

The InfoQ Podcast
InfoQ
Software engineers, architects and team leads have found inspiration to drive change and innovation in their team by listening to the weekly InfoQ Podcast. They have received essential information that helped them validate their software development map. We have achieved that by interviewing some of the top CTOs, engineers and technology directors from companies like Uber, Netflix and more. Over 1,200,000 downloads in the last 3 years.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Oct 1, 2017 • 43min
Nora Jones on Establishing, Growing, and Maturing a Chaos Engineering Practice
Nora Jones, a senior software engineer on Netflix’ Chaos Team, talks with Wesley Reisz about what Chaos Engineering means today. She covers what it takes to build a practice, how to establish a strategy, defines cost of impact, and covers key technical considerations when leveraging chaos engineering.
Why listen to this podcast:
- Chaos engineering is a discipline where you formulate hypotheses, perform experiments, and evaluate the results afterwards.
- Injecting a bit of failure over time is going to make your system more resilient in the end.
- Start with Tier 2 or non-critical services first, and build up success stories to grow chaos further.
- As systems become more and more distributed, there becomes a higher need for chaos engineering.
- If you’re running your first experiment, get your service owners in a war room and get them to monitor the results of the test as it is running.
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2vJoimw
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Sep 29, 2017 • 26min
Shubha Nabar Discusses Einstein, the Machine Learning System in Salesforce
Shubha Nabar is a senior director of data science for Salesforce Einstein. Prior to working for Salesforce, she was a data scientist at LinkedIn and Microsoft. In the podcast she discusses Salesforce Einstein and the problem space that they are trying to solve, explores the differences between enterprise and consumer for machine learning, and then talks about the Optimus Prime Scala library that they use in Salesforce.
Why listen to this podcast:
* The volume of data, and hardware advances have made it possible to do machine learning to do them a lot faster.
* AI is a science of building intelligent software, encompassing many aspects of intelligence that we tend to think of as human.
* If you can’t measure something, you can’t fix it.
* You have to think about what you can automate, rather than having a human to try and engineer out all those features.
* Get feedback on design.
Nora Jones, a senior software engineer on Netflix’ Chaos Team, talks with Wesley Reisz about what Chaos Engineering means today. She covers what it takes to build a practice, how to establish a strategy, defines cost of impact, and covers key technical considerations when leveraging chaos engineering.
Why listen to this podcast:
- Chaos engineering is a discipline where you formulate hypotheses, perform experiments, and evaluate the results afterwards.
- Injecting a bit of failure over time is going to make your system more resilient in the end.
- Start with Tier 2 or non-critical services first, and build up success stories to grow chaos further.
- As systems become more and more distributed, there becomes a higher need for chaos engineering.
- If you’re running your first experiment, get your service owners in a war room and get them to monitor the results of the test as it is running.
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2vJoimw
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq
Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8
Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ
Follow on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/infoq
Want to see extended shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2xK7OxR

Sep 23, 2017 • 29min
Simon Brown on the Role of the Software Architect in a Continuous Delivery Environment
This week's podcast features Simon Brown well known for his work training software architects. Topics include the differences between a tech lead and an architect, how much documentation is enough and what that looks like in a continuous delivery environment.
What you'll learn on this podcast:
• As an industry we seem to have lost our knowledge of how to do architecture well in the context of modern agile software teams.
• Architecture is about the expensive decisions; things that are costly to change later.
• Ideally architects should code in the production code base. If you are not able to do this at least be involved in quality reviews and peer reviews in the production code so you can get feedback on your designs.
• It is often said the the code is the only documentation you need but the code can’t tell you everything. You do need to document the things you can’t get from the code such as the architectural drivers, they key quality attributes and so on along with some high level diagrams and how you operate the system.
• As you step into the role of architect go and find a mentor or a local meet-up. The major change is that you have to influence and lead people.
This podcast is sponsored by AppDynamics. Software architects play a critical role in designi¬¬¬ng, executing, and migrating large infrastructures to the cloud. Download AppDynamic’s FREE eBook “10 Tips for Enterprise Cloud Migration” and launch your migration project with a proven plan. Download the eBook now at http://infoq.link/web_sndcld_appdynamics
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Sep 18, 2017 • 30min
Twitter's Yao Yue on Latency, Performance Monitoring, & Caching at Scale
This week's podcasts features Yao Yue of Twitter. Yao spent the majority of her career working on caching systems at Twitter. She has since created a performance team that deals with edge performance outliers often exposed by the enormous scale of Twitter. In this podcast, she discusses standing up the performance team, thoughts on instrumenting applications, and interesting performance issues (and strategies for solving them) they’ve seen at Twitter.
Why listen to this podcast:
* Performance problems can be caused by a few machines running slowly causing cascading failure
* Aggregating stats on a minute-by-minute basis can be an effective way of monitoring thousands of servers
* Being able to record second-by-second is often too expensive to centrally aggregate, but can be stored locally
* Distinguishing between request timeout and connection/network timeouts is important to prevent thundering herds
* With larger scale organisations, having dedicated performance teams helps centralise skills to solve performance problems
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2wnBemB
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
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Sep 8, 2017 • 35min
Linda Rising on the Importance of Patterns, Her Journey, & Patterns for Driving Change/Innovation
On the InfoQ Podcast this week, Wes Reisz talks with the Queen of Patterns, Linda Rising. Linda discusses her thoughts on the importance of patterns, she answers questions about what really is a pattern, and how she became involved in working with them. Throughout the podcast she discusses a variety of organizational and personal patterns and finally wraps with patterns to apply when driving change and innovation.
Why listen to this podcast:
- You have to realise that there’s nothing you can do about other people. The only person you can affect is yourself.
- A pattern is not a band-aid that you use once. You use it in a context where you use it in conjunctions with other patterns.
- Take baby steps when driving change in an organisation, and seek out a pocket of receptive people to drive it.
- Slack is an important part to have in life, so that if something comes along you can absorb it without having to stop doing something else.
- Listen, Listen, Listen.
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2vLIsMC
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq
Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8
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Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2vLIsMC

