Picture Me Coding

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...

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, sticke...

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 episi...

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 ). Send us Fan Mail

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...

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. Send us Fan Mail

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 Send us Fan...

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 Wa...

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 bus...

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 y...

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 the...

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 “ Inside Crowdstrike's Dep...

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...

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 pa...

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...

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: The Composable Codex | Voltron Data On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules (1972) Com...

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 engineeri...

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 architect...

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 goin...

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 attr...

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 &apo...

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 talke...

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 schem...

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 fu...

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&a...