Programming Throwdown

Transcribed - Published: 2 May 2026

Patrick and Jason discuss what it means to become a manager and how the role differs from individual engineering work. They cover hiring, coaching, performance management, team goals, and when moving into management is or is not the right choice.

Transcribed - Published: 3 February 2026

Patrick and Jason break down workflow orchestrators and why they matter for batch jobs, long-running tasks, and resumable distributed systems. They compare tools such as Airflow, Dagster, Temporal, Ray, and Kubeflow while explaining the infrastructure patterns behind them.

Transcribed - Published: 4 November 2025

Patrick and Jason explain asynchronous programming and how it differs from traditional multithreading and multiprocessing. They cover coroutines, blocking versus non-blocking operations, promises, callbacks, async/await, and the tradeoffs behind each approach.

Transcribed - Published: 23 September 2025

Patrick and Jason are joined by Mark Cunningham to discuss how software engineers can find strong job opportunities and perform well throughout the interview process. They cover sourcing strategies, reverse interviews, negotiation, hiring-manager expectations, and common mistakes candidates should avoid.

Transcribed - Published: 31 July 2025

Patrick and Jason discuss how AI-assisted coding tools can speed up development, answer questions about a codebase, and reduce boilerplate work. They compare common workflows and tools such as Copilot, Cursor, and command-line assistants while talking through where these systems help most.

Transcribed - Published: 30 June 2025

Patrick and Jason cover memory management from both the operating-system and language-runtime perspectives. They discuss heap management, virtual memory, garbage collection, ownership models, and practical techniques for diagnosing and reducing excessive memory use.

Transcribed - Published: 12 May 2025

Patrick and Jason introduce reinforcement learning and place it alongside supervised and unsupervised learning. They cover Q-learning, SARSA, policy gradients, actor-critic methods, PPO, imitation learning, and why training and evaluating RL systems is so challenging.

Transcribed - Published: 17 March 2025

Patrick and Jason discuss project planning and management for software teams. They cover why planning matters, how frameworks like SMART goals, Gantt charts, Scrum, Agile, and Kanban fit together, and how to deal with uncertainty, dependencies, and scheduling risk.

Transcribed - Published: 3 February 2025

Patrick and Jason revisit working from home and the realities of remote engineering work. They cover communication, scheduling, home-office setup, motivation, distractions, and why remote work is not equally effective for every team or every person.

Transcribed - Published: 3 December 2024

Patrick and Jason explain vector databases by starting with embeddings, similarity metrics, and approximate nearest-neighbor search. They discuss how these systems store and query high-dimensional vectors and where tools like pgvector, Weaviate, Pinecone, and Milvus fit.

Transcribed - Published: 4 November 2024

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.

Transcribed - Published: 24 September 2024

Patrick and Jason discuss how to write a strong technical resume that gets attention without becoming bloated or misleading. They cover what to include, what to avoid, how automated screening changes resume writing, and how career choices shape the resume you build over time.

Transcribed - Published: 16 August 2024

Patrick and Jason explain DevOps and how it relates to site reliability, build systems, testing infrastructure, and release processes. They cover infrastructure as code, CI/CD, deployment strategies, operational metrics, and the kinds of failures good DevOps practices are meant to prevent.

Transcribed - Published: 10 June 2024

Patrick and Jason discuss unit testing, regression testing, and system testing, with a focus on when mocking actually helps. They explain mocks versus fakes, testing tradeoffs, and the practical role of testing libraries across several major languages.

Transcribed - Published: 29 April 2024

Patrick and Jason explain transformers and large language models from the ground up. They cover attention, encoders and decoders, self-supervised learning, RLHF, and the key architectural ideas that made modern LLMs possible.

Transcribed - Published: 11 March 2024

Patrick and Jason walk through the differences between compilers and interpreters, starting from machine code and assembly and moving up to high-level languages. They cover bytecode, JIT compilation, intermediate representations, and the tradeoffs between portability and performance.

Transcribed - Published: 12 February 2024

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. Upcoming in tech What are essential programmer knowledge items?

Transcribed - Published: 24 December 2023

Patrick and Jason explain HyperLogLog and the broader problem of estimating cardinality efficiently at scale. They walk through the ideas behind Linear Counting, LogLog, and HyperLogLog, including how these probabilistic techniques make distributed counting practical.

