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
60 episodes
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
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