Afleveringen
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Our discussion with Randy Edwards from last week carried over to the following week in this part 2 episode of our discussion on software engineering management. Our wide-ranging discussion included references to James Bond and Billy Woods and all kinds of unexpected stuff in between.
Announcement Part 2: In celebration of episiode 50, Picture Me Coding now has a threadless shop with shirts, stickers, and coffee mugs for purchase! Impress your friends with your knowledge of the niche podcast space! Get goods here: https://picturemecoding.threadless.com/Send us a text
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This week we took on the subject of software engineering management and we were joined in this discussion by Randy Edwards, who started writing C++ at 16 and now runs an organization with software engineering managers reporting to him.
Randy shares wisdom he's learned along the way and Mike and Erik try to interrogate the goals and methods of management.
Announcement: In celebration of episiode 50, Picture Me Coding now has a threadless shop with shirts, stickers, and coffee mugs for purchase! Impress your friends with your knowledge of the niche podcast space! Get goods here: https://picturemecoding.threadless.com/Send us a text
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Recently, some people won a Nobel Prize in Physics for contributions in the field of Neural Networks and Mike went down this huge rabbit hole of content-addressable-memory and Hopfield Networks and Geoffrey Hinton's work on the Boltzmann machine. If you feel lost in this episode, let Mike be your guide (and you may be less lost than Erik).
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This week Mike and Erik wax nostalgic about the early days of the internet and then they wonder if all this trite nostalogizing (is that a word?) isn't really a dangerous or simply not-useful self-deception. Was stuff really better in the early days of the internet? What do you think?
Check out some links:
- https://web.archive.org/
- profile of Jake Nickell from 2011 in the Chicago Reader
- Cory Doctorow's now-famous blogpost in Wired on "enshitiffication"Send us a text
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In this episode Mike wanted to interview Erik on how he got his start as a programmer and he was surprised by this and all worked up about it by the end. Hear tales of Erik's journey in this episode.
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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 ÎT (timekeeping)
- Wikipedia on the leap second
- Keeping Time at NISTSend us a text
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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.
DuneMoby DickNeuromancer
Mike and Erik's Favorite Episodes of Hugo GirlSend us a text
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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.
https://phys.org/news/2024-08-business-spreadsheets-critical-errors.htmlAdvancing Excel as a programming language with Andy Gordon and Simon Peyton Jones
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 LinksSend us a text
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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
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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
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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.
âInside Crowdstrike's Deployment Processâ âThe graying open source community needs fresh bloodâ"Quantum Computing Set for Chicago Multibillion-dollar Campus""Machines Are on the Verge of Tackling Fermatâs Last Theoremâa Proof That Once Defied Them""California's DMV is using the blockchain to prevent fraud"A $200 Mouse with an Endless Subscription for Software UpdatesâGoogle pulls its terrible pro-AI âDear Sydneyâ ad after backlashâ
Stuff we discussedSend us a text
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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!
Manifesto for Agile Software DevelopmentSee also âPrinciples behind the Agile ManifestoâAgile and the Long Crisis of Software (by Miriam Posner, a professor at UCLA)Who Builds a House Without Drawing Blueprints?âStudy finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projectsâ (the âstudyâ)âAgile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' projectâ
Some Things We Referenced:Send us a text
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If you develop software professionally, chances are you use an agile process as the framework for scheduling and dividing work. You probably donât love it, but your level of frustration may lie anywhere on a broad spectrum from benign resignation to brain-damaging rage.
Manifesto for Agile Software DevelopmentSee also âPrinciples behind the Agile ManifestoâAgile and the Long Crisis of Software (by Miriam Posner, a professor at UCLA)Who Builds a House Without Drawing Blueprints?âStudy finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projectsâ (the âstudyâ)âAgile Manifesto co-author blasts failure rates report, talks up 'reimagining' projectâ
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.
ReferencesSend us a text
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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.
Deutschâs Fallacies 10 years later2021 Software Engineering Radio podcast episode with L. Peter DeutschGoogle SRE Book Chapter 2 "Embracing Risk"
LinksSend us a text
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This week we take on the subject of compositionality, an ultra-abstract concept that might just underlie all the programming things we do.
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.
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:Send us a text
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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!
Burnout self-testâBurnout in software engineering: A systematic mapping studyâA newer and broader definition of burnout: Validation of the "Burnout Clinical Subtype Questionnaire (BCSQ-36)âWorld Health Organization DefinitionScientific American âScience Quicklyâ podcast episode âYou Canât Fix Burnout with Self-CareâNagoski sisters Ted Talk: âThe Cure for Burnout: Hint it isnât self-careâ âBurnout in Software Development - Survey Results 2021âJoy Lab podcast âIs It Burnout or Depression?â
ResourcesSend us a text
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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!
Martin 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 microservices
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 AboutSend us a text
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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
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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
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This is part II of our Standing on the Shoulders of Giants episode about Edsger Dijkstra, the greatest philosopher of our field.
On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science (1988)Letter protesting U Texas switch to Java from Haskell (2001)âHow do we tell truths that might hurt?â (1975)âOn the Foolishness of âNatural Language Programmingâ (Video) âLecture: Reasoning About Programs - Solving 2 problems using programingâ - 1990
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:Send us a text
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