Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

Richard L. Sites discusses his new book Understanding Software Dynamics, which offers expert methods and advanced tools for understanding complex, time-constrained software dynamics in order to improve reliability and performance. Philip Winston spoke with Sites about the five fundamental computing resources CPU, Memory, Disk, Network, and Locks, as well as methods for observing and reasoning when investigating performance problems using the open-source utility KUtrace.

This week, Postgres server developer Bruce Momjian joins host Robert Blumen for a discussion of multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) in the Postgres database. They begin with a discussion of the isolation requirement in database transactions (I in ACID); how isolation can be achieved with locking; limitations of locking; how locking limits concurrency and creates variability in query runtimes; multi-version concurrency control as a means to achieve isolation; how Postgres manages multiple versions of a row; snapshots; copy-on-write and snapshots; visibility; database transaction IDs; how tx ids, snapshots and versions interact; the need for locking when there are multiple writers; how MVCC was added to Postgres; and how to clean up unused space left over from aged-out versions.

Vaughn Vernon, author of the book “Strategic Monoliths and Microservices” discusses his book with host Akshay Manchale about strategies for purposeful architecture from the perspective of both business decision makers and technical leaders.

Robert Seacord, author of Effective C, The CERT C Coding Standard and Secure Coding in C and C++, discusses why the C programming language can be insecure, the top 5 security issues and the tools and techniques you can employ to write secure code in C.

Ram Sriharsha of Pinecone discusses the role of vectors in machine learning, a technique that lies at the heart of many of the machine learning applications we use every day. Host Philip Winston spoke with Sriharsha about the basics of vectors, vector...

Sam Scott, CTO of Oso discusses how to build a global authorization service and challenges with host Priyanka.

Chase Kocher, the Founder and CEO of aim4hire, a technology recruitment agency, discusses the recruiting lifecycle from the candidate, the company and the recruiter’s point of view with host Kanchan Shringi.

Tim McNamara, author of Rust in Action, discusses the top three benefits of Rust and why they make it a performant, reliable and productive programming language.

Guest Sam Boyer, author of So you want to write a package manager talks about package management. The discussion covers - what is a package? what does it mean to manage package? package meta-data; package versioning; the quantity of packages in modern...

Chris Riccomini and Dmitriy Ryaboy discuss their book, The Missing Readme, which is intended to be the missing manual for new software engineers. Felienne spoke with Riccomini and Ryaboy about a range of topics that new software engineers might not have..