Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers – Details, episodes & analysis

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 vast amounts of data, narrow down issues, and even generate tests. From there, the discussion turns to AI debugging tools, with a particular look at ChatDBG's strengths and limitations, with a peek at time travel debugging. In the final segment, they consider several real-world scenarios and evaluate the feasibility and practicality of AI acting autonomously in debugging.

Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

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, and Sourabh explains why prompt injection is the top risk in this list. He describes the $10K Prompt Injection challenge that Pangea ran, and explains the key learnings from the challenge. The episode finishes with discussion of specific prompt-injection techniques and the security guardrails used to counter the risk.

Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Artie Shevchenko, author of Code Health Guardian, speaks with host Jeff Doolittle about the crucial role of human programmers in the AI era, emphasizing that humans must excel at managing code complexity. Shevchenko discusses these concepts and key takeaways from his book, including the three problems caused by complexity: change amplification, cognitive load, and the most severe, unknown unknowns. He suggests that maintaining code health should be viewed pragmatically as a productivity question, requiring an ownership mentality and product focus to balance short-term delivery with long-term maintainability. The episode also covers vital processes such as using design documents for upfront analysis and code reviews, highlighting four goals: high code quality, knowledge sharing, delivery speed, and -- most important for team productivity -- psychological safety.

This episode is sponsored by Monday Dev

Eric Olden talks with host Giovanni Asproni about identity orchestration, a software approach for managing distributed identity and access management (IAM) and integrating multiple identity systems or providers (IDPs) to make them look like a single system from a user perspective. The episode starts with a refresher in identity and access management, then introduces identity orchestration and some of the challenges it helps to address, such as integrating disparate identity management systems after company mergers or acquisitions; managing identities in situations where some of the IAM systems are unreachable; and implementing more secure identity management in legacy applications. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Jaxon Repp of HarperDB speaks with Brijesh Ammanath about distributed data infrastructure, including what it is and why it's important. They discuss the key factors that make distributed data infrastructure attractive, as well as challenges to implementing it. The episode explores the architecture and design principles, the key security considerations, and the transition factors for distributed data Infrastructure. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software.

Yeckezkel Rabinovich, CTO of Groundcover, speaks with host Philip Winston about observability and eBPF as it applies to Kubernetes. Rabinovich was previously the chief architect at the healthcare security company CyberMDX and spent eight years in the cyber security division of the Israeli Prime Minister's Office. This episode explores the three pillars of observability, extending the Linux Kernel with eBPF, the basics of Kubernetes, and how Groundcover uses eBPF as the basis for its observability platform.

Andy Suderman, CTO of Fairwinds, joins host Robert Blumen to talk about standing up a kubernetes cluster. Their discussion covers build-your-own versus managed clusters provided by cloud services, and how to determine the number of kubernetes clusters an organization needs. Andy describes best practices for automating cluster provisioning, and offers recommendations about customizations and opinionation of cloud service providers, choice of container registry, and whether you should run complementary services such as CI and monitoring on the same cluster. The episode also examines the day 0/day 1/day 2 lifecycle, cluster auto-scaling at the cloud service level, integrating stateful services and other cloud services into your cluster, and kubernetes secrets and alternatives. Finally, they consider the container-network interface (CNI), ingress and load balancers, and provisioning external DNS and TLS certificates for cluster services.

Zac Hatfield-Dodds, the Assurance Team Lead at Anthropic, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about property-based testing techniques and how to use them in an open-source tool called Hypothesis. They discuss how to define properties for a Python function and implement a test case in Hypothesis. They also explore some of the advanced features in Hypothesis that can automatically generate a test case and perform fuzzing campaigns.

José Valim, creator of the Elixir programming language, Chief Adoption Officer at Dashbit, and author of three programming books, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about what Elixir is today, what Livebook is, the five spearheads of the new machine learning ecosystem for Elixir, and how they all fit together. Valim describes why he created Elixir, what "the beam" is, and how he pitches it to new users. This episode examines things you can do with Livebook and how it is well-aligned with machine learning, as well as why immutability is important and how it works. They take a detailed look at a range of topics, including tensors with Nx, traditional machine learning with Scholar, data munging with Explorer, deep learning and neural networks with Axon, Bumblebee and Huggingface, and model creation basics. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

M. Scott Ford, the CTO of Corgibytes and host of the Legacy Code Rocks podcast, discusses managing dependency freshness. SE Radio's Sam Taggart speaks with him about why dependency freshness is important to ensure that your code has all the latest bug fixes, how exactly to measure dependency freshness, and some of the insights that teams can gain from monitoring freshness over time. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software Magazine.