Picture Me Coding

This week we took on the subject of software engineering management and we were joined in this discussion by Randy Edwards, who started writing C++ at 16 and now runs an organization with software engineering managers reporting to him. 

Randy shares wisdom he's learned along the way and Mike and Erik try to interrogate the goals and methods of management.

Announcement: In celebration of episiode 50, Picture Me Coding now has a threadless shop with shirts, stickers, and coffee mugs for purchase! Impress your friends with your knowledge of the niche podcast space! Get goods here: https://picturemecoding.threadless.com/

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Recently, some people won a Nobel Prize in Physics for contributions in the field of Neural Networks and Mike went down this huge rabbit hole of content-addressable-memory and Hopfield Networks and Geoffrey Hinton's work on the Boltzmann machine. If you feel lost in this episode, let Mike be your guide (and you may be less lost than Erik).

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This week Mike and Erik wax nostalgic about the early days of the internet and then they wonder if all this trite nostalogizing (is that a word?) isn't really a dangerous or simply not-useful self-deception. Was stuff really better in the early days of the internet? What do you think? 

Check out some links:

- https://web.archive.org/
- profile of Jake Nickell from 2011 in the Chicago Reader
- Cory Doctorow's now-famous blogpost in Wired on "enshitiffication"

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In this episode Mike wanted to interview Erik on how he got his start as a programmer and he was surprised by this and all worked up about it by the end. Hear tales of Erik's journey in this episode.

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In this episode of Picture Me Coding, your hosts take on the topic of time, a category of discussion that it turns out they are supremely not up to the task of at all.  Join us for this conversational and occasionally confused discussion.

Some Links
- Distributed Systems textbook by Marten van Steen
- Wikipedia on ΔT (timekeeping)
- Wikipedia on the leap second
- Keeping Time at NIST

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This week we were fortunate to have a super special guest, Amy Salley, who hails from the podcast Hugo Girl. Amy agreed to come on the show to talk to us about depictions of software in science fiction and we discussed works such as:

• A recently published short story by Naomi Kritzer called "Better Living Through Algorithms" (read it here).
• 2001: A Space Odyssey the 1968 Kubrick film
• War Games the 1983 film
• Neuromancer by William Gibson

Links!

• Hugo Girl Episode List
• Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer : Clarkesworld Magazine
• Vox article about the latest chatGPT model engaging in deception.

Mike and Erik's Favorite Episodes of Hugo Girl

• Dune
• Moby Dick
• Neuromancer

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This week Mike and Erik are joined by special guest Justin Runia an analyst and Excel wizard and returning guest Bob Farzin who told us a story in the high-frequency-trading episode about trading billions of dollars of swaps from an Excel spreadsheet.

We spent the whole hour talking about Excel: is it a no-code platform? Is it a programming language? Is it a database? Should we build the whole business on top of it?

If you're an immense fan of Excel like Mike is, then join us this hour as we tackle this crazy tool that contains the most widely used functional programming language.

Some Links

• https://phys.org/news/2024-08-business-spreadsheets-critical-errors.html
• Advancing Excel as a programming language with Andy Gordon and Simon Peyton Jones

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So the Surfer's Journal, a surfing magazine, has a feature called "Best I Ever Saw" where they ask people in the surfing world to remark on the best surfing performance they've ever seen. These are pretty interesting to read because it's an expert praising an expert and it's fun to see through their eyes. This week Erik wanted to ask Mike, "what's the best you ever saw?" in the field of software engineering, so this forms the topic of discussion for this episode.

Check out the Andy Irons one that Mike and Erik talk about with the amazing photograph at the top. Also, the Surfer's Journal has another example we referenced about Tom Carroll.

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Mike asked me the other day: "what's all this software actually worth?" Turns out he was talking about raw dollars. Who the hell knows? I said. Is this a thing anyone can answer?

Mike, then, dug up an academic paper from the Harvard Business School called "The Value of Open Source Software" where they tried to calculate the monetary value of open source software and then we needed a bunch of help just to read and understand this paper so we called our friend Irina Telyukova and she came on the show to explain basic Economics to us. Irina is a former Economics professor, and consultant in the field, but she's also run analytics and modeling departments at software concerns. It was pretty rad she came on to help us understand! 

References
- The Value of Open Source Software
- packages.ecosyste.ms
- 

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This week Mike and Erik committed to discussing the non-AI news out there in the software world. There's a lot of non-AI stuff going almost undiscussed and so our hosts each brought three news stories they found interesting to the podcast and then Erik includes a bonus one about AI which completely messes up the whole premise of the episode.

Stuff we discussed

• “Inside Crowdstrike's Deployment Process” 
• “The graying open source community needs fresh blood”
• "Quantum Computing Set for Chicago Multibillion-dollar Campus"
• "Machines Are on the Verge of Tackling Fermat’s Last Theorem—a Proof That Once Defied Them"
• "California's DMV is using the blockchain to prevent fraud"
• A $200 Mouse with an Endless Subscription for Software Updates
• “Google pulls its terrible pro-AI “Dear Sydney” ad after backlash”

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