Programming Throwdown

The best part of hosting Programming Throwdown is reading emails from people who listened to this show before they had any coding experience and went on to land jobs in tech. Thanks so much for inspiring us with your stories. My second favorite part of hosting the show is hearing about so many awesome programming tools and resources, often when they are just starting out. DeepCode is one of these amazing resources. DeepCode is a static analysis tool that looks at your code and, using AI trained on all code in github (!!!), finds common mistakes and offers suggestions on how to resolve. I am a heavy user of static analysis tools, and yet DeepCode was still able to find real issues in one of my python projects above and beyond pylint and mypy. Best of all, it's completely free to use for open source projects! Give it a shot and let us know what you think! Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2020/02/episode-99-squashing-bugs-using-ai-and.html

Hey all! Patrick and I are so lucky to be spending another year with you all. In this episode, we answer a bunch of listener questions and give away some great prizes. Thanks to all of our listeners for helping us bring the power of programming to so many people. We have some super exciting content coming up in 2020, so stay tuned!

Most developers that I know use CircleCI every single day. It's both an honor and an amazing experience to learn about continuous integration and continuous deployment from Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI. We also cover a range of topics from staying motivated to working remotely. If you ever plan on writing software with a team of folks, you need to give this episode a listen! Also, I'm super excited to announce our partnership with Educative! Educative is an interactive way to learn how to code. Check out educative.io/ProgrammingThrowdown to get a 20% discount! Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2019/11/episode-96-continuous-integration-with.html

Everyone has used programs that talk to a server: Uber, podcast apps, etc.. Most people also know about peer-to-peer applications such as bittorrent, but did you know that video chat programs such as Skype and Google Hangouts are also peer-to-peer? You can even write your own peer-to-peer applications to communicate or share information without the need for a server to relay everything. In this episode, we sit down with Sean DuBois, creator of Pion, to talk about WebRTC: a specification and set of tools for peer-to-peer communication over the internet. We also discuss Pion, an implementation of WebRTC that you can embed in almost any program you write. Happy Hacking! Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2019/10/episode-95-webrtc-with-sean-dubois.html

What actually happens when you type something in the search bar at the top of etsy.com and hit enter? This awesome interview with Liangjie Hong, Director of Data Science and Machine Learning, answers that question all the way from the philosophical (what should we show first?) to the inner workings (what is a reverse index and how does it work?). We also dive into what it's like to intern at a tech company. Happy Hacking! Show Notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2019/10/episode-94-search-at-etsy.html

Every interview we do is such an exciting and unique experience. Patrick and I had great pleasure in hosting Andy and Dave, authors of "The Pragmatic Programmer". We pick their brains on a variety of topics including rapid prototyping, the 10x engineer, tech leadership, and how to get your first coding job. Their new book, "The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition" comes out today! I hope that this interview inspires you all to grab their new book; it will definitely be a book-of-the-show for me. Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2019/09/episode-93-journey-to-programming.html

Surprise! Weekend episode :-D Every piece of code you write is either going to be for computer-to-computer interaction, or for human-machine interaction. For the latter, how do you make your interface easy to understand and use? Erik Kennedy, independent UX/UI designer, dives into user interface (UI) design. We cover the best tools for making quick prototypes, common design mistakes, and his journey from software engineer to freelance designer. This episode is a great way to get excited about design and has plenty of resources for first-time designers. Check out the show notes for details! Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2019/07/episode-92-basics-of-ui-design-for.html

Hey all! Since episode 82, we received a ton of email asking for more info on functional programming (FP). To cover FP in great detail we are thrilled to chat with Adam Bell. Adam is the host of the Corecursive podcast and an engineer with many years of experience in FP. In this episode, we dive into what FP is all about, when it's useful, static/dynamic typing (our favorite topic), and other areas of FP. Thanks again for all of your emails and support. It is a treasure to hear your inspirational stories and we are so greatful to be creating content for over eight years. Happy hacking! Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2019/06/episode-91-functional-programming-with.html

Hey all!! Ask and ye shall receive! Someone in the Programming Throwdown discord suggested that we cover terminals and shells, so here we are! Despite sounding simple on the surface, there's decades of complexity around terminal emulators and system shells. Patrick and I unpack this and more in today's episode! Thanks so much for all of your emails and support on Patreon! It's your enthusiasm and financial support that enable us to teach so many people, and we are eternally grateful for your support! Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2019/05/episode-90-terminals-and-shells.html

Hey all!! Today we are sitting down with Jerome Hardaway. Jerome is an Air Force Veteran and the founder of Vets Who Code: a non-profit dedicated to training Veterans in web development and connecting Veterans to hiring managers around the World. Whether you have served in the military or not, this inspiring podcast gives us all a glimpse into the boots of someone who rotated into a career in software development after school, and is full of great advice for newcomers to the field. Learn more about Vets Who Code, including how to donate to the cause, in the show notes below! We have more interviews in the future, but the next two months will just be Patrick and I. Keep sending us emails with topics that you want us to cover! Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2019/04/episode-89-from-combat-to-code.html