Aug 18, 2017 • 36min
Security Considerations and the State of Microservices with Sam Newman
Wesley Reisz talks with Sam Newman about microservices. They explore the current state of the art with regards the architectural style and corresponding tooling and deployment platforms. They then discuss how microservices increase the surface area of where sensitive information can be read or manipulated, but also have the potential to create systems that are more secure.
Why listen to this podcast:
- Different organisations have different risk appetites for new technology, so what may be appropriate for one organisation may not be appropriate technology choices for another.
- If you are deploying micro services then you need to know why you are doing it and what benefits you expect to get from deploying them.
- Micro services are defined by their independently deployable units rather than their size.
- Using a cryptographic token that is verifiable off line is a common pattern for passing authentication contexts around to different services.
- Serverless architectures redeuce the need to monitor server patching but does not diminish the need for monitoring application runtime or library dependencies from security patching.
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2v8NJg6
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq
Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8
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Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2v8NJg6

Aug 11, 2017 • 33min
Jessica Kerr on Productivity, Slack Chatbots, Yak Shaving, & Why Diversity Matters for Innovation
Wesley Reisz talks with Jessica Kerr about her focus on developer productivity. Topics include her work at Atomist building Slack Chatbots, an approach to categorizing Yak Shaving (in an effort to prioritize and automate development dependencies), how an innovation culture drives diversity, and, finally, the role of 10x developers in the lifecycle of a company or product.
Why listen to this podcast:
- There are five kinds of Yak to shave
- Atomist uses a Slack chatbot to automate and track commits, builds, push requests etc.
- Agile retrospectives are a great way to encourage an innovation culture
- Diverse teams flourish in innovation cultures
- 10x developers are great for launching products, but teams are needed as products scale up
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2uO60PR
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq
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Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2uO60PR

Jul 21, 2017 • 27min
Martin Hadley on R and the modern R ecosystem
Werner Schuster talks to Martin Hadley, data scientist at University of Oxford. They discuss the state of the R language, the rich R ecosystem that covers development (RStudio), notebooks for publication (R Notebooks, RPubs), writing web apps (Shiny), and the pros/cons of the different data frames implementations.
Why listen to this podcast:
- R is the tool for working with rectangular data
- Modern data frame implementations are Tibble and data.table (for large amounts of data)
- RMarkdown and R Notebooks allow to explore data and then publish it the results and (interactive) visualization
- Use Shinyapps to publish server side R applications
- Tidyverse is the place to look for modern R packages
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2twOXWJ
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hotest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq
Like InfoQ on Facebook: bit.ly/2jmlyG8
Follow on Twitter: twitter.com/InfoQ
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Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2twOXWJ

Jul 7, 2017 • 34min
Pony Language Designer Sylvan Clebsch on Pony’s Design, Garbage Collection, and Formal Verification
In this podcast Charles Humble talks to Sylvan Clebsch, who is the designer of the actor-model language Pony programming and now works at Microsoft Research in Cambridge in the Programming Language Principles group. They talk about the inspirations behind Pony, how the garbage collector avoids stop-the-world pauses, the queuing systems, work scheduler, and formal verification.
Why listen to this podcast:
* Pony scales from a Raspberry Pi through a 64 core half terabyte machine to a 4096 core SGI beast
* An actor has a 256-byte overhead, so creating hundreds of thousands of actors is possible
* Actors have unbounded queues to prevent deadlock
* Each actor garbage collects its own heap, so global stop-the-world pauses are not needed
* Because the type system is data-race free, it’s impossible to have concurrency problems in Pony
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2tZXcKE
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq
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Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2tZXcKE

Jun 22, 2017 • 29min
Kotlin Lead Language Designer Andrey Breslav on Android Support, Language Features and Future Plans
Why listen to this podcast:
- Kotlin is an officially supported language on Google Android platforms
- Kotlin Native and Kotlin JS will allow code reuse between server, client and mobile devices
- Type safety means that references can be checked for nullability Great tooling is a driver in what kind of language features are (and aren’t) adopted
- Coroutines provide a way of creating maintainable asynchronous systems
More on this: Quick scan our curated show notes on InfoQ http://bit.ly/2sHyxqQ
You can also subscribe to the InfoQ newsletter to receive weekly updates on the hottest topics from professional software development. bit.ly/24x3IVq
Subscribe: www.youtube.com/infoq
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Want to see extented shownotes? Check the landing page on InfoQ: http://bit.ly/2sHyxqQ