Picture Me Coding

Thanks for the Memory Part 2: Garbage Collection

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 04:00:00 -0700

This week we conclude our discussion of dynamic memory allocation with a discussion of the history and implementation of garbage collectors. There are no mentions of raccoons.

Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I

Uniprocessor Garbage Collection Techniques?

cpython/InternalDocs/garbage_collector.md at main

Generation Scavenging: A Non-disruptlve High Perfornm.nce Storage Reclamation Algorithm 1. Introduction 2. The Relationship Betw

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Thanks for the Memory Part I: Allocators

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 04:00:00 -0700

This week we present the first of two episodes on dynamic memory allocation. We were going to talk about garbage collection, but realized we should probably discuss allocators first. Turns out they are complicated, and there are many different strategies.

Dynamic Storage Allocation: A Survey and Critical Review (Wilson)

Hoard: a scalable memory allocator for multithreaded applications

mimalloc: A new, high-performance, scalable memory allocator for the modern era - Microsoft Research

A Scalable Concurrent malloc(3) Implementation for FreeBSD

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From the Academy to Industry with Alan Dyke

Fri, 11 Sep 2026 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode we interview Alan Dyke, a colleague of Erik's who got his Ph.D from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he did research on Computer-Aided Software Engineering. We talk about Alan's unique journey in software development, going from the academic environment to the defense industry, embedded software, and biotech. We also learn about the crucial importance of calibrating your software for hurricanes.

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DataCon LA

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 04:00:00 -0700

This week we're talking about Mike's visit to DataCon LA 26. We talk about the conference, various talks he was able to see, and his own experience giving a talk.

Compression Represents Intelligence Linearly

[2602.17127] The Emergence of Lab-Driven Alignment Signatures: A Psychometric Framework for Auditing Latent Bias and Compounding Risk in Generative AI

Instructor

spaCy

John Snow Labs

Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds (HNSW) | Pinecone

Lance Video is a demonstration platform for analyzing and searching video content with LanceDB. · GitHub

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The Monte Carlo Method

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0700

In this episode we discuss the Monte Carlo method, both the technique and its place in the history of computing. The Monte Carlo method is a set of tools that use probability to solve problems that are otherwise intractable. Programs using Monte Carlo were among the first programs created on digital computers.

The Monte Carlo Method Nicholas Metropolis; S. Ulam Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 44, No. 247. (Sep.

Equation of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines

Hitting the Jackpot: The Birth of the Monte Carlo Method | LANL

Monte Carlo Sampling Methods Using Markov Chains and Their Applications W. K. Hastings Biometrika, Vol. 57, No. 1. (Apr., 1970),

2014HaighPriestleyRope-LosAlamosBetsonENIAC.pdf

The Unheralded Contributions of Klara Dan von Neumann

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The Most Cited Papers from JACM

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode we discuss the 5 most-cited papers from the flagship journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, the JACM. The papers include everything from distributed computing to real-time scheduling.

Direct Search'' Solution of Numerical and Statistical Problems | Journal of the ACM

Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process | Journal of the ACM

Robust principal component analysis? | Journal of the ACM

Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment | Journal of the ACM

Scheduling Algorithms for Multiprogramming in a Hard-Real-Time Environment | Journal of the ACM

What is HITS Algorithm (Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search)?

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The Prehistory of the Internet

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 04:00:00 -0700

This episode started with the question: who first had the idea to connect computers together to make a network? We explore JCR Licklider's ideas about an "Intergalactic Network", some of the earliest attempts at networking, and the ideas that lead to packet switching and the Arpanet.

SAGE: Semi-Automatic Ground Environment Air Defense System | MIT Lincoln Laboratory

Memorandum for Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network

The Arpanet and Computer Networks

60 Years of Networking - by Bruce Davies - Systems Approach

Information Flow in Large Communication Nets (1961, Leonard Kleinrock, MIT)

On Distributed Communications Networks (1962, Paul Baran, RAND)

National Physical Laboratory Proposal for a Digital Communication Network by D. W. Davies June, 1966

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Software Development in 2046

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode we discuss a couple of recent papers on just-in-time development and agentic systems and how we think they suggest trends that will affect software development for years to come. We boldly predict that in 2046 people will still not want robot dentists.

The Time is Here for Just-in-Time Systems: Challenges and Opportunities

MDASH: The MS Security Thing

Services: The New Software | Sequoia Capital

Understanding Spec-Driven-Development: Kiro, spec-kit, and Tessl

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Numerology

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 04:00:00 -0700

For the 100th episode of Picture Me Coding we talk about numbers. Mike talks about his favorite numbers, Erik talks about his favorite ports, and we discuss the surprising phenomenon of Benford's Law.

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Do You Even Schedule, Bro? Making a Digital Workout Partner with Doug Burke

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 -0700

This week we were joined by our friend Doug Burke, who runs a company and has been working on his "digital life workout partner", a voice-activated LLM tool. Doug's story is interesting because he does not have a background in software development, and we wanted to learn more about what he's building.

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TokenMaxxing!: Agentic Software Development with Bob Farzin

Fri, 15 May 2026 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode we invite back our friend Bob Farzin to discuss our personal experiences with using teams of agents to write software, and we try to parse out the experiences we're seeing on the interwebs, including Steve Yegge's GasTown and Wes McKinney's discussion of agentic development in the context of Brooks's _Mythical Man Month_.

"Introducing Beads: A coding agent memory system"
Welcome to Gas Town — Steve Yegge's original essay
The Future of Coding Agents — Yegge's follow-up
Gas Town on GitHub — The actual tool
How to Think About Gas Town — Steve Klabnik's analysis
A Day in Gas Town — DoltHub's practical walkthrough
Gas Town, Beads, and the Rise of Agentic Development — Software Engineering Daily interview with Yegge
Top Coding Agents 2025 — Benched.ai comparison guide
[April 8, Wes McKinney] AI Agents, The Mythical Agent Month, My Wild AI Coding Setup

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Patricia Selinger and the Birth of Query Optimization

Fri, 01 May 2026 04:00:00 -0700

In this episode we attempt to explain query optimization and where it came from. In particular we discuss Patricia Selinger's 1979 SIGMOD paper Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System.

Access Path Selection paper (PDF)
A Conversation with Pat Selinger — ACM Queue (2006)
Database Dialogue with Pat Selinger — CACM (2008)
Pat Selinger Speaks Out — SIGMOD Interview (PDF)
Patricia Selinger — IBM History
System R: Database Research Retrospective — TODS 1981
Graefe, G. (1995). The Cascades Framework for Query Optimization
Leis et al. (2015). How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really? PVLDB Vol. 9 — introduces the Join Order Benchmark (JOB) and empirically audits modern optimizers.

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"Big-O Ops": An Interview with Kyle Risse

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0700

This week Mike and Erik are joined by Kyle Risse.

Erik met Kyle at Scale 23x in Pasadena this year while volunteering for the Tech Team. Kyle has a ton of experience in the field working on networks, infrastructure, linux server operations, and doing stressful operations stuff. In short, he has stories and he was kind enough to come on the show and share them with us!

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Hash Tables

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 04:00:00 -0700

Some recent articles about research on hash tables made us realize we probably didn't know enough about hash tables, one of the fundamental data structures in the biz. We talk about the history of hashing and hash tables, and some recent results that overturned a 40 year old conjecture on the most efficient way to insert items.

