Conversations about Software Engineering

Sven Johann talks with Manuel Pais about the challenges of development teams being asked to be responsible for many topics like their problem domain, technology/programming languages, security, infrastructure and operations, UX, etc. Manuel explains what cognitive load is, which types of cognitive load exist and where it can be reduced and where not. They then discuss the four fundamental team topologies stream-aligned, enabling, platform and complicated subsystem: their benefit, how you should run those teams and which obstacles you need to overcome to be successful.

Michele shares her journey in the software industry and how she got involved in product development. Customer interviews are not just something for product people -- Michele shares concrete ways that developers can get value from talking to their customers. She also shares a few tips for how to get involved with the customer research process and how to convince stakeholders of the value of the process (if necessary). They also discuss what the different between empathy, sympathy, and compassion. Empathy is understanding someone else's context and perspective. Since empathy is not something that comes naturally to everyone, Michele shares some tips about how to learn to become empathetic and become a better listener.

In this conversation about software engineering, Lucas Dohmen talks with Eric Normand. Eric first explains the origins of his book, Grokking Simplicity. He explains how to think in calculations, actions, and data. Lucas asks him about real-life situations dealing with concurrency and how he would solve them thinking functionally. Then they dive deep into their conversation about immutability, type systems, and learning from other communities.

In this episode, web accessibility expert Nicolas Steenhout talks to Stefan Tilkov about ways to improve web sites to make them usable by everyone. They cover the basics of web accessibility, the role of frameworks, common pitfalls and how to overcome them, blueberry muffins, and the perils of snake oil vendor tools.

In this episode of the CaSE Podcast, Lucas Dohmen talks to Joy Heron about Responsible Web Applications. They start talking about responsive web design and how it works nowadays with features like CSS Grid and Flexbox. Then Joy explains how to make a website usable with assistive technologies. Responsive and Accessible — That’s how we can create a responsible web application.

Alex Bramley continuous his conversation with Sven Johann. They begin with how granular you should monitor your user journeys and then discuss error budget policies in depth. They continue on how to iterate on SLIs, SLOs and error budget policies. They close the conversation with SLO alerting.

Alex Bramley continuous his conversation with Sven Johann. They start with what external and internal dependencies do with your availability requirements and how you calculate availability if you have a microservices dependency tree. They look into how you can introduce SLOs to your organisation. After that, they switch to measure user happiness with your monitoring system, measurement windows and how to report those results.

Alex Bramley talks to Sven Johann about the basics of service level objectives. They begin with terminologies (SLI, SLO, SLA, Error Budget), look at costs of outages and discuss what reliability has to do with customer happiness. They continue with having 100% reliability is the wrong target and what’s possibly the right target. Alex then explains how to get started with collecting data about your system’s behaviour. They close the first part of this series by looking into latency SLIs.

Simon Brown talks to Stefan Tilkov about software architecture – the importance for developers, its role in agile software development, documentation and tooling, and the importance (or lack of importance) of UML.

Eoin Woods discusses with Sven Johann all the things developers need to know to bring systems successfully into production and how to keep them there. They discuss production environments, what goes wrong in production, architectural requirements for operations, cost of very high availability, stability and capacity, communicating operational concerns, observability, learning from incidents, chaos engineering and operational models (SRE, You build it, you run it, classic).