Picture Me Coding

For the 100th episode of Picture Me Coding we talk about numbers.  Mike talks about his favorite numbers, Erik talks about his favorite ports, and we discuss the surprising phenomenon of Benford's Law.

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This week we were joined by our friend Doug Burke, who runs a company and has been working on his "digital life workout partner", a voice-activated LLM tool. Doug's story is interesting because he does not have a background in software development, and we wanted to learn more about what he's building.

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In 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 essay
• The Future of Coding Agents — Yegge's follow-up
• Gas Town on GitHub — The actual tool
• How to Think About Gas Town — Steve Klabnik's analysis
• A Day in Gas Town — DoltHub's practical walkthrough
• Gas Town, Beads, and the Rise of Agentic Development — Software Engineering Daily interview with Yegge
• Top Coding Agents 2025 — Benched.ai comparison guide
• [April 8, Wes McKinney] AI Agents, The Mythical Agent Month, My Wild AI Coding Setup

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In 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 History
• System R: Database Research Retrospective — TODS 1981
• Graefe, 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.

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This 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!

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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 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 Tables

Speeding Up Hash Tables | Communications of the ACM

https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/1734714.1734729

[2109.04548] Iceberg Hashing: Optimizing Many Hash-Table Criteria at Once

Modern Dictionaries by Raymond Hettinger

FOCS 2024 3B Optimal Bounds for Open Addressing Without Reordering

Optimal Bounds for Open Addressing Without Reordering

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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 network group this year, so we have some behind the scenes stories in addition to summaries of interesting talks and sessions.

• Scale conf
• Scale-network repo
• Erik Reinert’s Youtube Channel
• Docket
• BMO and  bmo-agent-setup
• Cline injection attack Adnan Khan
• Douglas Comer - Wikipedia
• EDB Postgres
• Advent of Computing Podcast

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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 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 Blog

I didn’t know how non-neurotypical I was until Murderbot

We’re Light-Years Away from True Artificial Intelligence, Says Murderbot Author Martha Wells | Scientific American

Martha Wells' next 'Murderbot Diaries' book is 'the family roadtrip from hell on Ringworld' (interview) | Space

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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 widespread story that NGINX arose from a need to scale porn sites.

Igor Sysoev - Wikipedia

Free Software Interview with Sysoev

History of Apache

How Sysoev Ended Up at Rambler

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Does 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.pdf

FUN 2026

The New Turing Omnibus

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