Brendan Callum, engineering manager for the Pinterest developer platform team, discusses the "spec first" approach to API development and how it's different from "API first." Brendan speaks with host Kanchan Shringi about the challenges and advantages...

Open source developers Jordan Harband and Donald Fischer join host Robert Blumen for a conversation about securing the software supply chain, especially open source. They start by reviewing supply chain security concepts, particularly as related to open..

Joe Nash of Twillio's TwilioQuest discusses the role of developer relations/advocate, which is a role at tech companies in-between developers, marketing, sales, and HR. Host Felienne speaks with Nash about the skills people need if they want to become...

Adam Dymitruk, CEO and founder of Adaptech Group, joins host Jeff Doolittle for an exploration of the event modeling approach to discovering requirements and designing software systems. Adam explains how the structured approach eliminates the specifics of implementation details and technology decisions, enabling clearer communication for all stakeholders while keeping conversations focused on the business opportunity. Using concrete examples of event modeling in practice, they examine event modeling in the context of other related approaches and methodologies, including event sourcing, event storming, CQRS, and domain-driven design.

Adam Warski, the co-founder and CTO of SoftwareMill, discusses Scala programming and the Tapir library. Scala is a general-purpose JVM language, and Tapir is a back-end library used to describe HTTP API endpoints as immutable Scala values. Host Philip Winston speaks with Warski about the implications of Scala being a JVM language, the Scala type system, the Scala community's view of functional vs. object-oriented programming, and the transition of the ecosystem from Scala 2 to Scala 3. The Tapir discussion explores why Tapir is a library and not a framework, how server interpreters work in Tapir, how interceptors work, and what observability features are included with Tapir.

Dan Lorenc, CEO of Chainguard, a software supply chain security company, joins SE Radio editor Robert Blumen to talk about software supply chain attacks. They start with a review of software supply chain basics; how outputs become inputs of someone else's supply chain; techniques for attacking the supply chain, including compromising the compilers, injecting code into installers, dependency confusion, and typo squatting. They also consider Ken Thompson's paper on injecting a backdoor into the C compiler. The episode then considers some well-known supply chain attacks: researcher Alex Birsan's dependency confusion attack; the log4shell attack on the Java Virtual Machine; the pervasiveness of compilers and interpreters where you don't expect them; the SolarWinds attack on a network security product; and CodeCov compromising the installer with code to insert exfiltration of environment variables into the installer. The conversation ends with some lessons learned, including how to protect your supply chain and the challenge of dependencies with modern languages.