Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers

Marian Kamenistak, founder of the Engineering Leaders Community and former VP of Engineering at Mews, joins host Priyanka Raghavan to discuss product management for software engineers. As AI increasingly takes over more of the code-writing process, the role of software engineers is evolving. The episode starts with some fundamental concepts of product management before diving into practical case studies and real-world examples. The discussion looks beyond simply building a product and explores the entire product lifecycle—from understanding customer needs to measuring how the product is actually used. Marian discusses success metrics and the importance of defining them up front to make better product decisions. Through case studies, he demonstrates how engineers can develop a stronger product mindset without necessarily becoming traditional product managers. The conversation concludes by exploring the emerging idea of a "Product Builder"—a new kind of engineering role combining technical skills with product thinking and market awareness. With AI agents increasingly handling many of the tactical and repetitive tasks, future product builders might need to focus more on creativity, customer understanding, strategy, and connecting technology to business outcomes.

Dr Andrew Tridgell of the Ardupilot project discusses flight control software for autonomous and remote controlled aircraft. This field has advanced considerably in recent years, and autonomous vehicles are playing an increasingly important role in many industries -- from package delivery to scientific surveying and film-making -- as well as in the consumer market.
Host Jason Davey speaks with Tridgell about the fundamental concepts required to keep a drone in the air, the hardware and software architecture behind these vehicles, and how development and testing are handled in Ardupilot, one of the leading open source flight control software stacks.

Danilo Krummrich, a software engineer at Red Hat, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the using the Rust programming language in the Linux kernel. After introducing the Nova project, which leverages Rust for building NVIDIA GPU drivers, they explore the benefits associated with Rust, such as GPU driver memory safety. The conversation also examines topics like best practices for implementing self-referential structures with Rust and the pin-init crate. Danilo also describes practical performance considerations and lessons learned from building and maintaining the Nova project.

Sowjanya Pandruju, Cloud Application Architect with Amazon Web Services, Vice Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Madison Section, and Chair of the IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE) Madison Section (Region 4), speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about managing agent state. Sowjanya discusses what agents are and are not, what agent state is, the role an LLM actually plays, why agents need state, the different types of state, where to store agent state, how multi-agents change things, and the solutions to the various challenges created by managing agent state.
Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Tim Varelmann, the founder of Bluebird Optimization, which helps companies automate complex decision-making, speaks with host Sriram Panyam about mathematical optimization. The episode begins by differentiating optimization from what software engineers usually mean by the word. Making something faster or smaller is improvement, whereas optimization means finding the provably best solution after which no further improvement is possible unless the problem's parameters change. The conversation examines the difference between simulation and optimization, where optimization is already running, optimization and AI, key software engineering principles, and how you can get started with mathematical optimization.