Intro topic: Getting an entry-level job

News/Links:

• Mario Kart 64 Fully Decompiled
  • https://gbatemp.net/threads/mario-kart-64-decompilation-project-reaches-100-completion.671104/
• Q-Learning is not yet scalable
  • https://seohong.me/blog/q-learning-is-not-yet-scalable/
• Grover’s Algorithm
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQWpF2Gb-gU&vl=en
• OrangePi has a RISC-V SBC
  • https://linuxgizmos.com/orangepi-rv2-a-cost-effective-risc-v-board-with-m-2-2280-slot-and-dual-gigabit-ethernet/
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick
  • The Will of the Many (James Islington)
    • https://amzn.to/44Dznsz
• Jason
  • The Intelligence Trap
    • https://amzn.to/3TqoKCB
      
      

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Patrick
  •  Pokemon Odyssey
    • https://www.reddit.com/r/PokemonROMhacks/comments/1l9zdta/pok%C3%A9mon_odyssey_final_release/
• Jason
  • Netflix Games
    • https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=6891422865930303475&hl=en_US
      
      

Topic: 

• Why
  • Speed up development
  • Catch errors faster than type checking/compiling
  • Writing tedious boilerplate code
  • Ask questions and learn local information
  • Look good for hiring managers
• How
  • Extensions for VSCode & other IDEs for inline suggestions
  • Chat with a selection/file
  • Command-line Tools run at the root directory
  • Local vs Cloud
• Examples
  • Copilot (VSCode extension)
    • Use the experimental mode
  • Cursor (Custom IDE)
    • Jumps to suggest changes in other places
    • Similar to copilot experimental mode
  • RooCode (VSCode extension)

Intro topic: Video Game Prices

News/Links:

• Step one: Jump in the Lava - Abyssoft
  • https://youtu.be/WdadpHLAfdA?si=oXYnhB0EdkR_RaPE
• Scalable world models for continuous control
  • https://www.tdmpc2.com/
• Clever code is probably the worst code you could write - Engineer’s Codex
  • https://read.engineerscodex.com/p/clever-code-is-probably-the-worst
• A new, open source text-to-speech model called Dia has arrived to challenge ElevenLabs, OpenAI and more
  • https://venturebeat.com/ai/a-new-open-source-text-to-speech-model-called-dia-has-arrived-to-challenge-elevenlabs-openai-and-more/
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick
  • The Muscle Ladder - Jeff Nippard
    • https://amzn.to/44Dznsz
• Jason
  • Metaphysics of War
    • https://amzn.to/4jMjvZ5
      
      

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Patrick
  • Pokemon Trading Card Game Pocket
• Jason
  • Phi-4
    • https://huggingface.co/spaces/microsoft/phi-4-multimodal
      
      

Topic: Memory Management

• Motivation
  • Avoid thrashing / crashes
  • Allocate resources efficiently
  • Keep high uptime
• Where
  • OS Level
    • Heap management
    • Virtual Memory
  • Language/Compiler Level
    • Cpp
    • Garbage collection
    • Ownership
• Tools
  • Instrumentation
    • Export to Datadog / Grafana
  • Python: psutil & tracemalloc
  • Valgrind
• What to do when your program uses too much memory?
  • Reduce data sizes
    • Compression
    • References
    • Lazy initializer
    • Generators & Back Pressure
  • Ring buffers
  • Arena allocators
  • Disk based caching

Intro topic: Grills

News/Links:

• You can’t call yourself a senior until you’ve worked on a legacy project
  • https://www.infobip.com/developers/blog/seniors-working-on-a-legacy-project
• Recraft might be the most powerful AI image platform I’ve ever used — here’s why
  • https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/ai-image-video/recraft-might-be-the-most-powerful-ai-image-platform-ive-ever-used-heres-why
• NASA has a list of 10 rules for software development
  • https://www.cs.otago.ac.nz/cosc345/resources/nasa-10-rules.htm
• AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT performance estimates leaked: 42% to 66% faster than Radeon RX 7900 GRE
  • https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/amd-estimates-of-radeon-rx-9070-xt-performance-leaked-42-percent-66-percent-faster-than-radeon-rx-7900-gre 

