Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

In this episode, Benjamin Brial, CEO and co-founder of Cycloid, speaks with host Sriram Panyam about internal developer platforms (IDPs) and internal developer portals. The conversation explores how these platforms address the growing challenges of DevOps scalability, multi-cloud complexity, and cloud waste, all of which organizations face as they grow. Benjamin begins by framing the core problems that IDPs solve: DevOps struggling to scale beyond small teams, the complexity of managing hybrid environments across on-premises, public cloud, and private cloud infrastructure, and the significant issue of cloud waste (averaging 35-45% according to major analysts). IDPs can serve as a bridge between DevOps teams and developers, providing access to tools, cloud resources, and automation for users who aren't DevOps or cloud experts. The technical discussion covers essential IDP components including service catalogs, versioning engines, platform orchestration, asset inventory, and FinOps/GreenOps modules. The episode concludes with Benjamin's practical advice: organizations should focus on understanding their specific pain points rather than following market trends, starting with simple use cases such as landing zones before building complex solutions, and adopt a GitOps-first approach as the foundation for any IDP implementation. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

In this episode of Software Engineering Radio, Srujana Merugu, an AI researcher with decades of experience, speaks with host Priyanka Raghavan about building LLM-based applications. The discussion begins by clarifying essential concepts like generative vs. predictive AI, pre-training vs. fine-tuning, and the transformer architecture that powers modern LLMs. Srujana explains diffusion models and vision transformers, highlighting how multimodal AI is reshaping content creation. The conversation then moves to practical aspects—where LLMs make sense, where they don't, and a decision framework for evaluating use cases. They explore common application patterns such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic architectures, breaking down components like planners, orchestrators, memory, and tools. Key considerations for model selection, evaluation metrics, and safety guardrails are discussed in depth. The episode also touches on prompting strategies, automated prompt optimization, and emerging trends like multi-sensory AI and the "Internet of Senses." Finally, Srujana shares tips on staying current in a fast-moving AI landscape and emphasizes lifelong learning and curated knowledge sources.

Philip Kiely, software developer relations lead at Baseten, speaks with host Jeff Doolittle about multi-agent AI, emphasizing how to build AI-native software beyond simple ChatGPT wrappers. Kiely advocates for composing multiple models and agents that take action to achieve complex user goals, rather than just producing information. He explains the transition from off-the-shelf models to custom solutions, driven by needs for domain-specific quality, latency improvements, and economic sustainability, which introduces the engineering challenge of inference engineering. Kiely stresses that AI engineering is primarily software engineering with new challenges, requiring robust observability and careful consideration of trust and safety through evals and alignment. He recommends an approach of iterative experimentation to get started with multi-agent AI systems. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Flavia Saldanha, a consulting data engineer, joins host Kanchan Shringi to discuss the evolution of data engineering from ETL (extract, transform, load) and data lakes to modern lakehouse architectures enriched with vector databases and embeddings. Flavia explains the industry's shift from treating data as a service to treating it as a product, emphasizing ownership, trust, and business context as critical for AI-readiness. She describes how unified pipelines now serve both business intelligence and AI use cases, combining structured and unstructured data while ensuring semantic enrichment and a single source of truth. She outlines key components of a modern data stack, including data marketplaces, observability tools, data quality checks, orchestration, and embedded governance with lineage tracking. This episode highlights strategies for abstracting tooling, future-proofing architectures, enforcing data privacy, and controlling AI-serving layers to prevent hallucinations. Saldanha concludes that data engineers must move beyond pure ETL thinking, embrace product and NLP skills, and work closely with MLOps, using AI as a co-pilot rather than a replacement. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Dave Thomas, author of The Pragmatic Programmer, The Manifesto for Agile Software Development, Programming Ruby, Agile Web Development with Rails, Programming Elixir, Simplicity, and co-founder of the Pragmatic Bookshelf, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about building infrastructure for eBooks. They discuss what an eBook is, the various formats, what infrastructure is needed to build them, how an author writes an book, the history of the Pragmatic Bookshelf, how they have evolved, how to handle links within eBooks, why humans are so important in the writing process, and why AI can help with your writing -- once you've written your content. Thomas discusses PDFs, eBooks, Mobi files, ePub files, CI/CD pipelines, WYSWYG, Markdown files, Pragmatic Markup Language, embedding code, AI agents, images, printing PDFs, JVMs, Java, jRuby, and how Markdown won the plain text writing format wars. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.