Programming Throwdown

Hey all! This is our annual holiday show! We give away prizes and talk about random news stories :-D. Thanks to everyone who chatted with us on Discord, and looking forward to a super exciting 2019! I'll be sending an email to all prize winners later today! Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2019/01/episode-85-holiday-party.html

Hey all! How do you find and triage bugs on other people's machines when they don't have the source code (or the knowledge to build it)? That's what we explain in today's episode! It's one of the topics that's rarely spoken about but extremely important to get right before shipping any software product. Happy hacking! This is the last episode before our Christmas special! If you are a patron, make sure Patreon has your up to date address so we can mail prizes! If you aren't on Patreon, sign up before our Christmas show to be entered in our raffle!! Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/12/episode-84-customer-bug-handling.html

Hey all! First of all, sorry for the delay in publishing Oct's episode. There are some pretty intense wildfires close to where we live, but it looks like things are getting under control. Huge thanks to all the firefighters! In this episode Patrick and I talk about teaching kids to code! We discuss how we learned to code and what are ways to build logic and reasoning skills in kids of all ages. Also we talk about ways to get kids excited about the fundamentals behind coding and solving problems. Check out the show notes here: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/11/episode-83-teaching-kids-to-code.html Do you have any good resources for teaching coding to kids? Let us know in the comments and we'll mention it in the next episode! Also this is the last chance to become a Patreon subscriber if you want to be entered in this year's annual give-a-away episode which will happen sometime in Dec! Last year we had a lot of trouble mailing the tokens to everyone, but our gears are turning around gift ideas for this year. Either way, a few lucky patrons will get free t-shirts! Become a patron here: https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown Happy Hacking!

Hey everyone! This episode is an absolutely fascinating interview with Jonas Bonér, creator of Akka. We dive into reactive programming, the actor model, and the Akka toolkit. Jonas also describes his journey as a developer that led him to create Akka and found Lightbend with Martin Odersky, the creator of Scala. Jonas brings a ton of in-depth technical discussion, so buckle up! :-) Show Notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/09/episode-82-reactive-programming-and.html

Hey all! Since setting up the #questions channel in discord, a lot of you have written some phenominal and thought-provoking questions both there and via email, so this is a great time to go back through our favorites and answer them in a Mailbag episode! Thanks for your support by checking out our Books of the Show links and our audible and patreon links! I was able to send out all the domestic Christmas gifts (email me if you haven't gotten yours!) but we could not ship them Internationally. I'm still looking for a solution there, and will keep you posted! Show Notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/09/episode-81-2018-mailbag.html

What is a thread/process? How can you speed up a program that requires a lot of compute resources? How can you have a single machine serve web pages to 100s of people, some of whom have slow connections? Patrick and I answer these questions on today's show: Concurrency! We have also set up a discord channel! We will be posting news stories as we find them and also record the show live! Check out our channel here: https://discord.gg/r4V2zpC Show Notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/07/episode-80-concurrency.html

Sunday is a non-traditional day for a new episode and this is definitely a non-traditional episode! Today we are talking about Technical Arguments. We cover the most common arguments/debates you will have on the job as a software engineer and how to make the best arguments to reach the best decisions with the least amount of friction. Patrick and I tried not to inject our own opinions, but it's hard not to add our two cents (yes, spaces really are better). This episode is the first of a potential new genre of show, where we talk about non-technical facets of being a software engineer. Listen to this episode and report back on whether we should do more shows like this one! If you want us to stick to our existing formats (technical topic and interview) let us know that too! Show Notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/07/episode-79-technical-arguments.html

Web services are for much more than building websites: they are one of the most common techniques for passing information among programs. Creating a web API for your program is a great way to access it from a browser, another program, or a mobile app. Today we chat with Abhinav Asthana, CEO of Postman, about building, scaling, and testing web services! Show Notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/05/episode-78-building-and-testing-web.html

Julia may be the most requested language we have ever received on the show, so Patrick and I took some time of the past few weeks to get familiar with Julia and share our findings. Overall, it's a really slick language that has data and process parallelism built into the language, so it will run on many threads or even many machines without having to design a communication system by hand. Show Notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/05/episode-77-julia.html

Writing documentation is an art and there aren't many cut-and-dry rules that will guarantee the right documentation quality. In this episode Patrick and I chat about our lessons learned and also cover a bunch of ways to document and write self-documenting code. Show Notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/04/episode-76-code-documentation.html

Ever want to build your own robot? We explain how to do this using Arduino! Show notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/03/episode-75-arduino.html

Today we discuss Cryptocurrency and Smart Contracts with Amy Wan, CEO of Sagewise. Amy has a legal background and combines this with expertise in cryptocurrency, blockchain, ICOs, and smart contracts. Show Notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2018/01/episode-74-cryptocurrency-smart.html

How can you use all of the computers in your lab/office at the same time to speed up tasks? Today we talk with Dori Exterman, CTO of Incredibuild, about parallel computing and the awesome tool Incredibuild has created that can run any multi-process program on several machines. Show Notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2017/12/episode-73-parallel-computing-with.html

How can you maintain a separate version of your app/site in all langauges and locales? How do you handle right-to-left text, various currencies, and a bunch of languages with non-ascii characters? We explain all this and more in Internationalization! Show notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2017/11/episode-72-internationalization.html

Today, we are going to talk about... office space! Not the hilarious 1999 movie directed by Mike Judge, but modern office spaces for engineers and developers. We cover office setups, desk setups, amenities, and more! We won't cover IDEs (check out episode 55 for that) but we do cover how to code comfortably. Show Notes: http://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2017/10/episode-71-office-spaces.html