
Picture Me Coding
Picture Me Coding is a music podcast about software. Each week your hosts Erik Aker and Mike Mull take on topics in the software world and they are sometimes joined by guests from other fields who arrive with their own burning questions about technology.
Email us at: podcast@picturemecoding.com
Patreon: https://patreon.com/PictureMeCoding
You can also pick up a Picture Me Coding shirt, mug, or stickers at our Threadless shop: https://picturemecoding.threadless.com/designs
Logo and artwork by Jon Whitmire - https://www.whitmirejon.com/
Episodes
71 episodes
Sailing to Byzantium
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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Season 3
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Episode 70
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58:26

Programming for Fun with David Beazley
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 crea...
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Season 3
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Episode 69
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1:08:46

Leslie Lamport and the Free Software Movement
In this SCaLE wrap-up Mike and Erik discuss the final day of the conference and talks by Denver Gingerich called "
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Season 3
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Episode 68
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44:58

Mike and Erik Go to Pasadena!
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...
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Season 3
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Episode 67
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1:00:06

Simulating Distributed Systems with David Morrison
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
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Season 3
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Episode 66
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55:39

Point Break and the Spirit of Devops
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 corporation...
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Season 3
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Episode 65
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1:22:30

"Where are all the elders?"
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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Season 3
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Episode 64
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1:06:44

Origin Story: Part 1 - Mike Fails at Being a Chemist
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...
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Season 3
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Episode 63
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51:02

The Failure Modes of Agile with Dr Junade Ali
In Episode 40 “Agile Trashers Part 2: The Trashening” we mentioned a study titled “
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Season 3
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Episode 62
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1:08:06

Do Programmers Need to Know Anything About Computers?
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 tel...
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Season 3
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Episode 61
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1:02:56

The Story of the CAP Theorem Part 2
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 Gilber...
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Season 3
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Episode 60
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1:07:41

The Story of the CAP Theorem Part 1
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...
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Season 3
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Episode 59
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57:52

Gleaming the Lambda Cube with Nathan Mull
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 ...
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Season 3
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Episode 58
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1:26:13

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Frances Allen and Compiler Optimizations
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 s...
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Season 3
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Episode 57
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55:15

We Read the News and Everyone’s On Drugs
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 ...
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Season 2
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Episode 56
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1:10:36

More Favorites: Radix Trees, Kadane's, Raft Leader Election
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 ...
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Season 2
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Episode 55
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56:13

Our Favorite Algorithms: FFTs and Hyperloglogs!
Mike wanted to talk about our favorite algorithms this week, so we covered a few:- Fast Fourier Transforms- HyperloglogSome references are below:- Article in Communications of the ACM:
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Season 2
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Episode 54
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50:06

Annoying Everybody with Our Questions about Timezones
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 ...
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Season 2
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Episode 53
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51:41

Into the Well of Formal Verifications
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...
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Season 2
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Episode 52
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59:07

"Some of the most valuable people I work with are really just politicians"
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 a...
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Season 2
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Episode 51
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47:55

Software Engineering Management with Randy Edwards
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.
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Season 2
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Episode 50
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40:37

Mike and Erik Vie for the Nobel Prize in Literature
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-mem...
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Season 2
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Episode 49
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47:48

Nostalgia for the 90s Internet
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&nbs...
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Season 2
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Episode 48
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51:04

Origin Story: How Erik Became a Programmer
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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Season 2
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Episode 47
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58:31

620 Million Years Ago the Workday Was Only 6 Hours Long
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 dis...
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Season 2
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Episode 46
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56:43
