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
98 episodes
Patricia Selinger and the Birth of Query Optimization
In this episode we attempt to explain query optimization and where it came from. In particular we discuss Patricia Selinger's 1979 SIGMOD paper Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System.
"Big-O Ops": An Interview with Kyle Risse
This week Mike and Erik are joined by Kyle Risse. Erik met Kyle at Scale 23x in Pasadena this year while volunteering for the Tech Team. Kyle has a ton of experience in the field working on networks, infrastructure, linux server ope...
Hash Tables
Some recent articles about research on hash tables made us realize we probably didn't know enough about hash tables, one of the fundamental data structures in the biz. We talk about the history of hashing and hash tables, and some recent ...
Scale 23x
We give a report of our experiences at the 23rd version of the Southern California Linux Expo (Scale 23x) in Pasadena. Erik was a volunteer in the network group this year, so we have some behind the scenes stories in addition to summaries...
Talking Murderbot with Amy Salley
In this episode we're joined again by Amy Salley, cohost of the Hugo, Girl! podcast, to help us discuss the Murderbot series of books by Martha Wells. We discuss our favorite characters and p...
The History of NGINX
This episode we look into the history of the web server NGINX and of web servers more generally. We play myth buster and try to investigate the widespread story that NGINX arose from a need to scale porn sites.
Recreational Programming
Does anyone program just for fun anymore? This episode we're talking about recreational programming, with a focus on A.K. Dewdney's Computer Recreations column from the 1980s. Also, taco shops.
Functional Programming: Are We There Yet?
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Scheme, we decided to talk about functional programming: what it is, how's it going these days, and does it still matter in the era of AI. Although there's been 70 years of research into FP it still ha...
The Infinite Drive: S3 and Cloud Object Storage
For our first episode of 2026 (and Season 4), we're talking about Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). S3 is probably the biggest cloud service, or at least we think it is, because it is super freakin' huge. We talk about how it's ...
Salesforce and Low-Code with Kyle Willcox
In this episode we discuss working in the Salesforce environment, and low-code platforms generally, with software engineer Kyle Willcox. Kyle's dev journey from a CS degree at UNC Wilmington to Salesforce dev to web app developer reveals ...
Tech News Roundup: Fighting Robots with Poetry
For the holiday we're doing another news roundup, although it's mostly about data centers and AI to be honest.
Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs): How To Survive the Zombie Apocalypse
Erik became fascinated with CRDTs while working on a project, so we're talking about how they work, how they simplify some distributed systems, and how they might protect you from zombies.
The Turing Test
This episode is about the Turing Test, and Alan Turing's original description of the test in Computing Machinery and Intelligence. We also discuss a recent work by two UCSD researchers that claims that current LLMs pass the Turin...
Ubiquitous Computing
In 1988 Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC coined the term "ubiquitous computing", and in 1991 he spelled out the particulars of this concept in a Scientific American article called "The Computer for the 21st Century". We discuss whether or not We...
The Two Problems With Regular Expressions
This week we're talking about regular expressions, aka, regex. These are a favorite tool of programmers, but they also have a dark side. Do regex cause more problems than they solve? Can they be evil? We also discuss the...
The History of Unix, Part 2: Unix not Eunuchs
A continuation of our discussion about the history of Unix and its development at Bell Labs. Erik wonders why Unix became successful and which features were novel and important. Mike just wants to talk about cool pranks Group 1127 pulled ...
The History of Unix: Part 1
This week we talk about the early days of Unix, primarily based on Brian Kernighan's book Unix: A History and Memoir, about his days at Bell Labs and the cre...
Space, Time, and Squishy Pebbles
This week we dip our toes into the river of theoretical computer science and immediately drown. We discuss the amazing and surprising result of researcher Ryan Williams about how space is a more powerful resource in computing than time.
Databases Part II: No SQL, No Problem
This week we try to make sense of what were once called "NoSQL" databases, focusing on the early entries into the field like Bigtable, Dynamo and Cassandra. We try to explain how they differ from prior database systems and what motivated ...
Vibe Coding: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
This week we host our friends Bobak Farzin and Kevin Fahey to talk about their experiences building applications with AI tools. Both Bob and Kevin are very tech savvy in different ways, but neither is a full-time software developer. ...
Friends and Relations
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 syst...
Shoulders of Giants: Jim Gray
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, a...
Language, Meaning, and Functional Programming with Matt Teichman
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 teac...