Picture Me Coding

Mike and Erik share debugging stories...

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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, screwups and mishaps and, yes, there will be swearing.

As mentioned on this episode, we have an email now, so please get in touch with us! Send us your feedback, tips, or ruminations on the show here: [email protected].

Also, check out the PMC - 2023 Playlist on Spotify. The playlist link is here:  https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4TdS9U2ONDC0gLyFp1Os9M?si=37adbdc3e1b34706

Erik predicts that Mike is the only person in the world who can listen to this entire thing and enjoy every song on there.

Have a happy new year, listeners! We'll be back in 2024...

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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 startups to investors and also raises some of the common pitfalls in approaching funders and running a startup. 

In order to test their newfound skills, Erik pitches an AI-powered coffee machine while Mike pitches a solution to the housing crisis involving tents for seniors.

If you've ever wanted to start a tech company and learn how to get some funding, this is the episode for you!

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This week on the show, Mike and Erik discuss the work of Barbara Liskov. Their discussion includes a tour through types, concurrency, and distributed systems. Liskov has had an incredible career spanning 6 decades and contributed ideas that are foundational to work we do as day-to-day software developers. Hope they're up to this task!

References

• Abstract Types
  • “Programming with abstract data types”, Barbara Liskov, Stephen Zilles, 1974
  • “A Behavioral Notion of Subtyping”, Barbara Liskov, Jeanette Wing, 1994
    • The “Liskov Substitution Principle”
• Distributed Computing
  • “Guardians and Actions: Linguistic Support for Robust, Distributed Programs”, Liskov, Schiefler, 1983
  • “Promises: linguistic support for efficient asynchronous procedure calls in distributed systems”, Liskov, Shrira, 1988
  • “Viewstamped Replication: A New Primary Copy Method to Support Highly-Available Distributed Systems”, Oki, Liskov, 1988 
  • “Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance”, Miguel Castro, Barbara Liskov, 2002
• Wikipedia article
• Quanta interview “The Architect of Modern Algorithms”

For music this week, Erik talked about Theo Katzman's Be the Wheel while Mike just fell into a hole and listened to the genre of deathcore for a week.

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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 compute power for their own nefarious aims. 

Scott started writing software in the Bay Area in the '80s and moved on to become an engineering manager overseeing operations and infrastructure, areas of activity we would today probably call "DevOps". At the time this story took place, Scott found himself in a startup that was going up against the likes of AWS, and this company's existence was potentially threatened by these hackers who were targeting their services.

What was this hacking group trying to do? Listen to Scott's story to find out. 

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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 Erik promises Mike that if they spend an hour talking about language philosophy, he'll never bring it up again, which Mike openly doubts. Finally, the pair try to relate this unexpected conversation to software.

This week Mike was listening to Mike Reed's The Separatist Party, while Erik was stuck on an album by Boygenius called the record.

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On this episode, Mike and Erik talk Kubernetes requests and limits as well as the Linux CPU scheduler. Erik complains impotently and Mike sagely breaks down the problem and then Erik complains some more. There is even some light ranting.

Oh, also, Mike talks a lot about Bach and Erik talks about Aesop Rock's new record Integrated Tech Solutions, where he raps that "we cannot be trusted with the stuff that we come up with," which, hey, that sounds just like us!

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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 disconnected from the internet and wiped clean! Network switches may be rigged to explode!

The Morris Worm was the first widespread hack that propagated itself independently from user actions and it paved the way for the botnets of today.

Music we were listening to this week: Dawn FM by The Weeknd, Water Made Us by Jamila Woods, and No Love Lost by Year of the Knife.

Here are Some Links to Things We Talked About:

• The Spafford paper
• Wikipedia entry
• US GAO Report
• FBI Report on Catching Morris

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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 longer than one microsecond to run? If so, then the exciting world of High Frequency Trading may be for you! In this episode, special guest Bob Farzin, who worked  in the field for a decade, takes us on a metaphorical flume ride into the intense and bizarre world of HFT.

Also, if you're listening to this episode and wondering what the data stream from an exchange looks like, here's the message specification for "Market Data" delivered via UDP from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

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This week Mike and Erik talked about Leslie Lamport's work. Lamport has been called "the father of distributed systems" and we cover Lamport clocks, Paxos, TLA+ and others of his ideas.

For music, Erik has been listening to Again  by Oneohtrix Point Never while Mike has been stuck on  8-Track by Ashley Bathgate.

References

• Lamport’s Personal Site (with links to all of his papers)
• Quanta Interview 
• Changelog Recent Podcast Interview
• Cloudflare leap second bug
• The Poem “Regalia for a Black Hat Dancer” from Robert Hass’ Sun Under Wood

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