail and How to Fix It, discuss the concept of readiness in software engineering with host Brijesh Ammanath. Although Agile workflows and technical practices help delivery, many software efforts still struggle to achieve desired outcomes. Rework, shifting requirements, delays, defects, and mounting technical debt can plague software delive...

Mojtaba Sarooghi, a Distinguished Product Architect at Queue-it, speaks with host Jeremy Jung about virtual waiting rooms for high-traffic events such as concerts and limited-quantity product releases. They explore using a virtual queue to prevent overloading systems, how most traffic is from bots, using edge workers to reduce requests to the customer's origin serve...

In this episode, Benjamin Brial, CEO and co-founder of Cycloid, speaks with host Sriram Panyam about internal developer platforms (IDPs) and internal developer portals. The conversation explores how these platforms address the growing challenges of DevOps scalability, multi-cloud complexity, and cloud waste, all of which organizations face as they grow.

Benjamin begins by framing the core problems that IDPs solve: DevOps struggling...

In this episode of Software Engineering Radio, Srujana Merugu, an AI researcher with decades of experience, speaks with host Priyanka Raghavan about building LLM-based applications. The discussion begins by clarifying essential concepts like generative vs. predictive AI, pre-training vs. fine-tuning, and the transformer architecture that powers modern LLMs.

Philip Kiely, software developer relations lead at Baseten, speaks with host Jeff Doolittle about multi-agent AI, emphasizing how to build AI-native software beyond simple ChatGPT wrappers. Kiely advocates for composing multiple models and agents that take action to achieve complex user goals, r...

Flavia Saldanha, a consulting data engineer, joins host Kanchan Shringi to discuss the evolution of data engineering from ETL (extract, transform, load) and data lakes to modern lakehouse architectures enriched with vector databases and embeddings. Flavia explains the industry's shift from treat...

Dave Thomas, author of The Pragmatic Programmer, The Manifesto for Agile Software Development, Programming Ruby, Agile Web Development with Rails, Programming Elixir, Simplicity, and co-founder of the Pragmatic Bookshelf, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about building infrastructure for eBooks. They discuss what an eBook is, the various formats, what infrastructure is needed to build them, ho...

Jennings Anderson, a Software Engineer with Meta Platforms, and Amy Rose, the Chief Technology Officer at Overture Maps Foundation, speak with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the Overture Maps project, which creates reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data. After exploring the fou...

Mark Williamson, CTO of Undo, joins host Priyanka Raghavan to discuss AI-assisted debugging. The conversation is structured around three main objectives:

• understanding how AI can serve as a debugging assistant; 
• examining AI-powered debugging tools;
• exploring whether AI debuggers can independently find and fix bugs.

Mark highlights how AI can support debugging with its ability to analyze ...

Sourabh Satish, CTO and co-founder of Pangea, speaks with SE Radio's Brijesh Ammanath about prompt injection. Sourabh begins with the basic concepts underlying prompt injection and the key risks it introduces. From there, they take a deep dive into the OWASP Top 10 security concerns for LLMs, an...

Kacper Łukawski, a Senior Developer Advocate at Qdrant, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the Qdrant vector database and similarity search engine. After introducing vector databases and the foundational concepts undergirding similarity search, they dive deep into the Rust-based implementation of Qdrant. Along with comparing and contrasting different vector databases, they also explore the best practices for the performan...