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Programming Throwdown

Patrick Wheeler and Jason Gauci

Programming Throwdown educates Computer Scientists and Software Engineers on a cavalcade of programming and tech topics. Every show will cover a new programming language, so listeners will be able to speak intelligently about any programming language.

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#189
August 24 · 1 hr 22 min
189: Agentic Loops
189: Agentic Loops Intro topic: Building in plain language News/Links: RAM prices going through the roof . Tom’s Hardware https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ram/memory-prices-climb-500-percent-in-12-months-up-to-10x-the-lowest-ever-tracked-prices-128gb-of-ddr5-now-usd3-399 Mario meet Pareto https://www.mayerowitz.io/blog/mario-meets-pareto Qwen 3.8 versus Muse Glimmer https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/serve-qwen-3-8-27b-fast/ Everyone should know SIMD https://mitchellh.com/writing/everyone-should-know-simd Book of the Show Patrick Waves in an Impossible Sea by Matt Strassler https://amzn.to/4xXnbOK Jason Diffusion World Modeling https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.12399 Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h Tool of the Show Patrick Nubby’s Number Factory Jason Opencode https://opencode.ai/ Topic: Agentic Loops Managing llm uncertainty Polling / Timed Loops Intelligent cronjobs Autoresearch Andrej Karpathy Recursive Self Improvement Verifiers Terminating conditions Managing context Subagents Best Practices Watchdogs to correct loops that are stuck/aborted
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#188
July 9 · 1 hr 36 min
188: World Models
Intro topic: Running News/Links: Flow matching versus diffusion models https://youtu.be/firXjwZ_6KI?is=QMq8DcCsXTTktOuE OpenCV 5 https://opencv.org/opencv-5/ Claude fable beats pokemon with no harness https://youtu.be/Ty_50J84fMY?si=EJ1KjZCZegipfCsV Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI? https://archive.ph/nKEVw Book of the Show Patrick Strength of the Few - James Islington https://amzn.to/4pmr10T Jason Descender - Jeff Lemire https://amzn.to/3QKhp3l Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h Tool of the Show Patrick No Man’s Sky Jason Paperlib https://paperlib.app/en/ Topic: World Models Making decisions with AI Action-Value (called a Q model): What is the long-term value of making a decision at a position Policy: What action should I take (must be a distribution) Value (called a V model): What is the value of a position (depends on policy) Advantage/Disadvantage: difference in value given two policies When advantage is +, do that more. Model-Free Look at the current situation and suggest an action Run that action in the real world and measure the effect Use that measurement to suggest better actions next time Model-Based Observe rollouts (sequences of situations) and learn the dynamics Choose an action, use your dynamics model to measure the consequence Potentially do MPC (try many actions and choose the best) World Models Observe many many rollouts and learn a full forward model (how to create the input in the future) Train a policy & value inside the world model Deploy the policy and fine-tune based on the real world
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#187
May 2 · 1 hr 38 min
187: Agentic Coding
187: Agentic Coding Intro topic: Bad equity vesting schedules News/Links: Artemis II https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-welcomes-record-setting-artemis-ii-moonfarers-back-to-earth/ Gemma 4 https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/gemma-4/ Hatetris https://qntm.org/files/hatetris/hatetris.html Dripwarts: School of Drip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnHjz8jvWFk Book of the Show Patrick Project Hail Mary https://amzn.to/4cQdxVa Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h Tool of the Show Jason FF6 T-Edition https://www.romhacking.net/hacks/6339/ Topic: Agentic Coding Progression Better Code Completion Intellisense Copilot Cowriting Cursor Roo Code Longer Horizon Claude Code Codex Gemini CLI Swarm Guidelines Git Planning Task decomposition AGENTS.md Adjusting vs Restarting Skepticism Future of software engineering?
