Picture Me Coding

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 S3How AWS S3 Achieves 1 Petabyte Per Second on Hard Disk DrivesUsing Lightweight Formal Methods to Validate a Key-Value Storage Node in Amazon S3Picture Me Coding 2025 Spotify PlaylistSend us a text

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 CodeExile SkimboardsSend us a text

For the holiday we're doing another news roundup, although it's mostly about data centers and AI to be honest.  Inside the Data Centers...Korean Data CenterOracle Data Center DebtCloudflare OutageRust Adoption Drives Android Memory Safety Bugs Below 20%Adversarial PoetrySend us a text

Erik became fascinated with CRDTs while working on a project, so we're talking about how they work, how they simplify some distributed systems, and how they might protect you from zombies.Conflict-Free Replicated Data TypesA Comprehensive Study of Convergent and Commutative Replicated Data TypesCounters - Aviral GoelSend us a text

This episode is about the Turing Test, and Alan Turing's original description of the test in Computing Machinery and Intelligence.  We also discuss a recent work by two UCSD researchers that claims that current LLMs pass the Turing Test.Computing Machinery and IntelligenceLarge Language Models Pass the Turing Test Pragmatic Engineer Podcast with Armin RonacherSend us a text