SE Radio 662: Vlad Khononov on Balancing Coupling in Software Design
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Release Date: 04/01/2025
SE Radio 678: Chris Love on Kubernetes Security
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Chris Love, co-author of the book , joins host for a conversation about kubernetes security. Chris identifies the node layer, secrets management, the network layer, contains, and pods as the most critical areas to be addressed. The conversation explores a range of topics, including when to accept defaults and when to override; differences between self-managed clusters and cloud-service provider-managed clusters; and what can go wrong at each layer -- and how to address these issues. They further discuss managing the node layer; network security best practices; kubernetes secrets and...
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SE Radio 677: Jacob Visovatti and Conner Goodrum on Testing ML Models for Enterprise Products
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Jacob Visovatti and Conner Goodrum of Deepgram speak with host Kanchan Shringi about testing ML models for enterprise use and why it's critical for product reliability and quality. They discuss the challenges of testing machine learning models in enterprise environments, especially in foundational AI contexts. The conversation particularly highlights the differences in testing needs between companies that build ML models from scratch and those that rely on existing infrastructure. Jacob and Conner describe how testing is more complex in ML systems due to unstructured inputs, varied data...
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SE Radio 676: Samuel Colvin on the Pydantic Ecosystem
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Samuel Colvin, the CEO and founder of Pydantic, speaks with host about the ecosystem of Pydantic’s Python frameworks, including Pydantic, Pydantic AI, and Pydantic Logfire. Along with discussing the design, implementation, and use of these frameworks, they dive into the refactoring of Pydantic and the follow-on performance improvements. They also explore ways in which Python programmers can use these three frameworks to build, test, evaluate, and monitor their own applications that interact with both local and cloud-based large language models. Brought to you by and .
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SE Radio 675: Brian Demers on Observability into the Toolchain
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Brian Demers, Developer Advocate at Gradle, speaks with host about the importance of having observability in the toolchain. Such information about build times, compiler warnings, test executions, and any other system used to build the production code can help to reduce defects, increase productivity, and improve the developer experience. During the conversation they touch upon what is possible with today’s tools; the impact on productivity and developer experience; and the impact, both in terms of risks and opportunities, introduced by the use of artificial intelligence. Brought to you...
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SE Radio 674: Vilhelm von Ehrenheim on Autonomous Testing
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Vilhelm von Ehrenheim, co-founder and chief AI officer of QA.tech, speaks with SE Radio's about autonomous testing. The discussion starts by covering the fundamentals, and how testing has evolved from manual to automated to now autonomous. Vilhelm then deep dives into the details of autonomous testing and the role of agents in autonomous testing. They consider the challenges in adopting autonomous testing, and Wilhelm describes the experiences of some clients who have made the transition. Toward the end of the show, Vilhelm describes the impact of autonomous testing on the traditional QA...
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SE Radio 673: Abhinav Kimothi on Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
In this episode of Software Engineering Radio, Abhinav Kimothi sits down with host Priyanka Raghavan to explore retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), drawing insights from Abhinav's book, A Simple Guide to Retrieval-Augmented Generation. The conversation begins with an introduction to key concepts, including large language models (LLMs), context windows, RAG, hallucinations, and real-world use cases. They then delve into the essential components and design considerations for building a RAG-enabled system, covering topics such as retrievers, prompt augmentation, indexing pipelines, retrieval...
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SE Radio 672: Luca Palmieri on Rust In Production
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Luca Palmieri, author of Zero to Production in Rust and Principal Engineering Consultant at MainMatter, speaks with SE Radio host about Rust in production. They discuss what production Rust means, how to get Rust code into production, specific Rust issues to think about when getting an application into production, what Rust profiles are, expected performance, telemetry options, error handling and what parts of Rust to use and avoid. Palmieri discusses docker containers, tracing, robust Rust error handling, how performant Rust is in the real world, p50, p99, docker build techniques,...
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SE Radio 669: Will McGugan on Text-Based User Interfaces
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Will McGugan, the CEO and founder of Textualize, speaks with host about how to use packages such as Rich and Textual to build text-based user interfaces (TUIs) and command-line interfaces (CLIs) in Python. Along with discussing the design idioms that enable developers to create TUIs in Python, they consider practical strategies for efficiently rendering the components of a TUI. They also explore the subtle idiosyncrasies of implementing performant TUI frameworks like Textual and Rich and introduce the steps that developers would take to create their own CLI or TUI. This episode is sponsored...
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SE Radio 671: Carson Gross on HTMX
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
In this episode, SE Radio host explores HTMX with its creator, Carson Gross, who is also creator of Hyperscript, the mind behind the Grug Brained Developer, a professor of software engineering at Montana State University, and co-author of . HTMX is a modern JavaScript library that allows developers to access AJAX, WebSockets, CSS Transitions, and Server-Sent Events directly in HTML using attributes. It represents a return to hypermedia-driven application architecture while supporting modern user experiences. The episode starts with a look at the current complexity in web development and...
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SE Radio 670: Matthias Endler on Prototype in Rust
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Matthias Endler, Rust developer, open-source maintainer, and consultant through his company Corrode, speaks with SE Radio host about prototyping in Rust. They discuss prototyping and why Rust is excellent for prototyping, and Matthias recommends a workflow for it, including what parts of Rust to use, and what parts to avoid at this stage. He describes the key components that Rust provides to help us validate ideas via prototypes, as well as tips and tricks to reach for. In addition, the conversation explores type inference, unwrap(), expect(), anyhow crate, bacon crate, cargo-script,...
info_outlineSoftware architect and author Vlad Khononov joins host Jeff Doolittle for a discussion on balancing coupling in software design. They start by examining coupling and its relationship to complexity and modularity. Vlad explains the historical models for assessing coupling and introduces his updated approach, integration strength, which aims to simplify earlier frameworks and adapt them for modern practices.
The episode explores three dimensions of coupling:
- integration strength (knowledge sharing),
- distance (proximity of components), and
- volatility (likelihood of change).
Vlad illustrates how design decisions can lead systems toward complexity or modularity, and he emphasizes the importance of managing coupling to minimize cognitive load and cascading changes. The conversation wraps up with insights on applying these principles to real-world software projects and a reminder of coupling's critical role in software architecture. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.