Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

SE Radio 724: Jure Leskovec on Relational Graph and Foundational Models

Jure Leskovec, Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and Chief Scientist at Kumo.ai, speaks with host Sriram Panyam about relational and graph language models and their transformative impact on enterprise decision-making and predictive modeling. Jure begins by establishing the critical importance of predictive modeling across industries - from fraud detection in financial institutions to customer churn prediction, lifetime value estimation, product recommendations, and healthcare risk assessment. He notes that while AI has made remarkable advances in natural language understanding and computer vision, predictive modeling over enterprise operational data stored in relational databases has been largely left behind, still relying on 30-year-old machine learning approaches that are expensive, time-consuming, and require manual feature engineering. His proposed solution to the fundamental problem with current approaches is relational deep learning and relational transformers. The discussion explores how this approach differs from traditional graph neural networks (GNNs), which Jure pioneered and deployed successfully at Pinterest. Jure concludes with practical guidance for software engineers and data scientists interested in exploring this technology.

SE Radio 723: Dave Airlie on Linux Kernel Maintenance

Dave Airlie, a Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about Linux kernel maintenance. After over-viewing the scale and structure of the Linux kernel, they dive deep into the review and validation of kernel patches, drawing on examples from the GPU subsystem. After discussing the features and benefits of the Linux kernel's maintenance model, they also explore kernel maintenance best practices and the supporting tools for these practices. Dave and Gregory also discuss topics such as the integration of Rust code in the Linux kernel and the ways in which AI-driven code review are influencing kernel maintenance.

SE Radio 722: Dwayne McDaniel on the Engineering Challenges of Secrets Management

Dwayne McDaniel [https://trail.gitguardian.com/api/t/c/usr_XgQEQPgwFZ78282oE/tsk_CSQx5hsyFYHpAHx2r/enc_U2FsdGVkX19aR9lGtbabCxEhb9Yde_hsokM0Br2H8cO0MuhkXtGOlxqoSa2kzhx9AJEkM4SrYvH4PEzf842ZL9fm-omZUuEVXLdnzhA74ugphvs8lMXgwE63YENVZ9Ax], developer advocate at GitGuardian.com [http://gitguardian.com/], joins host Priyanka Raghavan to talk about the engineering challenges of secrets management. They explore what "secrets" really are in modern systems—far beyond passwords—including API keys, tokens, certificates, and machine identities, and how "secret sprawl" emerges across the SDLC. Drawing on reports from GitGuardian and Verizon, they discuss the growing scale of secret leaks and why credential abuse and phishing remain dominant attack vectors. They examine common leak points—from code repos and logs to CI/CD pipelines, containers, and SaaS integrations—and how cloud, DevOps, and AI tooling are amplifying risks. Priyanka quizzes Dwayne about recent supply chain attacks from pyPi and trivy ecosystems, highlighting recurring root causes like poor access control, long-lived credentials, and weak security hygiene. Finally, they consider detection, response, and modern solutions—short-lived credentials, secret scanning, and identity-based approaches like OWASP NHIR and SPIFFE/SPIRE—ending with practical advice for engineers to reduce blast radius and design for secure secret lifecycle management.

SE Radio 721: Rob Moffat on Risk-First Software Development

In this episode, Rob Moffat, author of Risk-First Software Development and chief technical architect at the FinTech Open Source Software Foundation (FINOS), speaks with host Brijesh Ammanath about how all of software development is actually risk management. Rob introduces the concept of 'risk-first software development,' which sits in the context of existing methodologies like scrum and kanban. Showcasing multiple real-world project patterns to illustrate how things can go wrong when risk is ignored, he makes the case for why risk should be the primary lens behind every development decision, from architecture to prioritization. Through various examples, he shows how every developer action can be viewed as a risk trade-off and why making that explicit can lead to better outcomes. The conversation takes a deep dive into the risk-first framework and how teams can apply it in their existing processes.

SE Radio 720: Martin Dilger on Understanding Eventsourcing

Martin Dilger, founder and CEO of Nebuilt GmbH, speaks with host Giovanni Asproni about event sourcing -- a software architecture pattern in which, rather than storing just the current state of your data, you store a sequence of events that represents every change that has ever happened in the system. This episode starts by introducing the vocabulary around event sourcing, highlighting its relationship with event modeling, event streaming, and event storming. Martin describes some of the pros and cons of the approach, including which systems it is most suitable for. The conversation ends with guidance how to get started with event sourcing, for both greenfield and legacy systems.