Picture Me Coding

"Big-O Ops": An Interview with Kyle Risse

17 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

This week Mike and Erik are joined by Kyle Risse. Erik met Kyle Risse at Scale 23x in Pasadena this year while volunteering for the Tech Team. Kyle ha...

Hash Tables

03 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Scale 23x

20 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

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 n...

Talking Murderbot with Amy Salley

06 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

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 W...

The History of NGINX

20 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

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 wide...

Recreational Programming

06 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Does anyone program just for fun anymore?  This episode we're talking about recreational programming, with a focus on A.K. Dewdney's Comput...

Functional Programming: Are We There Yet?

23 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

The Infinite Drive: S3 and Cloud Object Storage

09 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

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 s...

Salesforce and Low-Code with Kyle Willcox

11 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode we discuss working in the Salesforce environment, and low-code platforms generally, with software engineer Kyle Willcox.  Kyle's...

Tech News Roundup: Fighting Robots with Poetry

27 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...K...

Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs): How To Survive the Zombie Apocalypse

13 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Erik became fascinated with CRDTs while working on a project, so we're talking about how they work, how they simplify some distributed systems, a...

The Turing Test

29 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This episode is about the Turing Test, and Alan Turing's original description of the test in Computing Machinery and Intelligence.  We also disc...

Ubiquitous Computing

15 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 Sc...

The Two Problems With Regular Expressions

01 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 r...

The History of Unix, Part 2: Unix not Eunuchs

17 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

A continuation of our discussion about the history of Unix and its development at Bell Labs.  Erik wonders why Unix became successful and which featu...

The History of Unix: Part 1

04 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Space, Time, and Squishy Pebbles

20 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This week we dip our toes into the river of theoretical computer science and immediately drown.  We discuss the amazing and surprising result of rese...

Databases Part II: No SQL, No Problem

08 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This week we try to make sense of what were once called "NoSQL" databases, focusing on the early entries into the field like Bigtable, Dynam...

Vibe Coding: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

24 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 a...

Friends and Relations

09 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We're talking about databases again.  Or database management systems, we're not totally sure.  In any case, they are relational databases ...

Shoulders of Giants: Jim Gray

25 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Language, Meaning, and Functional Programming with Matt Teichman

11 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This week Matt Teichman, host of the Elucidations podcast, dropped by the show to chat about functional programming and its surprising relationship to...

UX Wing Fighters

21 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 g...

Our Flag Means Local-First

14 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 Sof...

Interpreting the Newses

07 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Mike and Erik analyze the tech news again.  The AIs are hallucinating, but gamers are too because of Game Transfer Phenomenon.  The Luddites are bac...

Predicting the Future: Law, Software, and Attorneys Using AI

30 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 in...

Sailing to Byzantium

23 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This week Mike and Erik tackle Byzantine Fault Tolerance! But what's it all about? Gangsters? Generals? Constantinople? Take a journey with us as...

Programming for Fun with David Beazley

09 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We have an entertaining and wide-ranging discussion with prominent computer scientist and educator David Beazley, known for his many contributions to ...

Leslie Lamport and the Free Software Movement

26 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Mike and Erik Go to Pasadena!

19 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Simulating Distributed Systems with David Morrison

12 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Every once in a while you come across a project where you’re like “Oh, dang, wish I’d thought of that”.   That’s the case with this week’...

Point Break and the Spirit of Devops

05 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This week Mike and Erik are joined by Rob Hernandez who has deep experience with Devops and both cloud and on-prem infrastructure. Rob takes us from t...

"Where are all the elders?"

26 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This week we continue Mike's origin story for another 20 years of his history and Erik asks him the question: "Where did all the old people ...

Origin Story: Part 1 - Mike Fails at Being a Chemist

19 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This episode has a bit of everything.  Spaceships! Killer storms! Piracy!  Supercomputers that look like furniture!  But mainly we discover how Mik...

The Failure Modes of Agile with Dr Junade Ali

12 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

In Episode 40 “Agile Trashers Part 2: The Trashening” we mentioned a study titled “268% Higher Failure Rates for Agile Software Projects”. New...

Do Programmers Need to Know Anything About Computers?

