Murat Erder, CTO for Financial Services at Valtech in Europe, and Eoin Woods, independent consultant in the field of software architecture, join host Giovanni Asproni to talk about Continuous Architecture—an approach to software design where architectural decisions are made and refined continuously throughout the lifecycle of a system, instead of up front in a big design phase. The show starts with a definition of Continuous Architecture and a description of the six principles underpinning it. Following that is an explanation of the main reasons and advantages of this approach, which finishes with some hints on how to get started using it. During the conversation, they explore several key points, including how to empower teams to take architectural decisions and recording those decisions; using feedback loops to refine the architecture; the role of software architects and architectural governance; the importance of focusing on quality requirements; and the impact of artificial intelligence on the field.

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.

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In this episode, Sahaj Garg, CTO of wispr.ai, joins SE Radio host Robert Blumen to talk about the challenges of building low-latency AI applications. They discuss latency's effect on consumer behavior as well as interactive applications. The conversation explores how to measure latency and how scale impacts it. Then Sahaj and Robert shift to themes around AI, including whether "AI" means LLMs or something broader, as they look at latency requirements and challenges around subtypes of AI applications. The final part of the episode explores techniques for managing latency in AI: speed vs accuracy trade-offs; speed vs cost; latency vs cost; choosing the right model; reducing quantization; distillation; and guessing + validating.

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.

Max Geurnsey III and Luniel de Beer, co-authors of the book Ready: Why Most Software Projects Fail and How to Fix It, discuss the concept of readiness in software engineering with host Brijesh Ammanath. Although Agile workflows and technical practices help delivery, many software efforts still struggle to achieve desired outcomes. Rework, shifting requirements, delays, defects, and mounting technical debt can plague software delivery and impede or altogether halt progress toward goals. The problem is often that implementation begins prematurely, before the team is properly set up for success. A strict system of explicit readiness work and gating, called Requirements Maturation Flow (RMF), has the potential to solve this problem in an SDLC-independent way. Teams that adopt RMF can dramatically improve progress toward real goals while reducing stress on engineering teams. In this episode, Max and Luniel deep dive into RMF and explain its foundational pillars.

Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Mojtaba Sarooghi, a Distinguished Product Architect at Queue-it, speaks with host Jeremy Jung about virtual waiting rooms for high-traffic events such as concerts and limited-quantity product releases. They explore using a virtual queue to prevent overloading systems, how most traffic is from bots, using edge workers to reduce requests to the customer's origin servers, and strategies for detecting bots in cooperation with vendors. Mojtaba discusses using AWS services like Elastic Load Balancing, DynamoDB, and Simple Notification Service, and explains why DynamoDB's eventual consistency is a good fit for their domain. To explain the approach, he walks us through how his team resolved an incident in which a traffic spike overloaded their services.

Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

In this episode, Benjamin Brial, CEO and co-founder of Cycloid, speaks with host Sriram Panyam about internal developer platforms (IDPs) and internal developer portals. The conversation explores how these platforms address the growing challenges of DevOps scalability, multi-cloud complexity, and cloud waste, all of which organizations face as they grow.

Benjamin begins by framing the core problems that IDPs solve: DevOps struggling to scale beyond small teams, the complexity of managing hybrid environments across on-premises, public cloud, and private cloud infrastructure, and the significant issue of cloud waste (averaging 35-45% according to major analysts). IDPs can serve as a bridge between DevOps teams and developers, providing access to tools, cloud resources, and automation for users who aren't DevOps or cloud experts. The technical discussion covers essential IDP components including service catalogs, versioning engines, platform orchestration, asset inventory, and FinOps/GreenOps modules. The episode concludes with Benjamin's practical advice: organizations should focus on understanding their specific pain points rather than following market trends, starting with simple use cases such as landing zones before building complex solutions, and adopt a GitOps-first approach as the foundation for any IDP implementation.

Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

In this episode of Software Engineering Radio, Srujana Merugu, an AI researcher with decades of experience, speaks with host Priyanka Raghavan about building LLM-based applications. The discussion begins by clarifying essential concepts like generative vs. predictive AI, pre-training vs. fine-tuning, and the transformer architecture that powers modern LLMs.

Srujana explains diffusion models and vision transformers, highlighting how multimodal AI is reshaping content creation. The conversation then moves to practical aspects—where LLMs make sense, where they don't, and a decision framework for evaluating use cases. They explore common application patterns such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agentic architectures, breaking down components like planners, orchestrators, memory, and tools. Key considerations for model selection, evaluation metrics, and safety guardrails are discussed in depth. The episode also touches on prompting strategies, automated prompt optimization, and emerging trends like multi-sensory AI and the "Internet of Senses." Finally, Srujana shares tips on staying current in a fast-moving AI landscape and emphasizes lifelong learning and curated knowledge sources.