Is it just a fact of life that software is broken? Our industry often operates as if the answer is "yes." We write tests, we fix bugs, but we seem to accept a certain level of failure as the cost of doing business. Our guest today is tired of it.Isaac Van Doren is a software engineer at Paytient, a healthcare payment solutions provider, and he’s "sick of software being broken all the time". Isaac makes the provocative case for a radical cultural shift in how we approach software reliability. He argues that we need to move beyond the narrow view that reliability simply equals testing and instead adopt practices that force us to be explicit about the rules of our systems.Listen to explore a different philosophy of development—one where engineers are fully responsible for defining business logic , assertions are a tool for building a "theory of the system" , and failures in production are not just bugs, but immediate, unmissable signals that our understanding was wrong. This conversation will challenge your assumptions and give you a new vocabulary for building software that, as Isaac puts it, "actually works".
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Scaling Correctness: Marc Brooker on a Decade of Formal Methods at AWS
How do you prove the correctness of services that underpin a huge portion of the internet? At the scale of Amazon Web Services, traditional testing falls short.In this episode, Antithesis’ own Will Wilson and Ben Collins talk with Marc Brooker, a Distinguished Engineer who has spent nearly 17 years building core AWS infrastructure like S3, Lambda, and Aurora Serverless. Marc gives us the inside story on AWS's decade-long journey with formal methods, from the early days of using complex tools like TLA+ to the current focus on "lightweight" approaches that any engineering team can adopt.He shares the counterintuitive lesson learned at AWS: investing in correctness up front doesn't just improve reliability, it actually boosts development velocity and leads to faster delivery. We also explore the convergent evolution of deterministic simulation testing, the challenge of applying these techniques to user interfaces and control planes , and what role AI will play in the future of programming and verification.
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FoundationDB: From Idea to Apple Acquisition
The BugBash Podcast kicks off with a bit of pre-history -- the story of FoundationDB, one of the first companies to successfully use deterministic simulation testing to accelerate development, assure reliability, and build something legendary.Today, FoundationDB is the hidden layer in Snowflake, DeepSeek, and many core systems at places like Apple and Goldman Sachs. But it started with some guys in a garage, building a system demo with plywood and lightbulbs...
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!
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