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PODCAST

The BugBash Podcast

The BugBash podcast is a lively look at all aspects of software reliability, by enthusiasts, for everyone. Each episode brings leading engineers and researchers together for deep dives on everything from formal methods to testing to observability to human factors. There’s concrete advice on best practices, and nuanced discussion of how these strategies combine to deliver software that works. And if you’re enjoying these conversations, check out the talks from BugBash 2025 on YouTube, and join us

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All Episodes

00:47:55

Retrofitting Proofs onto Existing Rust Codebases

The BugBash Podcast ·

2026/10/07

In this episode we sit down with Jay Lorch and Chris Hawblitzel from Microsoft Research, along with Sr Engineer Shuxian Wang from Antithesis, all to talk about Verus.We break down how to retrofit proofs onto code you have already shipped, without starting over from scratch.Learn how modern SMT solvers check your code at compile time, why Rust ownership maps naturally to separation logic, and what happens when AI coding agents try to cheat their way through mathematical proofs.

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00:49:01

Beyond Academic Proof: Scaling Provable Correctness...

The BugBash Podcast ·

2026/10/01

Many elegant theoretical proofs exist for distributed systems, but local hardware and production realities rarely play by the rules. Today, we're joined by UIUC professors Ram Alagappan and Aishwarya Ganesan, along with Antithesis Sr Engineer Michael Vaughn, to explore what it actually takes to build resilient architectures. We look at how recovery protocols can actively backfire under disk faults, how novel storage interfaces let us achieve high performance without sacrificing guarantees, and

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00:47:46

Stop Talking About Formal Methods

The BugBash Podcast ·

2026/09/24

For decades, formal methods were considered theoretical exercises locked in academic labs—too brittle, complicated, and expensive for most production software. But as vital systems and AI-driven infrastructure face ever greater challenges, just testing edge cases by hand is no longer enough. Today, we're joined by Anjana Rajan and Jonathan Ring, co-founders of Atalanta, to explore how they are bridging the software understanding gap.They break down how to take high-level mission objectives and

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00:42:33

An Oceanographer Talks About Scientific Rigor in...

The BugBash Podcast ·

2026/09/17

Can thinking like an idealistic scientist make you a better developer? In this episode, Deepak Cherian, oceanographer turned software engineer joins the show to discuss the massive data deluge facing scientists—and what’s being done to keep up. Discover how Deepak’s team is building Ice Chunk to bring database-level transactions to n-dimensional datasets, how property-based testing acts as the ultimate automated peer reviewer, and why software engineering might benefit from embracing the scientific

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00:40:07

Virtual Time on a Deadline: Building an Open-Source...

The BugBash Podcast ·

2026/09/09

Building a deterministic hypervisor is an incredibly difficult feat of engineering. Doing it as a bachelor’s thesis in just four months is even more so. In this episode, David Wynn sits down with Peter Graugaard and Nicholas Kristensen, the creators of Dhyv—an open-source deterministic hypervisor they wrote for their undergraduate thesis at the Danish Technical University.Inspired by Antithesis, these two software engineering students dove straight into CPU manuals, custom kernel patches, and the

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00:39:13

Replication Before Raft: 15 Years of Correctness at...

The BugBash Podcast ·

2026/09/02

AI makes writing code faster, but shouldn’t it make software better, too?Today, Jesse Jiryu Davis, Senior Staff Research Engineer at MongoDB joins Carl Sverre to discuss why the time saved by AI should be reinvested and not squandered. Jesse talks about MongoDB’s journey with formal verification – and his own.He shares what it was like to build a custom replication protocol using TLA-plus, and how he realized that you can work in TLA-plus without a PhD. Jesse and Carl also talk about the future of

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00:53:39

The People Behind the Hamsters and Other Stories of...

The BugBash Podcast ·

2026/08/26

Behind every catastrophic system failure is a room full of stressed-out people trying to fix it. Launched in 2021, the Downtime Project was a podcast run by two seasoned distributed system engineers, who dissected post-mortems published after notable outages. Today, those two engineers, Jamie Turner and Tom Kleinpeter join David Wynn on the Bug Bash podcast to talk about their collaboration and what they learned. The two Dropbox veterans look back at the war rooms of the internal incidents behind

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01:12:47

From 18 months to 6: High-velocity database engineering

The BugBash Podcast ·

2026/08/19

In this episode, Carl Sverre and David Wynn sit down with Philip O'Toole, creator of rqlite. We dive into his philosophy of using tests as a core design strategy, his tactical advice for turning AI agents into technical research assistants, and how leveraging AI tools compressed his typical 18-month release cycle down to just six months. If you’re interested in a principled approach to solo projects in the AI era, or where the future of AI swarm management for critical infrastructure might be

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01:02:22

A Wild Hypothesis: The Python Library that Kills PhDs

The BugBash Podcast ·

2026/08/12

What happens when your open source library changes millions of lives?In this episode, we sit down with David MacIver, Zac Hatfield-Dodds, and Liam DeVoe — three generations of maintainers of Hypothesis, the property-based testing library used by roughly 5% of all Python developers. It’s by orders of magnitude the most-widely used property-based testing tool in the world. Hypothesis has introduced millions of developers to property-based testing, and made instant converts out of many others.All three

