SE Radio 738: Milan Milanovic on the Laws of Software Engineering
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Release Date: 09/16/2026
SE Radio 738: Milan Milanovic on the Laws of Software Engineering
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Milan Milanovic, Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies and author of the book, Laws of Software Engineering, joins host Giovanni Asproni for a conversation based on the content of his book—a collection of 53 empirical and mathematical laws governing modern software engineering. The book includes some well-known laws, such as Conway's and Brooks's laws, as well as other lesser-known but just as important, including Gilb's and Tesler’s laws. The episode starts with an introduction to the laws and the criteria that Milan used to choose them. The episode continues with some practical hints...
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SE Radio 737: Owen McGirr on Software Accessibility
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Owen McGirr, creator of SayIt!, Switchify, and an entrepreneur who builds inclusive technology, speaks with SE Radio host about software accessibility. For this episode, Gavin emailed the questions to Owen, who prepared his answers and generated the audio programmatically using text-to-speech. Owen discusses what accessibility is, different ways a user might interact with software, how accessibility is currently handled between various operating systems, the technical challenges of creating SayIt! and Switchify, plus what developers can do to improve accessibility. This episode explores...
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SE Radio 736: Sahil Walia on Apache Iceberg
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Sahil Walia, Senior Technical Architect at Snowflake, joins host Robert Blumen for a deep dive into Apache Iceberg. The conversation covers OLAP, data formats, data lakes and lake houses, Iceberg as a data format, columnar storage, use cases, reference implementation, read/write, how Iceberg structures metadata, indexing, query planning and performance issues.
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SE Radio 735: Vivek Yadav on Regression Testing Microservices
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Vivek Yadav, an engineering manager at the payment company Stripe, speaks with host Adi Narayan about building regression testing for microservices. Drawing on his work estimating network costs for card payments, Vivek explains why unit and integration tests fall short when a single transaction's cost can depend on 100+ parameters across card networks, countries, and merchant types. He describes Stripe's approach: structuring services so that core logic is stateless and separated from I/O, then wrapping that logic in an Apache Spark job that replays historical transactions from cold storage to...
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SE Radio 734: Sathiesh Veera on Engineering Data-Protection Guardrails with LLMs
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Sathiesh Veera, a GenAI Solutions Architect at At&T, speaks with host Brijesh Ammanath about the data-protection guardrails required when using LLMs. The core issue is that LLMs sit outside the cloud tenant in most enterprise AI deployments, which means that data leaves the company's perimeter with every prompt, RAG retrieval, and tool call. Contractual agreements can restrict the data that LLM vendors are allowed to use for training and audits, but they don't stop prompt injection or unintended exposure as company data is often shared to LLMs via natural language queries, APIs, tool and...
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SE Radio 733: Max Corbridge on Securing AI Agents
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Max Corbridge, an ethical hacker and red teamer who is co-founder and CEO of Secure Agentics, speaks with SE Radio host Amey Ambade about how AI agents get attacked and what engineers can actually do to defend them. Drawing on years of offensive security work, Corbridge frames agents as a new and largely undefended attack surface: the industry has handed AI systems autonomy and the ability to act in the real world while carrying forward prompt injection, a flaw the frontier labs themselves describe as effectively unsolvable. He likens the moment to the early, lawless days of the web, when SQL...
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SE Radio 732: Jason Gorman on The Effective Use of AI For Software Development
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Jason Gorman, a software development expert and founder of Codemanship, joins host Giovanni Asproni to explore how best to use AI in software development. They start by considering how established technical practices — test-driven development, modularization, continuous integration, and continuous reviews — become more important, not less, when working with AI assistance. These practices help address several key limitations of LLMs, including keeping context windows as small as possible. Looking at AI's impact on team productivity, Jason offers some practical advice for teams to introduce...
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SE Radio 731: Sonali Varde on AI and the Engineering Manager Role
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Sonali Varde, Senior Software Engineering Manager at LinkedIn, joins host Kanchan Shringi to discuss how AI is changing the role of the engineering manager. They explore how AI is showing up in day-to-day management work, including operational reviews, planning, communication, workflow automation, and preparation for leadership discussions. The conversation looks at how engineering teams are adopting AI tools and agents, what kinds of skills and practices are becoming more important, and how managers can think about context, review, testing, and operational rigor as AI-assisted development...
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SE Radio 730: Birgitta Boeckeler on Harness Engineering for AI Agents
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Birgitta Boeckeler, a Distinguished Engineer and consultant focused on AI-assisted software delivery at , joins host Priyanka Raghavan for a deep dive into harnesses for AI agents. The episode begins by unpacking the concept of harnesses and harness engineering before exploring the core building blocks — guides and sensors — that help AI agents operate more reliably in engineering environments. Priyanka and Birgitta discuss practical implementations of harnesses in real-world workflows, including the use of guides with .MD files and sensors with tools such as SonarQube and Semgrep, which...
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SE Radio 729: Garth Mollett on AI Supply Chain Security
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Garth Mollet, Senior Principal Product Security Engineer and Technical Advisor for Product Security at Red Hat, joins host Robert Blumen for a discussion of AI supply chain security. They start with the basics of supply chain security, including the key components of the AI supply chain, and how it differs from the conventional software supply chain. Garth discusses whether the attacks target model weights or inference, and describes the most common attacks and what’s in it for the attacker, whether exfiltration, credentials, sabotage, or resources. The episode also considers SPIFFE, SPIRE,...
info_outlineMilan Milanovic, Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies and author of the book, Laws of Software Engineering, joins host Giovanni Asproni for a conversation based on the content of his book—a collection of 53 empirical and mathematical laws governing modern software engineering. The book includes some well-known laws, such as Conway's and Brooks's laws, as well as other lesser-known but just as important, including Gilb's and Tesler’s laws. The episode starts with an introduction to the laws and the criteria that Milan used to choose them. The episode continues with some practical hints on how to apply the laws and concludes with thoughts on the importance of the laws for teams using artificial intelligence tools in their day-to-day work.