Dijkstra's Diss Track
This is part II of our Standing on the Shoulders of Giants episode about Edsger Dijkstra, the greatest philosopher of our field. Instead of using social media, Dijkstra would dash off hot takes on hi...
24 Apr 202430min
Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Edsger Dijkstra
This week we talked about the greatest philosopher of our field: Edsger Dijkstra. Most software engineers will immediately recall Dijkstra's Algorithm, for finding the shortest path between two nodes ...
17 Apr 202448min
The XZ Apocalypse
A week ago a developer in San Francisco named Andres Freund found a backdoor in SSH which would grant some shadowy figure access to Linux machines running the latest version of a library called liblzm...
10 Apr 202445min
AI Code Generators: Are We Going to Be Out of Work Someday?!
Along with our friend Bob Farzin, we visit upon the sleeping body of AI three ghosts this week: one for the past, one for the present, and one for the future. We make a sincere attempt to haunt the cr...
27 Mars 202455min
The Ethical Engineer
In our industry there are myriad examples of companies behaving unethically, so what power do we have as software engineers to uphold ethical principles and resist bad behavior? In this episode Mike a...
20 Mars 202453min
Season 2 Bonus Episode: The Way of the Naturalist
Mike's out this week so Erik went into his backyard and talked about famous Naturalists while birds chirped in the background. It's short and unexpected! Send us Fan Mail
18 Mars 202416min
Becoming an Engineer: the “Build or Buy” Question
It’s a very old software engineering question: should we build the thing or buy the thing? Fred Brooks says "you should always buy." This may even be an existential question: my role is to build thing...
6 Mars 202454min
What the Hell is Edge Computing?
In which Mike and Erik try to understand what "edge computing" means and whether it's meaningful or marketing speak. The topic comes up because Mike decides to run an LLM on his laptop and it turns ou...
28 Feb 202437min
