Programming Throwdown

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

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

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?

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 ★

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

• http://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 ★

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

• http://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 ★

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 ★

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 ★

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 ★

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 ★

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 ★

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 ★

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 ★

• 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 ★

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 ★

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 ★

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

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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)

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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 ★

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!

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