Programming Throwdown

Jerome Hardaway joins Patrick and Jason to talk about his path from the Air Force into software development and the work he is doing through Vets Who Code. The episode shares practical advice for newcomers to the field and a firsthand look at helping veterans transition into tech careers.

If you use ASCII encoding, the entire Oxford dictionary is about 5 million bytes. A single 4K image contains 25 million bytes.

While the web is one of the easiest platforms for deploying software, it can also be one of the trickiest to debug. People have many different browsers, and some have plugins or settings that restrict functionality.

Happy New Year! Today we are sitting down with Stephen Wolfram, inventor of Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, and Wolfram Language!

Hey all! This is our annual holiday show!

Hey all! How do you find and triage bugs on other people's machines when they don't have the source code (or the knowledge to build it)?

Patrick and Jason discuss how to teach kids to code by building logic, reasoning, and problem-solving skills at different ages. They share how they learned themselves and offer ideas for getting children excited about the fundamentals behind programming.

Hey everyone! This episode is an absolutely fascinating interview with Jonas Bonér, creator of Akka.

Hey all! I was able to send out all the domestic Christmas gifts (email me if you haven't gotten yours!) but we could not ship them Internationally.

What is a thread/process? How can you speed up a program that requires a lot of compute resources?

Sunday is a non-traditional day for a new episode and this is definitely a non-traditional episode! Today we are talking about Technical Arguments.

Web services are for much more than building websites: they are one of the most common techniques for passing information among programs. Creating a web API for your program is a great way to access it from a browser, another program, or a mobile app.

Julia may be the most requested language we have ever received on the show, so Patrick and I took some time of the past few weeks to get familiar with Julia and share our findings. Overall, it's a really slick language that has data and process parallelism built into the language, so it will run on many threads or even many machines without having to design a communication system by hand.

Writing documentation is an art and there aren't many cut-and-dry rules that will guarantee the right documentation quality. In this episode Patrick and I chat about our lessons learned and also cover a bunch of ways to document and write self-documenting code.

Ever want to build your own robot? We explain how to do this using Arduino!

Today we discuss Cryptocurrency and Smart Contracts with Amy Wan, CEO of Sagewise. Amy has a legal background and combines this with expertise in cryptocurrency, blockchain, ICOs, and smart contracts.

How can you use all of the computers in your lab/office at the same time to speed up tasks? Today we talk with Dori Exterman, CTO of Incredibuild, about parallel computing and the awesome tool Incredibuild has created that can run any multi-process program on several machines.

How can you maintain a separate version of your app/site in all langauges and locales? How do you handle right-to-left text, various currencies, and a bunch of languages with non-ascii characters?

Today, we are going to talk about... office space! Not the hilarious 1999 movie directed by Mike Judge, but modern office spaces for engineers and developers.

Did you know that there was a programming language co-invented by a consortium of government offices and top businesses (at the time)? Today we talk about that language: COBOL, and also discuss the mainframe computers of that era that ran COBOL.

Today we chat with Mark Engelberg about his background in software engineering and game design.

Patrick and Jason chat with John Sonmez about the soft skills that matter most in a software career, including communication, self-motivation, learning effectively, and negotiation. The episode focuses on the non-technical habits that can have an outsized impact on long-term growth.

Today we explain how cryptocurrency works and why it is possible to buy and sell electonic currency.

In this episode we explain how code reviews work and why they are so important.

In this episode we interview Josh and Adam from Kobiton. They describe the challenges with releasing a mobile app for many platforms, and how Kobiton allows one to test their app on many devices in the cloud.