SE Radio 742: Tim Varelmann on Mathematical Optimization for Software Engineers
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Release Date: 10/14/2026
SE Radio 742: Tim Varelmann on Mathematical Optimization for Software Engineers
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Tim Varelmann, the founder of Bluebird Optimization, which helps companies automate complex decision-making, speaks with host Sriram Panyam about mathematical optimization. The episode begins by differentiating optimization from what software engineers usually mean by the word. Making something faster or smaller is improvement, whereas optimization means finding the provably best solution after which no further improvement is possible unless the problem's parameters change. The conversation examines the difference between simulation and optimization, where optimization is already running,...
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SE Radio 741: Sahil Walia on Schema Changes and Data Migrations
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Sahil Walia, a senior technical architect at Snowflake, joins host Robert Blumen for a conversation about schema migration and data migration. Together, they discuss the basics of schema: do all data sets have schema?; what drives schema change?; are data migration and schema migration the same thing? Must they happen at the same time? They then talk about the challenges and failure modes of schema migration, including challenges at scale, migrating without downtime, the concept of “safety” in data migrations, and safety patterns for data migration - double writes, read repair,...
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SE Radio 740: Raju Dandigam on Building Production AI Agents
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Raju Dandigam speaks with host about building robust AI agents for production. Raju recommends treating an agent as a software subsystem rather than a standalone model call. That means designing decision contracts and tool boundaries, choosing between predictable workflows and multi-agent orchestration, and managing the runtime, state, and streaming that make agents durable. A recurring theme is that the model should not own the system: the right architecture is usually the simplest one that meets the product need while preserving reliability and control, with the language model placed inside...
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SE Radio 739: Erin Catto on Video Game Physics Engines
Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Erin Catto of Kintsugiyama, veteran video game developer who worked on the Tomb Raider series at Crystal Dynamics and later contributed to Diablo III, Overwatch, and other franchises at Blizzard, discusses video game physics engines with host Jason Davey. Erin created the popular open-source Box2D library used in titles including Angry Birds and Noita, and he released Box3D in 2026, bringing the much-loved physics engine to the third dimension. Underpinning everything from platformers and racing games to industrial robotics simulations, modern physics engines present a host of interesting...
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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...
info_outlineTim Varelmann, the founder of Bluebird Optimization, which helps companies automate complex decision-making, speaks with host Sriram Panyam about mathematical optimization. The episode begins by differentiating optimization from what software engineers usually mean by the word. Making something faster or smaller is improvement, whereas optimization means finding the provably best solution after which no further improvement is possible unless the problem's parameters change. The conversation examines the difference between simulation and optimization, where optimization is already running, optimization and AI, key software engineering principles, and how you can get started with mathematical optimization.