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#186
February 3 · 1 hr 27 min
186: Becoming a Manager
186: Becoming a Manager Intro topic: plastic welding kits News/Links: Parse.bot, turn any website into an API https://www.parse.bot/ Gemini 3 https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-3/ Depth Anything 3 https://github.com/ByteDance-Seed/Depth-Anything-3 Wan 2.2 (run on runpod) https://www.runpod.io/ Book of the Show Patrick The Thinking Game (DeepMind documentary) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95J8yzvjbQ Jason Plato: The Republic https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1497 Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h Tool of the Show Patrick Core Keeper Pc/Switch/Xbox/Playstation Jason Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic PC Topic: Becoming a Manager What is a Manager Opportunity Results + Retention Sizing Hiring Philosophy Interviews Downsizing How to Manage Company Goals / OKRs Breaking down & claiming company goals. Balancing inspirational & practical goals Coaching One-on-ones Career planning Performance Motivation Performance Management Review Compensation Choosing to become a manager Balancing personal and company incentives Why Manage Mentorship Build relationships Why to not manage Less time for your original joy (coding) Less technical influence More uncertainty and less closure How to transition back to Engineer Take the time/energy to get ramped up Act as an advisor to your manager ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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#185
Nov 4, 2025 · 1 hr 32 min
185: Workflow Orchestrators
Intro topic: Asymmetric Returns News/Links: NanoChat by Andrej Karpathy https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat Pydantic AI https://www.marktechpost.com/2025/03/25/pydanticai-advancing-generative-ai-agent-development-through-intelligent-framework-design/ 1000th Starlink this year https://spaceflightnow.com/2025/05/16/live-coverage-spacex-plans-morning-launch-of-starlink-satellites-from-california/ ChatGPT Apps SDK https://openai.com/index/introducing-apps-in-chatgpt/ Book of the Show Patrick The Will of the Many by James Islington https://amzn.to/43IfU8Q Jason Interview with DHH (Founder of Ruby on Rails) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vagyIcmIGOQ Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h Tool of the Show Patrick Factorio https://www.factorio.com/ Jason nip.io Topic: Workflow Orchestrators Why Batch jobs (embarrassingly parallel) Long-running tasks (e.g. transcoding video) Checkpointing/resuming How Message Queues Containerization Worker Pools & Autoscaling History & Backfill Steps to run workflows: Containerize the workflow definition and send to the cloud Containerize all the individual tasks Submit job(s) Examples Airflow Legacy but dominant Dagster Great UX for python developers Temporal: https://temporal.io/ The new hotness Ray Low-level but very powerful Kubeflow Designed for ML workflows, integrated dashboard ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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#184
Sep 23, 2025 · 1 hr 30 min
184: Asynchronous Programming
184: Asynchronous Programming Intro topic: AI Scams News/Links: Coding Adventure: Ray-Tracing Glass and Caustics (Sebastian Lague) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA1KVZ1eOuA Boson AI announces Higgs Audio V2 https://www.boson.ai/technologies/voice The Misconception that Almost Stopped AI [How Models Learn Part 1] (Welch Labs) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrO20Jb-hy0 A mind-bending conversation with Peter Thiel https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/podcasts/interesting-times-a-mind-bending-conversation-with-peter-thiel.html Book of the Show Patrick The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien) https://amzn.to/4mevuzE Jason NYT Word Games Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h Tool of the Show Patrick Escape Academy https://escapeacademygame.com/en Jason Multi-modal LLMs to make calendar meetings www.chatgpt.com Topic: Asynchronous Computing What/Why Multi-threading in between the lines Many of the benefits of multiprocessing without the overhead/complexity How Coroutines Thread-Local Memory Blocking vs Non-Blocking operations Blocking: arithmetic Non-Blocking: Reading from the network card into thread-local memory Interpreter locking Typescript: Single threaded Python: GIL Implementations Polling (not-Asynchronous) Callbacks (interrupts) Multithreading (with queues/message passing) Promise/Futures Async/Await ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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#183
Jul 31, 2025 · 1 hr 46 min
183: Landing a Software Job in 2025
00:00:00 Intro 00:01:58 Introducing Mark Cunningham 00:07:01 How Do You Find A Job? 00:15:43 How to Get the Best Interview 00:33:06 Tips on How To Pass An Interview 00:38:38 How to Have a Good Interview 00:48:12 What is the Reverse Interview? 00:54:24 What Is The Hiring Manager's Role? 00:57:12 Reverse Interviews: Red Flags 01:14:45 How to Negotiate a Tech Offer 01:23:02 When to Negotiate Your Compensation 01:35:21 Interview Horror Stories 01:39:29 How Do You Deal With Fake AI Applicants? 01:45:32 The Bidding Network ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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#182
Jun 30, 2025 · 1 hr 37 min
182: AI Assisted Coding
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) ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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#181
May 12, 2025 · 1 hr 46 min
181: Memory Management
