The BugBash Podcast

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...