Owen McGirr, creator of SayIt!, Switchify, and an entrepreneur who builds inclusive technology, speaks with SE Radio host Gavin Henry about software accessibility. For this episode, Gavin emailed the questions to Owen, who prepared his answers and generated the audio programmatically using text-to-speech. Owen discusses what accessibility is, different ways a user might interact with software, how accessibility is currently handled between various operating systems, the technical challenges of creating SayIt! and Switchify, plus what developers can do to improve accessibility. This episode explores access methods, what good accessibility means, eye gaze, touch, voice, keyboards, scanning, switches, radaring, screen overlays, iOS accessibility, Android accessibility, which OSes have better support, AI testing, what vendors can do to improve, what developers can do to improve and what two things a developer can do immediately to test their software accessibility.

Sahil Walia, Senior Technical Architect at Snowflake, joins host Robert Blumen for a deep dive into Apache Iceberg. The conversation covers OLAP, data formats, data lakes and lake houses, Iceberg as a data format, columnar storage, use cases, reference implementation, read/write, how Iceberg structures metadata, indexing, query planning and performance issues.

Vivek Yadav, an engineering manager at the payment company Stripe, speaks with host Adi Narayan about building regression testing for microservices. Drawing on his work estimating network costs for card payments, Vivek explains why unit and integration tests fall short when a single transaction's cost can depend on 100+ parameters across card networks, countries, and merchant types. He describes Stripe's approach: structuring services so that core logic is stateless and separated from I/O, then wrapping that logic in an Apache Spark job that replays historical transactions from cold storage to compare old versus new outputs at a granular, per-transaction level. This allows Stripe to validate major migrations with far more confidence and speed than a traditional shadow-rollout, and it now doubles as a tool for assessing network rule changes, debugging incidents, and even showing customers how a pricing change will affect their costs. The episode closes by noting the same pattern applies wherever AI-driven code changes need fast, reliable evals.