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 ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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#180
Mar 17, 2025 · 1 hr 52 min
180: Reinforcement Learning
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 ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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#179
Feb 3, 2025 · 1 hr 43 min
179: Project Planning
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 ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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#178
Dec 3, 2024 · 1 hr 45 min
178: Working from Home
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 ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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#177
Nov 4, 2024 · 1 hr 28 min
177: Vector Databases
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 ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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#176
Sep 24, 2024 · 1 hr 58 min
176: MLOps at SwampUp
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 ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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#175
Aug 16, 2024 · 1 hr 40 min
175: Resume Writing
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 ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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#174
Jun 10, 2024 · 1 hr 25 min
174: Devops
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 ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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#173
Apr 29, 2024 · 1 hr 35 min
173: Mocking and Unit Tests
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 ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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#172
Mar 11, 2024 · 1 hr 26 min
172: Transformers and Large Language Models
172: Transformers and Large Language Models Intro topic: Is WFH actually WFC? News/Links: Falsehoods Junior Developers Believe about Becoming Senior https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/falsehoods-junior-developers-believe-about-becoming-senior/ Pure Pursuit Tutorial with python code: https://wiki.purduesigbots.com/software/control-algorithms/basic-pure-pursuit Video example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYR7mmcwT2w PID without a PHD https://www.wescottdesign.com/articles/pid/pidWithoutAPhd.pdf Google releases Gemma https://blog.google/technology/developers/gemma-open-models/ Book of the Show Patrick: The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time) https://amzn.to/3uEhg6v Jason: How to Make a Video Game All By Yourself https://amzn.to/3UZtP7b Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h Tool of the Show Patrick: Stadia Controller Wifi to Bluetooth Unlock https://stadia.google.com/controller/index_en_US.html Jason: FUSE and SSHFS https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-use-sshfs-to-mount-remote-file-systems-over-ssh Topic: Transformers and Large Language Models How neural networks store information Latent variables Transformers Encoders & Decoders Attention Layers History RNN Vanishing Gradient Problem LSTM Short term (gradient explodes), Long term (gradient vanishes) Differentiable algebra Key-Query-Value Self Attention Self-Supervised Learning & Forward Models Human Feedback Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback Direct Policy Optimization (Pairwise Ranking) ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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#171
Feb 12, 2024 · 1 hr 25 min
171: Compilers and Interpreters
Intro topic: Monitor setups News/Links: BlueScuti, Willis, beats Tetris https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuJ5UuknsHU PalWorld accused of being an AI Product https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2024/01/22/palworld-accused-of-using-genai-with-no-evidence-so-far/?sh=26a9651b4239 4 Billion if-statements to determine if a number is even or odd https://andreasjhkarlsson.github.io/jekyll/update/2023/12/27/4-billion-if-statements.html Seamless M4T https://ai.meta.com/blog/seamless-m4t/ Book of the Show Patrick: Foundation by Isaac Asimov https://amzn.to/3SrmgnP Jason: Propaganda by Edward Bernays https://amzn.to/47JUCXJ Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h Tool of the Show Patrick: The Room Game https://www.fireproofgames.com/games/the-room Jason: Incredibuild https://www.incredibuild.com/ Topic: Compilers and Interpreters (Request by Jessica W.) Machine Code Architecture Specific Assembly Single vs Two Pass Compiler High level Languages Intermediate Representation JVM ByteCode vs Machine Code for portability Scripting/Interpreters JIT Profile Guided Optimization Resources https://www.craftinginterpreters.com/ https://nandgame.com/ Turing Complete ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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#170
Dec 24, 2023 · 1 hr 38 min
170: 2023 Holiday Special Live
Predictions: Jason VR for Work Lowering AI training cost/ improved efficiency RISC-V takeoff Patrick Ai claim of AGI Ai peer reviewer Ai Video Generator More space vehicles reaching orbit Early career, finding role at FAANG, liaising vs shipping code. Startup? 3 part. 1. How and when current hype for AI will end? 2. Shape of the show 3. Upcoming in tech What are essential programmer knowledge items? CS Student, how to organize life and goals? What purpose life should serve? What kind of programmer were you in college? Happy Holidays! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★
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