SE Radio 695: Dave Thomas on Building eBooks Infrastructure

SE Radio 695: Dave Thomas on Building eBooks Infrastructure

Author: SE-Radio Team November 19, 2025 Duration: 1:02:49
Dave Thomas, author of The Pragmatic Programmer, The Manifesto for Agile Software Development, Programming Ruby, Agile Web Development with Rails, Programming Elixir, Simplicity, and co-founder of the Pragmatic Bookshelf, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about building infrastructure for eBooks. They discuss what an eBook is, the various formats, what infrastructure is needed to build them, how an author writes an book, the history of the Pragmatic Bookshelf, how they have evolved, how to handle links within eBooks, why humans are so important in the writing process, and why AI can help with your writing -- once you've written your content. Thomas discusses PDFs, eBooks, Mobi files, ePub files, CI/CD pipelines, WYSWYG, Markdown files, Pragmatic Markup Language, embedding code, AI agents, images, printing PDFs, JVMs, Java, jRuby, and how Markdown won the plain text writing format wars. Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

For developers who think deeply about their craft, Software Engineering Radio-The Podcast for Professional Software Developers offers a steady, thoughtful conversation about building software. This isn't about chasing headlines or quick tips; it's a deliberate exploration of the principles, patterns, and hard-won insights that define lasting work in the field. The SE-Radio Team creates each episode as original, standalone content, ensuring you get focused depth rather than recycled conference talks. Every ten days, a new installment arrives, alternating between detailed tutorial-style deep dives on specific technologies or methodologies and candid interviews with influential voices and practitioners from across the industry. Tuning in means joining a continuous learning journey where complex topics are broken down with clarity, from system architecture and language design to team dynamics and career development. This podcast serves as a reliable educational archive, a resource you can return to as your experience grows, always anchored in the realities and challenges faced by professional developers every day.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 100

Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers
Podcast Episodes
SE Radio 666: Eran Yahav on the Tabnine AI Coding Assistant [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:02:05
Eran Yahav, Professor of Computer Science at Technion, Israel, and CTO of Tabnine, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about the Tabnine AI coding assistant. They discuss how the design and implementation allows softw…
SE Radio 663: Tyler Flint on Managing External APIs [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:27
Tyler Flint, CEO of qpoint.io, joins host Robert Blumen for a conversation about managing external vendor dependencies, including several best practices for adoption. They start with a look at internal versus external se…
SE Radio 662: Vlad Khononov on Balancing Coupling in Software Design [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 56:19
Software architect and author Vlad Khononov joins host Jeff Doolittle for a discussion on balancing coupling in software design. They start by examining coupling and its relationship to complexity and modularity. Vlad ex…
SE Radio 661: Sunil Mallya on Small Language Models [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 59:28
Sunil Mallya, co-founder and CTO of Flip AI, discusses small language models with host Brijesh Ammanath. They begin by considering the technical distinctions between SLMs and large language models. LLMs excel in generati…
SE Radio 660: Pete Warden on TinyML [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:04
Pete Warden, CEO of Useful Sensors and a founding member of the TensorFlow team at Google, discusses TinyML, the technology enabling machine learning on low-power, small-footprint devices. This innovation opens up applic…
SE Radio 659: Brenden Matthews on Idiomatic Rust [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:54
Brenden Matthews, a seasoned software engineer, entrepreneur, and author of the Idiomatic Rust and Code Like a Pro in Rust books (both from Manning), speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about Idiomatic Rust. They start…
SE Radio 658: Tanya Janca on Secure Coding [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:11:40
Tanya Janca, author of Alice and Bob Learn Secure Coding, discusses secure coding and secure software development life cycle with SE Radio host Brijesh Ammanath. This session explores how integrating security into every…
SE Radio 657: Hong Minhee on ActivityPub and the Fediverse [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 40:09
Hong Minhee, an open source developer and creator of the Fedify ActivityPub library, discusses the ActivityPub protocol and the fediverse with SE Radio's Jeremy Jung. They explore ActivityPub use cases, including microbl…