Episode 83: Teaching Kids to Code

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Intro

Building your own keyboard from scratch.

News/Links

• Nebraska Problem
• https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0011
• PyTorch 1.0
• https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2018/05/02/announcing-pytorch-1.0-for-research-production/
• Cosmic Ladder
• https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/the-cosmic-distance-ladder-ver-4-1/
• How to develop a boilerplate REST API
• https://hackernoon.com/how-to-develop-a-boilerplate-for-api-with-node-js-express-and-mongodb-4c771ae1c2df

Book of the Show

• Jason:
• Enlightenment Now https://amzn.to/2B3rvCt
• Patrick: 
  • The Bands of Mourning https://amzn.to/2TabkKH

Tool of the Show

• Jason: Quip https://quip.com/
• Patrick: Stardew Valley (iOS & Android)

Teaching Kids to Code (47:04)

Episode 82: Reactive programming and the Actor model with Jonas Bonér

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Reactive programming and the Actor model with Jonas Bonér

• Tell us about your background
• What is reactive programming?
• What is the actor model?  How does it fit with reactive programming?
• Why would someone use this way of programming?
• When is it applicable and when it is not a good fit?
• How does the actor model compare to other distributed programming paradigms (MPI, Map-Reduce)
• How can the system recover from node failure?
• What is Akka?
• What is it like to work at Lightbend?  Are you hiring?

More info:

Follow Jonas Bonér on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jboner

Check out Akka here: https://akka.io/

Episode 81: 2018 Mailbag

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We are on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown

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Intro

Christmas Gifts

News/Links

• Rendering an island from Moana with Open Source
• https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/07/16/moana-island-pbrt-all.html
• TED-Ed Riddles
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMFpOcLroOg

Book of the Show

• Jason:
• Aesop's Fables
• Patrick: 
  • The Blinding Knife: https://amzn.to/2MPO70V

Tool of the Show

• Jason:
• Tensorboard & TensorboardX https://www.tensorflow.org/guide/summaries_and_tensorboard
• Patrick:
• Sproggiwood

Mailbag (29:15)

• Nathan
•  PICO-8 and/or the pocketCHIP (if you order one, be warned they are behind on other orders. Check their forums) for simple 2D game development with Lua.
• Dylan
• Modding video games?
• David
• http://aduni.org/
• Jack
• How do we manage passwords?
• “A Listener”
• For job security, as an individual, is it best to have a little knowledge on a lot of languages or to specialise in just a single one
• Switching programming languages for a whole organization
• Chris
• OS X, Windows, Linux? If Linux, what distro? What do you use day to day? What languages? 
• What's your favorite development platform? Laptop? Battlestation? SMART PHONE?!
• BSDTech (Discord)
• I have a question.  As a fairly new programmer how do you best deal with variables changing types and being cast wrong in languages like python (what im working on).  In C it was fairly easy either its the right type all the time or it fails miserably and you didn't have random "its a NoneType this time" errors other than doing a ton of if loops checking for it
• McGee (Discord)
• I’m taking a class this semester called Operating Systems. In this class we will be creating a basic operating system in C and apparently some Assembly... what are some things to keep in mind or to expect when writing something like this?
• Vellor (Discord)
• Will we ever revisit topics on the show?
• Apettit9 (Discord)
• What do you listen to while you work?
• Peter (Discord)
• What are some of the best work from home positions? Sometimes it's hard to work remote, but are there any positions that are a good fit? Or does it depend more on company culture/co-workers?
• ReillyC52 (Discord)
• Where are some of best places to discover new open source projects and contribute to them ?
• Grant (Discord)
• Immutable vs. mutable objects
• New AI Libraries (tensorflow, keras, pytorch)

Episode 80: Concurrency

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Intro

We are on discord! https://discord.gg/r4V2zpC

News/Links

• 15 Years of SparkFun
• https://www.sparkfun.com/news/2571
• Build a CPU in the web browser
• http://nandgame.com/diagram
• Why Discord is Sticking With React Native
• https://blog.discordapp.com/why-discord-is-sticking-with-react-native-ccc34be0d427
• Fortnite has made over $1Billion so far
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2018/07/18/fortnite-battle-royale-has-made-over-1-billion-as-it-completely-dominates-video-game-streaming/#16a8bffb15ce

