Programming Throwdown - One Hundredth Episode

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

I hope everyone out there is safe and healthy during these crazy times. The silver lining on all of this is that many of us have more time. Time is one of the greatest gifts that one can get. I hope you are able to spend more time with family and learning new skills. I'm looking forward to seeing all of the amazing innovations that people create when the world is back open for business. This is our 100th episode!!! In this milestone show, we reflect on our early episodes and how the field has changed over the years. Happy hacking! Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2020/04/episode-100-one-hundredth-episode.html ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

programming throwdown episode 100 100th episode take it away patrick well it it is April of 2020 and the whole world is experiencing COVID-19. So we're going to have a celebration of our 100th episode. We're going to try not to dwell too much on it. We have some work from home stuff we might talk about in another episode or two and some tips and tricks we've learned. But this week, we want to use our intro topic to complain about how terrible all video conferencing is. Now that we're all stuck dealing with it all the time. Video conferencing is hard. I get it.

But man, it's just brutal, the latency. And for me, I never knew until this, we've talked about to various guests who work remotely and talking about working remotely. And when everyone works remotely, individually, and with the current latency and everything, what I underestimated is how hard it is to read a room. So how much I rely on like, saying something and looking at people and understanding, are they hearing what I'm saying? Is it interesting? Do I need to like, it because they look confused and then just have given up on that? It's like doing the podcast. It's just talking to an empty

audience and hoping that at the end they'll ask questions. Yeah, exactly. The latency for me is such a killer. And I feel like it's something that could be solved so easily. I mean, basically, you know, I think the actual true latency, like if I want to send a packet to any one of the people on the call, that that should be much less than a second. So so it's really just that there's buffering and they want it to feel natural and not stutter and everything, which that makes sense. But then at least give us something where we can like like i could press the space bar and my face would just glow so people know that i have something to say and then and then maybe like you know you when someone's talking the person who wants to talk next could just press the space bar and if like two people do it at the same time it would just randomly pick one um but instead what

you have is you know somebody talks and then they never really know if someone else has anything to say. So they keep talking. Finally, they stop. And then there's this pause and everyone interrupts each other at the same time. Yeah. Some of that, I feel like cultural and etiquette are going to evolve. I think this might be one of those things we look back on depending on how all this lasts and laugh about how bad it was in the beginning.

And I think maybe we kind of devise some etiquette for how to do stuff so like what is appropriate or inappropriate how do you like like you said like did you raise your hand and someone is like the the shell holder and they pass the shell to the next person uh and you know they're the ones who get to speak um yeah i don't know i think we can make it better but for now now, oh, not good. Yep. Yep. It's just a painful period. But I think actually one thing that really impressed me is the fact that you could have 20, 30, even 40 people in a call. We use this software called BlueJeans where I work.

I think it might only be for enterprise. I don't know if anyone can just go on BlueJeans. I'm actually going to look this up now. Yeah, I think it... Oh, no, I think... Well, no, it has a trial. Yeah, so it's basically for enterprise. It costs money. But it's amazing how many people can go in one call.

That part really impressed me. So I actually feel like the technology, you know, given the way the media is, the technology is pretty good, probably as good as it could get. But it's just that, you know, the limitations require us to communicate a little differently. And we just haven't figured that out yet. I mean, what's your take? Do you think that the tech itself is bad or just that we haven't figured out how to use it? I think both. So I think the well, that's, I guess, a cop out answer. So I mean, I think the tech, the latency is tough. But I think we've also just not adjusted to the sort of norms for it and doing these big group like running things the same

way they used to run. So we continue to run online meetings like we used to run in-person meetings. And I think maybe that's just not the right way. I don't know what the right way is, but maybe that's not the right way. So even just the UI, so we've had large meetings similarly with our software with 20, 30 people, but then like it won't fit all of the faces