Scientists Find Optimal Balance of Data Storage and Time | Quanta Magazine

[2111.00602] On the Optimal Time/Space Tradeoff for Hash Tables

Speeding Up Hash Tables | Communications of the ACM

https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/1734714.1734729

[2109.04548] Iceberg Hashing: Optimizing Many Hash-Table Criteria at Once

Modern Dictionaries by Raymond Hettinger

FOCS 2024 3B Optimal Bounds for Open Addressing Without Reordering

Optimal Bounds for Open Addressing Without Reordering

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Scale 23x

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 04:00:00 -0700

We give a report of our experiences at the 23rd version of the Southern California Linux Expo (Scale 23x) in Pasadena. Erik was a volunteer in the network group this year, so we have some behind the scenes stories in addition to summaries of interesting talks and sessions.

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Talking Murderbot with Amy Salley

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 04:00:00 -0800

In this episode we're joined again by Amy Salley, cohost of the Hugo, Girl! podcast, to help us discuss the Murderbot series of books by Martha Wells. We discuss our favorite characters and plots, but also how these books touch on AI, consciousness, and neurodivergence.

Galaxy’s Edge Interviews Martha Wells | Author Interview | Sci Fi Blog

I didn’t know how non-neurotypical I was until Murderbot

We’re Light-Years Away from True Artificial Intelligence, Says Murderbot Author Martha Wells | Scientific American

Martha Wells' next 'Murderbot Diaries' book is 'the family roadtrip from hell on Ringworld' (interview) | Space

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The History of NGINX

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 04:00:00 -0800

This episode we look into the history of the web server NGINX and of web servers more generally. We play myth buster and try to investigate the widespread story that NGINX arose from a need to scale porn sites.

Igor Sysoev - Wikipedia

Free Software Interview with Sysoev

History of Apache

How Sysoev Ended Up at Rambler

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Recreational Programming

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 03:00:00 -0800

Does anyone program just for fun anymore? This episode we're talking about recreational programming, with a focus on A.K. Dewdney's Computer Recreations column from the 1980s. Also, taco shops.

https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/recreational-cs.pdf

FUN 2026

The New Turing Omnibus

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Functional Programming: Are We There Yet?

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 04:00:00 -0800

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Scheme, we decided to talk about functional programming: what it is, how's it going these days, and does it still matter in the era of AI. Although there's been 70 years of research into FP it still hasn't become mainstream. Will AI reverse or accelerate that trend?

TIOBE Index

The Next 700 Programming Languages

An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus

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The Infinite Drive: S3 and Cloud Object Storage

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 04:00:00 -0800

For our first episode of 2026 (and Season 4), we're talking about Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). S3 is probably the biggest cloud service, or at least we think it is, because it is super freakin' huge. We talk about how it's built, how it works, and how people use it.

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Salesforce and Low-Code with Kyle Willcox

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 17:00:00 -0800

In this episode we discuss working in the Salesforce environment, and low-code platforms generally, with software engineer Kyle Willcox. Kyle's dev journey from a CS degree at UNC Wilmington to Salesforce dev to web app developer reveals a lot about both the benefits and pitfalls of working in isolated environments like Salesforce. Kyle is also a sponsored skimboarder and came to California to ride the surf, so he and Erik nerd out on weather and waves.

Low Code

Exile Skimboards

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Tech News Roundup: Fighting Robots with Poetry

Wed, 26 Nov 2025 16:00:00 -0800

For the holiday we're doing another news roundup, although it's mostly about data centers and AI to be honest.

Inside the Data Centers...

Korean Data Center

Oracle Data Center Debt

Cloudflare Outage

Rust Adoption Drives Android Memory Safety Bugs Below 20%

Adversarial Poetry

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Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs): How To Survive the Zombie Apocalypse

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 16:00:00 -0800

Erik became fascinated with CRDTs while working on a project, so we're talking about how they work, how they simplify some distributed systems, and how they might protect you from zombies.

Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types

A Comprehensive Study of Convergent and Commutative Replicated Data Types

Counters - Aviral Goel

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The Turing Test

Wed, 29 Oct 2025 03:00:00 -0700

This episode is about the Turing Test, and Alan Turing's original description of the test in Computing Machinery and Intelligence. We also discuss a recent work by two UCSD researchers that claims that current LLMs pass the Turing Test.

Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test

Pragmatic Engineer Podcast with Armin Ronacher

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Ubiquitous Computing

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 04:00:00 -0700

In 1988 Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC coined the term "ubiquitous computing", and in 1991 he spelled out the particulars of this concept in a Scientific American article called "The Computer for the 21st Century". We discuss whether or not Weiser's vision was achieved. It's hard to argue that computers are now all around us, but it doesn't seem like they've faded into the background as Weiser hoped.

The Computer for the 21st Century

Designing Calm Technology

Toward Ubiquitous Operating Systems: Lessons from the Field

Ambient Computing Has Arrived: Here's What It Looks Like in My House

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The Two Problems With Regular Expressions

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 02:00:00 -0700

This week we're talking about regular expressions, aka, regex. These are a favorite tool of programmers, but they also have a dark side. Do regex cause more problems than they solve? Can they be evil? We also discuss the origins of regular expressions, formal language theory, and finite automata.

Now You've Got Two Problems

XKCD: Regular Expressions

Representation of Events in Nerve Nets and Finite Automata

OWASP: ReDOS

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The History of Unix, Part 2: Unix not Eunuchs

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 04:00:00 -0700

A continuation of our discussion about the history of Unix and its development at Bell Labs. Erik wonders why Unix became successful and which features were novel and important. Mike just wants to talk about cool pranks Group 1127 pulled off.

Unix: A History and Memoir - Brian Kernighan

The Unix Time-Sharing System

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The History of Unix: Part 1

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 15:00:00 -0700

This week we talk about the early days of Unix, primarily based on Brian Kernighan's book Unix: A History and Memoir, about his days at Bell Labs and the creation of Unix and C by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and other luminaries.

https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/dp/1695978552

https://dsf.berkeley.edu/cs262/unix.pdf

https://cs3210.cc.gatech.edu/r/unix6.pdf

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Space, Time, and Squishy Pebbles

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 04:00:00 -0700

This week we dip our toes into the river of theoretical computer science and immediately drown. We discuss the amazing and surprising result of researcher Ryan Williams about how space is a more powerful resource in computing than time.

For Algorithms, Memory Is a Far More Powerful Resource Than Time | WIRED

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17779

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JuWdXrCmWg

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Databases Part II: No SQL, No Problem

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 10:00:00 -0700

This week we try to make sense of what were once called "NoSQL" databases, focusing on the early entries into the field like Bigtable, Dynamo and Cassandra. We try to explain how they differ from prior database systems and what motivated their creation.

Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data

Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store

Cassandra - A Decentralized Structured Storage System

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Vibe Coding: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 19:00:00 -0700

This week we host our friends Bobak Farzin and Kevin Fahey to talk about their experiences building applications with AI tools. Both Bob and Kevin are very tech savvy in different ways, but neither is a full-time software developer. Yet both have had good experiences building functional applications with tools like Cursor and Claude Code. We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of these tools, and the challenges that Bob and Kevin found in building their own software.

