SE Radio 700: Mojtaba Sarooghi on Waiting Rooms for High-Traffic Events
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Release Date: 12/23/2025
SE Radio 701: Max Guernsey, III and Luniel de Beer on Readiness in Software Engineering
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Max Geurnsey III and Luniel de Beer, co-authors of the book Ready: Why Most Software Projects Fail and How to Fix It, discuss the concept of readiness in software engineering with host . Although Agile workflows and technical practices help delivery, many software efforts still struggle to achieve desired outcomes. Rework, shifting requirements, delays, defects, and mounting technical debt can plague software delivery and impede or altogether halt progress toward goals. The problem is often that implementation begins prematurely, before the team is properly set up for...
info_outline
SE Radio 700: Mojtaba Sarooghi on Waiting Rooms for High-Traffic Events
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Mojtaba Sarooghi, a Distinguished Product Architect at Queue-it, speaks with host Jeremy Jung about virtual waiting rooms for high-traffic events such as concerts and limited-quantity product releases. They explore using a virtual queue to prevent overloading systems, how most traffic is from bots, using edge workers to reduce requests to the customer's origin servers, and strategies for detecting bots in cooperation with vendors. Mojtaba discusses using AWS services like Elastic Load Balancing, DynamoDB, and Simple Notification Service, and explains why DynamoDB's eventual consistency is a...
info_outline
SE Radio 699: Benjamin Brial on Internal Dev Platforms
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
In this episode, Benjamin Brial, CEO and co-founder of Cycloid, speaks with host Sriram Panyam about internal developer platforms (IDPs) and internal developer portals. The conversation explores how these platforms address the growing challenges of DevOps scalability, multi-cloud complexity, and cloud waste, all of which organizations face as they grow. Benjamin begins by framing the core problems that IDPs solve: DevOps struggling to scale beyond small teams, the complexity of managing hybrid environments across on-premises, public cloud, and private cloud infrastructure, and the significant...
info_outline
SE Radio 698: Srujana Merugu on How to build an LLM App
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
In this episode of Software Engineering Radio, Srujana Merugu, an AI researcher with decades of experience, speaks with host Priyanka Raghavan about building LLM-based applications. The discussion begins by clarifying essential concepts like generative vs. predictive AI, pre-training vs. fine-tuning, and the transformer architecture that powers modern LLMs. Srujana explains diffusion models and vision transformers, highlighting how multimodal AI is reshaping content creation. The conversation then moves to practical aspects—where LLMs make sense, where they don’t, and a decision framework...
info_outline
SE Radio 697: Philip Kiely on Multi-Model AI
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Philip Kiely, software developer relations lead at Baseten, speaks with host Jeff Doolittle about multi-agent AI, emphasizing how to build AI-native software beyond simple ChatGPT wrappers. Kiely advocates for composing multiple models and agents that take action to achieve complex user goals, rather than just producing information. He explains the transition from off-the-shelf models to custom solutions, driven by needs for domain-specific quality, latency improvements, and economic sustainability, which introduces the engineering challenge of inference engineering. Kiely stresses that AI...
info_outline
SE Radio 696: Flavia Saldanha on Data Engineering for AI
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Flavia Saldanha, a consulting data engineer, joins host to discuss the evolution of data engineering from ETL (extract, transform, load) and data lakes to modern lakehouse architectures enriched with vector databases and embeddings. Flavia explains the industry’s shift from treating data as a service to treating it as a product, emphasizing ownership, trust, and business context as critical for AI-readiness. She describes how unified pipelines now serve both business intelligence and AI use cases, combining structured and unstructured data while ensuring semantic enrichment and a single...
info_outline
SE Radio 695: Dave Thomas on Building eBooks Infrastructure
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Dave Thomas, author of The Pragmatic Programmer, The Manifesto for Agile Software Development, Programming Ruby, Agile Web Development with Rails, Programming Elixir, Simplicity, and co-founder of the Pragmatic Bookshelf, speaks with SE Radio host about building infrastructure for eBooks. They discuss what an eBook is, the various formats, what infrastructure is needed to build them, how an author writes an book, the history of the Pragmatic Bookshelf, how they have evolved, how to handle links within eBooks, why humans are so important in the writing process, and why AI can help with your...
info_outline
SE Radio 694: Jennings Anderson and Amy Rose on Overture Maps
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Jennings Anderson, a Software Engineer with Meta Platforms, and Amy Rose, the Chief Technology Officer at Overture Maps Foundation, speak with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the Overture Maps project, which creates reliable, easy-to-use, and interoperable open map data. After exploring the foundations of geospatial information systems, Gregory and his guests dive deep into the implementation of Overture Maps through features like the Global Entity Reference System (GERS). In addition to discussing the organizational structure of the Overture Maps Foundation and the need for a unified...
info_outline
SE Radio 693: Mark Williamson on AI-Assisted Debugging
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Mark Williamson, CTO of Undo, joins host Priyanka Raghavan to discuss AI-assisted debugging. The conversation is structured around three main objectives: understanding how AI can serve as a debugging assistant; examining AI-powered debugging tools; exploring whether AI debuggers can independently find and fix bugs. Mark highlights how AI can support debugging with its ability to analyze vast amounts of data, narrow down issues, and even generate tests. From there, the discussion turns to AI debugging tools, with a particular look at ChatDBG's strengths and limitations, with a peek at...
info_outline
SE Radio 692: Sourabh Satish on Prompt Injection
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Sourabh Satish, CTO and co-founder of Pangea, speaks with SE Radio's Brijesh Ammanath about prompt injection. Sourabh begins with the basic concepts underlying prompt injection and the key risks it introduces. From there, they take a deep dive into the OWASP Top 10 security concerns for LLMs, and Sourabh explains why prompt injection is the top risk in this list. He describes the $10K Prompt Injection challenge that Pangea ran, and explains the key learnings from the challenge. The episode finishes with discussion of specific prompt-injection techniques and the security guardrails used to...
info_outlineMojtaba Sarooghi, a Distinguished Product Architect at Queue-it, speaks with host Jeremy Jung about virtual waiting rooms for high-traffic events such as concerts and limited-quantity product releases. They explore using a virtual queue to prevent overloading systems, how most traffic is from bots, using edge workers to reduce requests to the customer's origin servers, and strategies for detecting bots in cooperation with vendors. Mojtaba discusses using AWS services like Elastic Load Balancing, DynamoDB, and Simple Notification Service, and explains why DynamoDB's eventual consistency is a good fit for their domain. To explain the approach, he walks us through how his team resolved an incident in which a traffic spike overloaded their services.
Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.