Picture Me Coding

This episode we look into the history of the web server NGINX and of web servers more generally.  We play myth buster and try to investigate the widespread story that NGINX arose from a need to scale porn sites.
Igor Sysoev - Wikipedia
Free Software Interview with Sysoev
History of Apache
How Sysoev Ended Up at Rambler

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Does anyone program just for fun anymore?  This episode we're talking about recreational programming, with a focus on A.K. Dewdney's Computer Recreations column from the 1980s.  Also, taco shops.

https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/recreational-cs.pdf
FUN 2026
The New Turing Omnibus

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To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Scheme, we decided to talk about functional programming: what it is, how's it going these days, and does it still matter in the era of AI.  Although there's been 70 years of research into FP it still hasn't become mainstream.  Will AI reverse or accelerate that trend?
TIOBE Index
The Next 700 Programming Languages
An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus

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For our first episode of 2026 (and Season 4), we're talking about Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3).  S3 is probably the biggest cloud service, or at least we think it is, because it is super freakin' huge.  We talk about how it's built, how it works, and how people use it.
Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3
How AWS S3 Achieves 1 Petabyte Per Second on Hard Disk Drives
Using Lightweight Formal Methods to Validate a Key-Value Storage Node in Amazon S3
Picture Me Coding 2025 Spotify Playlist

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In this episode we discuss working in the Salesforce environment, and low-code platforms generally, with software engineer Kyle Willcox.  Kyle's dev journey from a CS degree at UNC Wilmington to Salesforce dev to web app developer reveals a lot about both the benefits and pitfalls of working in isolated environments like Salesforce.  Kyle is also a sponsored skimboarder and came to California to ride the surf, so he and Erik nerd out on weather and waves.
Low Code
Exile Skimboards

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