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 discussion.Some Links- Distributed Systems textbook by Marten van Steen- Wikipedia on ΔT (timekeeping)- Wikipedia on the leap second- Keeping Time at NISTSend us a text

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 fiction and we discussed works such as:A recently published short story by Naomi Kritzer called "Better Living Through Algorithms" (read it here).2001: A Space Odyssey the 1968 Kubrick filmWar Games the 1983 filmNeuromancer by William GibsonLinks!Hugo Girl Episode ListBetter Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer : Clarkesworld MagazineVox article about the latest chatGPT model engaging in deception.Mike and Erik's Favorite Episodes of Hugo GirlDuneMoby DickNeuromancerSend us a text

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 in the high-frequency-trading episode about trading billions of dollars of swaps from an Excel spreadsheet. We spent the whole hour talking about Excel: is it a no-code platform? Is it a programming language? Is it a database? Should we build the whole business on top of it?If you're an immense fan of Excel like Mike is, then join us this hour as we tackle this crazy tool that contains the most widely used functional programming language.Some Linkshttps://phys.org/news/2024-08-business-spreadsheets-critical-errors.htmlAdvancing Excel as a programming language with Andy Gordon and Simon Peyton JonesSend us a text

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 expert praising an expert and it's fun to see through their eyes. This week Erik wanted to ask Mike, "what's the best you ever saw?" in the field of software engineering, so this forms the topic of discussion for this episode. Check out the Andy Irons one that Mike and Erik talk about with the amazing photograph at the top. Also, the Surfer's Journal has another example we referenced about Tom Carroll.Send us a text

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 paper from the Harvard Business School called "The Value of Open Source Software" where they tried to calculate the monetary value of open source software and then we needed a bunch of help just to read and understand this paper so we called our friend Irina Telyukova and she came on the show to explain basic Economics to us. Irina is a former Economics professor, and consultant in the field, but she's also run analytics and modeling departments at software concerns. It was pretty rad she came on to help us understand!  References- The Value of Open Source Software- packages.ecosyste.ms- Send us a text

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 podcast and then Erik includes a bonus one about AI which completely messes up the whole premise of the episode.Stuff we discussed“Inside Crowdstrike's Deployment Process” “The graying open source community needs fresh blood”"Quantum Computing Set for Chicago Multibillion-dollar Campus""Machines Are on the Verge of Tackling Fermat’s Last Theorem—a Proof That Once Defied Them""California's DMV is using the blockchain to prevent fraud"A $200 Mouse with an Endless Subscription for Software Updates“Google pulls its terrible pro-AI “Dear Sydney” ad after backlash”Send us a text

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:Manifesto for Agile Software DevelopmentSee also “Principles behind the Agile Manifesto”Agile and the Long Crisis of Software (by Miriam Posner, a professor at UCLA)Who Builds a House Without Drawing Blueprints?“Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects” (the “study”)“Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project”Send us a text

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 resignation to brain-damaging rage. In this episode, Mike and Erik talk about the history of Agile and what the original Agile manifesto was all about. Then, in part II, they'll cover criticisms of Agile because nobody really loves the stuff and if you've been paying attention lately, most of the chatter in our field seems to be actively bashing it and, in truth, our podcast hosts do not want to be left out of that.ReferencesManifesto for Agile Software DevelopmentSee also “Principles behind the Agile Manifesto”Agile and the Long Crisis of Software (by Miriam Posner, a professor at UCLA)Who Builds a House Without Drawing Blueprints?“Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects” (the “study”)“Agile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' project”Send us a text

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 pretty irresponsible! Listen along and see for yourself if they're making a terrible mistake.LinksDeutsch’s Fallacies 10 years later2021 Software Engineering Radio podcast episode with L. Peter DeutschGoogle SRE Book Chapter 2 "Embracing Risk"Send us a text

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 understand it? Are we required to care?Here are some references:The Composable Codex | Voltron DataOn the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules (1972)Composing Software: The Book - by Eric Elliott"Category: The Essence of Composition" from Bartosz Milewski's Programming CafeSeven Sketches in Compositionality: An Invitation to Applied Category TheoryErik's `compose` implementation in Python.Send us a text