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Friends and Relations

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 03:00:00 -0700

We're talking about databases again. Or database management systems, we're not totally sure. In any case, they are relational databases (or database management systems).

The relational database has been the go-to system for storing structured data since the 1980s, and is still the most popular type of system to use for applications and business reporting. We discuss their history, what makes them relational, and our experiences with some of the better known commercial and open-source relational systems.

A Relational Model of Shared Databanks - EF Codd

Dr. Michael Stonebraker - A Short History of Database Systems

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Shoulders of Giants: Jim Gray

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 04:00:00 -0700

Jim Gray was a key innovator in the area of database technology and he won the Turing Prize in 1998. He was particularly influential with respect to the definition and formalization of transactions, and he identified and named the A, C, and D of ACID. Gray, an avid hiker and sailor, disappeared in 2007 while sailing out of San Francisco to the Farallon Islands, and no trace of him was ever found.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/behind-the-code-with-jim-gray/

https://www.wired.com/2007/07/ff-jimgray-2/

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Language, Meaning, and Functional Programming with Matt Teichman

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0700

This week Matt Teichman, host of the Elucidations podcast, dropped by the show to chat about functional programming and its surprising relationship to linguistics and philosophy. Matt teaches Linguistics, Philosophy, and Computer Science at the University of Chicago and he also works on open-source software for the University of Chicago library, including an interesting OCaml project used by archivists called Attachment Converter.

Thanks to our newest Patreon subscribers: Ralph Minderhoud and Tim Lavoie!

Stuff to Check Out

Matt's podcast: Elucidations
Matt's website: Matt Teichman - Philosophy - University of Chicago
Attachment Converter, open-source library: Attachment Converter
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Montague Semantics

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UX Wing Fighters

Wed, 21 May 2025 00:00:00 -0700

In this episode we talk to Jonathan Whitmire who designed the Picture Me Coding swag, logos, artwork (and t-shirts and stickers and coffee mugs!).

He gives us a rundown on what it's like working alongside developers and what we talk about when we talk about UX.

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Our Flag Means Local-First

Wed, 14 May 2025 00:00:00 -0700

This week Mike and Erik talk about the local-first software movement. There's a pretty cool paper about it from 2019 called "Local-First Software:You Own Your Data, in spite of the Cloud", and there's also a podcast, a company, and various projects. Come get inspired to build stuff!

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Interpreting the Newses

Wed, 07 May 2025 00:00:00 -0700

Mike and Erik analyze the tech news again. The AIs are hallucinating, but gamers are too because of Game Transfer Phenomenon. The Luddites are back for what's likely a futile effort to keep the robots from taking our jobs, but Mike things he can at least outrun them.

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Predicting the Future: Law, Software, and Attorneys Using AI

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 01:00:00 -0700

Today Mike and Erik are joined by John Benson, an attorney with a background in digital forensics who has been at the forefront of integrating LLMs into legal practice. The conversation ranges over the practice of law, digital security, and AI

Find out more about John Benson's work here: https://john-benson.com/

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Sailing to Byzantium

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0700

This week Mike and Erik tackle Byzantine Fault Tolerance! But what's it all about? Gangsters? Generals? Constantinople? Take a journey with us as we sail off into the dizzying complexity of Byzantine faults.

Links

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Programming for Fun with David Beazley

Wed, 09 Apr 2025 00:00:00 -0700

We have an entertaining and wide-ranging discussion with prominent computer scientist and educator David Beazley, known for his many contributions to the Python community. We talk about why programming is fun, and how he has created his memorable conference talks and innovative programming classes. We also touch on music, theater, academic life, and, of course, Dave's No Doubt tribute band.

Show Notes:

https://www.dabeaz.com/
Sans-IO (https://sans-io.readthedocs.io/)
Rust elevator origin story (https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/14/1067869/rust-worlds-fastest-growing-programming-language/)
Book: "Understanding Software Dynamics", by Richard Sites. Addison-Wesley, 2022.
"Critical Program Reading", https://archive.org/details/youtube-7hdJQkn8rtA

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Leslie Lamport and the Free Software Movement

Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:00:00 -0700

In this SCaLE wrap-up Mike and Erik discuss the final day of the conference and talks by Denver Gingerich called "What happens when hardware puts software freedom first? We built a router to find out" and Leslie Lamport titled "Coding isn't Programming", and we got to meet Leslie Lamport and take photos with him and give him Picture Me Coding stickers.

Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/night-drift/the-horseman

Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/night-drift/x

Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/qube/play

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Mike and Erik Go to Pasadena!

Wed, 19 Mar 2025 02:00:00 -0700

This week we are on location in the city of Pasadena, CA for Scale 22x, the Socal Linux Expo. We talked to people and went to talks and drank a lot of coffee. We do a debrief of some of the amazing work we heard about in the first few days of the conference.

Stay tuned next week to hear what we learned from Leslie Lamport!

Check out some stuff we learned about!

- The Open Source Rover (from JPL)

- Solomon Hykes Keynote: "Robots Building Robots"

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Simulating Distributed Systems with David Morrison

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 02:00:00 -0700

Every once in a while you come across a project where you’re like “Oh, dang, wish I’d thought of that”. That’s the case with this week’s guest, David R. Morrison.

David is the founder of Applied Computing Research Labs (ACRL), and the creator of Simkube which allows you to record-and-replay Kubernetes simulations. Recently, he published an article in ACMQueue called "Simulation: An Underutilized Tool in Distributed Systems", which talks about simulation of distributed systems in general and his work with Simkube to analyze two Kubernetes autoscalers: KCA and Karpenter.

Links

- ACM Queue Article: "Simulation: An Underutilized Tool in Distributed Systems"

- Applied Computing Research Labs

- Simkube Homepage

- Simkube Github Repo

- "SimKube: Part 1 - Why do we need a simulator?"

- "Autoscaling Mesos Clusters with Clusterman"

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Point Break and the Spirit of Devops

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 09:00:00 -0800

This week Mike and Erik are joined by Rob Hernandez who has deep experience with Devops and both cloud and on-prem infrastructure. Rob takes us from the early days of his career as a student IT worker through to consulting for large corporations like Github and finally to running the tech team for the Socal Linux Expo, a massive open-source conference held in Pasadena every year.

Speaking of the conference: we're gonna be there! If you want to attend, Rob shared a coupon code with our listeners, which will get you a ticket at half-price. Use the code: FOSS.

Find conference info here: https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/22x

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"Where are all the elders?"

Wed, 26 Feb 2025 09:00:00 -0800

This week we continue Mike's origin story for another 20 years of his history and Erik asks him the question: "Where did all the old people go?"

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Origin Story: Part 1 - Mike Fails at Being a Chemist

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0800

This episode has a bit of everything. Spaceships! Killer storms! Piracy! Supercomputers that look like furniture! But mainly we discover how Mike fell into his lifelong pattern of turning everything into an opportunity to mess around with computers.

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The Failure Modes of Agile with Dr Junade Ali

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 05:00:00 -0800

In Episode 40 “Agile Trashers Part 2: The Trashening” we mentioned a study titled “268% Higher Failure Rates for Agile Software Projects”. News about this study showed up in all of the usual places (Hacker News, Reddit, TLDR, Google, Slashdot, etc.) and it caused a bit of a stir. That study was published by our guest today, Dr Junade Ali.