Book of the Show

• Patrick: 
  • The Player of Games (Ian M Banks)
    • https://a.co/d/1ZpUhGl (non-affiliate)
• Jason: 
  • Basic Roleplaying Universal Game Engine
    • https://amzn.to/3ES4p5i
      
      

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Patrick: 
  • Pokemon Sword and Shield
• Jason: 
  • Features and Labels ( https://fal.ai )

Topic: Reinforcement Learning

• Three types of AI
  • Supervised Learning
  • Unsupervised Learning
  • Reinforcement Learning
• Online vs Offline RL
• Optimization algorithms
  • Value optimization
    • SARSA
    • Q-Learning
  • Policy optimization
    • Policy Gradients
    • Actor-Critic
    • Proximal Policy Optimization
• Value vs Policy Optimization
  • Value optimization is more intuitive (Value loss)
  • Policy optimization is less intuitive at first (policy gradients)
  • Converting values to policies in deep learning is difficult
• Imitation Learning
  • Supervised policy learning
  • Often used to bootstrap reinforcement learning
• Policy Evaluation
  • Propensity scoring versus model-based
• Challenges to training RL model
  • Two optimization loops
    • Collecting feedback vs updating the model
  • Difficult optimization target
    • Policy evaluation
• RLHF &  GRPO

Intro topic: Lego event space & retail store: https://www.instagram.com/bambeecave 

News/Links:

• StackOverflow Question Count Going Down 
  • https://gist.github.com/hopeseekr/f522e380e35745bd5bdc3269a9f0b132
• DeepSeek claims its ‘reasoning’ model beats OpenAI’s o1 on certain benchmarks
  • https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/20/deepseek-claims-its-reasoning-model-beats-openais-o1-on-certain-benchmarks/ 
• Computer Science Papers Every Developer Should Read
  • https://newsletter.techworld-with-milan.com/p/computer-science-papers-every-developer
• Nvidia Cosmos - an AI platform to change the future of robots and cars - wins Best of CES 2025
  • https://www.zdnet.com/article/nvidia-signs-largest-car-maker-toyota-to-use-its-self-driving-tech/ 

Book of the Show

• Patrick: Alice’s Adventures in a differentiable wonderland
  • https://www.sscardapane.it/alice-book/
• Jason: 
  • A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Hulu/Netflix/etc)

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Patrick: 
  • Digseum
    • https://store.steampowered.com/app/3361470/Digseum/
• Jason: 
  • Sqlitedict - Python dictionaries saved to disk

Topic: Project Planning and Management

• Why?
  • Gathering feedback
  • Identifying risks
  • Deciding future headcount
  • Documenting / discovering dependencies
  • Critical path
  • Schedule
  • Reduce the bullwhip effect
• How it works
  • SMART goals
    • specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound
    • MT is most important
  • Gantt Charts
  • Scrum
  • Agile
  • Kanban
• Tools
  • Whiteboard (the generic IRL one)
  • Post it notes
  • JIRA
  • Asana
  • OpenProject
• Dealing with uncertainty
  • Buffering
    • Issues with recursive padding
  • Project planning Post-Mortems

Intro topic: Smart homes

News/Links:

• SpaceX Starship Flight Test Five / Six
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIKI7y3DTXk
• ShareDB
  • https://github.com/share/sharedb
• Orion AR Glasses
  • https://about.fb.com/news/2024/09/introducing-orion-our-first-true-augmented-reality-glasses/
• Blade and Sorcery 1.0 is out
  • https://www.meta.com/experiences/blade-sorcery-nomad/2031826350263349/
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick: 
  • The Book that Wouldn’t Burn by Mark Lawrence
    • https://amzn.to/4fry2XW
• Jason: 
  • Masters of Doom
    • https://amzn.to/3YxuD3c
      
      

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Patrick: 
  • Balatro
    • https://www.playbalatro.com/
• Jason: 
  • Cursor IDE
    • https://www.cursor.com/
      
      

