Picture Me Coding

In this episode we discuss the Monte Carlo method, both the technique and its place in the history of computing. The Monte Carlo method is a set of tools that use probability to solve problems that a...

14 Aug 55min

In this episode we discuss the 5 most-cited papers from the flagship journal of the Association for Computing Machinery, the JACM. The papers include everything from distributed computing to real-ti...

24 Juli 1h 14min

This episode started with the question: who first had the idea to connect computers together to make a network? We explore JCR Licklider's ideas about an "Intergalactic Network", some of the earlies...

10 Juli 1h

In this episode we discuss a couple of recent papers on just-in-time development and agentic systems and how we think they suggest trends that will affect software development for years to come. We b...

26 Juni 1h 5min

For the 100th episode of Picture Me Coding we talk about numbers. Mike talks about his favorite numbers, Erik talks about his favorite ports, and we discuss the surprising phenomenon of Benford's Law...

12 Juni 54min

This week we were joined by our friend Doug Burke, who runs a company and has been working on his "digital life workout partner", a voice-activated LLM tool. Doug's story is interesting because he doe...

29 Maj 1h 14min

In this episode we invite back our friend Bob Farzin to discuss our personal experiences with using teams of agents to write software, and we try to parse out the experiences we're seeing on the inter...

15 Maj 1h 10min

In this episode we attempt to explain query optimization and where it came from. In particular we discuss Patricia Selinger's 1979 SIGMOD paper Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Manageme...

1 Maj 1h 2min