Transcribed - Published: 27 November 2023

Patrick and Jason discuss the Godot game engine and what a game engine actually provides to developers. They cover graphics, physics, scripting, portability, rapid prototyping, and why Godot has become an appealing open-source option for game development.

Transcribed - Published: 20 November 2023

Patrick and Jason survey the landscape of desktop user-interface development and compare common toolkit choices. They cover Qt, wxWidgets, Electron, notebooks, Streamlit, and game engines while discussing the architectural choices that make desktop applications easier to build and maintain.

Transcribed - Published: 23 October 2023

pganalyze: - Weekly series "5mins of Postgres": - How Postgres chooses which index to use: - CMU databases courses: - Postgres community: As well as social links: - Mastodon: - Twitter/X: @pganalyze, @LukasFittl - GitHub: @pganalyze, @lfittl - LinkedIn.

Transcribed - Published: 16 October 2023

Patrick and Jason explain differential equations and why programmers should care about them. They cover rates of change, ordinary versus partial differential equations, numerical solvers, and practical examples ranging from simulations to PageRank and game physics.

Transcribed - Published: 25 September 2023

Things to consider when choosing a database Speed & Latency Consistency, ACID Compliance Scalability Language support & Developer Experience Relational vs. NoSQL) Data types Security Database environment Client vs Server access Info on Kris & Harper: Website: harperdb.io Twitter: @harperdbio, @kriszyp Github: @HarperDB, @kriszyp.

Transcribed - Published: 11 September 2023

Patrick and Jason break down recursion as a practical problem-solving technique rather than a classroom trick. They cover base cases, recursive steps, common pitfalls such as nontermination and stack limits, and real applications in trees, graphs, and divide-and-conquer algorithms.

Transcribed - Published: 14 August 2023

In the latest episode of Programming Throwdown, we delve into the captivating world of interactive fiction. We explore: Wordnet, Inform, and how games in the past have been the forerunners of today’s NLP challenges.

Transcribed - Published: 24 July 2023

MosaicML’s VP Of Engineering, Hagay Lupesko, joins us today to discuss generative AI! We talk about how to use existing models as well as ways to finetune these models to a particular task or domain.

Transcribed - Published: 10 July 2023

It’s a question that may seem easy to answer on the surface, but in truth hides more complexity than people expect. In today’s episode, we tackle the latest on AI, creative endeavors, and more before diving into the meaty discussion of position localization.

Transcribed - Published: 26 June 2023

GraphQL is one of the biggest API enablers in software development, but just how complicated can things be? Tanmai Gopal – Hasura’s CEO extraordinaire – talks with Jason and Patrick about how the secret sauce gets made.

Transcribed - Published: 12 June 2023

In today’s episode, Jason and Patrick dive deeply with JFrog’s Senior Solutions Engineer, Bill Manning. With the conversation tackling the depth and complexity of software supply chains, vulnerabilities and more, Bill deftly offers grounded advice to listeners old and new.

Transcribed - Published: 22 May 2023

There’s more than what meets the eye when it comes to Kubernetes, and Craig Box – ARMO’s VP of Open Source & Community –is one of several who have seen its many twists and turns since its inception. He talks with Jason and Patrick about Kubernetes’ origins in pop culture, utility in the modern workflow, and possible future in today’s episode.

Transcribed - Published: 8 May 2023

Join Patrick and Jason as they tackle their answers to these timely questions – plus an in-depth discussion on Perl in practice – with today’s episode of Programming Throwdown.

Transcribed - Published: 24 April 2023

When it comes to untangling the complexities of what lies ahead for search engines in this age of AI, few are as deeply versed in the subject as You.com Engineer Saahil Jain. Jason and Patrick talk with him in this episode about what search even is, what challenges lie ahead, and where the shift in paradigms can be found.

Transcribed - Published: 10 April 2023

A second Jason joins this episode of Programming Throwdown! Jason McDonald – Python evangelist, author, and more – talks to Patrick and Jason about his experience with the programming language, how his disability helped and hindered his software career, and where its strengths and weaknesses lie.

Transcribed - Published: 27 March 2023

has made a mark on the world as we know it, but that’s only the tip of the AI iceberg. Join us as we discuss how the field of artificial intelligence is growing – including some developments that might not be on your radar!

Transcribed - Published: 13 March 2023

Databases are key to almost any project, large or small. Most database systems in the cloud are designed for heavy use and the costs can get expensive quickly, but database-as-a-service is a rapidly growing area, where many databases can share the same hardware for a much reduced rate, or even for free! Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale, joins Jason and Patrick to discuss database-as-a-service.