Topic: Working from Home

• Intro
• Background & WFH experiences
• Is it Panacea?
  • Realizing it works better for some than others
  • Internally Motivated
• Scheduling
• Communications
• Home Setup
  • Dedicated space
  • Handling Non-work Distractions
  • Keyboards, Monitors, Music, … Desk related things
• The specter of RTO

Intro topic:  Buying a Car

News/Links:

• Cognitive Load is what Matters
  • https://github.com/zakirullin/cognitive-load
• Diffusion models are Real-Time Game Engines
  • https://gamengen.github.io/
• Your Company Needs Junior Devs
  • https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2024/09/07/your-team-needs-juniors
• Seamless Streaming / Fish Speech / LLaMA Omni
  • Seamless: https://huggingface.co/facebook/seamless-streaming
  • Fish: https://github.com/fishaudio/fish-speech 
  • LLaMA Omni: https://github.com/ictnlp/LLaMA-Omni 

Book of the Show

• Patrick: 
  • Thought Emporium Youtube
    • https://youtu.be/8X1_HEJk2Hw?si=T8EaHul-QMahyUvQ
• Jason: 
  • Novel Minds
    • https://www.novelminds.ai/
      
      

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Patrick: 
  • Escape Simulator
    • https://pinestudio.com/games/escape-simulator/
• Jason: 
  • Cursor IDE
    • https://www.cursor.com/
      
      

Topic: Vector Databases (~54 min)

• How computers represent data traditionally
  • ASCII values
  • RGB values
• How traditional compression works
  • Huffman encoding (tree structure)
  • Lossy example: Fourier Transform & store coefficients
• How embeddings are computed
  • Pairwise (contrastive) methods
  • Forward models (self-supervised)
• Similarity metrics
• Approximate Nearest Neighbors (ANN)
• Sub-Linear ANN
  • Clustering
  • Space Partitioning (e.g. K-D Trees)
• What a vector database does
  • Perform nearest-neighbors with many different similarity metrics
  • Store the vectors and the data structures to support sub-linear ANN
  • Handle updates, deletes, rebalancing/reclustering, backups/restores
• Examples
  • pgvector: a vector-database plugin for postgres
  • Weaviate, Pinecone 
  • Milvus

• James Morse: Software Engineer at Cisco
  • System Administrator to DevOps
  • Difference between DevOps and MLOps
  • Getting Started with DevOps
• Luke Marsden: CEO of Helix ML
  • How to start a business at 15 years old
  • BTRFS vs ZFS
  • MLOps: the intersection of software, DevOps and AI
  • Fine-tuning AI on the Cloud
  • Some advice for folks interested in ML Ops
• Yuval Fernbach: CTO MLOps & JFrog
  • Starting Qwak
  • Going from a jupyter notebook to production
  • ML Supply Chain
  • Getting started in Machine Learning
• Stephen Chin: VP of DevRel at Neo4J
  • Developer Relations: The Job
  • What is a Large Language Model?
  • Knowledge graphs and the Linkage Model
  • How to Use Graph databases in Enterprise
  • How to get into ML Ops

175: Resume Writing

Intro topic:  DSLR Photography vs Camera Phone

News/Links:

• Free Internet while flying by abusing edits to your profile name
  • https://robertheaton.com/pyskywifi/
• Making Animated Characters with AI Art
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSN76gb_Z28
• On 10x Engineers
  • https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/06/19/the-real-10x-developer-makes-their-whole-team-better/
• The Beauty and Challenges of AI-Generated Artistic Gymnastics
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwJIYj3hPAU
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick: 
  • The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu
    • https://amzn.to/3xNEoRB
• Jason: 
  • The Checklist Manifesto
    • https://amzn.to/3W2JjpM

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Patrick: 
  • Super Mario Bros. Wonder (Nintendo Switch)
  • https://amzn.to/3S9VJLf
• Jason: 
  • Amazon Q
  • https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=AmazonWebServices.amazon-q-vscode
    
    

Topic: Resume Writing (Courtesy of Matthew C.)

