The BugBash Podcast

• From the Lab to Production: Making Cutting-Edge Testing Practical

  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 industry curiosity to academic focus and back again—and what it will take for other techniques to do the same.Rohan shares insights on designing testable software, building a robust testing culture, and what truly makes a "good" property for finding bugs.

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• Ergonomics, reliability, durability

  Integrating non-deterministic, non-durable elements like AI agents into our workflows tends to lead to a lot of do-overs. But restarting AI processes can be costly, burning through tokens and losing valuable progress. Wouldn’t it be easier if there was always a clear checkpoint to restart a task from? Today I talk with Qian Li, co-founder of the DBOS durable execution engine, about reliability, ergonomics, and actually understanding your software. We discuss the long history of checkpointing, mental models, and how using durable execution allows systems to resume right where they left off after a crash. It makes your software resilient by default.Learn how this architectural pattern can impact an AI-assisted or any complex system that could use a little improvement in how developers work with it.

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• No actually, you can property test your UI

  How do you test for bugs that only appear when a user clicks frantically, or when asynchronous data loads in an unexpected order? Standard UI tests often miss the subtle stuff that happens all the time in the stateful, dynamic applications.In this episode, Paul Ryan and I sit down with Oskar Wickström, creator of the QuickStrom framework, among other things, to explore how to apply generative testing to the complex world of user interfaces. Oskar argues that you don't need to be a formal methods genius to get real value out of the approach. Even simple properties can uncover deep bugs, like ensuring a loading spinner eventually disappears or that the screen never goes blank. If you've been intrigued by property-based testing but intimidated by the thought of writing complex formal models for UIs, stick around. 

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• Slow down to go fast: TDD in the age of AI with Clare Sudbery

  AI coding assistants promise incredible speed, but what happens when you run straight into a wall of buggy code and technical debt?In this episode, Clare Sudbery, a software engineer with over 25 years of experience, discusses a crucial paradox for modern developers. The secret to harnessing AI's power isn't to move faster, but to slow down. Clare explains why deliberate, rigorous practices like Test-Driven Development (TDD) are the essential "guardrails" needed to guide AI tools toward reliable, high-quality software. You'll learn why "more, smaller steps" is the key to tackling technical debt and how throwing your code away might be the most productive thing you do all week.

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• Fixing five "two-year" bugs per day

  Some bugs are so rare, they can take years to track down and fix. What if you could find and fix five of them per day? For Joran Dirk Greef, the creator of the TigerBeetle database, that's not a wild dream — it's how his team works every day. While most people think building a new database takes a decade, Joran's team built TigerBeetle in just three and a half years. The key is a unique philosophy for writing software called "Tiger Style".Joran joins the show to share the secrets behind their speed and safety. You'll hear why he thinks picking C would have been a "fatal" mistake , how a strict rule about memory can force you to write better code , and why Zig was the perfect choice for TigerBeetle.The key to it all is a powerful testing method that Joran calls "existential" for any important project. If you want to hear more about how his team turns squashing impossible bugs into their normal day-to-day, stay tuned.

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