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00:35:18

Dev in the Street

The BugBash Podcast ·

2026/08/05

In this episode of the Bug Bash podcast, host David Wynn shares a collection of conversations recorded at Bug Bash 2026. 11 developers share their war stories about the most interesting bugs they've encountered and resolved.They talk about JDK issues on ARM architecture, kernel hangs related to NFS and half-duplex Ethernet, memory fences in Spark workloads, and complex logic bugs in iMessage.Together these conversations become a picture of what reliability-focused developers are thinking about

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00:57:38

Why simple workloads find the hardest bugs

The BugBash Podcast ·

2026/04/08

You hit 100% test coverage, deploy to production, and the system still falls over. An old story, maybe aside from the 100% coverage percent part.In this episode, David sits down with Marco Primi and Sean Allen from the Antithesis Red Team to talk about a likely missing piece in your testing strategy: workloads.They break down exactly what workloads are, why they are so helpful for testing distributed systems, and the biggest pitfalls engineers hit when trying them out. They talk about why you have

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00:49:27

Programming as an Act of Building Vocabulary

The BugBash Podcast ·

2026/04/02

Why do LLMs struggle to build complex architecture? According to Unmesh Joshi, Distinguished Engineer at ThoughtWorks, it often comes down to a lack of shared abstractions, of a shared vocabulary.Today he joins Will Wilson and David Wynn to unpack how we learn about, build, and test distributed systems. We cover the value of building miniature versions of systems like Kafka to grasp the basics, why Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST) is a highly effective tool for teaching as well as finding bugs

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00:51:12

The Dollar Bet that Fuzzed Figma: Exploding Laptops...

The BugBash Podcast ·

2026/03/25

Can you stress-test a React UI completely hands-free? In this episode, Oskar Wickström and I are joined by Jonathan Chan to discuss the origins of Fuzzmap.From a janitor’s closet in Figma—where end-to-end tests once lived on a "spicy pillow" MacBook—Jonathan shares how he applied coverage-guided fuzzing (inspired by AFL) to the world of web front-ends. We dive into the gnarly hacks required to instrument React, the challenges of visualizing complex state machines, and the future of

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00:51:53

Semmathesy and the Agentic Era: Learning Systems in 2026

The BugBash Podcast ·

2026/03/18

With the "Agentic Era" coming online, teams are onboarding new AI "minions" into our codebases every thirty minutes. So a critical question emerges: Are we actually becoming more productive, or just more busy?Jessica Kerr (Jessitron) joins me to explore symmathesis—the theory of learning systems made of learning parts. We dive into viewing software as a teammate, how the definition of "legacy code" is shifting to anything an AI can't understand, and why our most

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01:01:30

From Scale to Rigor: An Engineering Journey at Meta...

The BugBash Podcast ·

2026/03/11

Today we’re talking with Rain from Oxide Computing, tracing their journey from the massive, data-driven scale of Meta to the high-stakes, air-gapped world of shipping a 'cloud in a box'. We talk about moving from an environment of over 10,000 engineers—where a 10% tooling improvement is worth a thousand people—to a culture where you’re shipping hardware that simply cannot be patched once it leaves the building. Rain shares how they realized that technical writing is a senior engineer’s

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00:58:00

Escaping the Spaghetti: How to Test Untestable Codebases

The BugBash Podcast ·

2026/03/04

Everyone wants reliable software. But nobody wants to test messy legacy code. Today, Lewis Campbell from Outdata joins the show to share a practical approach for bringing deterministic simulation testing to existing systems. We get into why React components are terrible for business logic, and why front end static typing stops non-determinism at the door. We also take on non-tech aspects, like the politics of updating old code bases, the danger of hiding data conflicts, and how to ease your team

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00:51:50

How rr Became a Protected Species: A Story of...

The BugBash Podcast ·

2026/02/25

Building the rr replay debugger wasn't about academic purity. It was about survival.Today, creator Rob O'Callahan reveals the "necessary” complexity that makes time-travel debugging possible on Firefox. We dig into the engineering nightmares behind the tool: from patching 2-byte system calls to the constant fear of silent hardware failures.Rob explains how rr became a "protected species" inside the Linux kernel—and why messy, manual hacks often beat six months of theoretical

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01:20:22

Re-Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Shift...

The BugBash Podcast ·

2026/02/18

It’s been nine years since Designing Data-Intensive Applications became the standard text for distributed systems. Today, Martin Kleppmann and Chris Riccomini join the show to pull back the curtain on the upcoming Second Edition. After all, the era of local disks are giving way to cloud-native object storage. So we discuss why modern databases are being rebuilt entirely on top of S3.From there, we revisit the CAP theorem—and why it might be time to retire it in favor of "offline

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01:18:50

Hypothesis vs. Hallucinations: Property Testing...

The BugBash Podcast ·

2025/12/10

Large Language Models can generate code in a flash, but that code is notoriously unreliable. Traditional unit tests often can’t put enough guardrails in place to ensure correctness… even if they’re written by the LLM itself.This is where property-based testing (PBT) becomes essential.Today, we're joined by David R. MacIver, creator of the PBT library Hypothesis, and now an Antithesis employee! We discuss how to build robust feedback loops that are needed to make AI-generated code

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00:39:46

From the Lab to Production: Making Cutting-Edge...

The BugBash Podcast ·

2025/11/26

Software testing research is exploding, but in practice, most companies' testing approaches seem stuck in the past. Where does that gap come from?It often boils down to the distance between academic promises and the practical needs of developers who need usable tools and fast results.In this episode, David talks with Rohan Padhye, head of the PASTA research group at Carnegie Mellon University, who has lived on both sides of that divide. They explore how fuzz testing crossed that chasm—from

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29 results

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