This week we present the first of two episodes on dynamic memory allocation.  We were going to talk about garbage collection, but realized we should probably discuss allocators first.  Turns...

Today, we’re excited to share that AlphaEvolve is generally available (GA). AE is a code optimization and discovery agent built on Gemini that helps solve some of the hardest business problems organiz...

This episode started with the question: who first had the idea to connect computers together to make a network?  We explore JCR Licklider's ideas about an  "Intergalactic Network", some of t...

In this episode we discuss a couple of recent papers on just-in-time development and agentic systems and how we think they suggest trends that will affect software development for years to come. ...

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...

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 doe...

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 inter...

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 Man...

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 clai...

Critically analysing the Turing test.

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 ...

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...

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 plot...

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 s...

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 b...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 CenterOracle Data Center DebtCloudflare Outag...

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-Fre...

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 clai...

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 ...

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? ...

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 ...

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...

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...

This week we try to make sense of what were once called "NoSQL" databases, focusing on the early entries into the field like Bigtable, Dynamo and Cassandra.  We try to explain how they differ fro...

This week we host our friends Bobak Farzin and Kevin Fahey to talk about their experiences building applications with AI tools.  Both Bob and Kevin are very tech savvy in different ways, but neit...

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 data...

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 transacti...

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 Linguist...

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 alongs...

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...

Mike and Erik analyze the tech news again.  The AIs are hallucinating, but gamers are too because of Game Transfer Phenomenon.  The Luddites are back for what's likely a futile effort to kee...

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 th...

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 ...

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 prog...

In this SCaLE wrap-up Mike and Erik discuss the final day of the conference and talks by Denver Gingerich called "What happens when hardware puts software freedom first? We built a router to find out"...

This week we are on location in the city of Pasadena, CA for Scale 22x, the Socal Linux Expo. We talked to people and went to talks and drank a lot of coffee. We do a debrief of some of the amazing wo...