Show Notes
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 Antithesis Red Team to talk about a likely missing piece in your testing strategy: workloads. They break down exactly what workloads are, why they are so helpful for testing distributed systems, and the biggest pitfalls engineers hit when trying them out. They talk about why you have to let go of deterministic, "happy path" testing, and how even a workload as "dumb" as a basic `while true` loop can expose silent data loss that your unit tests would never catch.
More from The BugBash Podcast
In 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 down how to retrofit proofs onto code you have already shipped, without starting over from scratch. Learn how modern SMT solvers check your code at compile time, why Rust ownership maps naturally to separation logic, and what happens when AI coding agents try to cheat their way through mathematical proofs.
Many 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 Alagappan and Aishwarya Ganesan, along with Antithesis Sr Engineer Michael Vaughn, to explore what it actually takes to build resilient architectures. We look at how recovery protocols can actively backfire under disk faults, how novel storage interfaces let us achieve high performance without sacrificing guarantees, and why the emergence of autonomous agents is forcing us to rethink data infrastructure from the ground up.
For decades, formal methods were considered theoretical exercises locked in academic labs—too brittle, complicated, and expensive for most production software. But as vital systems and AI-driven infrastructure face ever greater challenges, just testing edge cases by hand is no longer enough. Today, we're joined by Anjana Rajan and Jonathan Ring, co-founders of Atalanta, to explore how they are bridging the software understanding gap. They break down how to take high-level mission objectives and translate them into code-level proofs without needing a PhD in mathematics. From securing autonomous nuclear reactors to creating resilient space architectures, discover how formal verification is moving from an academic ideal to an accessible engineering reality.
Can 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 massive data deluge facing scientists—and what’s being done to keep up. Discover how Deepak’s team is building Ice Chunk to bring database-level transactions to n-dimensional datasets, how property-based testing acts as the ultimate automated peer reviewer, and why software engineering might benefit from embracing the scientific method a little more vigorously. And if you like conversations like this, you’ll want to join us at the first ever European edition of the Bug Bash conference, happening on September 30 in Copenhagen. Check it out at bugbash.antithesis.com
Building 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 Wynn sits down with Peter Graugaard and Nicholas Kristensen, the creators of Dhyv—an open-source deterministic hypervisor they wrote for their undergraduate thesis at the Danish Technical University. Inspired by Antithesis, these two software engineering students dove straight into CPU manuals, custom kernel patches, and the brutal realities of virtualizing time. Listen to how they survived the crunch, wrangled the chaotic spectrum of determinism, and built "AI-friendly" CLI tools to automate their massive testing pipelines. Joining him for the conversation is Alex Pshenichkin, the architect of Antithesis’ own deterministic hypervisor. And if you like conversations like this, you’ll want to join us at the first ever European edition of the Bug Bash conference, happening on September 30 in Copenhagen. Check it out at bugbash.antithesis.com