Ubiquitous Computing
In 1988 Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC coined the term "ubiquitous computing", and in 1991 he spelled out the particulars of this concept in a Scientific American article called "The Computer for the 21st ...
15 Okt 20251h
The Two Problems With Regular Expressions
This week we're talking about regular expressions, aka, regex. These are a favorite tool of programmers, but they also have a dark side. Do regex cause more problems than they solve? Can they be ev...
1 Okt 202556min
The History of Unix, Part 2: Unix not Eunuchs
A continuation of our discussion about the history of Unix and its development at Bell Labs. Erik wonders why Unix became successful and which features were novel and important. Mike just wants to ta...
17 Sep 202553min
The History of Unix: Part 1
This week we talk about the early days of Unix, primarily based on Brian Kernighan's book Unix: A History and Memoir, about his days at Bell Labs and the creation of Unix and C by Ken Thompson, Dennis...
4 Sep 20251h
Space, Time, and Squishy Pebbles
This week we dip our toes into the river of theoretical computer science and immediately drown. We discuss the amazing and surprising result of researcher Ryan Williams about how space is a more powe...
20 Aug 202545min
Databases Part II: No SQL, No Problem
This week we try to make sense of what were once called "NoSQL" databases, focusing on the early entries into the field like Bigtable, Dynamo and Cassandra. We try to explain how they differ from pri...
8 Aug 20251h 9min
Vibe Coding: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
This week we host our friends Bobak Farzin and Kevin Fahey to talk about their experiences building applications with AI tools. Both Bob and Kevin are very tech savvy in different ways, but neither i...
24 Juli 20251h 8min
Friends and Relations
We're talking about databases again. Or database management systems, we're not totally sure. In any case, they are relational databases (or database management systems). The relational database has ...
9 Juli 202558min