05 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This episode is based on a mild difference in view that Erik and I have about whether it’s useful for programmers to know details of computer hardwa...

The Story of the CAP Theorem Part 2

29 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Mike and Erik return to the CAP Theorem to finish the discussion started last week. Their goal is to try to find answers to this question: why do soft...

The Story of the CAP Theorem Part 1

22 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Your podcast hosts have a suspicion about the CAP Theorem: if you're a working programmer and you've heard of any single result in the field...

Gleaming the Lambda Cube with Nathan Mull

15 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This week Nathan Mull, a type theorist and CS Professor at Boston University, came on the show to help Mike and Erik understand what the phrase "...

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Frances Allen and Compiler Optimizations

08 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This week Mike and Erik discussed the work of Frances Allen, who worked for IBM for 45 years starting in 1957. The first female Turing Award winner, A...

We Read the News and Everyone’s On Drugs

18 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode we looked at the tragic story of tech company CEOs doing drugs and the various knock-on effects.We also played a lightning round of &q...

More Favorites: Radix Trees, Kadane's, Raft Leader Election

11 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

We carried over from last week and kept doing algos! This week we talked about:- Diffie Hellman- Radix Trees: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/32147...

Our Favorite Algorithms: FFTs and Hyperloglogs!

04 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Mike wanted to talk about our favorite algorithms this week, so we covered a few:- Fast Fourier Transforms- HyperloglogSome references are below:- Art...

Annoying Everybody with Our Questions about Timezones

27 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, Mike and Erik go back to the topic of time in order to explore what is specifically frustrating to programmers about dealing with tim...

Into the Well of Formal Verifications

20 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This week Mike and Erik were trying to understand the arena of formal verification: what are these tools? Where do they come from? How do they work? C...

"Some of the most valuable people I work with are really just politicians"

13 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 m...

Software Engineering Management with Randy Edwards

06 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Mike and Erik Vie for the Nobel Prize in Literature

30 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 conte...

Nostalgia for the 90s Internet

23 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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&...

Origin Story: How Erik Became a Programmer

09 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 e...

620 Million Years Ago the Workday Was Only 6 Hours Long

25 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 th...

Software In Pop Culture with Amy Salley

18 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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...

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Excel

11 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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...

The Best I Ever Saw

28 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 remar...

The Value of Software with Irina Telyukova

21 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Software News Roundup (with No AI news! (sorta))

14 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 undis...

Agile Trashers Part 2: the Trashening

07 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 fe...

Agile Trashers Part 1: a pre-history

31 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

If you develop software professionally, chances are you use an agile process as the framework for scheduling and dividing work.  You probably don’t...

The Nine Fallacies of Distributed Computing

17 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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!...

Hidden Vibrations of the Universe: Compositionality

10 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 i...

The Burnouts of the Century

03 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Following publication of a recent report where 80%(!) of software engineers and managers are reporting burnout, Mike and Erik take on the difficult to...

Monoliths vs Microservices

19 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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...

The End of the Fullstack Developer Era

12 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 surro...

Why Rust?

30 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 Rus...

Dijkstra's Diss Track

24 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 socia...

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Edsger Dijkstra

17 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This week we talked about the greatest philosopher of our field: Edsger Dijkstra. Most software engineers will immediately recall Dijkstra's Algo...

The XZ Apocalypse

10 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 run...

AI Code Generators: Are We Going to Be Out of Work Someday?!

27 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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...

The Ethical Engineer

20 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In our industry there are myriad examples of companies behaving unethically, so what power do we have as software engineers to uphold ethical principl...

Season 2 Bonus Episode: The Way of the Naturalist

18 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 an...

Becoming an Engineer: the “Build or Buy” Question

06 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

It’s a very old software engineering question: should we build the thing or buy the thing? Fred Brooks says "you should always buy." This ...

What the Hell is Edge Computing?

28 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

In which Mike and Erik try to understand what "edge computing" means and whether it's meaningful or marketing speak. The topic comes up...

Let's Talk Technical Books!

14 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This week Mike and Erik dig into their bookshelves to find and discuss their favorite technical books. As per usual, Mike references a bunch of stuff ...

Complexity Part 2: Out of the Tar Pit

07 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This week Mike and Erik conclude their discussion on complexity with a review of the 2006 fan-favorite paper "Out of the Tar Pit."Send us a ...

