The BugBash Podcast
by Antithesis
Latest episode
Retrofitting Proofs onto Existing Rust Codebases
Retrofitting Proofs onto Existing Rust Codebases
About this podcast
The BugBash podcast is a lively look at all aspects of software reliability, by enthusiasts, for everyone.
Each episode brings leading engineers and researchers together for deep dives on everything from formal methods to testing to observability to human factors. There’s concrete advice on best practices, and nuanced discussion of how these strategies combine to deliver software that works.
And if you’re enjoying these conversations, check out the talks from BugBash 2025 on YouTube, and join us at BugBash 2026 on April 23-24, 2026, in Washington DC!
Episodes
The newest 20 of 29 episodes
- Retrofitting Proofs onto Existing Rust Codebases · 48 min · Season 3 Episode 9In this episode we sit down with Jay Lorch and Chris Hawblitzel from Microsoft Research, along with Sr Engineer Shuxian Wang from Antithesis, all to talk about Verus. We break…
- Beyond Academic Proof: Scaling Provable Correctness in Production · 49 min · Season 3 Episode 8Many elegant theoretical proofs exist for distributed systems, but local hardware and production realities rarely play by the rules. Today, we're joined by UIUC professors Ram…
- Stop Talking About Formal Methods · 48 min · Season 3 Episode 7For decades, formal methods were considered theoretical exercises locked in academic labs—too brittle, complicated, and expensive for most production software. But as vital…
- An Oceanographer Talks About Scientific Rigor in Software Engineering · 43 min · Season 3 Episode 6Can thinking like an idealistic scientist make you a better developer? In this episode, Deepak Cherian, oceanographer turned software engineer joins the show to discuss the…
- Virtual Time on a Deadline: Building an Open-Source Deterministic Hypervisor · 40 min · Season 3 Episode 5Building a deterministic hypervisor is an incredibly difficult feat of engineering. Doing it as a bachelor’s thesis in just four months is even more so. In this episode, David…
- Replication Before Raft: 15 Years of Correctness at MongoDB · 39 min · Season 3 Episode 4AI 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…
- The People Behind the Hamsters and Other Stories of Downtime · 54 min · Season 3 Episode 3Behind 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…
- From 18 months to 6: High-velocity database engineering · 1 h 12 min · Season 3 Episode 2In 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…
- A Wild Hypothesis: The Python Library that Kills PhDs · 1 h 2 min · Season 3 Episode 1What 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…
- Dev in the Street · 35 minIn 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…
- Why simple workloads find the hardest bugs · 58 min · Season 2 Episode 8You 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…
- Programming as an Act of Building Vocabulary · 49 min · Season 2 Episode 7Why 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…
- The Dollar Bet that Fuzzed Figma: Exploding Laptops and UI Reliability with Jonathan Chan · 51 min · Season 2 Episode 6Can 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…
- Semmathesy and the Agentic Era: Learning Systems in 2026 · 52 min · Season 2 Episode 5With 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…
- From Scale to Rigor: An Engineering Journey at Meta and Oxide · 1 h 1 min · Season 2 Episode 4Today 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…
- Escaping the Spaghetti: How to Test Untestable Codebases · 58 min · Season 2 Episode 3Everyone 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…
- How rr Became a Protected Species: A Story of Necessary Hacks · 52 min · Season 2 Episode 2Building 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…
- Re-Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Shift to Cloud-Native Storage · 1 h 20 min · Season 2 Episode 1It’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…
- Hypothesis vs. Hallucinations: Property Testing AI-Generated Code · 1 h 18 min · Season 1 Episode 11Large 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…
- From the Lab to Production: Making Cutting-Edge Testing Practical · 40 min · Season 1 Episode 10Software 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…
