The BugBash Podcast

Kyle Kingsbury, a leading distributed systems researcher known as Aphyr, joins David Wynn to share his insights on creating the Distributed Systems Reliability Glossary. They discuss the surprising effects of cosmic rays on computing and the challenges of cloud data integrity. Kyle reveals the complexities behind testing distributed systems, including adversarial methods and the importance of clear definitions. The conversation also touches on AI-generated code's impact on software reliability and the ongoing quest for reproducibility in tech.

Is it just a fact of life that software is broken? Our industry often operates as if the answer is "yes." We write tests, we fix bugs, but we seem to accept a certain level of failure as the cost of doing business. Our guest today is tired of it.Isaac Van Doren is a software engineer at Paytient, a healthcare payment solutions provider,   and he’s "sick of software being broken all the time". Isaac makes the provocative case for a radical cultural shift in how we approach software reliability. He argues that we need to move beyond the narrow view that reliability simply equals testing and instead adopt practices that force us to be explicit about the rules of our systems.Listen to explore a different philosophy of development—one where engineers are fully responsible for defining business logic , assertions are a tool for building a "theory of the system" , and failures in production are not just bugs, but immediate, unmissable signals that our understanding was wrong. This conversation will challenge your assumptions and give you a new vocabulary for building software that, as Isaac puts it, "actually works".

Marc Brooker, Distinguished Engineer at AWS, shares insights from his nearly 17 years of experience building essential cloud services like S3 and Lambda. He reveals how AWS's journey into formal methods transformed software correctness, enhancing both reliability and development speed. The discussion highlights innovative testing strategies, the challenges of applying these methods in complex systems, and the game-changing potential of AI in programming. From the intricate landscape of verification to the tech scene in Cape Town, Marc offers a glimpse into the future of software development.

The BugBash Podcast kicks off with a bit of pre-history -- the story of FoundationDB, one of the first companies to successfully use deterministic simulation testing to accelerate development, assure reliability, and build something legendary.Today, FoundationDB is the hidden layer in Snowflake, DeepSeek, and many core systems at places like Apple and Goldman Sachs. But it started with some guys in a garage, building a system demo with plywood and lightbulbs...