Emre Baran , CEO and co-founder of Cerbos, and Alex Olivier , CPO and co-founder, join SE Radio host Priyanka Raghavan to explore “stateless decoupled authorization frameworks. The discussion begins with an introduction to key terms, including authorization, authorization models, and decoupled frameworks. They dive into the challenges of building decoupled authorization, as well as the benefits of this approach and the operational hurdles. The conversation shifts to Cerbos, an open-source policy...
Apr 15, 2025•52 min•Ep. 664
Tyler Flint , CEO of qpoint.io , joins host Robert Blumen for a conversation about managing external vendor dependencies, including several best practices for adoption. They start with a look at internal versus external services, including details such as the footprint of external services within a micro-services application, and difficulties organizations have tracking their service consumption, quantifying service consumption, and auditing external services. Tyler also discusses the security i...
Apr 08, 2025•52 min•Ep. 663
Software architect and author Vlad Khononov joins host Jeff Doolittle for a discussion on balancing coupling in software design. They start by examining coupling and its relationship to complexity and modularity. Vlad explains the historical models for assessing coupling and introduces his updated approach, integration strength , which aims to simplify earlier frameworks and adapt them for modern practices. The episode explores three dimensions of coupling: integration strength (knowledge sharin...
Apr 01, 2025•56 min•Ep. 662
Sunil Mallya , co-founder and CTO of Flip AI, discusses small language models with host Brijesh Ammanath . They begin by considering the technical distinctions between SLMs and large language models. LLMs excel in generating complex outputs across various natural language processing tasks, leveraging extensive training datasets on with massive GPU clusters. However, this capability comes with high computational costs and concerns about efficiency, particularly in applications that are specific t...
Mar 25, 2025•59 min•Ep. 661
Pete Warden , CEO of Useful Sensors and a founding member of the TensorFlow team at Google, discusses TinyML, the technology enabling machine learning on low-power, small-footprint devices. This innovation opens up applications such as voice-controlled devices, offline translation tools, and smarter embedded systems, which are crucial for privacy and efficiency. SE Radio host Kanchan Shringi speaks with Warden about challenges like model compression, deployment constraints, and privacy concerns....
Mar 18, 2025•55 min•Ep. 660
Brenden Matthews , a seasoned software engineer, entrepreneur, and author of the Idiomatic Rust and Code Like a Pro in Rust books (both from Manning), speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about Idiomatic Rust. They start with a look at what "idiomatic" means, and then discuss Generics, Traits, common design patterns you'll see in well written Rust code, and anti-patterns to avoid. Matthews suggests some tools that can help you immediately write idiomatic Rust, as well as what building blocks ca...
Mar 12, 2025•54 min•Ep. 659
Tanya Janca , author of Alice and Bob Learn Secure Coding , discusses secure coding and secure software development life cycle with SE Radio host Brijesh Ammanath . This session explores how integrating security into every phase of the SDLC helps prevent vulnerabilities from slipping into production. Tanya strongly recommends defining security requirements early, and discusses the importance of threat modeling during design, secure coding practices, testing strategies such as static, dynamic, an...
Mar 06, 2025•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 658
Hong Minhee , an open source developer and creator of the Fedify ActivityPub library, discusses the ActivityPub protocol and the fediverse with SE Radio's Jeremy Jung . They explore ActivityPub use cases, including microblogging applications such as Mastodon and Misskey, as well as activities built into the specification such as Like, Follow, and Accept. They also discuss extending the specification to include properties like Discoverable and Suspended, how different implementations communicate ...
Feb 27, 2025•40 min•Ep. 657
Ivett Ördög speaks with host Sam Taggart about rewrite versus refactor -- a choice that many projects face as they grow. It's a topic that inspires a lot of dogmatic feelings. They discuss how companies and projects end up at this crossroads and consider some strategies to try to avoid it. Ivett challenges the myth that you should never rewrite but points to two key factors that need to be present for a successful large-scale rewrite or refactor. They end by talking about how to get management o...
Feb 20, 2025•50 min•Ep. 656
In this episode, Charles Humble speaks withhost Brijesh Ammanath about skills that can provide developers a grounding in systems thinking . Charles is a 30-year veteran of the IT industry, including as a former software engineer, architect, and CTO, as well as former editor in chief of InfoQ and chief editor for Container Solutions. He has published “Professional Skills for Software Engineers” as a series of 14 O’Reilly shortcuts covering communication, critical thinking, documentation, and netw...
