Episode 473: Mike Del Balso on Feature Stores

Eyal Solomon, CEO and co-founder of Lunar.dev, joins SE Radio’s Kanchan Shringi for a discussion on tooling for API consumption management. The episode starts by examining why API consumption management is an increasingly important topic, and how existing tooling on the provider side can be inadequate for client-side issues. Eyal talks in detail about issues that are unique to API consumers, before taking a deep dive into the evolution of middleware built by teams and companies to address these issues and the gaps. Finally they consider how Lunar.dev seeks to solve these issues, as well as Eyal's vision of lunar.dev as a open source platform. This episode is sponsored by WorkOS.

Ines Montani, co-founder and CEO of Explosion, speaks with host Jeremy Jung about solving problems using natural language processing (NLP). They cover generative vs predictive tasks, creating a pipeline and breaking down problems, labeling examples for training, fine-tuning models, using LLMs to label data and build prototypes, and the spaCy NLP library.

Phillip Carter, Principal Product Manager at Honeycomb and open source software developer, talks with host Giovanni Asproni about observability for large language models (LLMs). The episode explores similarities and differences for observability with LLMs versus more conventional systems. Key topics include: how observability helps in testing parts of LLMs that aren't amenable to automated unit or integration testing; using observability to develop and refine the functionality provided by the LLM (observability-driven development); using observability to debug LLMs; and the importance of incremental development and delivery for LLMs and how observability facilitates both. Phillip also offers suggestions on how to get started with implementing observability for LLMs, as well as an overview of some of the technology's current limitations. This episode is sponsored by WorkOS.

Rishi Singh, founder and CEO at Sapient.ai, speaks with SE radio’s Kanchan Shringi about using generative AI to help developers automate test code generation. They start by identifying key problems that developers are looking for in an automated test-generation solution. The discussion explores the capabilities and limitations of today’s large language models in achieving that goal, and then delves into how Sapient.ai has built wrappers around LLMs in an effort to improve the quality of the generated tests. Rishi also suggests how to validate the generated tests and outlines his vision of the future for this rapidly evolving area. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine. This episode is sponsored by WorkOS.

Hyrum Wright, Senior Staff Engineer at Google, discusses the book he co-edited, “Software Engineering at Google,” with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer. Wright describes the professional and technical best practices adopted by the software engineers at Google. The wide-ranging conversation investigates an array of topics, including measuring engineering productivity and writing effective test cases. This episode is sponsored by the Algorand Foundation.

Lane Wagner of Boot.dev speaks with host Philip Winston about Go, the programming language that's popular for web, cloud, devops, networking, and other types of development. In addition to discussing existing features such as structs, interfaces, concurrency, and error handling, Lane and Philip take a deep look at generics, a recent addition to the language. They also explore the developer experience with Go.

John Frandsen, Chief Product officer for Elebase, joins host Jeff Doolittle for an exploration of geospatial technologies. The conversation begins with a discussion of the history of mapping and global information systems (GIS) technologies. John describes the underlying technologies used in location-aware applications and the ways that developers can incorporate maps in their own applications. The conversation also highlights recent changes and innovations in the space, as well as the challenges and opportunities of incorporating your own data into existing base map providers. This episode is sponsored by WorkOS.

Charlie Jones, Director of Product Management at ReversingLabs and subject matter expert in supply chain security, joins host Priyanka Raghavan to discuss tackling third-party software risks. They begin by defining different types of third-party software risks and then take a deep dive into case studies where third-party components and software have had cascading effects on downstream systems. They consider some frameworks for secure software development that can be used to evaluate third-party software and components – both as a publisher or as a consumer – and end by discussing laws and regulations with final advise from Charlie on how enterprises can tackle third-party software risks. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine. This episode is sponsored by WorkOS.

Yingjun Wu, founder of RisingWave Labs and previously a software engineer at Amazon Web Services and researcher at IBM Almaden Research Center, speaks with SE Radio host Brijesh Ammanath about streaming databases. After considering the benefits and unique challenges, they delve into the architecture and design patterns of streaming databases, as well as the evolution and security considerations. Yingjun also talks about the future of streaming databases, including the potential impact that Amazon S3 Express One Zone will have on the streaming landscape, and how the unified batch and streaming might evolve in the database world. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Karl Wiegers, Principal Consultant with Process Impact and author of 14 books, and Candase Hokanson, Business Architect and PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner at ArgonDigital, speak with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about software requirements essentials. They explore five different parts of requirements engineering and how you can apply them to any ongoing project. Wiegers and Hokanson describe why requirements constantly change, how you can test that you're meeting them, and why the tools you have at hand are suitable to start straight away. They discuss the need for requirements in every software project and provide recommendations on how to gather, analyze, validate, and manage those requirements. Candase and Karl offer in-depth perspectives on a range of topics, including how to elicit requirements, speak with users, get to the source of the business or user goal, and create requirement sets, models, prototypes, and baselines. Finally, they look at specifications you can use, and how to validate, test, and verify them. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.