SE Radio 695: Dave Thomas on Building eBooks Infrastructure

SE Radio 695: Dave Thomas on Building eBooks Infrastructure

Author: team@se-radio.net (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 build the world's most critical systems, Software Engineering Radio offers deep, substantive conversations that move beyond the hype cycle. This isn't about quick tips or news flashes; it's a dedicated audio library for career engineers seeking to solidify their foundational knowledge and explore advanced concepts. Each episode is crafted as an enduring resource, featuring either a comprehensive tutorial breaking down a specific technology or methodology, or a detailed interview with a leading practitioner shaping the field. You'll hear focused discussions on everything from low-level systems architecture and programming language design to team dynamics and project management, all through the lens of professional software creation. The content is exclusively produced for this podcast, ensuring thoughtful, in-depth analysis you won't find simply repackaged from conference talks. If your work demands a rigorous understanding of the craft, this is the podcast for you.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 100

Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers
Podcast Episodes
SE Radio 723: Dave Airlie on Linux Kernel Maintenance [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:09:27
Dave Airlie, a Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat, speaks with host Gregory M. Kapfhammer about Linux kernel maintenance. After over-viewing the scale and structure of the Linux kernel, they dive deep into the review and…
SE Radio 721: Rob Moffat on Risk-First Software Development [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:31
In this episode, Rob Moffat, author of Risk-First Software Development and chief technical architect at the FinTech Open Source Software Foundation (FINOS), speaks with host Brijesh Ammanath about how all of software dev…
SE Radio 720: Martin Dilger on Understanding Eventsourcing [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:36
Martin Dilger, founder and CEO of Nebuilt GmbH, speaks with host Giovanni Asproni about event sourcing -- a software architecture pattern in which, rather than storing just the current state of your data, you store a seq…
SE Radio 719: Birol Yildiz on Building an Agentic AI SRE [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:57
Birol Yildiz, CEO and co-founder of iLert, joins host Kanchan Shringi to explore how iLert built an AI SRE — an autonomous agent for handling production incidents — and what the experience revealed about building AI agen…
SE Radio 718: Will Sentance on JS Modernization [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 58:43
Will Sentance, educator and co-founder of Codesmith, joins SE Radio's Adi Narayan to discuss the evolution of JavaScript and modern best practices. They begin with JavaScript's origins as a simple scripting language and…
SE Radio 717: Eric Tschetter on Decoupling Observability [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:00:13
In this episode, host Amey Ambade sits with Eric Tschetter, co-founder of Apache Druid and Chief Architect at Imply, to dissect the critical move toward Decoupling Observability. To begin, they define three pillars—logs,…
SE Radio 716: Martin Kleppmann Local-First Software [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:14
Martin Kleppmann, Associate Professor at the University of Cambridge and author of the best-selling O'Reilly book Designing Data-Intensive Applications, talks to host Adi Narayan about local-first collaboration software.…
SE Radio 715: Sahaj Garg on Designing for Ambiguity in Human Input [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:02
Sahaj Garg, co-founder and CTO of Wispr, a voice-to-text AI that turns speech into polished writing, talks with host Amey Ambade about designing systems for the ambiguity that's inherent in human input (text, voice, mult…
SE Radio 714: Costa Alexoglou on Remote Pair Programming [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:27
Costa Alexoglou, co-founder of the open source Hopp pair-programming application, talks with host Brijesh Ammanath about remote pair programming. They start with a quick introduction to pair programming and its importanc…