Feb 13, 2025•55 min•Ep. 655
Chris Patterson , founder and principal architect of MassTransit, joins host Jeff Doolittle to discuss MassTransit, a message bus framework for building distributed systems. The conversation begins with an exploration of message buses, their role in asynchronous and durable application design, and how frameworks like MassTransit simplify event-driven programming in .NET. Chris explains concepts like pub/sub, durable messaging, and the benefits of decoupled architectures for scaling and reliabili...
Feb 04, 2025•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 654
Asanka Abeysinghe , CTO at WSO2, joins host Giovanni Asproni to discuss cell-based architecture -- a style that's intended to combine application, deployment, and team architecture to help organizations respond quickly to changes in the business environment, customer requirements, or enterprise strategy. Cell-based architecture is aimed at creating scalable, modular, composable systems with effective governance mechanisms. The conversation starts by introducing the context and some vocabulary be...
Jan 30, 2025•1 hr•Ep. 653
Christian Mesh , tech lead of the OpenTofu project, speaks with host Robert Blumen about OpenTofu. They start with the history of terraform, terraform providers, license changes to open source projects, the origin of OpenTofu as a fork of terraform, and the structure of the OpenTofu organization. They further explore compatibility issues for HCL, providers, and modules, performance issues, and adoption, as well as significant features in the OpenTofu-included dynamic-provider iteration, and the ...
Jan 21, 2025•52 min•Ep. 652
Paul Frazee , CTO of Bluesky, speaks with SE Radio's Jeremy Jung about the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (ATProto) used by the Bluesky decentralized social network. They discuss why ATProto was created, as well as how it differs from the ActivityPub open standard, the scaling limitations of peer-to-peer solutions, cryptographic decentralized identifiers, and creating a protocol based on experience with distributed systems. They also examine the role of personal data servers, relays, and app vi...
Jan 17, 2025•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 651
Robert Seacord , the Standardization Lead at Woven by Toyota, the convenor of the C standards committee, and author of The CERT® C Coding Standard , Effective C , and Secure Coding in C and C++ , speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about What's New in the C Programming Language. They start with a review of the history of C and why it has a standard, and then they discuss what C23 brings and how programmers can take advantage of it. They consider the sectors in which C is most used and whether ...
Jan 17, 2025•50 min•Ep. 650
Praveen Gujar , Director of Product at LinkedIn, joins SE Radio host Kanchan Shringi for a discussion on how generative AI (GenAI) is transforming digital advertising technology platforms. The conversation starts with a look at how GenAI facilitates scalable ad content creation, using self-attention mechanisms for customized ad generation. They explore AI's role in simplifying campaign management, automating tasks such as audience targeting and performance measurement. Praveen emphasizes that ad...
Jan 08, 2025•52 min•Ep. 647
Lukas Gentele , CEO of Loft Labs, joins host Robert Blumen for a discussion of kubernetes vclusters (virtual clusters). A vcluster is a kubernetes cluster that runs kubernetes application on a host kubernetes cluster. The conversation covers: vcluster basics; sharing models; what is owned by the vcluster and what is shared with the host; attached nodes versus shared nodes; the primary use case: multi-tenancy vcluster per tenant; alternatives - namespace per tenant, full cluster per tenant; trade...
Jan 02, 2025•58 min•Ep. 649
Matthew Adams , Head of Security Enablement at Citi, joins SE Radio host Priyanka Raghavan to explore the use of large language models in threat modeling, with a special focus on Matthew's work, Stride GPT. The episode kicks off with an overview of threat modeling, its applications, and the stages of the development life cycle where it fits in. They then discuss the STRIDE methodology and strideGPT, highlighting practical examples, the technology stack behind the application, and the tool's inpu...
Dec 27, 2024•47 min•Ep. 648
Matthew Skelton joins host Giovanni Asproni to talk about team topologies —an approach to organizing teams for fast flow of value. The episode starts with a description of the underlying principles before exploring the approach in more detail. From there, they discuss when to consider implementing the approach; keys to a successful implementation; and some common mistakes to avoid. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine ....
Dec 11, 2024•57 min•Ep. 646
Vinay Tripathi , a senior network engineer in Google Backbone Engineering and an 18-year network engineering veteran, discusses BGP optimization, a technique that's critical in achieving top goals in distributed applications. Host Philip Winston speaks with Tripathi about BGP, autonomous systems, peer grouping, router hardware and software, software-defined networks, and shared network optimization and debugging stories. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine ....
