Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

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SE Radio 745: Andrew Tridgell on Flight Control Software Nov 04, 2026

Show notes

Dr Andrew Tridgell of the Ardupilot project discusses flight control software for autonomous and remote controlled aircraft. This field has advanced considerably in recent years, and autonomous vehicles are playing an increasingly important role in many industries -- from package delivery to scientific surveying and film-making -- as well as in the consumer market.

Host Jason Davey speaks with Tridgell about the fundamental concepts required to keep a drone in the air, the hardware and software architecture behind these vehicles, and how development and testing are handled in Ardupilot, one of the leading open source flight control software stacks.

SE Radio 744: Danilo Krummrich on Rust in the Linux Kernel Oct 29, 2026

Show notes

Danilo Krummrich, a software engineer at Red Hat, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the using the Rust programming language in the Linux kernel. After introducing the Nova project, which leverages Rust for building NVIDIA GPU drivers, they explore the benefits associated with Rust, such as GPU driver memory safety. The conversation also examines topics like best practices for implementing self-referential structures with Rust and the pin-init crate. Danilo also describes practical performance considerations and lessons learned from building and maintaining the Nova project.

SE Radio 743: Sowjanya Pandruju on Managing Agent State Oct 21, 2026

Show notes

Sowjanya Pandruju, Cloud Application Architect with Amazon Web Services, Vice Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Madison Section, and Chair of the IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE) Madison Section (Region 4), speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about managing agent state. Sowjanya discusses what agents are and are not, what agent state is, the role an LLM actually plays, why agents need state, the different types of state, where to store agent state, how multi-agents change things, and the solutions to the various challenges created by managing agent state.

Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

SE Radio 742: Tim Varelmann on Mathematical Optimization for Software Engineers Oct 14, 2026

Show notes

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, optimization and AI, key software engineering principles, and how you can get started with mathematical optimization.

SE Radio 741: Sahil Walia on Schema Changes and Data Migrations Oct 07, 2026

Show notes

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, replication, ending on the Apache Iceberg case study.

SE Radio 740: Raju Dandigam on Building Production AI Agents Sep 30, 2026

Show notes

Raju Dandigam speaks with host Amey Ambade 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 a controlled runtime that settles authentication, policy, data freshness, and idempotency before it is ever asked to reason.

They focus largely on how teams can be sure that an agent works and how to debug it when it does not. The episode covers behavioral testing against contracts, golden scenarios, and observability that captures the full execution path rather than flat logs, which is the gap behind agent-inspect and its readable execution trees. Raju and Amey close on operating agents in production: measuring cost and latency per run, knowing when a simpler model or no AI path is the right call, and treating prompts, schemas, tools, and evaluation sets as owned, versioned artifacts.

Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

SE Radio 739: Erin Catto on Video Game Physics Engines Sep 23, 2026

Show notes

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 engineering challenges, including the need to balance accuracy, stability, determinism, and performance. Catto describes the core concepts, the various trade-offs and factors that influence the design of these systems, and how they fit into the broader software architecture of a video game.

SE Radio 738: Milan Milanovic on the Laws of Software Engineering Sep 16, 2026

Show notes

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 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.

SE Radio 737: Owen McGirr on Software Accessibility Sep 09, 2026

Show notes

Owen McGirr, creator of SayIt!, Switchify, and an entrepreneur who builds inclusive technology, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry 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 access methods, what good accessibility means, eye gaze, touch, voice, keyboards, scanning, switches, radaring, screen overlays, iOS accessibility, Android accessibility, which OSes have better support, AI testing, what vendors can do to improve, what developers can do to improve and what two things a developer can do immediately to test their software accessibility.

SE Radio 736: Sahil Walia on Apache Iceberg Sep 03, 2026

Show notes

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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