In this episode we talk about software failure, agile, and what practices might come next.

Links

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Do Programmers Need to Know Anything About Computers?

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 05:00:00 -0800

This episode is based on a mild difference in view that Erik and I have about whether it’s useful for programmers to know details of computer hardware. I feel that it is important and beneficial. Erik feels... Well, he never did tell me what he really thinks here but I got him to confess that he sometimes solves problems without knowing the reason for the problem in the first place!

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The Story of the CAP Theorem Part 2

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 05:00:00 -0800

Mike and Erik return to the CAP Theorem to finish the discussion started last week. Their goal is to try to find answers to this question: why do software engineers love to talk about the CAP Theorem so much? This episode covers the 2002 Gilbert and Lynch proof of CAP, as well as more recent critiques of the CAP Theorem, mostly based on Martin Kleppeman's article “Please Stop Calling Databases CP OR AP”.

Links

Brewer’s “Towards Robust Distributed Systems” (slideshow of the talk!)
FLP Paper: Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process (1985)
Lynch: “A Hundred Impossibility Proofs for Distributed Computing” (1989)
Lynch and Gilbert prove CAP Conjecture: “Brewer's conjecture and the feasibility of consistent, available, partition-tolerant web services” (2002)
Martin Kleppeman “Please Stop Calling Databases CP OR AP”
“Highly Available Transactions: Virtues and Limitations”

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The Story of the CAP Theorem Part 1

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 05:00:00 -0800

Your podcast hosts have a suspicion about the CAP Theorem: if you're a working programmer and you've heard of any single result in the field of distributed systems, we think you'll have heard of the CAP Theorem. But did you ever wonder where it comes from? In this episode, we'll tell the story of the CAP Theorem. THERE WILL BE BLUEBERRIES!!!

Reach us by email: podcast@picturemecoding.com
Sponsor us on Patreon: https://patreon.com/PictureMeCoding

Links

2000 PODC website
Brewer’s “Towards Robust Distributed Systems” (slideshow of the talk!)
FLP Paper: Impossibility of Distributed Consensus with One Faulty Process (1985)
Lynch: “A Hundred Impossibility Proofs for Distributed Computing” (1989)
Brewer Interview in 2015: https://medium.com/s-c-a-l-e/google-systems-guru-explains-why-containers-are-the-future-of-computing-87922af2cf95
Brewer interview with Software Engineering Daily 2023: https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2023/05/12/cap-theorem-23-years-later/
A Theoretical View of Distributed Systems: Nancy Lynch (2021 Talk)

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Gleaming the Lambda Cube with Nathan Mull

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 05:00:00 -0800

This week Nathan Mull, a type theorist and CS Professor at Boston University, came on the show to help Mike and Erik understand what the phrase "Propositions as Types" is all about. This is an idea about how programs are connected to logic and mathematical proofs, whether we want them to be or not! You know that program that orders pizza from Dominos?! Yes, even that program is a proof of something. Find out what it proves on this episode of Picture Me Coding!

Links

Nathan Mull's personal site
2014 Philip Wadler Paper: Propositions as Types
2016 Strangeloop Conference recording (Youtube): "Propositions as Types" by Philip Wadler

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Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Frances Allen and Compiler Optimizations

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 00:00:00 -0800

This week Mike and Erik discussed the work of Frances Allen, who worked for IBM for 45 years starting in 1957. The first female Turing Award winner, Allen authored a number of papers on compiler optimizations that describe techniques that are still in use!

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We Read the News and Everyone’s On Drugs

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0800

In this episode we looked at the tragic story of tech company CEOs doing drugs and the various knock-on effects.

We also played a lightning round of "Aspiring to be a nation state or on drugs?" with various headlines.

This is the final episode of Picture Me Coding for 2024 and we’ll be taking a break for a few weeks after this. But we’ll be back next year!

Mike made a playlist of all the music we talked about this year too! Find it here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6jbM32yzvi8MK3zv2cXPSr?si=f40f8df000404a11

REFERENCES ROUNDUP

NYT: “The C.E.O.s Are Tripping. Can Psychedelics Help the C-Suite?”
The Verge: “Google reveals quantum computing chip with ‘breakthrough’ achievements”
Google blog announcement of quantum computing breakthrough
Scott Aaronson: Shtetl-Optimized » Blog Archive » The Google Willow thing
TechCrunch: “Court orders Automattic to restore WP Engine’s access to WordPress.org”
Wordpress’s Mullenweg interview with The Verge.
Goodbye, unreliable weather forecasts? Google DeepMind's AI model sets new benchmark for 15-day predictions | TechRadar
Google Blog: Introducing Gemini 2.0: our new AI model for the agentic era
the Spectator “Are you ready for agentic AI?”
Google Genai: new Python repo with “Part” data type
Azure’s AI Agent Service announcement
Toms Hardware: “AI GPU Clusters with one million GPUs are planned for 2027”
Big Tech Embraces Nuclear Power to Fuel AI and Data Centers - IEEE Spectrum
https://subseacables.blogspot.com/2024/10/breaking-story-facebook-building-subsea.html

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More Favorites: Radix Trees, Kadane's, Raft Leader Election

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 04:00:00 -0800

We carried over from last week and kept doing algos! This week we talked about:
- Diffie Hellman
- Radix Trees: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/321479.321481
- Kadane's Algorithm
- Raft's Leader Election: https://raft.github.io/raft.pdf

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Our Favorite Algorithms: FFTs and Hyperloglogs!

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 04:00:00 -0800

Mike wanted to talk about our favorite algorithms this week, so we covered a few:
- Fast Fourier Transforms
- Hyperloglog

Some references are below:

- Article in Communications of the ACM: What Is an Algorithm?
- Al-Khwarizmi (mathematician, wikipedia page)
- HyperLogLog Paper: https://algo.inria.fr/flajolet/Publications/FlFuGaMe07.pdf

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Annoying Everybody with Our Questions about Timezones

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 05:00:00 -0800

In this episode, Mike and Erik go back to the topic of time in order to explore what is specifically frustrating to programmers about dealing with time. Why's it so hard and annoying? And why do people get so irritated when we ask them a bunch of questions about what they really want us to build with respect to time?

We also mentioned on this and our last episode that there are some new ways to reach out to us (in addition to our email address), but they are:

- Bluesky account: https://bsky.app/profile/picturemecoding.bsky.social
- Threadless store (in case you want a Picture Me Coding coffee mug or stickers!): https://picturemecoding.threadless.com/
- Existing email address: podcast@picturemecoding.com

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Into the Well of Formal Verifications

Wed, 20 Nov 2024 05:00:00 -0800

This week Mike and Erik were trying to understand the arena of formal verification: what are these tools? Where do they come from? How do they work? Can we categorize them?

There's a ton of stuff to talk about in this area and we're just learning the things, so we made an attempt here to wade in and figure stuff out!

