CaSE: Conversations about Software Engineering

By CaSE Podcast Team

What's CaSE: Conversations about Software Engineering about?

Conversations about Software Engineering (CaSE) is an interview podcast for software developers and architects about Software Engineering and related topics. We release a new episode every three weeks.

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CaSE: Conversations about Software Engineering episodes:

09.11.2023
Aino Corry on Better Tech Meetings
Aino explains to Sven what skills are required to make meetings more successful. They talk about the different roles of meeting attendees. They continue with the thinking process to organize a meeting: do we need it at all? What is the expected...
05.16.2022
Angelo Veltens on Solid
Solid is a specification that lets people store their data securely in decentralized data stores called Pods. But why do we want to keep our data decentralized? What problems does Solid solve? In this episode, Angelo Veltens explains to Lucas...
03.14.2022
Mark Seemann on heuristics for software engineering
Stefan Tilkov talks to Mark Seemann about his book “Code that fits in your head”, heuristics about software engineering, and the role of craftspeople and engineers. They dive into three selected topics: Vertical slices, triangulation, and rhythm.
02.21.2022
Chris Richardson on Service Templates and Service Chassis
How do you enable a developer to quickly start the development of business logic of a new microservice without losing too much time on setting up everything else like monitoring, tracing, dependency management, security, configuration and much more. After the...
01.17.2022
Adam Tornhill on Software Design X-Rays
Sven Johann talks to Adam Tornhill about the link between how organizations write code and how teams work together. Adam Tornhill can make this link visible to help improve your team’s code and your organization's work. The interview is based...
10.25.2021
Manuel Pais on Team Topologies
Sven Johann talks with Manuel Pais about the challenges of development teams being asked to be responsible for many topics like their problem domain, technology/programming languages, security, infrastructure and operations, UX, etc. Manuel explains what cognitive load is, which types...
10.04.2021
Michele Hansen on Customer Interviews and Deploying Empathy
Michele shares her journey in the software industry and how she got involved in product development. Customer interviews are not just something for product people -- Michele shares concrete ways that developers can get value from talking to their customers....
06.21.2021
Eric Normand on Functional Thinking
In this conversation about software engineering, Lucas Dohmen talks with Eric Normand. Eric first explains the origins of his book, Grokking Simplicity. He explains how to think in calculations, actions, and data. Lucas asks him about real-life situations dealing with...
06.01.2021
Nicolas Steenhout on Accessibility
In this episode, web accessibility expert Nicolas Steenhout talks to Stefan Tilkov about ways to improve web sites to make them usable by everyone. They cover the basics of web accessibility, the role of frameworks, common pitfalls and how to...
05.10.2021
Joy Heron on Responsible Web Applications
In this episode of the CaSE Podcast, Lucas Dohmen talks to Joy Heron about Responsible Web Applications. They start talking about responsive web design and how it works nowadays with features like CSS Grid and Flexbox. Then Joy explains how...
05.03.2021
Alex Bramley on The Art of SLO, Part 3
Alex Bramley continuous his conversation with Sven Johann. They begin with how granular you should monitor your user journeys and then discuss error budget policies in depth. They continue on how to iterate on SLIs, SLOs and error budget policies....
04.26.2021
Alex Bramley on The Art of SLO, Part 2
Alex Bramley continuous his conversation with Sven Johann. They start with what external and internal dependencies do with your availability requirements and how you calculate availability if you have a microservices dependency tree. They look into how you can introduce...
04.19.2021
Alex Bramley on The Art of SLO, Part 1
Alex Bramley talks to Sven Johann about the basics of service level objectives. They begin with terminologies (SLI, SLO, SLA, Error Budget), look at costs of outages and discuss what reliability has to do with customer happiness. They continue with...
03.29.2021
Simon Brown on Software Architecture
Simon Brown talks to Stefan Tilkov about software architecture – the importance for developers, its role in agile software development, documentation and tooling, and the importance (or lack of importance) of UML.
03.01.2021
Eoin Woods on Bringing Systems into Production and Keeping them there
Eoin Woods discusses with Sven Johann all the things developers need to know to bring systems successfully into production and how to keep them there. They discuss production environments, what goes wrong in production, architectural requirements for operations, cost of...
01.28.2021
Christin Gorman on Why large projects fail and what to do about it
In this episode, Stefan talks to software developer Christin Gorman about her experience with very large software projects and the reasons why they fail, especially in the public sector. The two address issues of size, approaches that do and don’t...
