Qian Li of DBOS, a durable execution platform born from research by the creators of Postgres and Spark, speaks with host Kanchan Shringi about building durable, observable, and scalable software systems, and why that matters for modern applications. They discuss database-backed program state, workflow orchestration, real-world AI use cases, and comparisons with other workflow technologies.

Li explains how DBOS persists not just application data but also program execution state in Postgres to enable automatic recovery and exactly-once execution. She outlines how DBOS uses workflow and step annotations to build deterministic, fault-tolerant flows for everything from e-commerce checkouts to LLM-powered agents. Observability features, including SQL-accessible state tables and a time-travel debugger, allow developers and business users to understand and troubleshoot system behavior. Finally, she compares DBOS with tools like Temporal and AWS Step Functions.

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

Luke Hinds, CTO of Stacklok and creator of Sigstore, speaks with SE Radio's Brijesh Ammanath about the privacy and security concerns of using AI coding agents. They discuss how the increased use of AI coding assistants has improved programmer productivity but has also introduced certain key risks. In the area of secrets management, for example, there is the risk of secrets being passed to LLMs. Coding assistants can also introduce dependency-management risks that can be exploited by malicious actors. Luke recommends several tools and behaviors that programmers can adopt to ensure that secrets do not get leaked.

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

Wesley Beary of Anchor speaks with host Sam Taggart about designing APIs with a particular emphasis on user experience. Wesley discusses what it means to be an “API connoisseur”— paying attention to what makes the APIs we consume enjoyable or frustrating and then taking those lessons and using them when we design our own APIs. Wesley and Sam also explore the many challenges developers face when designing APIs, such as coming up with good abstractions, testing, getting user feedback, documentation, security, and versioning. They address both CLI and web APIs.

This episode is sponsored by Fly.io.