Programming Throwdown

By Patrick Wheeler and Jason Gauci

Technology Software How-To

What's Programming Throwdown about?

Programming Throwdown attempts to educate Computer Scientsts and Software Engineers on a cavalcade of programming and tech topics. Every show covers a new programming language, so listeners will be able to speak intelligently about any programming language. Look for our Podcast in the iTunes Store

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LAST EPISODE

Holiday 2020!

01.28.2021

Happy Holidays! In this show we make predictions about 2021 and take questions from YOU, our loyal fans! Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2021/01/episode-107-holiday-episode-2020.html

Programming Throwdown episodes:

01.28.2021 Holiday 2020! Happy Holidays! In this show we make predictions about 2021 and take questions from YOU, our loyal fans! Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2021/01/episode-107-holiday-episode-2020.html
11.20.2020 Augmented Reality This month we are speaking with Connel Gauld from Zappar about Augmented Reality. Connel is an AR genius and blows our mind with details on how AR works under the hood and how it's easy for anyone to make AR ...
10.14.2020 A Chatbot with a Brain The September episode did arrive.... somewhat delayed, but it's worth the wait!! We have NEW INTRO MUSIC by amazing recording artist Eric Barndollar. We have a NEW PODCAST DEPLOYMENT SCRIPT which means the podcast timestamp will be correct and people ...
08.21.2020 DevOps and Site Reliability How do the most popular websites stay online? How do mobile app developers release new versions safely and monitor them? Today we have Matt Watson from Stackify on the show to talk about Developer Operations (DevOps) and site reliability. These ...
07.29.2020 Working From Home Many of us have found ourselves working from home due to current events. In this show, we chat with Adam Bell who has been working from home for the past decade. We also do the show interactive on Twitch.tv and ...
06.22.2020 Bayesian Thinking Many people have asked us for more content on machine learning and artificial intelligence. This episode covers probability and Bayesian math. Understanding random numbers is key to so many different technologies and solutions. Max and I dive deep and try ...
05.22.2020 ReactJS Hey all! In this episode we chat with Guillermo Rauch, co-founder of Next.js, about ReactJS. ReactJS is an amazing framework for web development that I've been a huge fan of for years. We dive deep into how ReactJS works and ...
04.21.2020 One Hundredth Episode I hope everyone out there is safe and healthy during these crazy times. The silver lining on all of this is that many of us have more time. Time is one of the greatest gifts that one can get. I ...
02.18.2020 Squashing bugs using AI and Machine Learning The best part of hosting Programming Throwdown is reading emails from people who listened to this show before they had any coding experience and went on to land jobs in tech. Thanks so much for inspiring us with your stories. ...
01.21.2020 Agile Thinking With ZenHub One of the most exciting but also overwhelming feelings in software engineering is starting a new project. Staring at an empty main.py file is intimidating for everyone. A great way to keep motivated and stay on course is to start ...
12.30.2019 Christmas Episode Hey all! Patrick and I are so lucky to be spending another year with you all. In this episode, we answer a bunch of listener questions and give away some great prizes. Thanks to all of our listeners for helping ...
11.13.2019 Continuous Integration Most developers that I know use CircleCI every single day. It's both an honor and an amazing experience to learn about continuous integration and continuous deployment from Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI. We also cover a range of topics from ...
10.24.2019 WebRTC Everyone has used programs that talk to a server: Uber, podcast apps, etc.. Most people also know about peer-to-peer applications such as bittorrent, but did you know that video chat programs such as Skype and Google Hangouts are also peer-to-peer? ...
10.07.2019 Search at Etsy What actually happens when you type something in the search bar at the top of etsy.com and hit enter? This awesome interview with Liangjie Hong, Director of Data Science and Machine Learning, answers that question all the way from the ...
09.14.2019 A Journey to Programming Mastery Every interview we do is such an exciting and unique experience. Patrick and I had great pleasure in hosting Andy and Dave, authors of "The Pragmatic Programmer". We pick their brains on a variety of topics including rapid prototyping, the ...
07.13.2019 Basics of UI Design for Engineers Surprise! Weekend episode :-D Every piece of code you write is either going to be for computer-to-computer interaction, or for human-machine interaction. For the latter, how do you make your interface easy to understand and use? Erik Kennedy, independent UX/UI ...
06.19.2019 Functional Programming Hey all! Since episode 82, we received a ton of email asking for more info on functional programming (FP). To cover FP in great detail we are thrilled to chat with Adam Bell. Adam is the host of the Corecursive ...
05.21.2019 Terminal and Shells Hey all!! Ask and ye shall receive! Someone in the Programming Throwdown discord suggested that we cover terminals and shells, so here we are! Despite sounding simple on the surface, there's decades of complexity around terminal emulators and system shells. ...
04.30.2019 From Combat to Code Hey all!! Today we are sitting down with Jerome Hardaway. Jerome is an Air Force Veteran and the founder of Vets Who Code: a non-profit dedicated to training Veterans in web development and connecting Veterans to hiring managers around the ...
04.01.2019 Image Processing If you use ASCII encoding, the entire Oxford dictionary is about 5 million bytes. A single 4K image contains 25 million bytes. If you watch a 4K video running at 60 frames-per-second, over 300 dictionaries worth of data are going ...
03.04.2019 Typescript While the web is one of the easiest platforms for deploying software, it can also be one of the trickiest to debug. People have many different browsers, and some have plugins or settings that restrict functionality. It may be extremely ...
01.15.2019 Wolfram Language and Mathematica Happy New Year! Today we are sitting down with Stephen Wolfram, inventor of Mathematica, Wolfram Alpha, and Wolfram Language! In this super interesting episode, Stephen talks us through his journey as a mathematician, software architect, and language inventor. It was ...
01.02.2019 Holiday Party Hey all! This is our annual holiday show! We give away prizes and talk about random news stories :-D. Thanks to everyone who chatted with us on Discord, and looking forward to a super exciting 2019! I'll be sending an ...
