Picture Me Coding

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 still matter in the era of AI.  Although there's been 70 years of research into FP it still hasn't become mainstream.  Will AI reverse or accelerate that trend?

TIOBE Index

The Next 700 Programming Languages

An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus

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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 service, or at least we think it is, because it is super freakin' huge.  We talk about how it's built, how it works, and how people use it.

• Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3
• How AWS S3 Achieves 1 Petabyte Per Second on Hard Disk Drives
• Using Lightweight Formal Methods to Validate a Key-Value Storage Node in Amazon S3
• Picture Me Coding 2025 Spotify Playlist

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In this episode we discuss working in the Salesforce environment, and low-code platforms generally, with software engineer Kyle Willcox.  Kyle's dev journey from a CS degree at UNC Wilmington to Salesforce dev to web app developer reveals a lot about both the benefits and pitfalls of working in isolated environments like Salesforce.  Kyle is also a sponsored skimboarder and came to California to ride the surf, so he and Erik nerd out on weather and waves.

Low Code

Exile Skimboards

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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...

Korean Data Center

Oracle Data Center Debt

Cloudflare Outage

Rust Adoption Drives Android Memory Safety Bugs Below 20%

Adversarial Poetry

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

Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types

A Comprehensive Study of Convergent and Commutative Replicated Data Types

Counters - Aviral Goel

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This episode is about the Turing Test, and Alan Turing's original description of the test in Computing Machinery and Intelligence.  We also discuss a recent work by two UCSD researchers that claims that current LLMs pass the Turing Test.

Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test 

Pragmatic Engineer Podcast with Armin Ronacher

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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 Scientific American article called "The Computer for the 21st Century".  We discuss whether or not Weiser's vision was achieved.  It's hard to argue that computers are now all around us, but it doesn't seem like they've faded into the background as Weiser hoped.

The Computer for the 21st Century

Designing Calm Technology

Toward Ubiquitous Operating Systems: Lessons from the Field

Ambient Computing Has Arrived: Here's What It Looks Like in My House

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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 regex cause more problems than they solve?  Can they be evil?  We also discuss the origins of regular expressions, formal language theory, and finite automata.

Now You've Got Two Problems

XKCD: Regular Expressions

Representation of Events in Nerve Nets and Finite Automata

OWASP: ReDOS

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A continuation of our discussion about the history of Unix and its development at Bell Labs.  Erik wonders why Unix became successful and which features were novel and important. Mike just wants to talk about cool pranks Group 1127 pulled off.

Unix: A History and Memoir - Brian Kernighan

The Unix Time-Sharing System

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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 and the creation of Unix and C by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and other luminaries.

https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/dp/1695978552

https://dsf.berkeley.edu/cs262/unix.pdf

https://cs3210.cc.gatech.edu/r/unix6.pdf

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