Transcribed - Published: 27 February 2023

Machine Learning Engineer is one of the fastest growing professions on the planet. Liran Hason, co-founder and CEO of Aporia, joins us to discuss this new field and how folks can learn the skills and gain the experience needed to become an ML Engineer!

Transcribed - Published: 13 February 2023

Patrick and I are always stressing the importance of code reviews and collaboration when developing. On Freund, co-founder & CEO at Wilco, is super familiar with how code review processes can go well, or become a hinderance. In today’s episode with us, he shares his unique perspective on code reviews and maintaining high code quality!

Transcribed - Published: 24 January 2023

At scale, anything we build is going to involve people. Many of us have personal schedules and to-do lists, but how can we scale that to hundreds or even thousands of people? When you file a help ticket at a massive company like Google or Facebook, ever wonder how that ticket is processed? Sanjay Siddhanti, Akasa’s Director of Engineering, is no slouch when it comes to navigating massive workflow engines – and in today’s episode, he shares his experiences in bioinformatics, workflows, and more with us.

Transcribed - Published: 9 January 2023

Today we field questions from Programming Throwdown’s listeners about AI, machine learning, and more practical matters as developers in our annual holiday special!

Transcribed - Published: 26 December 2022

Package managers are an often-overlooked aspect of any operating system, but their importance is not to be underestimated – especially in today’s development environment. As both creator of Homebrew and CEO of tea.xyz, Max Howell is intimately familiar with the ins and outs of open-source development, software engineering, and balancing passion with practicality. He shares these experiences and more with us in today’s deep dive into the subject!

Transcribed - Published: 12 December 2022

Yonatan Cohen – Co-Founder & CTO of Quantum Machines – joins us in this episode to tackle quantum computing! Did you know anyone can run quantum programs on Amazon Web Services for mere dollars? Learn about this field early to take pole superposition in the race to understand and use quantum computers!

Transcribed - Published: 28 November 2022

In this tour-de-force, Mike Dalessio – Engineering Director at Shopify – and Evan Phoenix – self-described “long-time Rubyist” – join us for a practical discussion of all things Ruby! Ruby is a beautiful language, and we're really excited to cover the history and present of this language with two experts.

Transcribed - Published: 14 November 2022

Today we discuss adventures, books, tools, and art discoveries before diving into unsupervised machine learning in this duo episode!

Transcribed - Published: 24 October 2022

Today we go back to our programming language roots with author, KT Academy founder, and Kotlin rockstar Marcin Moskala! We talk about how Kotlin makes itself doubly useful for app and backend development.

Transcribed - Published: 10 October 2022

Finding something online might seem easy - but as Marcus Eagan tells it, it’s not easy to get it right. In today’s episode, MongoDB’s Staff Product Manager on Atlas Search speaks with Jason and Patrick about his own journey in software development and how to best use search engines to capture user intent.

Transcribed - Published: 26 September 2022

Douwe Maan’s journey sounds too fantastic to be true, yet the tale that Meltano’s founder shares with Jason and Patrick today is very, very real. Whether it’s about doing software development by 11, joining Gitlab while juggling college responsibilities, or building his own company during today’s challenging times, he has quite the story to tell. In today’s episode, he speaks on Twitter, his perspective on remote work, and why data operations are a critical part of developer stacks in today’s world.

Transcribed - Published: 12 September 2022

Chip Morningstar, Software Engineer at Agoric, has had quite a career in the software industry – from designing spaceships, to joining Lucasfilm’s entertainment brands, to the emerging cryptocurrency industry. In this episode, he talks with Patrick and Jason about these and more: security in today’s online world, AI’s nascent role in gaming, and how expectations in game releases have changed with the times.

Transcribed - Published: 22 August 2022

Burnout in the tech industry is a very prominent concern among both leaders and developers alike. Ronak Rahman, Developer Relations Manager at Quali, joins Patrick and I in this episode to share his experience, and why having the right infrastructure in place can prevent work-life erosion (plus sticker shock with cloud service bills)!

Transcribed - Published: 9 August 2022

Coming off the heels of the scientific python conference, we are delighted to have Guido Imperiale, OSS Engineer at Coiled, to talk with us about this exciting space, including his own work on Dask, remote work benefits, and how distributed computing with the latest Python tools has allowed him to manage large data science projects with ease.

Transcribed - Published: 25 July 2022