Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers

Matthias Endler, Rust developer, open-source maintainer, and consultant through his company Corrode, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about prototyping in Rust.

They discuss prototyping and why Rust is excellent for prototyping, and Matthias recommends a workflow for it, including what parts of Rust to use, and what parts to avoid at this stage. He describes the key components that Rust provides to help us validate ideas via prototypes, as well as tips and tricks to reach for.

In addition, the conversation explores type inference, unwrap(), expect(), anyhow crate, bacon crate, cargo-script, Rust macros to use, generics, lifetimes, best practices, project layout styles, and how to design through types.

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

Will McGugan, the CEO and founder of Textualize, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about how to use packages such as Rich and Textual to build text-based user interfaces (TUIs) and command-line interfaces (CLIs) in Python. Along with discussing the design idioms that enable developers to create TUIs in Python, they consider practical strategies for efficiently rendering the components of a TUI. They also explore the subtle idiosyncrasies of implementing performant TUI frameworks like Textual and Rich and introduce the steps that developers would take to create their own CLI or TUI.

This episode is sponsored by Fly.io.

Steve Summers speaks with SE Radio host Sam Taggart about securing test and measurement equipment. They start by differentiating between IT and OT (Operational Technology) and then discuss the threat model and how security has evolved in the OT space, including a look some of the key drivers. They then examine security challenges associated with a specific device called a CompactRIO, which combines a Linux real-time CPU with a field programmable gate array (FPGA) and some analog hardware for capturing signals and interacting with real-world devices.

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

Ashley Peacock, the author of Serverless Apps on Cloudflare, speaks with host Jeremy Jung about content delivery networks (CDNs). Along the way, they examine dependency injection with bindings, local development, serverless, cold starts, the V8 runtime, AWS Lambda vs Cloudflare workers, WebAssembly limitations, and core services such as R2, D1, KV, and Pages. Ashley suggests why most users use an external database and discusses eventually consistent data stores, S3-to-R2 migration strategies, queues and workflows, inter-service communication, durable objects, and describes some example projects.

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

Eran Yahav, Professor of Computer Science at Technion, Israel, and CTO of Tabnine, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the Tabnine AI coding assistant. They discuss how the design and implementation allows software engineers to use code completion and perform tasks such as automated code review while still maintaining developer privacy. Eran and Gregory also explore how research in the field of natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) has informed the features in Tabnine.

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

Malcolm Matalka, founder of Terrateam, joins host Giovanni Asproni to talk about the reasoning behind choosing a not-so-widespread language (OCaml) and (almost) totally avoiding frameworks for the development of Terrateam. While discussing the reasons for choosing this specific programming language and the advantages and disadvantages of using external frameworks, they also consider a range of related topics, including static vs. dynamic typing, the use of monorepos, and the advantages of choosing a single language that can be used both for web front ends and server back ends. The episode ends with lessons learned that can be applied to other contexts and projects.

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

Emre Baran, CEO and co-founder of Cerbos, and Alex Olivier, CPO and co-founder, join SE Radio host Priyanka Raghavan to explore "stateless decoupled authorization frameworks. The discussion begins with an introduction to key terms, including authorization, authorization models, and decoupled frameworks.

They dive into the challenges of building decoupled authorization, as well as the benefits of this approach and the operational hurdles. The conversation shifts to Cerbos, an open-source policy-based access control framework, comparing it with OPA (Open Policy Agent). They also delve into Cerbos's technical workings, including specification definitions, GitOps integration, examples of usage, and deployment strategies. The episode concludes with insights into potential trends in the authorization space.

This episode is sponsored by Penn Carey Law school

Tyler Flint, CEO of qpoint.io, joins host Robert Blumen for a conversation about managing external vendor dependencies, including several best practices for adoption. They start with a look at internal versus external services, including details such as the footprint of external services within a micro-services application, and difficulties organizations have tracking their service consumption, quantifying service consumption, and auditing external services. Tyler also discusses the security implications of external services, including authentication and authorization. They examine metrics and monitoring, with recommendations on the key metrics to collect, as well as acceptable error rates for external services. From there they consider what can go wrong, how to respond to external service outages, and challenges related to testing external services. The episode wraps up with a discussion of qPoint's migration from a proxy-based solution to one based on eBPF kernel probes.

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

Software architect and author Vlad Khononov joins host Jeff Doolittle for a discussion on balancing coupling in software design. They start by examining coupling and its relationship to complexity and modularity. Vlad explains the historical models for assessing coupling and introduces his updated approach, integration strength, which aims to simplify earlier frameworks and adapt them for modern practices.

The episode explores three dimensions of coupling:

• integration strength (knowledge sharing),
• distance (proximity of components), and
• volatility (likelihood of change).

Vlad illustrates how design decisions can lead systems toward complexity or modularity, and he emphasizes the importance of managing coupling to minimize cognitive load and cascading changes. The conversation wraps up with insights on applying these principles to real-world software projects and a reminder of coupling's critical role in software architecture. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Sunil Mallya, co-founder and CTO of Flip AI, discusses small language models with host Brijesh Ammanath. They begin by considering the technical distinctions between SLMs and large language models.

LLMs excel in generating complex outputs across various natural language processing tasks, leveraging extensive training datasets on with massive GPU clusters. However, this capability comes with high computational costs and concerns about efficiency, particularly in applications that are specific to a given enterprise. To address this, many enterprises are turning to SLMs, fine-tuned on domain-specific datasets. The lower computational requirements and memory usage make SLMs suitable for real-time applications. By focusing on specific domains, SLMs can achieve greater accuracy and relevance aligned with specialized terminologies.

The selection of SLMs depends on specific application requirements. Additional influencing factors include the availability of training data, implementation complexity, and adaptability to changing information, allowing organizations to align their choices with operational needs and constraints.

This episode is sponsored by Codegate.