Episodes
101
Latest episode
Jun 2026
Language
EN-US
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/
For the 100th episode of Picture Me Coding we talk about numbers. Mike talks about his favorite numbers, Erik talks about his favorite ports, and we discuss the surprising phenomenon of Benford's Law.Send us Fan Mail
This week we were joined by our friend Doug Burke, who runs a company and has been working on his "digital life workout partner", a voice-activated LLM tool. Doug's story is interesting because he does not have a background in software development, and we wanted to learn more about what he's building.Send us Fan Mail
In this episode we invite back our friend Bob Farzin to discuss our personal experiences with using teams of agents to write software, and we try to parse out the experiences we're seeing on the interwebs, including Steve Yegge's GasTown and Wes McKinney's discussion of agentic development in the context of Brooks's _Mythical Man Month_."Introducing Beads: A coding agent memory system"Welcome to Gas Town — Steve Yegge's original essayThe Future of Coding Agents — Yegge's follow-upGas Town on GitHub — The actual toolHow to Think About Gas Town — Steve Klabnik's analysisA Day in Gas Town — DoltHub's practical walkthroughGas Town, Beads, and the Rise of Agentic Development — Software Engineering Daily interview with YeggeTop Coding Agents 2025 — Benched.ai comparison guide[April 8, Wes McKinney] AI Agents, The Mythical Agent Month, My Wild AI Coding SetupSend us Fan Mail
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. Access Path Selection paper (PDF)A Conversation with Pat Selinger — ACM Queue (2006)Database Dialogue with Pat Selinger — CACM (2008)Pat Selinger Speaks Out — SIGMOD Interview (PDF)Patricia Selinger — IBM HistorySystem R: Database Research Retrospective — TODS 1981Graefe, G. (1995). The Cascades Framework for Query Optimization Leis et al. (2015). How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really? PVLDB Vol. 9 — introduces the Join Order Benchmark (JOB) and empirically audits modern optimizers.Send us Fan Mail
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 operations, and doing stressful operations stuff. In short, he has stories and he was kind enough to come on the show and share them with us!Send us Fan Mail
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 results that overturned a 40 year old conjecture on the most efficient way to insert items.Scientists Find Optimal Balance of Data Storage and Time | Quanta Magazine[2111.00602] On the Optimal Time/Space Tradeoff for Hash TablesSpeeding Up Hash Tables | Communications of the ACMhttps://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/1734714.1734729[2109.04548] Iceberg Hashing: Optimizing Many Hash-Table Criteria at OnceModern Dictionaries by Raymond HettingerFOCS 2024 3B Optimal Bounds for Open Addressing Without ReorderingOptimal Bounds for Open Addressing Without ReorderingSend us Fan Mail
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 of interesting talks and sessions.Scale confScale-network repoErik Reinert’s Youtube ChannelDocketBMO and bmo-agent-setupCline injection attack Adnan KhanDouglas Comer - WikipediaEDB PostgresAdvent of Computing PodcastSend us Fan Mail
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 plots, but also how these books touch on AI, consciousness, and neurodivergence. Galaxy’s Edge Interviews Martha Wells | Author Interview | Sci Fi BlogI didn’t know how non-neurotypical I was until MurderbotWe’re Light-Years Away from True Artificial Intelligence, Says Murderbot Author Martha Wells | Scientific AmericanMartha Wells' next 'Murderbot Diaries' book is 'the family roadtrip from hell on Ringworld' (interview) | SpaceSend us Fan Mail
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.Igor Sysoev - WikipediaFree Software Interview with SysoevHistory of ApacheHow Sysoev Ended Up at RamblerSend us Fan Mail
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.pdfFUN 2026The New Turing OmnibusSend us Fan Mail
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