We also mentioned on this episode that there are some new ways to reach out to us (in addition to our email address), but they are:

- Bluesky account: https://bsky.app/profile/picturemecoding.bsky.social
- Threadless store (in case you want a Picture Me Coding coffee mug or stickers!): https://picturemecoding.threadless.com/
- Existing email address: podcast@picturemecoding.com

Here Are Some Links to Stuff We Discussed

Lamport’s A Science of Concurrent Programs (pdf)
Dafny
Cloudflare’s Formally Verified DNS
P language
Wadler’s Propositions as Types paper
Hillel Wayne’s “Let’s Prove Leftpad” and repo
Amazon Science page on “automated reasoning” as an area
Amazon paper “Model checking distributed protocols in Must”

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"Some of the most valuable people I work with are really just politicians"

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 05:00:00 -0800

Our discussion with Randy Edwards from last week carried over to the following week in this part 2 episode of our discussion on software engineering management. Our wide-ranging discussion included references to James Bond and Billy Woods and all kinds of unexpected stuff in between.

Announcement Part 2: In celebration of episiode 50, Picture Me Coding now has a threadless shop with shirts, stickers, and coffee mugs for purchase! Impress your friends with your knowledge of the niche podcast space! Get goods here: https://picturemecoding.threadless.com/

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Software Engineering Management with Randy Edwards

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 05:00:00 -0800

This week we took on the subject of software engineering management and we were joined in this discussion by Randy Edwards, who started writing C++ at 16 and now runs an organization with software engineering managers reporting to him.

Randy shares wisdom he's learned along the way and Mike and Erik try to interrogate the goals and methods of management.

Announcement: In celebration of episiode 50, Picture Me Coding now has a threadless shop with shirts, stickers, and coffee mugs for purchase! Impress your friends with your knowledge of the niche podcast space! Get goods here: https://picturemecoding.threadless.com/

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Mike and Erik Vie for the Nobel Prize in Literature

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 05:00:00 -0700

Recently, some people won a Nobel Prize in Physics for contributions in the field of Neural Networks and Mike went down this huge rabbit hole of content-addressable-memory and Hopfield Networks and Geoffrey Hinton's work on the Boltzmann machine. If you feel lost in this episode, let Mike be your guide (and you may be less lost than Erik).

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Nostalgia for the 90s Internet

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 05:00:00 -0700

This week Mike and Erik wax nostalgic about the early days of the internet and then they wonder if all this trite nostalogizing (is that a word?) isn't really a dangerous or simply not-useful self-deception. Was stuff really better in the early days of the internet? What do you think?

Check out some links:

- https://web.archive.org/
- profile of Jake Nickell from 2011 in the Chicago Reader
- Cory Doctorow's now-famous blogpost in Wired on "enshitiffication"

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Origin Story: How Erik Became a Programmer

Wed, 09 Oct 2024 05:00:00 -0700

In this episode Mike wanted to interview Erik on how he got his start as a programmer and he was surprised by this and all worked up about it by the end. Hear tales of Erik's journey in this episode.

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620 Million Years Ago the Workday Was Only 6 Hours Long

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 05:00:00 -0700

In this episode of Picture Me Coding, your hosts take on the topic of time, a category of discussion that it turns out they are supremely not up to the task of at all. Join us for this conversational and occasionally confused discussion.

Some Links
- Distributed Systems textbook by Marten van Steen
- Wikipedia on ΔT (timekeeping)
- Wikipedia on the leap second
- Keeping Time at NIST

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Software In Pop Culture with Amy Salley

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 05:00:00 -0700

This week we were fortunate to have a super special guest, Amy Salley, who hails from the podcast Hugo Girl. Amy agreed to come on the show to talk to us about depictions of software in science fiction and we discussed works such as:

A recently published short story by Naomi Kritzer called "Better Living Through Algorithms" (read it here).
2001: A Space Odyssey the 1968 Kubrick film
War Games the 1983 film
Neuromancer by William Gibson

Links!

Mike and Erik's Favorite Episodes of Hugo Girl

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The Agony and the Ecstasy of Excel

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0700

This week Mike and Erik are joined by special guest Justin Runia an analyst and Excel wizard and returning guest Bob Farzin who told us a story in the high-frequency-trading episode about trading billions of dollars of swaps from an Excel spreadsheet.

We spent the whole hour talking about Excel: is it a no-code platform? Is it a programming language? Is it a database? Should we build the whole business on top of it?

If you're an immense fan of Excel like Mike is, then join us this hour as we tackle this crazy tool that contains the most widely used functional programming language.

Some Links

https://phys.org/news/2024-08-business-spreadsheets-critical-errors.html
Advancing Excel as a programming language with Andy Gordon and Simon Peyton Jones

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The Best I Ever Saw

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 05:00:00 -0700

So the Surfer's Journal, a surfing magazine, has a feature called "Best I Ever Saw" where they ask people in the surfing world to remark on the best surfing performance they've ever seen. These are pretty interesting to read because it's an expert praising an expert and it's fun to see through their eyes. This week Erik wanted to ask Mike, "what's the best you ever saw?" in the field of software engineering, so this forms the topic of discussion for this episode.

Check out the Andy Irons one that Mike and Erik talk about with the amazing photograph at the top. Also, the Surfer's Journal has another example we referenced about Tom Carroll.

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The Value of Software with Irina Telyukova

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 05:00:00 -0700

Mike asked me the other day: "what's all this software actually worth?" Turns out he was talking about raw dollars. Who the hell knows? I said. Is this a thing anyone can answer?

Mike, then, dug up an academic paper from the Harvard Business School called "The Value of Open Source Software" where they tried to calculate the monetary value of open source software and then we needed a bunch of help just to read and understand this paper so we called our friend Irina Telyukova and she came on the show to explain basic Economics to us. Irina is a former Economics professor, and consultant in the field, but she's also run analytics and modeling departments at software concerns. It was pretty rad she came on to help us understand!

References
- The Value of Open Source Software
- packages.ecosyste.ms
-

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Software News Roundup (with No AI news! (sorta))

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 05:00:00 -0700

This week Mike and Erik committed to discussing the non-AI news out there in the software world. There's a lot of non-AI stuff going almost undiscussed and so our hosts each brought three news stories they found interesting to the podcast and then Erik includes a bonus one about AI which completely messes up the whole premise of the episode.

Stuff we discussed

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Agile Trashers Part 2: the Trashening

Wed, 07 Aug 2024 05:00:00 -0700

In this follow-up to last week's episode on agile processes, Mike and Erik investigate the various criticisms of Agile and even come up with a few new hits of their own!

Some Things We Referenced:

Manifesto for Agile Software Development
See also “Principles behind the Agile Manifesto”
Agile and the Long Crisis of Software (by Miriam Posner, a professor at UCLA)
Who Builds a House Without Drawing Blueprints?
“Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects” (the “study”)
“Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project”

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Agile Trashers Part 1: a pre-history

Wed, 31 Jul 2024 05:00:00 -0700

If you develop software professionally, chances are you use an agile process as the framework for scheduling and dividing work. You probably don’t love it, but your level of frustration may lie anywhere on a broad spectrum from benign resignation to brain-damaging rage.

In this episode, Mike and Erik talk about the history of Agile and what the original Agile manifesto was all about. Then, in part II, they'll cover criticisms of Agile because nobody really loves the stuff and if you've been paying attention lately, most of the chatter in our field seems to be actively bashing it and, in truth, our podcast hosts do not want to be left out of that.