01.04.2021
Artur Ortega on GraphQL
In this episode, Artur Ortega explains to Stefan Tilkov what GraphQL is, how it came to be, and how it differs from REST. Predictably, the two debate whether it’s better or not, but also spend some time going over its...
10.07.2020
Markus Völter on Language Engineering
In this episode, Markus Völter talks with Stefan Tilkov about language engineering and its connection to domain-driven design. Picking up from their past interactions in various different podcasts, the two agree and disagree fundamentally in equal parts, on topics such...
08.24.2020
Birgitta Böckeler on Cultivating Architecture Principles
Birgitta Böckeler talks with Sven Johann about cultivating architecture principles. They first discuss what architecture principles are, why they are useful, how they are structured and how they help to guide decision making across multiple teams. They then talk about...
05.28.2020
Rachel Andrew on contributing to CSS and CSS Layout
Joy Heron talks with Rachel Andrew about CSS Layout. Rachel shares her journey as a web developer and how the web has changed over that time. They discuss Rachel’s work with the CSS working group and how developers can get...
05.07.2020
Daniel Bryant on Service Meshes and API Gateways for Application Modernization
Daniel Bryant talks with Sven Johann about the business problems to modernize applications. They need to be decoupled from the compute fabric and the network fabric and Daniel explains the reasons for that, what products are available and what strategies...
04.16.2020
Mike Sperber on Functional Architecture
Does functional programming matter? Stefan and Mike continue an interesting conversation they had on Twitter: Does the style of programming matter if you look at it from a larger distance? Mike describes two distinguishing characteristics of functional programming: Immutable data...
02.27.2020
Peter Elger on Commodity AI
Peter Elger talks with Sven Johann about AI as a service - commodity web services offered by large cloud providers, which make it very easy to use AI in your application just by using an API. They start the discussion...
02.06.2020
Lars Hupel on Algebraic Design
In this episode of the CaSE podcast, Lucas talks to Lars Hupel of Typelevel-fame about algebraic design. Lars starts to explain how the expression problem views the difference between the functional and Object Oriented style of programming. He then explains...
01.09.2020
Ryan Singer on Shape Up
In this Conversation about Software Engineering, Stefan Tilkov talks with Ryan Singer about Shape Up. Ryan works on the product strategy for Basecamp. Over time the company started growing, and they needed to step up how they managed their product...
12.19.2019
Felienne Hermans on Programming Education
In this episode, Stefan Tilkov talks with Felienne Hermans, associate Professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands heading the Programming Education Research Lab. They talk about programming education with a focus on people learning their first programming skills and how...
07.08.2019
Philippe Kruchten on Managing Technical Debt
In this episode, Sven Johann hosts Philippe Kruchten, the author of the Managing Technical Debt book. They talk about the research leading to the book and the practical implications the book and the research offer. They start the conversation with...
05.17.2019
Sam Newman on Insecure Transit – Microservices Security
In this episode, Sven Johann hosts Sam Newman, the author of the first Microservices book, to talk about security in the world of Microservices. They discuss why and where it is different to security in a monolithic architecture and why...
02.19.2019
Richard Rodger on Message-based, Generic Microservices
In this episode, Stefan Tilkov talks to author and microservices expert Richard Rodger about his approach to microservices, which focuses on small services that exchange messages, are built using a “generalize first” approach, and rely on content-based routing to allow...
08.14.2018
Mentoring Engineers with Steve Vinoski
In this episode, Stefan Tilkov hosts well-known distributed systems expert Steve Vinoski to talk about lessons learned in 30+ years of software engineering. In their conversation, they cover topics such as what to learn and what to avoid, how to...
07.05.2018
Micro Frontends with Gustaf Nilsson Kotte
In this conversation about software engineering, Gustaf Nilsson Kotte, web architect at IKEA, talks to host Stefan Tilkov about ways to build large web sites and applications with multiple teams. Topics covered include team organization and Conway’s law, horizontal vs....
06.07.2018
Web Frontend with Lucas Dohmen
Joy Clark talks with Lucas Dohmen about Web Front-End development. They first discuss the role of front-end development and frontend architecture. Lucas then explains his view on the role of JavaScript and the separation between front-end and back-end development. They...
05.03.2018
Problem Solving and Clojure 1.9 with Rich Hickey
Joy Clark talks with Rich Hickey about Clojure and Datomic and the reasons that Rich decided to design them the way that he did. They discuss the dependency problem and how we should change our method of developing libraries so...