Book of the Show

• Jason:
• Dear Harvard Business Review (podcast)
• Patrick: 
  • Old Man's War: https://amzn.to/2LPEXjL

Tool of the Show

• Jason: PyTorch https://pytorch.org/
• Patrick: Suzy Cube (iOS and Android)

Concurrency (29:15)

• Why?
• Getting more work done
• Handling asynchronous requests
• How?
• Threads vs Processes
• Message Passing
• Shared Memory
• Threadpool
• Locking/Mutex/Semaphore
• Coordinating Threads
• Preventing Threads from modifying the same structure
• Pitfalls
• Race conditions
• Deadlock
• Advice
• Don’t do concurrency yourself
• Gnu parallel
• Async libraries
• Basic Linear Algebra System
• Have a way to actually measure results

Episode 79: Technical Arguments

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We are on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown

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Intro

Understanding how Blockchain works

News/Links

• OpenAI Five
• https://blog.openai.com/openai-five/
• Microsoft Acquires GitHub
• https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2018/06/04/microsoft-github-empowering-developers/
• Families earning $117,000 now qualify as "low income" in California's Bay Area
• https://www.cbsnews.com/news/families-earning-117000-now-qualify-as-low-income-in-californias-bay-area/
• 5 React Practice Projects
• https://daveceddia.com/react-practice-projects/

Book of the Show

• Jason:
• Critical Play: Radical Game Design
• https://amzn.to/2Kw04XN
• Patrick: 
  • Name of the Wind
  • https://amzn.to/2tWyXKR

Tool of the Show

• Jason: Visual Studio Code https://code.visualstudio.com/
• Patrick: Github https://github.com/

Technical Arguments (1:00:26)

• Making progress vs “Doing it Right”
• Adding/Reclaiming Technical Debt
• Delivering on time
• When/how to optimize
• Language Arguments
• Which language to use
• Tabs vs Spaces
• Style
• IDE/Text Editor
• How to make technical arguments
• Reflect on why you want X
• What alternatives/substitutes exist?  What compromises?
• Do not force an argument to complete in a single session
• In between sessions, reflect on what has changed
• Pick your battles

Episode 78: Building and Testing Web Services with Postman

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T-Shirts! http://www.cafepress.com/programmingthrowdown/13590693

Building and Testing Web Services with Postman

• What is a web service and how is it different from a web page?
• What is REST?
• Why would someone use a web service if they aren't building a website?
• How can we make sure a web service is reliable?
• What is Postman?  
• What is it like working at Postman? Is Postman hiring?

More info:

Follow Postman on Twitter: https://twitter.com/postmanclient

Also on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/postman-api-tools-/

Episode 77: Julia

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We are on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown

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Intro

Classic Computer Science

News/Links

• Microsoft Releases AI Training
• https://aischool.microsoft.com/learning-paths
• Belgium declares loot boxes gambling and therefore illegal
• https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-04-25-now-belgium-declares-loot-boxes-gambling-and-therefore-illegal
• Taxonomy of Technical Debt
• https://engineering.riotgames.com/news/taxonomy-tech-debt
• Ubuntu 18.04 is available
• https://insights.ubuntu.com/2018/04/26/ubuntu-18-04-lts-optimised-for-security-multi-cloud-containers-ai

Book of the Show

• Jason:
• Economix: How and Why Our Economy Works (and Doesn't Work) in Words and Pictures
• https://amzn.to/2HuBMwu
• Patrick: 
  • Black Prism
  • https://amzn.to/2HsqqsK

Tool of the Show

• Jason: Brutal Doom http://www.moddb.com/mods/brutal-doom
• Patrick: YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw

Julia (51:10)

• Scientific Programming
• Typically slow interpreter, but very fast instructions
• Optimized instructions
• BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra System) library
• FFTW (Fastest Fourier Transform in the West)
• OpenMP
• IDE with plotting, visualization support
• MATLAB IDE
• Jupyter/ipython
• Top Features
• Async (check episode 41 for details)
• Native multiprocessor and distributed support
• Completely free and open source (better than Java)
• Compiled
• 2017 Used for scientific calculation that reached 1.54 petaflops
• C, C++, Fortran are only other high level languages to be used at 1+ petaflops so far