References

Manifesto for Agile Software Development
See also “Principles behind the Agile Manifesto”
Agile and the Long Crisis of Software (by Miriam Posner, a professor at UCLA)
Who Builds a House Without Drawing Blueprints?
“Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects” (the “study”)
“Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project”

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The Nine Fallacies of Distributed Computing

Wed, 17 Jul 2024 05:00:00 -0700

One day Erik decided to foolishly not worry about the 9 fallacies of distributed computing. Surprisingly, Mike seemed to indicate that was fine to do! These guys are pretty irresponsible! Listen along and see for yourself if they're making a terrible mistake.

Links

Deutsch’s Fallacies 10 years later
2021 Software Engineering Radio podcast episode with L. Peter Deutsch
Google SRE Book Chapter 2 "Embracing Risk"

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Hidden Vibrations of the Universe: Compositionality

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 05:00:00 -0700

This week we take on the subject of compositionality, an ultra-abstract concept that might just underlie all the programming things we do.

Does this idea really inform our work? Do we need category theory to talk about and understand it? Are we required to care?

Here are some references:

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The Burnouts of the Century

Wed, 03 Jul 2024 05:00:00 -0700

Following publication of a recent report where 80%(!) of software engineers and managers are reporting burnout, Mike and Erik take on the difficult topic of burnout in our industry. Through a discussion of the definition, causes, and frequency of this phenomenon, your Picture Me Coding hosts decide that maybe software itself is to blame!

Resources

Burnout self-test
“Burnout in software engineering: A systematic mapping study
“A newer and broader definition of burnout: Validation of the "Burnout Clinical Subtype Questionnaire (BCSQ-36)”
World Health Organization Definition
Scientific American “Science Quickly” podcast episode “You Can’t Fix Burnout with Self-Care”
Nagoski sisters Ted Talk: “The Cure for Burnout: Hint it isn’t self-care”
“Burnout in Software Development - Survey Results 2021”
Joy Lab podcast “Is It Burnout or Depression?”

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Monoliths vs Microservices

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 05:00:00 -0700

Did you ever wake up one day and realize your microservices architecture had transformed into a large distributed monolith? Did your boss come to your house and did your family try to disown you? Mike and Erik have lived that story too!

In this episode they wade boldly into the microservices vs monoliths discussion and Mike makes the bold claim that doing microservices isn't even an architecture!

Articles We Talked About

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The End of the Fullstack Developer Era

Wed, 12 Jun 2024 05:00:00 -0700

Mike made this argument recently that the era of the full stack developer is over. The so-called stacks are still around, but they're now surrounded by so much infrastructure and supporting technology that claiming to be full-stack is misleading. Mike wrote a whole essay about this, in fact, which you can read over here.

This week, we talked about his idea that fullstack engineering is going away, and we included commentary from an essay called "The Myth of the Fullstack Developer" as well as a mastodon post by Daniel Stenberg that Erik mentioned.

Finally, we closed with a discussion of a related article, "HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points" by Rachel Andrew.

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Why Rust?

Thu, 30 May 2024 05:00:00 -0700

After a few weeks off while Mike traveled the land, your Picture Me Coding hosts are back this week with an episode about the programming language Rust. They've mentioned this language a few times and, inspired by an offhand comment Mike made about how professional software engineers should "know a compiled language," they dedcided to go deeper into the reasons why it's an attractive language and a good tool in the toolbox for any contemporary software developer.

They also chat briefly about the High on Fire album Cometh the Storm.

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Dijkstra's Diss Track

Wed, 24 Apr 2024 05:00:00 -0700

This is part II of our Standing on the Shoulders of Giants episode about Edsger Dijkstra, the greatest philosopher of our field.

Instead of using social media, Dijkstra would dash off hot takes on his typewriter or his pen and in this episode we cover various of his opinions and essays. You'll hear him say stuff like, "Java sucks" and it's "cowardly to call our errors 'bugs'."

Here are some links to the material we discussed:

On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science (1988)
Letter protesting U Texas switch to Java from Haskell (2001)
“How do we tell truths that might hurt?” (1975)
“On the Foolishness of ‘Natural Language Programming”
(Video) “Lecture: Reasoning About Programs - Solving 2 problems using programing” - 1990

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Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Edsger Dijkstra

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 05:00:00 -0700

This week we talked about the greatest philosopher of our field: Edsger Dijkstra. Most software engineers will immediately recall Dijkstra's Algorithm, for finding the shortest path between two nodes in a graph, but Dijkstra's work covers a large range of topics over 5 decades, from code quality to complexity to concurrent programming, and programming languages.

In this episode, we talked specifically about the following works, including the original paper where Dijkstra first published what we now call "Dijkstra's algorithm":

This episode is part I of our Dijkstra discussion. We'll be back next week for more.

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The XZ Apocalypse

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 05:00:00 -0700

A week ago a developer in San Francisco named Andres Freund found a backdoor in SSH which would grant some shadowy figure access to Linux machines running the latest version of a library called liblzma. Even more incredibly, there were various semi-anonymous figures clamoring for inclusion of this compromised version of liblzma into the latest version of various Linux distros.

This entire scheme had been underway for over three years before it fell apart under Freund's scrutiny and attention from the broader software industry.

This week Mike gives us a breakdown of the exploit and we talk about the fallout from this backdoor which took advantage of an overworked and vulnerable open-source maintainer.

As Mike puts it, the story is "bonkers".

To read more about it, check out these articles:

The Verge: “How one volunteer stopped a backdoor from exposing Linux systems worldwide”
Wired: “The Mystery of ‘Jia Tan,’ the XZ Backdoor Mastermind”
TuxCare: “A Deep Dive on the xz Compromise”
Timeline from Boehs.org: https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor

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AI Code Generators: Are We Going to Be Out of Work Someday?!

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 07:00:00 -0700

Along with our friend Bob Farzin, we visit upon the sleeping body of AI three ghosts this week: one for the past, one for the present, and one for the future. We make a sincere attempt to haunt the crap out of LLMs like GPT, Claude, and Github Copilot and to give them a truly spooky, creeped out feeling as they look upon what they're doing to their industry.

What skills will we need in the future if AI writes all of our code for us? What's going to happen to our tools, our programming languages, our industry? Will we have to go to more meetings?

Erik is a lot more nervous about the future than the calmly reflective Mike and Bob, but we'll do our best this week to predict the future.

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The Ethical Engineer

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 05:00:00 -0700

In our industry there are myriad examples of companies behaving unethically, so what power do we have as software engineers to uphold ethical principles and resist bad behavior? In this episode Mike and Erik look at adopting a software engineering code of ethics, relying primarily on the ACM's Code of Ethics as a foundational set of guidelines for ethical and professional behavior.

Also, we're not really known for this but it's worth mentioning that this episode may include some hot takes? I guess I would say that these takes are at least a little warmer than usual.

Mike's music choice this week is The Past is Still Alive by Hurray For The Riff Raff, while Erik talked about his travails with DNS.

Oh, by the way, if you want to email us, the email address is working now(!) and we can be reached over at podcast@picturemecoding.com

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Season 2 Bonus Episode: The Way of the Naturalist

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 08:00:00 -0700

Mike's out this week so Erik went into his backyard and talked about famous Naturalists while birds chirped in the background. It's short and unexpected!