04.19.2018
Security and Privacy with Susan Landau
Sven Johann talks with Susan Landau about Security and Privacy. After defining those terms they proceed to find out why this important to individuals and societies. They discuss why its the job of intelligence agencies to collect data, but how...
03.29.2018
Application Security with Peter Chestna
Joy Clark talks with Peter Chestna about application security. The overarching topic of the podcast was what a developer can do in order to make applications more secure. This included talking about some of the most prevalent security vulnerabilities and...
03.22.2018
Blockchain Technology with Andreas M. Antonopoulos (Part 2)
In this second episode of a two-part interview, Stefan Tilkov talks to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency expert Andreas M. Antonopoulos about Bitcoin vs. blockchain tech, the programmable Ethereum system, alternatives to the proof of work approach, and using Bitcoin in hybrid...
03.01.2018
Blockchain Technology with Andreas M. Antonopoulos (Part 1)
In the first episode of a two-part interview, Stefan Tilkov talks to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency expert Andreas M. Antonopoulos about the Bitcoin system’s technical foundation and architecture. Andreas addresses common questions about Bitcoin’s usefulness, scalability, and energy consumption.
01.25.2018
Domain-Driven Design with Vaughn Vernon
Joy talks with Vaughn Vernon about Domain-Driven Design. Vaughn shares his journey to DDD and the reasons behind his DDD books. They then go on to discuss strategic design, the broad brush strokes of DDD, what a model actually looks...
12.21.2017
aim42 with Gernot Starke
Joy Clark talks with Gernot Starke about aim42, a method for systematically improving software. They discuss in detail the three phases of the process: Analyze, Evaluate, and Improve. Gernot shares his wisdom about how to carry out each phase using...
11.30.2017
Advanced Scala with Daniel Westheide
Daniel Westheide, author of “The Neophyte’s guide to Scala” and Stefan Tilkov talk about some advanced Scala features and challenges, such as case classes and the problems they can create, algebraic data types, type classes and implicits, using the...
11.09.2017
ClojureScript with David Nolen
Joy Clark talks with David Nolen about ClojureScript. David introduces the language and discusses the direction that the language is heading in. He talks about how the language is compiled to JavaScript and how it takes advantage of the the...
10.19.2017
Management for Developers with Camille Fournier
Stefan Tilkov talks to Camille Fournier about making a career as a manager in a software development organization. Camille shares her insights about when or why someone would want to become a manager and how to become good at it....
09.14.2017
Scala with Sofia Vaughn-Jones
Joy Clark talks with Sofia Vaughn-Jones (née Cole) about Scala. Sofia introduces the language and describes its features. They then discuss what kinds of programs can be written with Scala and the tooling and frameworks that are available. They attempt...
08.25.2017
Microservices with Michele Leroux Bustamante
In this episode, Stefan Tilkov talks to Michele Leroux Bustamante about Microservices. Michele shares her perspective on microservices and what she sees as the difference between SOA and microservices: The way they share data. Stefan and Michele also talk about...
08.03.2017
Clojure with Alex Miller
Joy Clark talks with Alex Miller about Clojure. Topics include the Clojure language and how it compares to other languages as far as features and maintainability are concerned. The benefits of dynamic languages are also discussed, and clojure.spec is introduced...
07.13.2017
Microservices with Eberhard Wolff
Lucas Dohmen talks with Eberhard Wolff about microservices. Eberhard Wolff is a fellow at innoQ and wrote a book as well as a primer about microservices. He talks about what lead to microservices and the advantages, and disadvantages of as...
06.22.2017
Rails Girls with Ute Mayer
Eberhard Wolff talks with Ute Mayer about Rails Girls. Topics include how Rails Girls increase diversity in IT and thereby influence the live of the attendees. Rails Girls is a global movement and does workshops to introduce women to programming....
06.01.2017
Legacy Software and Immutable Infrastructure with Chad Fowler
Joy Clark talks with Chad Fowler about legacy software and immutable infrastructure. They begin by discussing legacy software and why the description 'legacy' shouldn't actually be a bad thing. Then they contrast how reusable libraries differ from a system of...
05.11.2017
Software Architecture with Stefan Tilkov
Joy Clark talks with Stefan Tilkov about software architecture. After discussing the definition of software architecture, they go on to cover what the role 'Software Architect' actually means and what tools and skills an architect needs to do their job....
04.20.2017
OpenTechSchool with Martin Stadler
Eberhard Wolff talks with Martin Stadler about OpenTechSchool, an organization that helps people to learn about programming and software development. Topics include the different types of events and material OpenTechSchool offers and how OpenTechSchool enables a hands-on, empowering, and peer-driven...

