Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

Jennings Anderson, a Meta software engineer working on geospatial data and Overture Maps implementation, and Amy Rose, CTO of the Overture Maps Foundation building interoperable open map data. They explore GIS basics, Overture’s unified schema and six data themes, the Global Entity Reference System (GERS), conflation of diverse sources, cloud-native formats like GeoParquet, and practical tools for using and contributing to open map datasets.

Mark Williamson, CTO of Undo and kernel-level debugging expert, talks AI-assisted debugging and time-travel debugging. He explores how AI can sift vast data, act as a smart search and rubber duck, generate tests and automate workflows. He examines LLMs hooked to debuggers like ChatDBG, challenges in kernel/C++ and distributed systems, and risks such as hallucinations and the need for guardrails.

Sourabh Satish, CTO and co-founder of Pangea and seasoned security entrepreneur, breaks down prompt injection risks for LLMs. He covers the OWASP Top 10 for generative AI, the $10K prompt-injection challenge and attacker techniques like obfuscation and style injection. Learn about ingress/egress filters, system-prompt guardrails, detection methods, and priorities for securing LLM deployments.

Kacper Łukawski, Senior Developer Advocate at Qdrant who focuses on vector databases and similarity search. He explains vector databases, embeddings, and when to use semantic search. They cover Qdrant’s Rust-based design, performance benchmarking and precision trade-offs, deployment options and client libraries, and how vector search supports retrieval-augmented generation and real-world applications.

Florian Gilcher, co-founder of Ferrous Systems and the Rust Foundation, speaks with host Giovanni Asproni about the application of Rust in mission- and safety-critical systems. The discussion starts with a brief overview of such systems, and an introduction to Rust, emphasizing aspects that make it well-suited for critical environments. Florian and Giovanni then discuss how Rust compares to C and C++ — two widely used languages in this sector. They proceed to outline important factors that companies should consider when assessing whether to move from C or other languages to Rust. The episode also touches on Ferrocene, an open-source Rust toolchain qualified for safety- and mission-critical systems, which was developed and supported by Ferrous Systems. The conversation ends with some reflections on the future of Rust for mission- and safety-critical applications. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Amey Desai, CTO at Nexla and data systems engineer, explains the Model Context Protocol as a way to tame integration spaghetti and let LLMs orchestrate tool calls. He walks through GitHub analytics, PDF routing, and multi-agent labeling patterns. The conversation highlights emerging MCP architectures, reliability trade-offs with agent-to-agent approaches, and practical enterprise security and adoption advice.

Daniel Stenberg, Swedish internet protocol expert and founder of curl, describes the five-year attempt to add and then remove Rust-based Hyper from curl. He recounts why Hyper was chosen, the FFI and async integration hurdles, testing and adoption shortfalls, and the lasting codebase improvements and lessons learned from the experiment.

In this discussion, Elizabeth Figura, a Wine developer at CodeWeavers, delves into the intricacies of the Wine compatibility layer and Proton. She explains how Wine translates Windows APIs to run applications on non-Windows systems. Elizabeth highlights the challenges of debugging closed-source software and describes performance optimizations that sometimes make Wine faster than native Windows. She outlines Valve's role in enhancing gaming on Linux, along with the history of Wine and its ongoing contributions to game development.

François Daoust, a W3C staff member and co-chair of the Web Developer Experience Community Group, dives into the origins and mission of the W3C. He uncovers the intricacies of browser standardization and its collaboration with TC39, IETF, and other organizations. The discussion highlights the lack of formal specifications for certain features, the challenges in standardizing media codecs, and the balance between functionality and privacy. François emphasizes the importance of interoperability and informs developers on navigating web standards.

Will Wilson, CEO and co-founder of Antithesis, dives into the world of Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST), a game-changing method he helped pioneer at FoundationDB. He discusses how DST eliminates non-determinism for robust testing, allowing for safe fault injection without affecting live systems. The conversation also highlights practical applications in major organizations like MongoDB and Ethereum, as well as the unique 'Determinator' hypervisor designed to accelerate testing. Wilson emphasizes the future influence of AI in enhancing software testing methodologies.