• Why have a resume?
  • Many jobs require it to get into the consideration
  • Today many are screened for keywords automatically
  • Log for future you
• What is a resume?
  • One-page description
  • Key accomplishments & experiences
  • Comparison to CV
  • References
• How to write a good resume?
  • Do’s
    • Include your github if it has good contributions
    • Be specific (dates, locations, skills)
    • Isolate your specific contributions
    • Be accurate/honest
    • Be concise
    • Be ready to discuss any point you have on the resume
    • List hobbies/activities/extracurriculars
  • Don’ts
    • Have mistakes (especially dates)
    • Use images (most companies use text extraction)
    • Use it as a design portfolio
    • Put social qualities (e.gs. hard-working, motivated, friendly)
    • Use fancy templates/tools
  • Resources
    • Manager Tools: How to scan resumes https://www.manager-tools.com/2016/05/how-scan-resume-part-1 
    • Google docs
    • Latex/Lyx for CVs
• How to think about your career and how it impacts your future resume writing (career planning)
  • Technologies and architectures more than specifics of project details
  • How various choices may age over time

Intro topic:  Social Media Auto Responder LLM

News/Links:

• Amazon releases Amazon Q
  • https://press.aboutamazon.com/2024/4/aws-announces-general-availability-of-amazon-q-the-most-capable-generative-ai-powered-assistant-for-accelerating-software-development-and-leveraging-companies-internal-data
• Cheap RiscV “Super Cluster” from Bitluni
  • DIY 256-Core RISC-V super computer
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4d3PgEXhdY
  • CH32V203
• Phi 3 Vision Released
  • https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/new-models-added-to-the-phi-3-family-available-on-microsoft-azure/
  • Ollama
• ChatGPT 4o
  • https://openai.com/index/hello-gpt-4o/
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick: MyFirstMillion Podcast
  • https://www.mfmpod.com/
• Jason: A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence
  • https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf

Patreon https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Patrick: Dave the Diver
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/1868140/DAVE_THE_DIVER/
• Jason: Turing Complete
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/1444480/Turing_Complete/ 

Topic: DevOps

• What is DevOps
  • DevOps vs SRE
• Why DevOps is important
  • Engineering time is expensive
  • Outages can hurt company metrics & reputation
• Build & Testing Infrastructure
  • Bazel & Build/Test Idempotency
  • Build/Test Farms
  • BuildBarn
  • Github Actions
  • Jenkins
• Infrastructure as code
  • Terraform
  • Blue Green Deployment
• Continuous Everything!
  • Continuous Integration
  • Continuous Deployment
• How to Measure DevOps
  • Build Times
  • Release cadence
  • Bug tracking / round trip times
  • Engineer Surveys
    • Time spent doing what you enjoy
• DevOps Horror Stories

173: Mocking and Unit Tests

Intro topic:  Headphones

News/Links:

• Texas A&M University Physics Festival
  • https://physicsfestival.tamu.edu/
• Rust vs Cpp at Google
  • Lars Bergstrom (Google Director of Engineering): Rust teams at Google are as productive as the ones using Go and 2x those using Cpp
  • https://youtu.be/6mZRWFQRvmw?t=27012
• Is Cosine Similarity Really About Similarity
  • https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05440
• Xz utils supply chain attack
  • Andres Freund at Microsoft
  • https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/04/what-we-know-about-the-xz-utils-backdoor-that-almost-infected-the-world/
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick:
  • 80/20 Running by Matt Fitzgerald
  • https://amzn.to/3xyEKLo
• Jason: 
  • A Movie Making Nerd
  • https://amzn.to/49ycDJj

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Patrick: 
  • Shapez Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.playdigious.shapez&hl=en_US&gl=US
  • Shapez iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shapez-factory-game/id6450830779
• Jason: 
  • Dwarf Fortress
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/975370/Dwarf_Fortress/
    
    

Topic: Mocking and Unit Tests

• What are Unit Tests
  • Balance between utility, maintenance, and coverage
  • Unit Test: testing small functions
  • Regression Test: Testing larger functions
  • System Test: End-to-end testing of programs
• What are mocks & fakes
• When to use mock vs. fake
• Mocking libraries in various languages
  • Python: https://docs.python.org/3/library/unittest.mock.html
  • Java: https://github.com/mockito/mockito
  • C++:  https://github.com/google/googletest