The Three Faces of Complexity

31 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

As programmers, we want to control complexity and simplify our software, but these things are often hard for us to define. We know them when we see th...

A Short History of Deploying Software

24 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

This week Mike and Erik chat about deploying software and try to understand how it used to be and characterize what it's mostly like now. What ar...

It's Gonna Take a Lot of Fireworks to Clean This Place Up

17 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Mike and Erik share debugging stories...Send us a text

The Charlie Brown Property of Software: Something Bad Will Eventually Happen

27 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In this last recording for 2023, Mike and Erik talk about embarrassing things they've done at work over the years. These are mistakes, errors, sc...

How To Swim with Sharks: An Interview with Chris Staszak

20 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode Mike and Erik talk to Chris Staszak who works for a startup investor in San Diego. Chris teaches the pair of hosts how to pitch startu...

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Liskov

13 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

This week on the show, Mike and Erik discuss the work of Barbara Liskov. Their discussion includes a tour through types, concurrency, and distributed ...

Cyber Crimes in the Early Days of Cloud Computing

06 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Today on the show we welcome Scott Aker who regales us with a tale of a seedy group of hackers breaking into cloud compute services in order to steal ...

Is a Hot Dog a Sandwich? An Entire Episode about Language Philosophy

29 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

This week Erik asks Mike what living person he'd want to meet and then volunteers a person he would _not_ want to meet, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then...

Kubernetes CPU Limits Got You Down? Come on down to our complaint clinic and we'll get you sorted out!

22 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

On this episode, Mike and Erik talk Kubernetes requests and limits as well as the Linux CPU scheduler. Erik complains impotently and Mike sagely break...

Disconnect from the Internet: the Morris Worm Is Out of Control! (A True Crime story!)

15 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

This week on the 35th anniversary of the infamous Morris Worm, Mike and Erik look back at this sensational true crime story. Computers will be disconn...

Get in Loser, We’re Going High Frequency Trading

01 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Have you ever wished you could trade billions of dollars in stocks and bonds from an Excel spreadsheet? Do you get impatient when your code takes long...

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Lamport

25 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

This week Mike and Erik talked about Leslie Lamport's work. Lamport has been called "the father of distributed systems" and we cover La...

Things We've Changed Our Minds About

18 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

You can probably learn a lot about a person by asking what they've changed their minds about. In a long career as a software engineer, you will h...

How Government Is Like Building Software Applications: An Interview with Frank Holland, a political and governmental affairs strategist.

11 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Lithium mining! Water policy! Housing! Software development! What do these things have to do with each other? Let’s find out in this week’s episod...

Are Second Systems Inevitable

04 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Mike and Erik talk about second systems and weigh whether we can ever even avoid the things in the first place. Acronyms loom large in this conversat...

Ideas We Found in the Bog

20 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Mike and Erik talk about super powers and then discuss technologies that were around in previous decades which seemed like they were going to be a big...

Why Does Some Tech Get Popular?

13 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Mike and Erik talk betamax and ask the question: why do some technologies get popular? Your podcast hosts are on the case! Mike tells the story of goi...

Quotes tennis

06 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

This week Mike and Erik play a game called "quotes tennis" where they try to trip each other up with quotes from the field that the other st...

Vibes Driven Development

28 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Mike and Erik discuss Hillel Wayne's 3-part blog piece titled “Are We Really Engineers?” Erik tries to convince Mike that we can throw cautio...

How Not to Hire Software Engineers

21 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Mike and Erik talk about the worst interview questions you can ask software engineers and then ponder the interview process: why's it so terrible...

Can Software Be Built On An Assembly Line?

14 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Inspired by an New York Times article on turning the production of Hollywood writing content into an assembly line, and also by Simon Winchester’s b...

The Open Source Software Renaissance Is Going to End Someday

01 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

The revolution in open source software over the last 30 years is akin to the Italian Renaissance: ideas spread like wildfire and this creates a virtuo...

And Gravity Drowned Too: the software skeptics take on chatGPT

24 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Mike Mull brings up some of the skepticism he's encountered recently around chatGPT. Erik and Mike discuss the hype around LLMs and whether the e...