on the screen at the same time. Like how do you choose who to display? I don't think the sort of invent, the way we always use it before is like one room connecting to another room or one person dialing into a meeting. We've never had a, you know, 20, 30 person meeting where everyone's in their own room. And so it is actually, as you said, somewhat impressive that it works at all with that many people and getting all of the video streams into one place processing them and sending them out back to everyone i mean that is not an easy problem yeah yeah i think

you're right the latency is is is something that i don't think it can really be solved if you're sending video especially at that quality but yeah it just needs to be handled better so that um so that people could communicate without cutting each other off maybe another way of putting it is i feel like the technology is good but the product isn't good maybe that's a that's a better way to say but i would say maybe the product isn't wasn't built with this use case in mind like it's uh it's the most adjacent thing but it wasn't at least how we're using it it's not the most adjacent you're totally right it's not the it using it, it's not the most adjacent. You're totally right. It wasn't designed for that use case. Yep, yep.

It's almost like someone needs to make a new product. Yeah. And all of those people are working from home using their own product trying to build the fixes. So they also are struggling, right? They're all like, no, our person team, this is not working well. So I'm sure it's a pain point for them. And they're probably trying to fix it, but it'll take time for them to. there's a lot of complexity around the details there, but, but, uh, if someone comes up with a new way for, you know, 10 people to, you know, all talk with each other, uh, without constantly

interrupting each other, I think they could easily disrupt, uh, whoever's at the top right now, I guess maybe zoom is at the top. I don't know. They seem to be the most one in the press. So I know they're constantly in the press and and some of the things are pretty wild i don't know how true they are there's something like all of the um um all of the information is going to like a server offshore or something i don't know there's a lot of weird stories about zoom yeah well i mean it's the classic engineering trope to say that uh i understand one thing i understand all the things so this can't be that hard yeah exactly so you're right maybe an opportunity for someone someone new in the space to come in and uh to take advantage of all this i don't know i guess although the internet pipes

are might just fall over uh i know for me are they still uh are they still doing standard def for YouTube and all the video streaming, Netflix? Yeah, I think a lot of them are rolling it out. Just they're crumbling under the 300, 400, 500% increase in utilization. I think YouTube, they changed the default down, but you can still bump it back up if you would like to. Got it. you can still bump it back up uh if you you elect to got it so yeah i mean it's just completely unexpected um to have something like uh 300 increase in usage for something like youtube it's unbelievable so for news and our sites of the month sites of the month i like that oh i just made that up right now um so so my first one is I did not know about this before.

And then, you know, people publishing this like, you know, now that you and we should we should give a shout out, you know, if you've if you've been furloughed or lost your job, you know, my heart goes out to you because, yeah, I think that's happening to a lot of people. I'm very fortunate. It hasn't happened to me, you know, but I know that's a lot of people. So complaining about work from home is a little bit of a privileged stance, I guess, because it's good to actually be able to work. So if you haven't been, you know, apologies, shout outs. I know students, students are struggling right now. A lot of part time work as this appeared. So so my heart goes out to you. If you do have free time, though, or, you know, you're just stuck inside because you're under a

shelter in place somewhere in this wonderful world. uh this site i didn't know that this even existed before uh now that it did i'm i'm got it open and i'm uh starting to to kind of do this and that's uh learn.unity.com and this is sort of the unity platform which we've i think we had a whole episode about um their website for learning how to program and use Unity. And they've made these teaching sessions free for three months. And they have projects like a first-person shooter or like a go-kart game where you can go in and make modifications, small changes, learn how it works. And I think that's really cool. For me, starting from scratch or even with just a game engine or something like Unity

and building up a whole project is pretty intimidating. But I definitely could go in and change some of the assets for a first-person shooter or the physics or change it into adding up some HUD or something. And they have a number of tutorials here that are free at least for the next three months um i wasn't ever i wasn't able to find out how much it costs normally it didn't look that hard but for the next three months at least this is a cool thing to be able to do so if you've ever had an interest in sort of playing around in game programming i i would take advantage of this i'm planning to get download some of these projects and sort of goof around

with them myself i think for my kids it would be a good opportunity yeah they're probably not going to use this to learn to program they're still a little bit young but have them tell me what they would like to see and be able to do it for them and be the kind of uh hero in their eyes at least which i guess is a kind of a low bar but you know be able to do something specific i want a pumpkin oh sure here let's let's make a pumpkin and then they can have a game that they they helped build yeah this is awesome i'm taking a look at it now um yeah there's a ton of really good resources here unity is definitely um sort of taking over as as as the game engine now and the thing about game engines it's kind of like it's kind of like, it's kind of like you have those web apps that they make for the phone. And the things don't quite feel right.

