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Software Engineering Radio

The Podcast for Professional Software Developers

Since Software Engineering Radio was founded in 2006, it has published over 180 episodes on a wide variety of software engineering topics. SE Radio has evolved into one of the premier software podcasts, and many luminaries and opinion leaders in the field have appeared on the show. In fact, we just reached a huge milestone: over 5 million downloads.

Starting in 2012, SE Radio will continue producing podcasts under the wings of IEEE Software, a respected magazine published by the IEEE Computer Society. The authority on translating theory into practice, IEEE Software (www.computer.org/software) delivers reliable, leading-edge information to software developers and managers. SE Radio’s founder and co-editor Markus Voelter was on the magazine’s editorial board for the last three years, so collaboration between the two organizations was a natural fit. The topics covered by IEEE Software are quite similar to those in SE Radio, focusing not on hype or short-term trends but rather on the “timeless fundamentals.” Both the SE Radio team and IEEE Software staff and volunteers are excited about this new relationship.

IEEE Software will keep the SE Radio brand alive and will keep the content licensed under Creative Commons. Some of the current team members will remain on the team or at least produce an episode from time to time. But new folks will join, bringing in their own style, topics, and emphasis, ensuring that SE Radio evolves and remains at the leading edge.

SE Radio’s core team—Martin Lippert, Michael Kircher, and Markus Voelter—want to thank the people who made SE Radio possible: Eberhard Wolff, Arno Haase, Alexander Schmid, Cristi Popovici, Volker Mosthaf, Bernd Kolb, Robert Blumen, Scott Jensen, and Attila-Mihaly Balazs. But most of all, they thank all the listeners who have kept SE Radio going with positive feedback and downloaded some of the most popular episodes up to 40,000 times.

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Recording Venue: Skype

Guests: Martin Fowler, Rebecca Parsons

In this episode, Markus talk with Martin Fowler and Rebecca Parsons about domain-specific languages (DSLs). Topics covered include a definition of DSL, Internal vs. External DSLs, reasons to use DSLs and reasons not to, the DSL lifecycle and the role of language workbenches. The conversation is loosely based on their book Domain-Specific Languages.

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Recording Venue: Skype

Guest: Rini van Solingen

In this episode we talk with Rini van Solingen, the author of the book “The Power of Scrum”, about scrum and agile software development in distributed settings where the team is spread across different locations, different buildings or even different countries and continents. We reflect about the basic concepts and assumptions of agile software development and what makes it difficult to do real agile software development when the team members are not co-located. Walking through the different areas we also discuss different cultures, team building for distributed teams, what it means to use video conferencing or other technology to overcome the communication problems of distributed teams and why you should probably not start as a distributed team.

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Recording Venue: Skype

Guest: Jurgen Appelo

In this episode Michael interviews developer, manager, and book author Jurgen Appelo on the topic of management in agile organizations: leading agile developers. They talk about the need for a different style of management compared to previous command and control styles used to lead organizations. In going through the best practices that are also covered by his latest book Management 3.0, they cover topics like: Energize People, Empower Teams, Align Constraints, Develop Competence, Grow Structure, and Improve Everything – which are the six views he uses to explain his experiences.

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Recording Venue: O’Reilly Scala 2011, Santa Clara California

Guest: Jonathan Ellis

Host: Robert

Cassandra is a distributed, scalable non-relational data store influenced by the Google BigTable project and many of the distributed systems techniques pioneered by the Amazon Dynamo paper.  Guest Jonathan Ellis, the program chair of the Apache Cassandra project, discusses Cassandra’s data model, storage model, techniques used to achieve high availability and provides some insight into the trend away from relational databases.

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Recording Venue: Skype

Guest: Jonas Boner

This episode is a conversation with Jonas Boner about Akka. Akka is a Scala-based framework for concurent and distributed applications, providing among other things support for actors, remote communication, transactional memory. In the episode we take a look at the most important aspects of Akka, as well as how and where it is used today. We also briefly talk about Jonas’ involvment in the Typesafe company.

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Recording Venue: Phone

Guest: Steve Will

IBM i (formerly known as OS/400) is an advanced object-based operating system by IBM that runs thousands of businesses around the world.  Steve Will, the Chief Architect of IBM i speaks with us about the history, technical features, and underlying architecture discussing the concepts of Single Level Store, integrated databases, machine and logical virtualization, and workload management in an operating system and environment that takes an alternative and often kinder look at the role operations systems should play vs. the common programming infrastructure management models.

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Recording Venue: Skype

Guest: Martin Laforest

In this Episode, we talk about quantum computing. Our guest is Martin Laforest from the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo, Canada. We start with some physics basics, and then cover topics ranging from how quantum computing works, which different models of quantum computing are explored, current and future uses of the approach as well as the current state of the art. This is one of the more propellerhead-oriented episodes, so make sure you listen carefully :-)

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Recording Venue: OOP 2011

Guest: Andrew Brownsword

Host: Markus

In this episode I talk with Andrew Brownsword about software development for (modern) games. At the time, Andrew worked for Electronic Arts, so our discussion is mainly based on the Need for Speed franchise. We discuss characteristics and performance properties of modern games and outline the challenges for software development. We then discuss various patterns Andrew and his team used to address these.

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Guest: Wilbert Albers

Host: Markus

In this episode we take a look at microchip production, with a special focus on waferscanners. To do this, we talked with Wilbert Albers of ASML, the leading waferscanner manufacturer in the world. In the episode, we talk about the overall chip production process (from silicon sand over wafer cutting to lithography and etching), and then we talk about the challenges of building high-precision, high-throughput waferscanners.

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