If you use ASCII encoding, the entire Oxford dictionary is about 5 million bytes. A single 4K image contains 25 million bytes. If you watch a 4K video running at 60 frames-per-second, over 300 dictionaries worth of data are going through your tv every second. Let that sink in for a moment. One of the most magical areas of engineering is image processing. Everything from the way the images are stored to advanced AI techniques like face recognition have mind-boggling complexity. In this episode, we scratch the surface of image processing, but if an area from this show interested you and you would like to learn more, let us know! Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2019/04/episode-88-image-processing.html

While the web is one of the easiest platforms for deploying software, it can also be one of the trickiest to debug. People have many different browsers, and some have plugins or settings that restrict functionality. It may be extremely difficult to reproduce errors on your development machine. As a result, we want to discover as many errors as possible before we launch a new site. With node.js and people running javascript on the server, static checks become even more important. Enter typescript! Typescript is a language that transpiles to javascript, but along the way it adds type checking and advanced javascript features. After checking the types, typescript produces javascript that can run in almost any browser. Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2019/03/episode-87-typescript.html

Happy New Year! Today we are sitting down with Stephen Wolfram, inventor of Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, and Wolfram Language! In this super interesting episode, Stephen talks us through his journey as a mathematician, software architect, and language inventor. It was truly an honor to talk to Stephen and hear about his decades of experience. Check this interview out and give us feedback! Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2019/01/episode-86-wolfram-language-and.html

Hey all! This is our annual holiday show! We give away prizes and talk about random news stories :-D. Thanks to everyone who chatted with us on Discord, and looking forward to a super exciting 2019! I'll be sending an email to all prize winners later today! Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2019/01/episode-85-holiday-party.html

Hey all! How do you find and triage bugs on other people's machines when they don't have the source code (or the knowledge to build it)? That's what we explain in today's episode! It's one of the topics that's rarely spoken about but extremely important to get right before shipping any software product. Happy hacking! This is the last episode before our Christmas special! If you are a patron, make sure Patreon has your up to date address so we can mail prizes! If you aren't on Patreon, sign up before our Christmas show to be entered in our raffle!! Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/12/episode-84-customer-bug-handling.html

Hey all! First of all, sorry for the delay in publishing October's episode. There are some pretty intense wildfires close to where we live, but it looks like things are getting under control. Huge thanks to all the firefighters! In this episode Patrick and I talk about teaching kids to code! We discuss how we learned to code and what are ways to build logic and reasoning skills in kids of all ages. Also we talk about ways to get kids excited about the fundamentals behind coding and solving problems. Check out the show notes here: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/11/episode-83-teaching-kids-to-code.html Do you have any good resources for teaching coding to kids? Let us know in the comments and we'll mention it in the next episode! Also this is the last chance to become a Patreon subscriber if you want to be entered in this year's annual give-a-away episode which will happen sometime in December! Last year we had a lot of trouble mailing the tokens to everyone, but our gears are turning around gift ideas for this year. Either way, a few lucky patrons will get free t-shirts! Become a patron here: https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown Happy Hacking!

Hey everyone! This episode is an absolutely fascinating interview with Jonas Bonér, creator of Akka. We dive into reactive programming, the actor model, and the Akka toolkit. Jonas also describes his journey as a developer that led him to create Akka and found Lightbend with Martin Odersky, the creator of Scala. Jonas brings a ton of in-depth technical discussion, so buckle up! :-) Show Notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/09/episode-82-reactive-programming-and.html

Hey all! Since setting up the #questions channel in discord, a lot of you have written some phenominal and thought-provoking questions both there and via email, so this is a great time to go back through our favorites and answer them in a Mailbag episode! Thanks for your support by checking out our Books of the Show links and our audible and patreon links! I was able to send out all the domestic Christmas gifts (email me if you haven't gotten yours!) but we could not ship them Internationally. I'm still looking for a solution there, and will keep you posted! Show Notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/09/episode-81-2018-mailbag.html

What is a thread/process? How can you speed up a program that requires a lot of compute resources? How can you have a single machine serve web pages to 100s of people, some of whom have slow connections? Patrick and I answer these questions on today's show: Concurrency! We have also set up a discord channel! We will be posting news stories as we find them and also record the show live! Check out our channel here: https://discord.gg/r4V2zpC Show Notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/07/episode-80-concurrency.html

Sunday is a non-traditional day for a new episode and this is definitely a non-traditional episode! Today we are talking about Technical Arguments. We cover the most common arguments/debates you will have on the job as a software engineer and how to make the best arguments to reach the best decisions with the least amount of friction. Patrick and I tried not to inject our own opinions, but it's hard not to add our two cents (yes, spaces really are better). This episode is the first of a potential new genre of show, where we talk about non-technical facets of being a software engineer. Listen to this episode and report back on whether we should do more shows like this one! If you want us to stick to our existing formats (technical topic and interview) let us know that too! Show Notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/07/episode-79-technical-arguments.html