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.
Produced by Neiko Will.
Logo and artwork by Jon Whitmire - https://www.whitmirejon.com/
Reach out to us here: podcast@picturemecoding.com
Episodes
47 episodes
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
The XZ Apocalypse
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, ther...
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Season 2
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Episode 30
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45:03
AI Code Generators: Are We Going to Be Out of Work Someday?!
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 ...
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Season 2
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Episode 29
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55:51
The Ethical Engineer
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 engineer...
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Season 2
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Episode 28
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53:13
Season 2 Bonus Episode: The Way of the Naturalist
Mike's out this week so Erik went into his backyard and talked about famous Naturalists while birds chirped in the background. It's short and unexpected!
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Season 2
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Episode 0
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16:37
Becoming an Engineer: the “Build or Buy” Question
It’s a very old software engineering question: should we build the thing or buy the thing? Fred Brooks says "you should always buy." This may even be an existential question: my role is to build things, not to buy them,
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Season 2
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Episode 27
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54:05
What the Hell is Edge Computing?
In which Mike and Erik try to understand what "edge computing" means and whether it's meaningful or marketing speak. The topic comes up because Mike decides to run an LLM on his laptop and it turns out that when he's doing this he's participati...
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Season 2
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Episode 26
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37:41
Let's Talk Technical Books!
This week Mike and Erik dig into their bookshelves to find and discuss their favorite technical books. As per usual, Mike references a bunch of stuff Erik has never heard of but one new thing this week is that Erik tries hard not to piss off Ra...
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Season 2
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Episode 25
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43:17
Complexity Part 2: Out of the Tar Pit
This week Mike and Erik conclude their discussion on complexity with a review of the 2006 fan-favorite paper "Out of the Tar Pit."
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Season 2
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Episode 4
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1:12:26
The Three Faces of Complexity
As programmers, we want to control complexity and simplify our software, but these things are often hard for us to define. We know them when we see them! This week, Mike and Erik talk about what it means to say that software is "complex...
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Season 2
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Episode 3
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1:08:23