What's CaSE: Conversations about Software Engineering about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

CaSE: Conversations about Software Engineering episodes:

Aino Corry on Better Tech Meetings

Angelo Veltens on Solid

Mark Seemann on heuristics for software engineering

Chris Richardson on Service Templates and Service Chassis

Adam Tornhill on Software Design X-Rays

Manuel Pais on Team Topologies

Michele Hansen on Customer Interviews and Deploying Empathy

Eric Normand on Functional Thinking

Nicolas Steenhout on Accessibility

Joy Heron on Responsible Web Applications

Alex Bramley on The Art of SLO, Part 3

Alex Bramley on The Art of SLO, Part 2

Alex Bramley on The Art of SLO, Part 1

Simon Brown on Software Architecture

Eoin Woods on Bringing Systems into Production and Keeping them there

Christin Gorman on Why large projects fail and what to do about it

Artur Ortega on GraphQL

Markus Völter on Language Engineering

Birgitta Böckeler on Cultivating Architecture Principles

Rachel Andrew on contributing to CSS and CSS Layout

Daniel Bryant on Service Meshes and API Gateways for Application Modernization

Mike Sperber on Functional Architecture

Peter Elger on Commodity AI

Lars Hupel on Algebraic Design

Ryan Singer on Shape Up

Felienne Hermans on Programming Education

Philippe Kruchten on Managing Technical Debt

Sam Newman on Insecure Transit – Microservices Security

Richard Rodger on Message-based, Generic Microservices

Mentoring Engineers with Steve Vinoski

Micro Frontends with Gustaf Nilsson Kotte

Web Frontend with Lucas Dohmen

Problem Solving and Clojure 1.9 with Rich Hickey

Security and Privacy with Susan Landau

Application Security with Peter Chestna

Blockchain Technology with Andreas M. Antonopoulos (Part 2)

Blockchain Technology with Andreas M. Antonopoulos (Part 1)

Domain-Driven Design with Vaughn Vernon

aim42 with Gernot Starke

Advanced Scala with Daniel Westheide

ClojureScript with David Nolen

Management for Developers with Camille Fournier

Scala with Sofia Vaughn-Jones

Microservices with Michele Leroux Bustamante

Clojure with Alex Miller

Microservices with Eberhard Wolff

Rails Girls with Ute Mayer

Legacy Software and Immutable Infrastructure with Chad Fowler

Software Architecture with Stefan Tilkov

OpenTechSchool with Martin Stadler