Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

Pete Koomen, Co-founder and CTO at Optimizely, dives deep into A/B testing, sharing insights from running over 200,000 tests. He reveals how structured experimentation can elevate product innovation, highlighting the importance of hypotheses and success metrics. The conversation also addresses the challenges of testing, the significance of understanding user behavior, and the ethical considerations in experimentation. Koomen emphasizes fostering a culture of testing within organizations to drive data-driven decision-making and enhance user experience.

How can you scale an engineering organization when you haven’t already experienced rapid growth? Jean-Denis Greze of Plaid explains how to proactively enhance team capabilities and readiness by “leveling up” through a maturity map.

Dr. Andrii Gakhov, author of the book Probabilistic Data Structures and Algorithms for Big Data Applications talks about probabilistic data structures and their application to the big data domain with host Robert Blumen.

Adam Barr, a seasoned software developer and author, joins Felienne to explore the intricacies of code quality. They discuss the subjective nature of coding standards and the challenges that self-taught programmers face. Adam emphasizes the importance of readability and maintainability over complex metrics. They dive into the historical significance of the Morris worm incident as a lesson in software vulnerabilities. Additionally, the conversation touches on the disconnect between academia and industry, advocating for more practical programming education.

Tim Coulter, the founder of Truffle (Ethereum DApp development framework) discusses the Truffle framework for Ethereum SmartContracts and Decentralized App development. Kishore Bhatia spoke with Tim Coulter about: Ethereum Decentralized Apps (DApps)...

Randy Shoup talks with SE-Radio's Travis Kimmel about how to scale technology and organizations together, so that an organization can move faster as they grow (and not slow down). Their discussion covers how to effectively scale culture, process...

Avi Kivity of Scylladb deep dives into the internals of Scylladb and what makes it a high performant version of Cassandra, a distributed key-value datastore. The discussion covers the architecture of Scylladb, its relationship with high performance...

Max Neunhoffer of ArangoDB discusses about multi-model databases in general, and open source ArangoDB, in specific, with show host Nishant Suneja. The show discussion covers motivation behind deploying a multi-model database in an enterprise setting, and deep dives into ArangoDB internals.

Travis Kimmel talks with Johnathan Nightingale about scaling engineering management. Their discuss when to hire additional engineering managers and how to set them up for success, how leaders can prepare for "growing pains" as an organization scales,

Bernd Rücker, who has contributed to multiple open source workflow management projects, discusses orchestrating microservices with workflow management. As distributed systems evolve into a family of microservices that must handle long-running stateful processes with time-dependent actions, events, multiple paths through the system, and complex rollbacks, the workflow management model provides a way to ensure clear modeling, correctness, and separation of concerns. Rücker recommends a federated model in which each microservice is paired with its own workflow to handle retries and other policies and failure modes around that service. Robert Blumen spoke with Rücker about microservice architecture, event-driven systems, long-running stateful processes versus synchronous request/response, event handling, time-outs, and handling exceptional conditions with compensating transactions. Rücker compares the choreography versus orchestration models for collaboration and discusses why orchestration provides a better separation of concerns. The discussion delves into the implementation of workflow management systems including persistence, scaling, event handling, timers and scheduling, and similarities to CQRS. The discussion wraps up with monitoring and visualization.