So because it's HTML and JavaScript, but they're trying to make it feel like the iPhone UI, the slider doesn't quite move right. There's just not as much inertia on the slider. It's just kind of this uncanny valley. I think that Unity is getting such a market share that everyone else is getting kind of put into that uncanny valley. Where now, if I play a game that isn't on the Unity engine, they're just weird. It just doesn't behave like everything else. And so if you're interested in doing games and they might

even get into um other sort of you know visual if you have to do maybe interactive charts or something might might become a thing in unity so i think it's definitely a good thing to learn it looks like the after the three months it costs 15 a month which uh you know seems very reasonable um if you're if you're using it, you're getting a lot of content out of it. So cool. My thing of the show is dig.ccmixter.org. So CC Mixer is a site that has a ton of different audio resources.

And dig.ccmixter is a bunch of free resources. So if you're making a YouTube video, if you're making a youtube video for making a video game in unity if you want to take the background music that came with the uh with the unity uh uh you know starter pack and replace it with something else um you can just go and grab uh any of these uh um music uh songs and you can put them anywhere you know as long as some of them are attribution licensed so you know in the credits of your game or your video or in the comments the description of your video you have to give a shout out I mean which you should be doing anyways but But other than that, they're totally free to use. And there's a ton of content.

They just hit their one million mark or one million folks have used at least one song from there, which is pretty incredible. And, you know, it's a great resource. I love things like this and Free Sound and other sort of sites that have tons of media for you to use for your own projects. That's pretty cool.

I guess that dovetails in with the previous suggestions when you make your game and you want some cool music and you can, yeah. Yeah, exactly. By the end of this, if you are furloughed, which again, heart goes out to you all, but you could use some of that time to make a pretty cool first-person shooter, learn some new tech. So not building on the previous two, I have something completely different, which is physicstravelguide.com. And I've always had this sort of weird passing interest in physics.

I've never been able to get into the rigor of it. You know, I studied it and I guess a little bit in high school and in college. And I never really got into sort of the deep physics or whatever, theoretical physics and those kinds of things. But I found this website pretty good. And reading the explanation, it's like something I guess I never knew was missing, which is you get these, which is what I would give. So I won't try to for any of them. You get the sort of like armchair quarterback explanation of physics from your friend, which often leaves some to be desired. You could search whatever you're interested in in Wikipedia and probably be overwhelmed by things you don't understand

or complexity, which is what I often find for math and physics. And so this website tries to take a variety of topics, allow you to sort of look in whatever you're interested in, and then explains it somewhere in the middle. So it tries to be rigorous, but it gives you sort of an intuitive explanation. So something that just like, oh, okay, I get that that kind of makes sense. And then they try to give you a sort of more formal and then the fully sort of abstract with formulas and everything. But they also give you

a bunch of links to follow up on and all of that. And they've got tons of articles here on just, you know, all sorts of things about quantum mechanics. Here's Maxwell's equation, Schrodinger's equation. And there's brief, very sort of simple to understand high level stuff. There's, you know, what what where to go from there. Like, how does it relate to the rest of physics? I found this a really interesting resource. You know, I haven't sat here and read all of it, but I do find every so often I come across some idea and I'm thinking about it.

I don't know why. And just wondering, you know, I wonder how that works. And here's a way to go look it up. There's so much good content here there's also just looking at it i'm like i have no idea what that is and like click it and then i get uh oh okay well at least now i i didn't know i knew that before but uh that's pretty cool yeah i mean this is awesome yeah i mean i could easily uh i know what i'm doing today. Yeah, I mean, this covers everything. Yeah, so things like magnetic monopoles. And do they exist?

