Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers

Scott Kingsley, a VP of Engineering at SmartBear, speaks with host Gregory Kapfhammer about the Swagger ecosystem. They discuss the user interface, editor, and Swagger CodeGen and how these tools support the creation and documentation of OpenAPI-compatible APIs. Scott describes how Swagger fits into frameworks like FastAPI, as well as how Swagger APIs can be exposed through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). They discussion closes with best practices for designing and testing APIs and the role that APIs play in a landscape in which AI agents are building and interacting with APIs.

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.

Yechezkel "Chez" Rabinovich, CTO and co-founder at Groundcover, joins SE Radio host Brijesh Ammanath to discuss the key challenges in migrating observability toolsets. The episode starts with a look at why customers might seek to migrate their existing Observability stack, and then Chez explains some approaches and techniques for doing so. The discussion turns to OpenTelemetry, including what it is and how Groundcover helps with the migration of dashboards, monitors, pipelines, and integrations that are proprietary to vendor products. Chez describes methods for validating a successful migration, as well as metrics and signals that engineering teams can use to assess the migration health. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Sriram Panyam returns to the show to discuss the system design interview (SDI) with host Robert Blumen. This challenging part of the hiring process is included in the interview loop for many jobs across tech, including management and for all levels from entry to senior. The conversation starts with a look at what the SDI is, who will face it, and how critical this interview is for hiring and leveling. Sriram shares some common system design questions and what the interviewers are generally looking for, including stated versus unstated requirements and ambiguity in the questions. He offers recommendations on how candidates should disambiguate their designs and manage their time. He shares some personal stories of interview failures and successes, and even discusses some mistakes that interviewers make. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Derick Schaefer, author of CLI: A Practical Guide to Creating Modern Command-Line Interfaces, talks with host Robert Blumen about command-line interfaces old and new. Starting with a short review of the origin of commands in the early unix systems, they trace the evolution of commands into modern CLIs. Following the historic rise, fall, and re-emergence of CLIs, they consider innovative examples such as git, github, WordPress, and warp. Schaefer clarifies whether commands are the same as CLIs and then discusses a range of topics, including implementation languages, packages in the golang ecosystem for CLI development, CLIs and APIs, CLIs and AIs, AI tooling versus MCP, the object-command pattern, command flags, API authentication, whether CLIs should be stateless, and output formats - json, rich text. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.