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 frequency of this phenomenon, your Picture Me Coding hosts decide that maybe software itself is to blame! ResourcesBurnout self-test“Burnout in software engineering: A systematic mapping study“A newer and broader definition of burnout: Validation of the "Burnout Clinical Subtype Questionnaire (BCSQ-36)”World Health Organization DefinitionScientific American “Science Quickly” podcast episode “You Can’t Fix Burnout with Self-Care”Nagoski sisters Ted Talk: “The Cure for Burnout: Hint it isn’t self-care” “Burnout in Software Development - Survey Results 2021”Joy Lab podcast “Is It Burnout or Depression?”Send us a text

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! In this episode they wade boldly into the microservices vs monoliths discussion and Mike makes the bold claim that doing microservices isn't even an architecture!  Articles We Talked AboutMartin Fowler's definition"How Engineers Can Accidentally Create Distributed Monoliths"https://segment.com/blog/goodbye-microservices/Monolithic vs. Microservice Architecture: A Performance and Scalability Evaluation | IEEE Journals & MagazineEven Amazon can't make sense of serverless or microservicesSend us a text

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-stack is misleading. Mike wrote a whole essay about this, in fact, which you can read over here.This week, we talked about his idea that fullstack engineering is going away, and we included commentary from an essay called "The Myth of the Fullstack Developer" as well as a mastodon post by Daniel Stenberg that Erik mentioned.Finally, we closed with a discussion of a related article, "HTML, CSS and our vanishing industry entry points" by Rachel Andrew.Send us a text

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 about how professional software engineers should "know a compiled language," they dedcided to go deeper into the reasons why it's an attractive language and a good tool in the toolbox for any contemporary software developer.They also chat briefly about the High on Fire album Cometh the Storm.Send us a text

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 episode we cover various of his opinions and essays. You'll hear him say stuff like, "Java sucks" and it's "cowardly to call our errors 'bugs'."Here are some links to the material we discussed:On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science (1988)Letter protesting U Texas switch to Java from Haskell (2001)“How do we tell truths that might hurt?” (1975)“On the Foolishness of ‘Natural Language Programming” (Video) “Lecture: Reasoning About Programs - Solving 2 problems using programing” - 1990 Send us a text

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 large range of topics over 5 decades, from code quality to complexity to concurrent programming, and programming languages.In this episode, we talked specifically about the following works, including the original paper where Dijkstra first published what we now call "Dijkstra's algorithm":Notes on structured programmingSolution of a problem in concurrent program control (1965)Two Problems in Connexion with Graphs (1959)Go To Statement Considered HarmfulThis episode is part I of our Dijkstra discussion. We'll be back next week for more.Send us a text

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, there were various semi-anonymous figures clamoring for inclusion of this compromised version of liblzma into the latest version of various Linux distros. This entire scheme had been underway for over three years before it fell apart under Freund's scrutiny and attention from the broader software industry.This week Mike gives us a breakdown of the exploit and we talk about the fallout from this backdoor which took advantage of an overworked and vulnerable open-source maintainer. As Mike puts it, the story is "bonkers".To read more about it, check out these articles: The Verge: “How one volunteer stopped a backdoor from exposing Linux systems worldwide” Wired: “The Mystery of ‘Jia Tan,’ the XZ Backdoor Mastermind” TuxCare: “A Deep Dive on the xz Compromise” Timeline from Boehs.org: https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoorSend us a text

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 Copilot and to give them a truly spooky, creeped out feeling as they look upon what they're doing to their industry. What skills will we need in the future if AI writes all of our code for us? What's going to happen to our tools, our programming languages, our industry? Will we have to go to more meetings?Erik is a lot more nervous about the future than the calmly reflective Mike and Bob, but we'll do our best this week to predict the future.Send us a text

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 engineering code of ethics, relying primarily on the ACM's Code of Ethics as a foundational set of guidelines for ethical and professional behavior. Also, we're not really known for this but it's worth mentioning that this episode may include some hot takes? I guess I would say that these takes are at least a little warmer than usual. Mike's music choice this week is The Past is Still Alive by Hurray For The Riff Raff, while Erik talked about his travails with DNS. Oh, by the way, if you want to email us, the email address is working now(!) and we can be reached over at podcast@picturemecoding.comSend us a text

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! Send us a text