Picture Me Coding

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, wha...

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 foun...

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 archi...

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. Send us Fan Mail

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! Send us Fan Mail

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. Watching These Humanoid Robots Try to Run a Half Marathon Is Hilarious and Bizarre Protecting NATS and the integrity of open...

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/ Send us Fan Mail

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 Some constraints and tradeoffs in the design of network communications | Proceedings of the fifth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles Notes on Data Base Operating Systems...

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...

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 #Uppb...

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) -...

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 Und...

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 c...

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?"  Send us Fan Mail

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. Send us Fan Mail

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,...

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! Send us Fan...

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 Databas...

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@pictureme...

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 o...

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!  Send us Fan Mail

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...

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 Send us Fan Mail

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 Send us Fan Mail

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...