Picture Me Coding

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...

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...

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. Send us Fan Mail

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. Send us Fan Mail

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...

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 (PD...

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! Send us Fan Mail

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 | Quant...

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. Scale conf Scale-network repo Erik Reinert’s Youtube Channel Docket BMO and  bmo-agent-setup Cline injection attack Adnan Kha...

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 M...

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 Send us Fan Mail

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 Send us Fan Mail

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 Pr...

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. Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3 How AWS S3 Achieves 1 Petabyte Per Second...

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...

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 Send us Fan Mail

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 Send us Fan Mail

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 Send us Fan Mail

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 fa...

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...

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 Send us Fan Mail

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 Send us...

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 Send us Fan...

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 Decentralize...

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, an...