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Becoming an Engineer: the “Build or Buy” Question

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 05:00:00 -0800

It’s a very old software engineering question: should we build the thing or buy the thing? Fred Brooks says "you should always buy." This may even be an existential question: my role is to build things, not to buy them, right? Why would I ever buy anything?

According to Mike, learning to answer the "Build or Buy" is an essential part of becoming a software engineer, so we'll try to answer it for you definitively this week!

Erik has been listening to Ovlov's Buds while Mike has been listening to Strings Attached: The Voice of Kannel by Anna-Liisa Eller.

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What the Hell is Edge Computing?

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0800

In which Mike and Erik try to understand what "edge computing" means and whether it's meaningful or marketing speak. The topic comes up because Mike decides to run an LLM on his laptop and it turns out that when he's doing this he's participating in edge computing!

For musict his week Erik is listening to the Baroness album Stone while Mike has been into Brittany Howard's What Now.

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Let's Talk Technical Books!

Wed, 14 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0800

This week Mike and Erik dig into their bookshelves to find and discuss their favorite technical books. As per usual, Mike references a bunch of stuff Erik has never heard of but one new thing this week is that Erik tries hard not to piss off Radiohead fans.

Books Mentioned

Unix Network Programming, W. Richard Stevens
Software Architecture in Practice, Bass, Clements, Kazman
Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics, Foley and Van Dam
The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie
Hacker’s Delight by Henry Warren
Joe Celko's Trees and Hierarchies in SQL for Smarties
A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming
Mastering Regular Expressions
Javascript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford
Natural Language Processing with Python
An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus by Greg Michaelson
Kubernetes Up and Running by Kelsey Hightower, Brendan Burns, and Joe Beda
Building Microservices by Sam Newman
Enterprise Integration Patterns by Gregor Hohpe and Bobby Woolf
Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann
The SRE Book by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff and Niall Richard Murphy
Mazes for Programmers by Jamis Buck
Building an Interpreter in Go, by Thorsten Ball

For music this week Erik's into The Smile's Wall of Eyes, while Mike likes Compassion by Vijay Iyer, Linda May Hah Oh, Tyshawn Sorey

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Complexity Part 2: Out of the Tar Pit

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 05:00:00 -0800

This week Mike and Erik conclude their discussion on complexity with a review of the 2006 fan-favorite paper "Out of the Tar Pit."

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The Three Faces of Complexity

Wed, 31 Jan 2024 05:00:00 -0800

As programmers, we want to control complexity and simplify our software, but these things are often hard for us to define. We know them when we see them!

This week, Mike and Erik talk about what it means to say that software is "complex" and along the way they'll offer three definitions of complexity, so the next time you're at work and commenting on pull requests and telling someone that what they've written is too complex, you can cite these random guys on this podcast!

For music this week Mike has been listening to ORQUÍDEAS by Kali Uchis while Erik is listening to SUSS, a work of ambient country music (whatever that means).

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A Short History of Deploying Software

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 05:00:00 -0800

This week Mike and Erik chat about deploying software and try to understand how it used to be and characterize what it's mostly like now. What are the best ways to deploy we've seen in our careers and what mistakes can we avoid. As is typical, there is much complaining also.

For music this week Mike mentioned Melusine by Cecile Mclorin Salvant,
where are we? by Joshua Redman and Gabrielle Cavassa, and Continuing by Tyshawn Sorey. Erik continued on his journey into the peaceful-feelings music forest with Alberta Cross's Sinking Ships.

Links

- Google Paper "Towards Modern Development of Cloud Applications"

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It's Gonna Take a Lot of Fireworks to Clean This Place Up

Wed, 17 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Mike and Erik share debugging stories...

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The Charlie Brown Property of Software: Something Bad Will Eventually Happen

Wed, 27 Dec 2023 05:00:00 -0800

In this last recording for 2023, Mike and Erik talk about embarrassing things they've done at work over the years. These are mistakes, errors, screwups and mishaps and, yes, there will be swearing.

As mentioned on this episode, we have an email now, so please get in touch with us! Send us your feedback, tips, or ruminations on the show here: podcast@picturemecoding.com.

Also, check out the PMC - 2023 Playlist on Spotify. The playlist link is here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4TdS9U2ONDC0gLyFp1Os9M?si=37adbdc3e1b34706

Erik predicts that Mike is the only person in the world who can listen to this entire thing and enjoy every song on there.

Have a happy new year, listeners! We'll be back in 2024...

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How To Swim with Sharks: An Interview with Chris Staszak

Wed, 20 Dec 2023 05:00:00 -0800

In this episode Mike and Erik talk to Chris Staszak who works for a startup investor in San Diego. Chris teaches the pair of hosts how to pitch startups to investors and also raises some of the common pitfalls in approaching funders and running a startup.

In order to test their newfound skills, Erik pitches an AI-powered coffee machine while Mike pitches a solution to the housing crisis involving tents for seniors.

If you've ever wanted to start a tech company and learn how to get some funding, this is the episode for you!

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Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Liskov

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 05:00:00 -0800

This week on the show, Mike and Erik discuss the work of Barbara Liskov. Their discussion includes a tour through types, concurrency, and distributed systems. Liskov has had an incredible career spanning 6 decades and contributed ideas that are foundational to work we do as day-to-day software developers. Hope they're up to this task!

References

Abstract Types
- “Programming with abstract data types”, Barbara Liskov, Stephen Zilles, 1974
- “A Behavioral Notion of Subtyping”, Barbara Liskov, Jeanette Wing, 1994
  - The “Liskov Substitution Principle”
Distributed Computing
- “Guardians and Actions: Linguistic Support for Robust, Distributed Programs”, Liskov, Schiefler, 1983
- “Promises: linguistic support for efficient asynchronous procedure calls in distributed systems”, Liskov, Shrira, 1988
- “Viewstamped Replication: A New Primary Copy Method to Support Highly-Available Distributed Systems”, Oki, Liskov, 1988
- “Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance”, Miguel Castro, Barbara Liskov, 2002
Wikipedia article
Quanta interview “The Architect of Modern Algorithms”

For music this week, Erik talked about Theo Katzman's Be the Wheel while Mike just fell into a hole and listened to the genre of deathcore for a week.

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Cyber Crimes in the Early Days of Cloud Computing

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 05:00:00 -0800

Today on the show we welcome Scott Aker who regales us with a tale of a seedy group of hackers breaking into cloud compute services in order to steal compute power for their own nefarious aims.

Scott started writing software in the Bay Area in the '80s and moved on to become an engineering manager overseeing operations and infrastructure, areas of activity we would today probably call "DevOps". At the time this story took place, Scott found himself in a startup that was going up against the likes of AWS, and this company's existence was potentially threatened by these hackers who were targeting their services.

What was this hacking group trying to do? Listen to Scott's story to find out.

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Is a Hot Dog a Sandwich? An Entire Episode about Language Philosophy

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 07:00:00 -0800

This week Erik asks Mike what living person he'd want to meet and then volunteers a person he would _not_ want to meet, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then Erik promises Mike that if they spend an hour talking about language philosophy, he'll never bring it up again, which Mike openly doubts. Finally, the pair try to relate this unexpected conversation to software.

This week Mike was listening to Mike Reed's The Separatist Party, while Erik was stuck on an album by Boygenius called the record.

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Kubernetes CPU Limits Got You Down? Come on down to our complaint clinic and we'll get you sorted out!

