Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

Michael J. Freedman, the Robert E. Kahn Professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University, as well as the co-founder and CTO of Timescale, spoke with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about TimescaleDB. They revisit what time series data means in 2024, the history of TimescaleDB, how it integrates with PostgreSQL, and they take the listeners through a complete setup. Freedman discusses the types of data well-suited for a timeseries database, the types of sectors that have these requirements, why PostgreSQL is the best, Pg callbacks, Pg hooks, C programming, Rust, their open source contributions and projects, data volumes, column-data, indexes, backups, why it is common to have one table for your timeseries data, when not to use timescaledb, IoT data formats, Pg indexes, how Pg works without timescaledb, sharding, and how to manage your upgrades if not using Timescale Cloud. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Wolf Vollprecht, the CEO and founder of Prefix.dev, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about how to implement Python tools, such as package managers, in the Rust programming language. They discuss the challenges associated with building Python infrastructure tooling in Python and explore how using the Rust programming language addresses these concerns. They also explore the implementation details of Rust-based tooling for the Python ecosystem, focusing on the cross-platform Pixi package management tool, which enables developers to easily and efficiently install libraries and applications in a reproducible fashion. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Xe Iaso of Fly.io discusses their hosting platform with host Jeremy Jung. They cover building globally distributed applications with Anycast, using Wireguard to encrypt inter-service communication, writing custom code to handle load balancing and scaling with fly-proxy, why serving EU customers has unique requirements, letting users use docker images without the docker runtime by converting them to firecracker and cloud hypervisor microVMs, the differences between regular VMs and microVMs, challenges of acquiring and serving GPUs to customers. when to use Kubernetes, and dealing with abuse on the platform. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Shannon Selbert, co-founder of Soren and developer of Oban, and Parker Selbert, creator of the Oban background job framework, chief architect at dscout, and co-founder of Soren, speak with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about robust job processing in Elixir. They explore the reliability, consistency, and observability in relation to job processing, to understand how Oban, Elixir, and PostgreSQL deliver them. The Selberts describe why Oban was created, its history, which parts of the Elixir ecosystem they use, and why this would not be possible without PostgreSQL and Elixir. They discuss the lessons learned in the 5 years since the first release, as well as use cases, job throughput, the hardest problem to solve so far, workers, queues, CRON, distributed architectures, retry algorithms, just-once methodologies, the reliability the beam brings, consistency across nodes, how PostgreSQL is vital, telemetry data, best use cases for Oban, and the most common issues that new users face. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Infrastructure engineer and Kubernetes ingress-Nginx maintainer James Strong joins host Robert Blumen to discuss the Kubernetes networking layer. The discussion draws on content from Strong's book on the topic and covers a lot of ground, including: the Kubernetes network's use of different IP ranges than the host network; overlay network with its own IP ranges compared to using expanded portions of the host network ranges; adding routes with kernel extension points; programming kernel extension points with IP tables compared to eBPF; how routes are updated as the host network gains or loses nodes, the use of the Linux network namespace to isolate each pod; routing between pods on the same host; routing between pods across the host network; the container-network interface (CNI); the CNI ecosystem; differences between CNIs; choosing a CNI when running on a public cloud service; the Kubernetes service abstraction with a cluster-wide IP address; monitoring and telemetry of the Kubernetes network; and troubleshooting the Kubernetes network. Brought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society.

Andreas Møller, founder of Toddle, a no-code tool for building scalable performant web applications, speaks with SE Radio's Brijesh Ammanath about no-code platforms. They discuss the role of developers in a no-code ecosystem and explore scalability and performance considerations, as well as enterprise adoption of no-code tools. Andreas also expands on why he built Toddle.dev and its unique features. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software.

Frances Buontempo, author of the new book Learn C++ by Example, discusses the C++ programming language, a widely used general-purpose programming language. Host Philip Winston spoke with Buontempo about where C++ fits into the landscape of existing programming languages and how recent C++ standards have changed things. They talk about specific language features such as lambdas, templates, concurrency, ranges, concepts along with tips for learning and using C++. Brought to you by IEEE Software and IEEE Computer Society.

Ori Saporta, co-founder and Systems Architect at vFunction, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about the role of the software architect. The episode begins with Ori's thoughts on what is typically missed or overlooked regarding this role. The conversation then explores aspects of both hard and soft skills required of software architects. Other topics include the relationship of the software architect to other roles, to design and process, and to quality. The show concludes by addressing the importance of dependency management by software architects. Brought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society.

Kent Beck, Chief Scientist at Mechanical Orchard, and inventor of Extreme Programming and Test-Driven Development, joins SE Radio host Giovanni Asproni for a conversation on software design based on his latest book "Tidy First?". The episode starts with exploring the reasons for writing the book, and introducing the concepts of tidying, cohesion, and coupling. It continues with a conversation about software design, and the impact of tidyings. Then Kent and Giovanni discuss how to balance design and code quality decisions with cost, value delivered, and other important aspects. The episode ends with some considerations on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the software developer's job. Brought to you by IEEE Software and IEEE Computer Society.

Wouter Groeneveld, author of The Creative Programmer and PhD researcher at KU Leuven, discusses his research related to programming education with host Jeremy Jung. Topics include evaluating projects, constraints, social debt in teams, common fallacies in critical thinking, maintaining flow state, documenting and retaining knowledge, and creating environments that encourage creativity. Brought to you by IEEE Software and IEEE Computer Society.