Podcast
Picture Me Coding
Hosted by Erik Aker and Mike Mull · EN
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/
15episodes
Episodes
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TokenMaxxing!: Agentic Software Development with Bob Farzin
3w ago01:10:36Tap to summarizeIn 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
Transcribe →Patricia Selinger and the Birth of Query Optimization
May 101:02:25Tap to summarizeIn 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
Transcribe →"Big-O Ops": An Interview with Kyle Risse
Apr 1701:34:05Tap to summarizeThis 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
Transcribe →Hash Tables
Apr 300:58:31Tap to summarizeSome 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
Transcribe →Scale 23x
Mar 2001:27:39Tap to summarizeWe 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
Transcribe →Talking Murderbot with Amy Salley
Mar 601:32:05Tap to summarizeIn 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
Transcribe →The History of NGINX
Feb 2000:57:02Tap to summarizeThis 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
Transcribe →Recreational Programming
Feb 601:00:16Tap to summarizeDoes 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
Transcribe →Functional Programming: Are We There Yet?
Jan 2300:52:54Tap to summarizeTo 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 IndexThe Next 700 Programming LanguagesAn Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda CalculusSend us Fan Mail
Transcribe →The Infinite Drive: S3 and Cloud Object Storage
Jan 901:04:02Tap to summarizeFor 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 S3Picture Me Coding 2025 Spotify PlaylistSend us Fan Mail
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