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 05:00:00 -0800

On this episode, Mike and Erik talk Kubernetes requests and limits as well as the Linux CPU scheduler. Erik complains impotently and Mike sagely breaks down the problem and then Erik complains some more. There is even some light ranting.

Oh, also, Mike talks a lot about Bach and Erik talks about Aesop Rock's new record Integrated Tech Solutions, where he raps that "we cannot be trusted with the stuff that we come up with," which, hey, that sounds just like us!

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Disconnect from the Internet: the Morris Worm Is Out of Control! (A True Crime story!)

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 05:00:00 -0800

This week on the 35th anniversary of the infamous Morris Worm, Mike and Erik look back at this sensational true crime story. Computers will be disconnected from the internet and wiped clean! Network switches may be rigged to explode!

The Morris Worm was the first widespread hack that propagated itself independently from user actions and it paved the way for the botnets of today.

Music we were listening to this week: Dawn FM by The Weeknd, Water Made Us by Jamila Woods, and No Love Lost by Year of the Knife.

Here are Some Links to Things We Talked About:

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Get in Loser, We’re Going High Frequency Trading

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 05:00:00 -0700

Have you ever wished you could trade billions of dollars in stocks and bonds from an Excel spreadsheet? Do you get impatient when your code takes longer than one microsecond to run? If so, then the exciting world of High Frequency Trading may be for you! In this episode, special guest Bob Farzin, who worked in the field for a decade, takes us on a metaphorical flume ride into the intense and bizarre world of HFT.

Also, if you're listening to this episode and wondering what the data stream from an exchange looks like, here's the message specification for "Market Data" delivered via UDP from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

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Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Lamport

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 05:00:00 -0700

This week Mike and Erik talked about Leslie Lamport's work. Lamport has been called "the father of distributed systems" and we cover Lamport clocks, Paxos, TLA+ and others of his ideas.

For music, Erik has been listening to Again by Oneohtrix Point Never while Mike has been stuck on 8-Track by Ashley Bathgate.

References

Lamport’s Personal Site (with links to all of his papers)
Quanta Interview
Changelog Recent Podcast Interview
Cloudflare leap second bug
The Poem “Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer” from Robert Hass’ Sun Under Wood

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Things We've Changed Our Minds About

Wed, 18 Oct 2023 05:00:00 -0700

You can probably learn a lot about a person by asking what they've changed their minds about. In a long career as a software engineer, you will have a lot of opportunities to change your mind. This week Mike talks about technologies he changed his mind about and Erik shares a few examples of his own.

For music this week Mike is listening to Javelin, the new Sufjan Stevens album, while Erik is moved by a Cat Power medley of “He Was a Friend of Mine” / “Shivers” because his cat Bertrand Russell died and he is grieving the loss.

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How Government Is Like Building Software Applications: An Interview with Frank Holland, a political and governmental affairs strategist.

Wed, 11 Oct 2023 04:00:00 -0700

Lithium mining! Water policy! Housing! Software development! What do these things have to do with each other? Let’s find out in this week’s episode, an interview with Frank Holland, a political and governmental affairs strategist.

This week is our first interview with an expert and in addition to random questions about lithium mining we'll also ask Frank our favorite question for an expert: "what’s surprisingly hard and surprisingly easy in your field?" Frank then completely plagiarizes this question from us and turns it back on his interlocutors.

For Music, Erik talks about Simon Joyner's, Grass, Branch and Bone while Mike brings up Scaring the Hoes by JPEGMAFIA/Danny Brown.

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Are Second Systems Inevitable

Wed, 04 Oct 2023 09:00:00 -0700

Mike and Erik talk about second systems and weigh whether we can ever even avoid the things in the first place. Acronyms loom large in this conversation, both IRS and AWS come up.

Here are some links to things that we talked about in the show:

Joel (not Jeff!) Spolsky post: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/
IRS IMF: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/tom-temin-commentary/2020/10/irs-details-strategy-for-replacing-its-most-ancient-computer-code/
AWS Oracle Migration: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-consumer-business-just-turned-off-its-final-oracle-database/
Dropbox “Sync” rewrite: https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-our-sync-engine
Twitter off of rails: https://www.infoq.com/news/2012/11/twitter-ruby-to-java/
Discord from Go to Rust: https://discord.com/blog/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to-rust
Mozilla rewrites Firefox in Rust: https://hub.packtpub.com/mozilla-engineer-shares-the-implications-of-rewriting-browser-internals-in-rust/

Music covered include Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree's, Aion, and Mitski, The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We

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Ideas We Found in the Bog

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 06:00:00 -0700

Mike and Erik talk about super powers and then discuss technologies that were around in previous decades which seemed like they were going to be a big deal and then faded away. Mike also talks about HELLMODE by Jeff Rosenstock while Erik raves about Motomami by Rosalia.

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Why Does Some Tech Get Popular?

Wed, 13 Sep 2023 06:00:00 -0700

Mike and Erik talk betamax and ask the question: why do some technologies get popular? Your podcast hosts are on the case! Mike tells the story of going to the "Professional Developer Conference" and Erik asks hard-hitting questions about what he ate there. Music for this week: Giant Sand's Center of the Universe and Karol G's Mañana Será Bonito (Bichota Season).

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Quotes tennis

Wed, 06 Sep 2023 10:00:00 -0700

This week Mike and Erik play a game called "quotes tennis" where they try to trip each other up with quotes from the field that the other struggles to disagree with. It's a battle of wits: do you know your opponent well enough to challenge them?

Music discussed includes: “Bummer Year” by the band Good Looks and "Where Are All the Nice Girls?" by Any Trouble.

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Vibes Driven Development

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 05:00:00 -0700

Mike and Erik discuss Hillel Wayne's 3-part blog piece titled “Are We Really Engineers?” Erik tries to convince Mike that we can throw caution to the wind and design software based on vibes alone.

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How Not to Hire Software Engineers

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 06:00:00 -0700

Mike and Erik talk about the worst interview questions you can ask software engineers and then ponder the interview process: why's it so terrible interviewing for software positions? They'll try to figure out how bad it can get.

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Can Software Be Built On An Assembly Line?

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 02:00:00 -0700

Inspired by an New York Times article on turning the production of Hollywood writing content into an assembly line, and also by Simon Winchester’s book The Perfectionists, Mike and Erik discuss if there is a way to build software analogous to the factory assembly line.

What would it take to build an assembly line for software? Who would ever want such a thing?

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The Open Source Software Renaissance Is Going to End Someday

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 16:00:00 -0700

The revolution in open source software over the last 30 years is akin to the Italian Renaissance: ideas spread like wildfire and this creates a virtuous incubation space for more ideas and innovation. Open source software and package managers have made it incredibly easy for software developers to rapidly share their ideas and for other developers to consume and rapidly accumulate huge amounts of code. Mike and Erik discuss the evolution of software engineering as a discipline that consumes open-source software and wonder ruminate on what will happen when this frothy period ends.

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And Gravity Drowned Too: the software skeptics take on chatGPT

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 08:00:00 -0700

Mike Mull brings up some of the skepticism he's encountered recently around chatGPT. Erik and Mike discuss the hype around LLMs and whether the expectations for it are valid or misplaced. The pair also talk about Godflesh and Killer Mike.

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