Picture Me Coding

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 have a lot of opportunities to change your mind. This week Mike talks about technologies he changed his mind about and Erik shares a few examples of his own.

For music this week Mike is listening to Javelin, the new Sufjan Stevens album, while Erik is moved by a Cat Power medley of “He Was a Friend of Mine” / “Shivers” because his cat Bertrand Russell died and he is grieving the loss.

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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 episode, an interview with Frank Holland, a political and governmental affairs strategist.

This week is our first interview with an expert and in addition to random questions about lithium mining we'll also ask Frank our favorite question for an expert: "what’s surprisingly hard and surprisingly easy in your field?" Frank then completely plagiarizes this question from us and turns it back on his interlocutors.

For Music, Erik talks about Simon Joyner's, Grass, Branch and Bone while Mike brings up Scaring the Hoes by JPEGMAFIA/Danny Brown.

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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 conversation, both IRS and AWS come up. 

Here are some links to things that we talked about in the show:

• Joel (not Jeff!) Spolsky post: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/
• IRS IMF: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/tom-temin-commentary/2020/10/irs-details-strategy-for-replacing-its-most-ancient-computer-code/
• AWS Oracle Migration: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-consumer-business-just-turned-off-its-final-oracle-database/
• Dropbox “Sync” rewrite: https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-our-sync-engine
• Twitter off of rails: https://www.infoq.com/news/2012/11/twitter-ruby-to-java/
• Discord from Go to Rust: https://discord.com/blog/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to-rust
• Mozilla rewrites Firefox in Rust: https://hub.packtpub.com/mozilla-engineer-shares-the-implications-of-rewriting-browser-internals-in-rust/

Music covered include Bees Made Honey in the Vein Tree's, Aion, and Mitski, The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We

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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 deal and then faded away. Mike also talks about HELLMODE by Jeff Rosenstock while Erik raves about Motomami by Rosalia.

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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 going to the "Professional Developer Conference" and Erik asks hard-hitting questions about what he ate there. Music for this week: Giant Sand's Center of the Universe and Karol G's Mañana Será Bonito (Bichota Season).

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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 struggles to disagree with. It's a battle of wits: do you know your opponent well enough to challenge them?

Music  discussed includes:  “Bummer Year”  by the band Good Looks  and "Where Are All the Nice Girls?" by Any Trouble.

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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 caution to the wind and design software based on vibes alone.

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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 interviewing for software positions? They'll try to figure out how bad it can get.

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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 book The Perfectionists, Mike and Erik discuss if there is a way to build software analogous to the factory assembly line. 

What would it take to build an assembly line for software? Who would ever want such a thing?

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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 virtuous incubation space for more ideas and innovation. Open source software and package managers have made it incredibly easy for software developers to rapidly share their ideas and for other developers to consume and rapidly accumulate huge amounts of code. Mike and Erik discuss the evolution of software engineering as a discipline that consumes open-source software and wonder ruminate on what will happen when this frothy period ends.

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