Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

Edwin Brady speaks to Matthew Farwell about Type Driven Development and the Idris Programming language. The show covers: what a type is; static vs dynamic types in programming languages; dependent types; the Idris programming language; why Idris was created. Type safe printf modelling state in Idris modelling protocols in Idris modelling concurrency in Idris type driven development and how it changes the development process.

Felienne talks with Michael Feathers about Legacy Code. When is something legacy? Is working on legacy different from working on greenfield code? Do developers need different skills and techniques? Testing legacy code. How to test a legacy system? When do we have enough tests to feel safe to start coding? Techniques to make legacy systems more testable.

Asaf Yigal talks with SE Radio’s Edaena Salinas about machine learning in log analysis. The discussion starts with an overview of the structure of logs and what information they can contain. Asaf discusses what the log analysis process looks like without machine learning -- and the role of humans in this – before moving on to how the process is improved by incorporating external resources using machine learning. Topics include: log analysis, machine learning, operations.

Yakov Fain talks with SE Radio’s Matthew Farwell about the Angular web development framework. The show covers the philosophy behind Angular; who would want to use the framework; how an Angular application is composed, including how to handle form submission and validation; why Typescript was chosen for Angular; how Angular uses reactive programming (RxJS, in particular); how to test an Angular application; security concerns of web applications; who developed Angular and how it is supported, and performance considerations of an Angular application.

Phillipp Krenn talks with SE Radio’s Jeff Meyerson about Elasticsearch, a scalable search index. The conversation begins with a discussion of search, how it compares to database queries, and what an inverted index is. Phillipp introduces Wikipedia as an example that runs throughout the episode because Wikipedia uses Elasticsearch to power its full-text search. A discussion of Elasticsearch’s scalability ensues, including basic terminology and an explanation of other applications of Elasticsearch.

Morgan Wilde talks with SE Radio’s Jeff Meyerson about the LLVM compiler toolchain. They begin with a discussion of how a compiler works and how compiled code executes against different processor architectures. Using the JVM as a model for interoperability, they move on to how LLVM is a system that optimizes an intermediate representation (IR), which is similar to the Java bytecode: every programming language that compiles down to IR can leverage the same optimizations of that IR. The conversation concludes with a discussion of applications of LLVM and the future of the ecosystem.

Docker Security Team lead Diogo Mónica talks with SE Radio’s Kim Carter about Docker Security aspects. Simple Application Security, which hasn’t changed much over the past 15 years, is still considered the most effective way to improve security around Docker containers and infrastructure. The discussion explores characteristics such as Immutability, the copy-on-write filesystem, as well as orchestration principles that are baked into Docker Swarm, such as mutual TLS/PKI by default, secrets distribution, least privilege, content scanning, image signatures, and secure/trusted build pipelines. Diogo also shares his thoughts around the attack surface of the Linux kernel; networking, USB, and driver APIs; and the fact that application security remains more important to focus our attention on and get right.

James Turnbull joins Robert Blumen for a discussion of Terraform, an infrastructure-as-code tool, and a deep dive into how Terraform implements the declarative programming model.

Francois Raynaud and Kim Carter cover moving to DevSecOps from traditional delivery approaches. Shifting security focus up front. Building a development team with not only development specialties, but also security and operations.

Neal Ford, a seasoned expert in software architecture, teams up with Kim Carter, an accomplished professional in the field. They dive into the essential skills for software architects, emphasizing the balance between technical expertise and soft skills like communication. The duo discusses the challenges architects face in agile environments and the importance of historical context in evolution. They explore the complexities of maintaining clear code and the human factors influencing architectural design, providing valuable insights on fostering change in development teams.