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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/
92 Episodes
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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. https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/recreational-cs.pdf FUN 2026 The New Turing Omnibus Send us a text
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 hasn't become mainstream. Will AI reverse or accelerate that trend? TIOBE Index The Next 700 Programming Languages An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus Send us a text
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 built, how it works, and how people use it. Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3How AWS S3 Achieves 1 Petabyte Per Second on Hard Disk DrivesUsing Lightweight Formal Methods to Validate a Key-Value Storage Node in Amazon S3Pictur...
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 a lot about both the benefits and pitfalls of working in isolated environments like Salesforce. Kyle is also a sponsored skimboarder and came to California to ride the surf, so he and Erik nerd out on weather and waves. Low Code Exile Skimboards ...
For the holiday we're doing another news roundup, although it's mostly about data centers and AI to be honest. Inside the Data Centers... Korean Data Center Oracle Data Center Debt Cloudflare Outage Rust Adoption Drives Android Memory Safety Bugs Below 20% Adversarial Poetry Send us a text
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. Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types A Comprehensive Study of Convergent and Commutative Replicated Data Types Counters - Aviral Goel Send us a text
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 Turing Test. Computing Machinery and Intelligence Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test Pragmatic Engineer Podcast with Armin Ronacher Send us a text
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 Weiser's vision was achieved. It's hard to argue that computers are now all around us, but it doesn't seem like they've faded into the background as Weiser hoped. The Computer for the 21st Century Designing Calm Technology Toward Ubiquitous Operatin...
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 origins of regular expressions, formal language theory, and finite automata. Now You've Got Two Problems XKCD: Regular Expressions Representation of Events in Nerve Nets and Finite Automata OWASP: ReDOS Send us a text
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 off. Unix: A History and Memoir - Brian Kernighan The Unix Time-Sharing System Send us a text
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 creation of Unix and C by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and other luminaries. https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/dp/1695978552 https://dsf.berkeley.edu/cs262/unix.pdf https://cs3210.cc.gatech.edu/r/unix6.pdf Send us a text
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. For Algorithms, Memory Is a Far More Powerful Resource Than Time | WIRED https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17779 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JuWdXrCmWg Send us a text
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 system for storing structured data since the 1980s, and is still the most popular type of system to use for applications and business reporting. We discuss their history, what makes them relational, and our experiences with some of the better known commercial and op...
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, and D of ACID. Gray, an avid hiker and sailor, disappeared in 2007 while sailing out of San Francisco to the Farallon Islands, and no trace of him was ever found. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/behind-the-code-with-jim-gray/ http...
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 teaches Linguistics, Philosophy, and Computer Science at the University of Chicago and he also works on open-source software for the University of Chicago library, including an interesting OCaml project used by archivists called Attachment Converter. Thanks to our newest Patreon subscribers: Ralph Minderhou...
In this episode we talk to Jonathan Whitmire who designed the Picture Me Coding swag, logos, artwork (and t-shirts and stickers and coffee mugs!). He gives us a rundown on what it's like working alongside developers and what we talk about when we talk about UX. Send us a text
This week Mike and Erik talk about the local-first software movement. There's a pretty cool paper about it from 2019 called "Local-First Software:You Own Your Data, in spite of the Cloud", and there's also a podcast, a company, and various projects. Come get inspired to build stuff! Send us a text
Today Mike and Erik are joined by John Benson, an attorney with a background in digital forensics who has been at the forefront of integrating LLMs into legal practice. The conversation ranges over the practice of law, digital security, and AI Find out more about John Benson's work here: https://john-benson.com/ Send us a text
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 Some constraints and tradeoffs in the design of network communications | Proceedings of the fifth ACM symposium on Operating systems principlesNotes on Data Base Operating SystemsReaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults | Journal of the ACMThe Byzantine Generals Problem - Micr...
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 created his memorable conference talks and innovative programming classes. We also touch on music, theater, academic life, and, of course, Dave's No Doubt tribute band. Show Notes: https://www.dabeaz.com/Sans-IO (https://sans-io.readthedocs.io/)Rust elev...
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