Dec 04, 2024•59 min•Ep. 645
Tim McNamara , a well-known Rust educator, author of Rust in Action (Manning), and a recipient of a Rust Foundation Fellowship in 2023, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about error handling in Rust. They discuss the errors that Rust prevents, what an error is in Rust, what Tim classes as the "four levels of error handling," and the lifecycle of your journey reaching for them. McNamara explains why Rust handles errors as it does, how it differs from other languages, and what the developer ex...
Nov 30, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 644
Ganesh Datta , co-founder of Cortex.io, joins host Robert Blumen for a conversation about production readiness. The conversation covers the history of production readiness; its relationship to microservice architecture; the Google SRE model's impact on production readiness; production readiness checklists; the process; and production readiness transparency.
Nov 20, 2024•53 min•Ep. 643
Simon Wijckmans , founder of c/side -- a company that focuses on monitoring, securing, and optimizing third-party JavaScript -- joins SE Radio host Kanchan Shringi for a conversation about the security risks posed by third-party browser scripts. Through real-world examples and insights drawn from his work in web security, Simon highlights the dangers, including malicious attacks such as the recent Polyfill.io incident. He emphasizes the need for vigilant monitoring, as these third-party scripts ...
Nov 13, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 642
Catherine Nelson , author of the new O’Reilly book, Software Engineering for Data Scientists , discusses the collaboration between data scientists and software engineers -- an increasingly common pairing on machine learning and AI projects. Host Philip Winston speaks with Nelson about the role of a data scientist, the difference between running experiments in notebooks and building an automated pipeline for production, machine learning vs. AI, the typical pipeline steps for machine learning, and...
Nov 06, 2024•48 min•Ep. 641
Jonathan Horvath of Z-bit discusses physical access control systems (PACS) with host Jeremy Jung . They start with an overview of PACS components and discuss the proprietary nature of the industry, the slow pace of migration to open standards, and why Windows is commonly used. Jonathan describes the security implications of moving from isolated networks to the cloud, as well as credential vulnerabilities, encryption using symmetric keys versus asymmetric keys, and the risks related to cloning cr...
Oct 30, 2024•59 min•Ep. 640
Cody Ebberson , CTO of Medplum, joins host Sam Taggart to discuss the constraints that working in regulated industries add to the software development process. They explore some general aspects of developing for regulated industries, such as healthcare and finance, as well as a range of specific considerations that can add complexity and effort. Cody describes how translating regulatory requirements into test specifications and automating those tests can help streamline software development in t...
Oct 23, 2024•39 min•Ep. 639
Nick Tune and Jean-Georges Perrin join host Giovanni Asproni to talk about their proposed approach to modernizing legacy systems. The episode starts with some high-level perspective to set context for the approach described in their book, Architecture Modernization (Manning, 2024). From there, the discussion turns to important details, including criteria for deciding which aspects to revisit; some of the activities, processes, and tools; and the importance of data engineering in modernization ef...
Oct 17, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 638
Steve Smith , founder and principal architect at Nimble Pros, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about software quality. The episode begins with a discussion of why software quality matters for businesses, customers, and developers. Steve explains some patterns and practices that help teams design for quality. They discuss in detail the practices of testing and quality assurance, and the conversation wraps up with suggestions for fostering a culture of quality in teams and organization...
Oct 10, 2024•59 min•Ep. 637
Sriram Panyam , CTO at DagKnows, discusses SaaS Control Planes with SE Radio host Brijesh Ammanath . The discussion starts off with the basics, examining what control planes are and why they're important. Sriram then discusses reasons for building a control plane and the challenges in designing one. They explore design and architectural considerations when building a SaaS control plane, as well as the key differences between a control plane and a data plane. This episode is sponsored by QA Wolf....
Oct 02, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 636
Stevie Caldwell , Senior Engineering Technical Lead at Fairwinds, joins host Priyanka Raghavan to discuss zero-trust network reference architecture. The episode begins with high-level definitions of zero-trust architecture, zero-trust reference architecture, and the pillars of Zero Trust. Stevie describes four open-source implementations of the Zero Trust Reference Architecture: Emissary Ingress, Cert Manager, LinkerD, and the Policy Engine Polaris. Each component is explored to help clarify the...
Sep 26, 2024•50 min•Ep. 635
