Shows / SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
SWE: Software engineering, explained like you're smart but brand new. Two hosts, one big idea a day, zero jargon left unexplained. If you've ever nodded along in a tech conversation you didn't understand, this is your show.
Episodes
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 34: Who Actually Runs Your Computer?
Mia and Leo explain operating systems through a busy hotel: the manager who hands out rooms, schedules the kitchen, and keeps every guest from crashing the…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 33: The Doll Inside the Doll Inside the Doll
Mia and Leo explain recursion through Russian nesting dolls: a function that calls itself, the base case that stops the chain, and why your computer's folders…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 32: Why One App Crawls and Another Flies
Mia and Leo explain algorithms and Big-O notation through a dinner party: recipes as step-by-step plans, constant, linear, quadratic, and logarithmic growth…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 31: The Street and the Treasure Hunt
Mia and Leo explain data structures through a street of numbered houses and a treasure hunt: arrays for instant lookup, linked lists for easy inserting and…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 30: The Kitchen With No Perfect Layout
Mia and Leo explain system design through designing a kitchen: tradeoffs between speed and cost, scaling out versus a single point of failure, caching…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 29: Why Your Messages Travel in a Locked Box
Mia and Leo explain encryption through a locked box: symmetric encryption with one shared key, asymmetric encryption with public and private keys, HTTPS and…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 28: Showing Your ID Is Not the Same as Opening the Door
Mia and Leo explain authentication vs authorization through an office building: showing ID at the front desk versus a keycard that opens only certain doors…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 27: Who Gets Called When Your App Breaks at Three A M
Mia and Leo explain incidents and on-call through an emergency plumber: severity levels, on-call rotations, rollbacks that stop the leak first, status updates…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 26: Three Clues That Tell Engineers What Your App Is Really Doing
Mia and Leo explain logs, metrics, and traces through a building's visitor log, dashboard gauges, and security cameras: what logs record, why metrics trigger…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 25: The Assembly Line That Ships Code While You Sleep
Mia and Leo explain CI/CD through a factory assembly line making blenders: continuous integration, automated tests, builds, continuous delivery vs continuous…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 24: How Your Favorite App Changes Overnight Without Breaking
Mia and Leo explain software deployments through a restaurant chain swapping its soup recipe across twenty kitchens: canary rollouts, blue-green deployments…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 23: The Traffic Cop Who Keeps Websites From Crashing
Mia and Leo explain load balancers through a supermarket attendant directing shoppers to the shortest checkout line: round robin, least connections, health…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 22: One Super Checkout Lane or Ten Ordinary Ones?
Mia and Leo explain scaling up vs scaling out through supermarket checkout lanes: why one bigger computer hits a ceiling and a single point of failure, how…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 21: The Shipping Container That Fixed 'It Works on My Machine'
Mia and Leo explain containers and Docker through the shipping container: why apps break when they move between computers, how a container packs code with its…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 20: The Cloud Is Just Someone Else's Computer
Mia and Leo explain cloud computing through a rented workshop: why apps like Netflix and Spotify run on someone else's computers, how companies rent more power…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 19: Why Your Bank and Instagram Don't Use the Same Database
Mia and Leo compare SQL and NoSQL databases through a filing cabinet with fixed drawers versus flexible labeled bins. Schemas, document stores like MongoDB…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 18: How Every App Asks Its Database a Question
Mia and Leo teach SQL — Structured Query Language — through a librarian who follows precise instructions. Select, filter, sort, and join: how apps ask database…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 17: The Library That Never Forgets
Mia and Leo open the doors on databases — software's long-term memory. Tables, rows, columns, and indexes explained through a library filing system, plus why a…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 16: Why a Video From Tokyo Loads Instantly in Dallas
Mia and Leo explain content delivery networks (CDNs) through neighborhood warehouses: edge servers, origin servers, latency, caching at global scale, what gets…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 15: Why Your Apps Keep a Spare Copy of Everything
Mia and Leo explain caching through a kitchen counter versus pantry: browser cache, memory cache, stale data, cache expiration and invalidation, and why…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 14: How Websites Remember You When They Have No Memory
Mia and Leo explain cookies, sessions, and logins through a coat-check ticket: how a tiny cookie lets a forgetful website remember you, why logging out…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 13: Every Click You Make Sends a Secret Form
Mia and Leo explain HTTP in plain English through a post-office form: request methods GET, POST, PUT, PATCH and DELETE, response status codes 200, 301, 404…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 12: The Waiter Who Serves a Million Tables at Once
Mia and Leo explain APIs through a restaurant menu: endpoints, requests, parameters, API keys, and responses, with real examples from weather apps, Google…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 11: The Dining Room and the Kitchen Behind Every App
Mia and Leo explain frontend vs backend through a restaurant: the dining room you see and touch, the kitchen doing the hidden work, and the A P I waiter…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 10: What Really Happens in the Second Before a Website Appears
Mia and Leo trace the journey from typing a URL to seeing a page — DNS address lookup, HTTP requests, servers, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and status codes like 404…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 9: The Tape Fix That Costs You Later
Mia and Leo explain technical debt: why software teams knowingly take shortcuts (like taping a leaky pipe before guests arrive), how refactoring pays it back…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 8: Pilots Never Skip the Checklist. Neither Should Code
Mia and Leo explain automated testing through the pilot's pre-flight checklist: unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, why every code change gets a full…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 7: The Teaspoon That Cost 300 Million Dollars
Not all bugs are created equal. Mia and Leo break down the three kinds of bugs — syntax errors, runtime errors, and the silent, deadly logic error — and…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 6: Never Rewrite the Original While the Kitchen Is Serving
Mia and Leo explain Git branches, pull requests, code review, merges, and merge conflicts through a restaurant kitchen's master recipe book — how engineers…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 5: Save Points for Code
Mia and Leo explain Git through a photo album for your code: commits as labeled snapshots, diffs as side-by-side comparisons, reverting as time travel to a…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 4: The Translator Who Reads the Whole Book First
Mia and Leo explain compilers vs. interpreters: how source code becomes machine code, why compiled programs like phone apps run fast while interpreted…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 3: The Recipe Your Computer Can't Read
Mia and Leo crack open source code: the human-readable recipe behind every app and website, why engineers write recipes instead of ones and zeros, and how…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 2: Why Talking to a Rubber Duck Fixes Your Code
Mia and Leo unpack the debugging mindset: the rubber duck technique, reproducing bugs, reading error messages, divide-and-conquer with binary search, logging…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
Episode 1: What a Software Engineer Actually Does
Mia and Leo kick off SWE with the plain-English basics: debugging, Git, A P Is, databases, testing, and deployment. The eighty percent of software engineering…
- SWE – Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
SWE Trailer: Software Engineering for the Rest of Us
A 60-second intro to SWE: one software engineering concept a day, explained in plain English. New episodes every morning.