Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

Robert Blumen talks with Cody Voellinger, the founder of a recruiting firm that specializes in filling software engineer roles for San Francisco-area startups, about how jobs are created and how companies and engineers get matched up. Their discussion covers the entire job search process, from job descriptions to salary negotiations. They look at the job market from both sides: how companies define what they want, find the right people, and evaluate candidates, and how job seekers can position themselves for the role they want. Other topics include culture fit versus skill and resumes in an age of social networking. They conclude with a look at the mistakes that job seekers, recruiters, and companies should avoid.

Michael Nygard of "Release It!" fame talks with Stefan Tilkov about his experience using the Clojure programming language. Topics include the tool chain and development process, the Clojure learning curve, and on-boarding new developers. Michael explains the similarities and differences compared to typical OO languages when implementing domain logic, and uses both game development and typical web development projects as examples. Finally, the two discuss how well Clojure can be used in the face of long-running projects, and some typical obstacles and strategies for introducing it to real-world scenarios.

Monica Beckwith joins Robert Blumen for a discussion of java garbage collection. What is garbage collection? GC algorithms; history of GC in the java language; fragmentation and compaction; generational strategies; causes of pauses; impact of pauses on application performance; tuning GC; GC on multi-core and large memory machines; should production servers be implemented in non-GC languages?; going off heap and other programming techniques to avoid garbage; the future of java GC.

Mike Barker talks with Sven Johann about the architecture of the LMAX system. LMAX is a low-latency, high-throughput trading platform. Their discussion begins with what LMAX does; the origins of LMAX; and extreme performance requirements faced by LMAX. They then delve into systems that LMAX communicates with; LMAX users; the two main components of the system (broker and exchange); Mechanical Sympathy as an architectural driver; message flow using the Disruptor library; and lock-free algorithms. Mike and Sven wrap up by discussing how a well modeled domain model can improve the performance of any system; automated (performance) tests; continuous delivery; and measuring response times.

Fred George talks with Eberhard about "Developer Anarchy" - a manager-less development approach Fred has been using very successfully in different organizations - combined with microservices.

Robert Blumen talks to Christopher Meiklejohn about conflict-free replicated data types. The discussion covers consistency in distributed systems, CRDTs, and their use in NoSQL databases.

Martin Klose talks with Eberhard Wolff about Coderetreats - events where developers practice development techniques to become better programmers. He explains how to join such events and what it takes to do your own Coderetreat.

Alex Budzier of the Oxford Saïd Business School and Jürgen Laartz of McKinsey Berlin join Robert Blumen to talk about the their research on large IT project failures. Why do large projects fail and to what extent are these failures avoidable?