Software Engineering Radio

Recording Venue: MongoSF 2010
Guest(s): Dwight Merriman

Host(s): Robert
Dwight Merriman talks with Robert about the emerging NoSQL movement, the three types of non-relational data stores, Brewer’s CAP theorem, the weaker consistency guarantees that can be made in a distributed database, document-oriented data stores, the data storage needs of modern web applications, and the open source MongoDB.

Links:

• 10-gen
• NoSQL – the Shift to a Non-Relational World by Dwight Merriman
• A series of blog posts on consistency in a distributed database (see entries from March 26 to April 15, 2010)
• Slides and video from MongoSF 2010
• NoSQL hub
• NoSQL mailing list on Google
• Follow Dwight Merriman on twitter
• 10-gen’s blog
• Brewer’s presentation on the CAP theorem
• MongoDB

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Recording Venue: Skype
Guest(s): Lisa Crispin

Host(s): Michael
This episode covers the topic of agile testing. Michael interviews Lisa Crispin as an practionier and book author on agile testing. We cover several topics ranging from the role of the tester in agile teams, over test automation strategy and regression testing, to continuous integration.

Links:

• Software Testing Club
• Weekend Testing Community
• Agile Testing Yahoo group
• Lisa’s homepage

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Recording Venue: QCon
Guest(s): Jay Kreps

Host(s): Robert
Jay Kreps talks about the open source data store Project Voldemort. Voldemort is a distributed key-value store used by LinkedIn and other high-traffic web sites to overcome the inherent scalability limitations of a relational database. The conversation delves into the workings of a Voldemort cluster, the type of consistency guarantees that can be made in a distributed database, and the tradeoff between client and the server.

Links:

• Project Voldemort
• Jay Kreps presentation at QCon San Francisco 2009
• Google mailing list for Project Voldemort
• Project Voldmort on github
• LinkedIn blog entry on Project Voldemort
• Amazon’s paper on Dynamo
• NoSQL hub
• Google mailing list for NoSQL

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Recording Venue: Skype
Guest(s): Roman Pichler

Host(s): Martin
In this episode, we discuss with Roman Pichler how Scrum impacts product management and how agile product management differs from traditional approaches. The topics covered include product owners on large projects and product owner teams, facilitating customer feedback through early and frequent releases, envisioning the product, and creating products with the minimum functionality. Enjoy!

Links:

• Roman’s blog
• Book: Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love
• Roman’s website

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Recording Venue: QCon San Francisco 2009
Guest(s): Ramnivas Laddad

Host(s): Robert
This episode is a conversation with Ramnivas Laddad about aspect-oriented programming (AOP), Aspect J, and Spring AOP. We review the fundamental concepts of AOP, discuss AspectJ (an open source compiler that extends java with support for AOP), and cover the Spring Framework’s proxy-based AOP system. Laddad also gives his thoughts on the use cases for AOP and where we are in the technology adoption curve, and updates on the state of the AspectJ project itself.

Links:

• AspectJ in Action: Enterprise AOP with Spring Applications (2nd edition) by Ramnivas Laddad
• Episode 145: Spring in 2009 with Eberhard Wolff
• Episode 106: Introduction to AOP
• Episode 49: Dynamic Languages
• Episode 11: Gregor Kiczales
• Ramnivas Laddad’s web site
• Follow Ramnivas Laddad on Twitter
• AspectJ Development Tools
• Spring AOP Support Forum
• The AspectJ project
• AspectJ User Mailing Lists
• The Spring Framework

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Recording Venue: Skype
Guest(s): Scott Meyers

Host(s): Markus
This episode is a conversation with Scott Meyers about the upcoming C++0x standard. We talk a bit about the reasons for creating this new standard and then cover the most important new features, including upport for concurrency, implicitly-typed variables, move semantics, variadic templates, lambda functions, and uniform initialization syntax. We also looked at some new features in the standard library.

Links:

• Scott Meyers’ C++0x Training Course
• just::thread Implementation of C++0x Concurrency Features
• C++0x Feature Availability in gcc and VC++
• Wikipedia:C++0x
• Scott’s Website
• Scott Meyers’ C++0x Training Materials

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Recording Venue:
Guest(s): Rich Hickey

Host(s): Markus
This episode is a coversation with Rich Hickey about his programming language Clojure. Clojure is a Lisp dialect that runs on top of the JVM that comes with – among other things – persistent data structures and transactional memory, both very useful for writing concurrent applications.

Links:

• Persistent Data Structures
• Transactional Memory
• Previous SE Radio Episode on Lisp with Dick Gabriel
• Rich Hickey on Twitter
• Clojure

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Recording Venue: QCon San Francisco 2009
Guest(s): Philip Zeyliger

Host(s): Robert
Philip Zeyliger of Cloudera discusses the Hadoop project with Robert Blumen. The conversation covers the emergence of large data problems, the Hadoop file system, map-reduce, and a look under the hood at how it all works. The listener will also learn where and how Hadoop is being used to process large data sets.

Links:

• Cloudera
• Cloudera Hadoop distribution
• Philip’s E-mail
• Presentation slides
• Book: Hadoop – The Definitive Guide
• Hadoop Project

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Recording Venue: Frankfurt
Guest(s): David Anderson & Arne Roock

Host(s): Martin
This episode is part of our series on agile software development. We talk with David Anderson about Kanban, an agile software development method that is quite different from most of the other agile methods out there. We discuss the basic ideas behind Kanban, the differences between Kanban and Scrum and when and why projects can benefit from using Kanban. This episode is done in cooperation with the German magazine ObjektSpektrum (thanks for sharing this interview with us).

Links:

• Limited Work in Progress Society
• David Andersons Blog
• David Anderson on Twitter
• Kanban vs. Scrum by Henrik Kniberg
• Book on Kanban by David Anderson

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Recording Venue: Skype
Guest(s): Johannes Link & Lasse Koskela

Host(s): Markus
In this episode Johannes Link interviews Lasse Koskela – the author of “Test-Driven” – about test-driven development (TDD). We cover the basics, the rationale behind it and the challenges you face when doing it in more difficult environments.

Links:

• JDave
• RSpec
• FitNesse
• Cucumber
• Johannes Link
• Lasse Koskela
• Book: Test-Driven

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