12.04.2018 Customer Bug Handling Hey all! How do you find and triage bugs on other people's machines when they don't have the source code (or the knowledge to build it)? That's what we explain in today's episode! It's one of the topics that's rarely ...
11.13.2018 Teaching Kids to Code Hey all! First of all, sorry for the delay in publishing Oct's episode. There are some pretty intense wildfires close to where we live, but it looks like things are getting under control. Huge thanks to all the firefighters! In ...
09.28.2018 Reactive programming and the Actor model Hey everyone! This episode is an absolutely fascinating interview with Jonas Bonér, creator of Akka. We dive into reactive programming, the actor model, and the Akka toolkit. Jonas also describes his journey as a developer that led him to create ...
09.06.2018 2018 Mailbag Hey all! Since setting up the #questions channel in discord, a lot of you have written some phenominal and thought-provoking questions both there and via email, so this is a great time to go back through our favorites and answer ...
07.31.2018 Concurrency What is a thread/process? How can you speed up a program that requires a lot of compute resources? How can you have a single machine serve web pages to 100s of people, some of whom have slow connections? Patrick and ...
07.01.2018 Technical Arguments Sunday is a non-traditional day for a new episode and this is definitely a non-traditional episode! Today we are talking about Technical Arguments. We cover the most common arguments/debates you will have on the job as a software engineer and ...
05.31.2018 Building and Testing Web Services with Postman Web services are for much more than building websites: they are one of the most common techniques for passing information among programs. Creating a web API for your program is a great way to access it from a browser, another ...
05.02.2018 Julia Julia may be the most requested language we have ever received on the show, so Patrick and I took some time of the past few weeks to get familiar with Julia and share our findings. Overall, it's a really slick ...
04.04.2018 Code Documentation Writing documentation is an art and there aren't many cut-and-dry rules that will guarantee the right documentation quality. In this episode Patrick and I chat about our lessons learned and also cover a bunch of ways to document and write ...
03.05.2018 Arduino Ever want to build your own robot? We explain how to do this using Arduino! Show notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/03/episode-75-arduino.html
01.30.2018 Cryptocurrency and Smart Contracts Today we discuss Cryptocurrency and Smart Contracts with Amy Wan, CEO of Sagewise. Amy has a legal background and combines this with expertise in cryptocurrency, blockchain, ICOs, and smart contracts. Show Notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/01/episode-74-cryptocurrency-smart.html
12.19.2017 Parallel Computing with Incredibuild How can you use all of the computers in your lab/office at the same time to speed up tasks? Today we talk with Dori Exterman, CTO of Incredibuild, about parallel computing and the awesome tool Incredibuild has created that can ...
11.28.2017 Internationalization How can you maintain a separate version of your app/site in all langauges and locales? How do you handle right-to-left text, various currencies, and a bunch of languages with non-ascii characters? We explain all this and more in Internationalization! Show ...
10.30.2017 Office Spaces Today, we are going to talk about... office space! Not the hilarious 1999 movie directed by Mike Judge, but modern office spaces for engineers and developers. We cover office setups, desk setups, amenities, and more! We won't cover IDEs (check ...
09.28.2017 COBOL and Mainframe Computing Did you know that there was a programming language co-invented by a consortium of government offices and top businesses (at the time)? Today we talk about that language: COBOL, and also discuss the mainframe computers of that era that ran ...
08.17.2017 Puzzle Games with Mark Engelberg Today we chat with Mark Engelberg about his background in software engineering and game design. Show notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2017/08/episode-69-puzzle-games-with-mark.html
07.19.2017 Soft Skills with SimpleProgrammer Today we chat with John Sonmez about soft skills: communication, self-motivation, learning to learn, and negotiation, Show notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2017/07/episode-68-soft-skills-with.html
06.30.2017 Cryptocurrency Today we explain how cryptocurrency works and why it is possible to buy and sell electonic currency. Show notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2017/06/episode-67-cryptocurrency.html
05.30.2017 Code Reviews In this episode we explain how code reviews work and why they are so important. Show notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2017/05/episode-66.html
05.15.2017 Testing on Mobile with Kobiton In this episode we interview Josh and Adam from Kobiton. They describe the challenges with releasing a mobile app for many platforms, and how Kobiton allows one to test their app on many devices in the cloud. Show notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2017/05/episode-65-testing-on-mobile-with.html
03.30.2017 Cryptography In this episode we explain how data is encrypted and decrypted, and how you can use encryption in the things you build. Show notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2017/03/episode-64-cryptography.html
02.28.2017 Spring Framework In this episode we interview Spencer Gibb and Mark Heckler from Pivotal, the company behind Spring Framework: a set of powerful enterprise Java libraries and services. Show notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2017/02/episode-63-spring-framework.html
01.24.2017 PHP and Hack On this show we discuss PHP and Hack, an language that extends PHP. Show notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2017/01/episode-62-php-and-hack.html
12.22.2016 Clojure with Eric Normand On this show we discuss Clojure and ClojureScript, and all the amazing things you can build with them. Show notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2016/12/episode-61-clojure-with-eric-normand.html
11.23.2016 Javascript For Mobile with Burke Holland How to build great mobile apps with Javascript. Show notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2016/11/episode-60-javascript-for-mobile.html
10.31.2016 Deploying Software How to distribute software so it works on other people's computers. Show notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2016/10/episode-59-deploying-software.html
09.27.2016 Scaling Web Sites with Daniel Moore This show is an interview with Daniel Moore about scaling web sites. Show notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2016/09/episode-58-scaling-web-sites.html

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