In our latest episode we talk to technology entrepreneur Doug Burke about his experience building a personal AI assistant named Sam, using Claude Code and other agent tools. www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

In the latest episode we bring back Bob Farzin to help us discuss building software with a team of agents: www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

Rachel Entrekin is the most interesting and amazing athlete this week but she won't be on the news.

Our latest episode is about query optimization, focused on Patricia Selinger's seminal paper about cost-based optimization in System R: www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

Our worst fears have come to pass: AI does all the creative thinking, humans spend our days on two-factor auth.

Comey is probably just an amateur mathematician -- Prime Curios! 8647 share.google/fOihbKz60c5t...

My phone autocorrects Kleene to Kleenex

R.E.M. :: Lifes Rich Pageant at 40 aquariumdrunkard.com/2026/04/21/r... Take a picture here, take a souvenir.

Happy Patriot's Day/Boston Marathon day.

Rust 1.95.0 has been released! 🌈 🦀✨ This release includes cfg_select!{}, if-let guards in match, Vec::push_mut, VecDeque::push_{front,back}_mut, std::hint::cold_path, and more! Check out the blog post for details: blog.rust-lang.org/2026/04/16/R...

Wow. "When AI routinely completes tasks in seconds, the reference point for how long a task should take can shift – and as a consequence, unaided work starts to feel counterfactually more effortful, a process structurally analogous to hedonic adaptation..." arxiv.org/abs/2604.04721

This is the software equivalent of a William Vollmann novel steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-t...

AI has taught me that I am not a "builder". I write software to learn things and useful tools are just a fortuitous side effect. I have yet to find a way to make "pay me to learn" sound sufficiently agentic.

In our latest episode we go back to basics and discuss hash tables. Turned out we didn't understand them as well as we thought, so we look at their history and some recent interesting developments: www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

This is cool cacm.acm.org/research/whe...

I blogged about an aspect of reviewing llm-generated code that seems so offputting: erikaker.com/posts/2026-0...

I'm older than fiber optics but younger than lasers

"A few contributors even act as a proxy between the reviewer and the LLM, copy their reviewer’s question, reply with LLM-generated response. For the love of god, please. I want to emphasize this is incredibly frustrating. This is the top contributing factor to potential burn outs for me."

We give our report on @socallinuxexpo.bsky.social 23x, where Erik worked as a volunteer this year. (Note: you might hear my dog whimpering toward the end-- she was fine she just wanted snacks) www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

Even in a world of extremes, some events still stand out to me. This is one. All-time monthly records are being shattered. The size of this ridge across the western U.S. is truly striking for March, and we see a very clear climate change connection. Explore: csi.climatecentral.org/climate-shif...

There is an excellent writeup by Charles Clark about Cray’s Customer Service division, go check it out here:
 cray-history.net/2021/11/04/c...

Arctos Alliance (arctosalliance.org) is now officially launched! "If your organization depends on Arrow or Parquet or you’re interested in helping sustain these critical data technologies, we would welcome a conversation about how to get involved."

hugogirl.libsyn.com/episode-90-g... This one took a little extra time. Here's Green Mars!

In our latest episode Amy Salley of @hugogirlpodcast.bsky.social returns to help us discuss Murderbot. We discuss the books (up to Network Effect) and how Martha Wells explores topics like AI, consciousness, and neurodivergence. www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

A recent post by @dov.dev about Materialize's new Iceberg sink, and generally about connecting live operational data to analytics stores. Some interesting detail about (overcome) streaming-batch friction, and turning pristine CDC streams into .. Iceberg! materialize.com/blog/making-...

I wrote a tiny vectorized interpreter last night, and .. thought I'd write up a post describing it. Nothing earth shattering here, but if you haven't seen one of these before it could be interesting! Probably easier to read than the J Incunabulum, but also less .. wow. github.com/frankmcsherr...

Check out my new episode with @gsalmieri.bsky.social on freedom of speech: elucidations.vercel.app/posts/episod...

My short interview with Leah Hoffman for CACM cacm.acm.org/opinion...

I started a software research company notes.eatonphil.com/2026-02-25-i...

Here's a roundup of many great fan writers to consider for your Hugo nominations! We're especially excited to see @annmichelleharris.bsky.social, who is eligible for fan writer, short story, and novel! www.nerds-feather.com/2026/02/nerd...

The second edition of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, by myself and @chris.blue, is finished and sent off to the printers! Ebooks should be available in the next week, and print books in 3–4 weeks. Sigh of relief. 😅 (BTW, this is a good opportunity to support your favourite local bookshop!)

kellabyte.substack.com/p/building-a... -- Exactly the kind of thing that shows the power of DataFusion. You can build the database and not (re) build the core query engine

📄 New blog post! AI will soon write most distributed code. Distributed code is where our worst bugs —Heisenbugs— live. The real lever isn’t “test more,” it’s **aim better**: AI should target frameworks where correctness contracts are explicit and checkable. jhellerstein.github.io/blog/codegen...

today is Bach day new Goldberg Variations just dropped: open.spotify.com/album/29g6SU... 11/10

I'm so glad I got to experience writing code as a hobby. Creating things with the primary purpose of bringing yourself joy changes how you view software. Instead of bits and bytes, you start to see the thread and needle.

The cost of turning written business logic into code has dropped to zero. At best, near-zero. The cost of integrating services and libraries, the plumbing of the code world, has dropped to zero. At best, near-zero. What does that mean for the future? New blog post: brooker.co.za/blog/2026/02...

Our latest episode is mostly Mike waxing nostalgic about the heyday of recreational programming, especially the late A.K. Dewdney's _Computer Recreations_ column. We also explain taco shops. www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

I wrote a short article about the major companies behind the most recent release of Postgres. Also mentioned interesting commits by smaller contributors, including a first-time contributor who fixed a bug involving ctid scans that might have dated back to 1999. theconsensus.dev/p/2026/02/02...

I have been working on a talk about the future of table formats, specifically what is needed for AI workloads, and I found Weston's blogs on LanceDB well written and super helpful: lancedb.com/blog/designi...

Absolute banger of a @picturemecoding.bsky.social episode on 'local first': www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Scheme, we did an episode on functional programming. We trace the history of FP and discuss how FP will or won't fit in the AI programming world. www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

...and we're back. For our first episode of 2026, we're talking about S3 and cloud object storage. Plus, we finally figure out what an exabyte is. www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

Huh

Looks like you manifested a paper arxiv.org/abs/2512.12957

For our last episode of 2025 (and Season 3) we welcome guest Kyle Willcox to talk about Salesforce and Low Code. Also, surf, waves, stingrays, and Plato. Multitudes, baby, multitudes. www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

We did another tech news roundup for the holiday week, but it's mostly about data centers. We recommend you save it for after the Thanksgiving feast-- it should pair nicely with a food coma and a nice Pinot Noir www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...

Not to talk about a podcast I like randomly but nothing changed my perspective on AI more than the question posed on @picturemecoding.bsky.social "will we have robots running all the marathons now?" I'm pretty sure it was just a joke question, but it really snapped me back to reality.

Building Modern Databases with the FDAP Stack • Andrew Lamb & Olimpiu Pop • GOTO 2025 www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd-m...

In this episode we talk about CRDTs. If you don't know what those are, you should listen. It might save you from zombies. www.picturemecoding.com/2222783/epis...