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
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
55 episodes
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
Software In Pop Culture with Amy Salley
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 fic...
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1:20:10
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Excel
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
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Season 2
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Episode 44
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58:42
The Best I Ever Saw
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 exp...
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Season 2
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Episode 43
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51:20
The Value of Software with Irina Telyukova
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 pap...
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Season 2
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Episode 42
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54:53
Software News Roundup (with No AI news! (sorta))
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 podc...
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Season 2
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Episode 41
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52:46
Agile Trashers Part 2: the Trashening
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:
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Season 2
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Episode 40
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52:40
Agile Trashers Part 1: a pre-history
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 res...
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Season 2
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Episode 39
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37:29
The Nine Fallacies of Distributed Computing
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...
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Season 2
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Episode 38
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53:56
Hidden Vibrations of the Universe: Compositionality
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 unde...
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Season 1
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Episode 37
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50:00
The Burnouts of the Century
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 fre...
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Season 2
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Episode 36
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50:16
Monoliths vs Microservices
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!
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Season 2
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Episode 35
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59:31
The End of the Fullstack Developer Era
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-sta...
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Season 2
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Episode 34
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53:04
Why Rust?
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 a...
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Season 2
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Episode 33
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57:44
Dijkstra's Diss Track
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 ep...
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Season 1
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Episode 32
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30:56
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Edsger Dijkstra
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 lar...
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Season 2
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Episode 31
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48:44