Picture Me Coding

This week Mike and Erik tackle Byzantine Fault Tolerance! But what's it all about? Gangsters? Generals? Constantinople? Take a journey with us as we sail off into the dizzying complexity of Byzantine faults.

Links

• Some constraints and tradeoffs in the design of network communications | Proceedings of the fifth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles
• Notes on Data Base Operating Systems
• Reaching Agreement in the Presence of Faults | Journal of the ACM
• The Byzantine Generals Problem - Microsoft Research
• GitHub - JVerwolf/byzantine_generals: An implementation of Leslie Lamport's OM algorithm for the Byzantine Generals Problem
• The Byzantine Generals Strike Again
• The Chinese Generals Problem
• SIFT: Design and Analysis of a Fault-Tolerant Computer for Aircraft Control
• The Generals – Dean Eigenmann
• Practical Byzantine fault tolerance | Proceedings of the third symposium on Operating systems design and implementation

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We have an entertaining and wide-ranging discussion with prominent computer scientist and educator David Beazley, known for his many contributions to the Python community.  We talk about why programming is fun, and how he has created his memorable conference talks and innovative programming classes.  We also touch on music, theater, academic life, and, of course, Dave's No Doubt tribute band.

Show Notes:

• https://www.dabeaz.com/
• Sans-IO  (https://sans-io.readthedocs.io/)
• Rust elevator origin story (https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/14/1067869/rust-worlds-fastest-growing-programming-language/)
• Book: "Understanding Software Dynamics", by Richard Sites. Addison-Wesley, 2022. 
• "Critical Program Reading",   https://archive.org/details/youtube-7hdJQkn8rtA

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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 software freedom first? We built a router to find out" and Leslie Lamport titled "Coding isn't Programming", and we got to meet Leslie Lamport and take photos with him and give him Picture Me Coding stickers.

Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/night-drift/the-horseman

Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/night-drift/x

Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
https://uppbeat.io/t/qube/play

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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 coffee. We do a debrief of some of the amazing work we heard about in the first few days of the conference.

Stay tuned next week to hear what we learned from Leslie Lamport!

Check out some stuff we learned about!

- The Open Source Rover (from JPL)

- Solomon Hykes Keynote: "Robots Building Robots"

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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’s guest, David R. Morrison.  

David is the founder of Applied Computing Research Labs (ACRL), and the creator of Simkube which allows you to record-and-replay Kubernetes simulations.  Recently, he published an article in ACMQueue called "Simulation: An Underutilized Tool in Distributed Systems", which talks about simulation of distributed systems in general and his work with Simkube to analyze two Kubernetes autoscalers: KCA and Karpenter.

Links

- ACM Queue Article: "Simulation: An Underutilized Tool in Distributed Systems"

- Applied Computing Research Labs

- Simkube Homepage

- Simkube Github Repo

- "SimKube: Part 1 - Why do we need a simulator?"

- "Autoscaling Mesos Clusters with Clusterman"

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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 the early days of his career as a student IT worker through to consulting for large corporations like Github and finally to running the tech team for the Socal Linux Expo, a massive open-source conference held in Pasadena every year.

Speaking of the conference: we're gonna be there! If you want to attend, Rob shared a coupon code with our listeners, which will get you a ticket at half-price. Use the code: FOSS.

Find conference info here: https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/22x

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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 go?" 

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This episode has a bit of everything.  Spaceships! Killer storms! Piracy!  Supercomputers that look like furniture!  But mainly we discover how Mike fell into his lifelong pattern of turning everything into an opportunity to mess around with computers.

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In Episode 40 “Agile Trashers Part 2: The Trashening” we mentioned a study titled “268% Higher Failure Rates for Agile Software Projects”. News about this study showed up in all of the usual places (Hacker News, Reddit, TLDR, Google, Slashdot, etc.) and it caused a bit of a stir. That study was published by our guest today, Dr Junade Ali. 

In this episode we talk about software failure, agile, and what practices might come next.

Links

• “268% Higher Failure Rates for Agile Software Projects”
• How to Protect Yourself from Killer Computers
• “So Am I Dr. Frankenstein? Or Were You a Monster the Whole Time?”: Mitigating Software Project Failure With Loss-Aversion-Aware Development Methodologies”
• Hillel Wayne's criticism
• “P-Hacking with Dinosaurs”
• The Strawmen of Agile | HackerNoon

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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 hardware.  I feel that it is important and beneficial.  Erik feels... Well, he never did tell me what he really thinks here but I got him to confess that he sometimes solves problems without knowing the reason for the problem in the first place!

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