Picture Me Coding

This week we were joined by our friend Doug Burke, who runs a company and has been working on his "digital life workout partner", a voice-activated LLM tool. Doug's story is interesting because he does not have a background in software development, and we wanted to learn more about what he's building.
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In this episode we invite back our friend Bob Farzin to discuss our personal experiences with using teams of agents to write software, and we try to parse out the experiences we're seeing on the interwebs, including Steve Yegge's GasTown and Wes McKinney's discussion of agentic development in the context of Brooks's _Mythical Man Month_.
"Introducing Beads: A coding agent memory system"
Welcome to Gas Town — Steve Yegge's original essay
The Future of Coding Agents — Yegge's follow-up
Gas Town on GitHub — The actual tool
How to Think About Gas Town — Steve Klabnik's analysis
A Day in Gas Town — DoltHub's practical walkthrough
Gas Town, Beads, and the Rise of Agentic Development — Software Engineering Daily interview with Yegge
Top Coding Agents 2025 — Benched.ai comparison guide
[April 8, Wes McKinney] AI Agents, The Mythical Agent Month, My Wild AI Coding Setup

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In this episode we attempt to explain query optimization and where it came from.  In particular we discuss Patricia Selinger's 1979 SIGMOD paper Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System. 
Access Path Selection paper (PDF)
A Conversation with Pat Selinger — ACM Queue (2006)
Database Dialogue with Pat Selinger — CACM (2008)
Pat Selinger Speaks Out — SIGMOD Interview (PDF)
Patricia Selinger — IBM History
System R: Database Research Retrospective — TODS 1981
Graefe, G. (1995). The Cascades Framework for Query Optimization 
Leis et al. (2015). How Good Are Query Optimizers, Really? PVLDB Vol. 9 — introduces the Join Order Benchmark (JOB) and empirically audits modern optimizers.

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This week Mike and Erik are joined by Kyle Risse. 
Erik met Kyle at Scale 23x in Pasadena this year while volunteering for the Tech Team. Kyle has a ton of experience in the field working on networks, infrastructure, linux server operations, and doing stressful operations stuff. In short, he has stories and he was kind enough to come on the show and share them with us!
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Some recent articles about research on hash tables made us realize we probably didn't know enough about hash tables, one of the fundamental data structures in the biz.  We talk about the history of hashing and hash tables, and some recent results that overturned a 40 year old conjecture on the most efficient way to insert items.

Scientists Find Optimal Balance of Data Storage and Time | Quanta Magazine
[2111.00602] On the Optimal Time/Space Tradeoff for Hash Tables
Speeding Up Hash Tables | Communications of the ACM
https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/1734714.1734729
[2109.04548] Iceberg Hashing: Optimizing Many Hash-Table Criteria at Once
Modern Dictionaries by Raymond Hettinger
FOCS 2024 3B Optimal Bounds for Open Addressing Without Reordering
Optimal Bounds for Open Addressing Without Reordering

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