Why would they be important if they don't exist or do exist? Yeah, it's cool stuff. Yeah, you have this whole equation section. They talk about all these different ways of solving problems. Physics is one of those things that has sort of puzzled me when I think about it. It seems like throughout my career, various physics things have always come up, like topics just from the news or from someone's idle thoughts, and we'll bring it up in the office,

which is one of the things I don't think comes up as much anymore. But, you know, it's one of those things that is a recurring theme where I don't need to know any physics to be able to do my job whatsoever presently. But it's something that I find that people who tend to do programming and stuff and be into it and like me also have a sort of passing interest. So I guess there's some similarity there. And it's one of those kind of quirky things that I guess there's no real reason why they need to be related but I find that they often are yeah I think it makes sense I mean I think the the at the end of the day the physics is kind of like what people what computer scientists did before there were computer scientists right so I mean a lot of us like to build stuff and simulate things. And now we can work sort of in the world of bits. But before, when there was only the world like to learn more about which is the sort of rigorous formal computer science uh theorem proving and we i'm

sure we've probably talked about uh various of languages used for this and before one is c o q is that coke or cock i don't know um but another one is the lean theorem prover. And as soon as I try reading it, I instantly kind of nope my way out. I think we've talked about Agda before, too. And I think Agda is pretty similar. Maybe not. I don't know. See, I don't even know enough about this to know. This is wild. What is this? So this lean theorem prover is one of these things where you try to take a theorem and through a series of I guess you would call them transformations. I don't know. I need to kind of go all the way through it again. It's on my maybe bucket list is too strong, but it's on

my list of things to one day learn about is to sort of take a set of transformations and prove a statement. So you might say that like the inverse of an inverse of a value is equal to the value itself, right? So you say like if I invert a value and invert it back, it's itself. So like, but why? How? Like how do you prove that? Like what is the sequence of steps to go through to explain that? Or the you know rule of what is it commutivity or associative rule like these rules in mathematics like how do you say that a plus b is equal to b plus a like how do we know that that's universally true how would you prove to a computer that this is uh something that it should take for granted um you know as a human we know we trust other people have done it but if you have a computer which has a set of i guess a language for describing what things are

true at a base level and you prove enough of those base level things and and link them to each other in a certain way the computer can go yes you have shown that this must be true now oh i see so uh this natural number oh sorry yeah this graph is is doing is trying to do that so this yeah so this natural number game which is my link will link it in the show notes uh presently it's it's uh i think getting it with for some reason having some hiccups it wasn't working so great for me has a sequence of things to go through teaching you uh i guess a variant of the lean theorem prover, which is one of the tools people use to do this kind of work by taking you through the steps of getting through sort of proving addition and how addition works and why it works. And going

to like I was saying, like that, I always forget the rules, associativity and commutivity. And they have a sequence of learning steps laid out in a graph of one way you might go through the dependencies and build upon each other in your understanding while also teaching you how to do this theorem proving. And I thought it was a pretty cool approach for something that I've long wanted to understand.

And maybe this is helpful to you if you've also wanted to learn about theorem proving. Yeah, this is awesome. Yeah. I've never been, uh, you know, into, into theorem proving, but, uh, my, my PhD advisor, he's famous for saying, uh, theory is worthless. That's like his thing.

Um, you know, I think that, that obviously that's like a really extreme view. I mean, it's something that only someone who is a professor in neural networks would say. But I think that without it, you can't really get started. I think a lot of the stuff that we take for granted, as you said, is because some people took something that we observed and were able to construct a pattern and generalize it. Yeah, this is totally awesome. And it actually has a really nice tutorial and it walks you through like starting with the identity, like proving that X equals X.

And then, or I guess at that point, that's an observation. Yeah, this is cool. Man, between this and the last thing, that's basically gonna be my entire day now. Hey, guys, we're going to take a little break to talk about University of California, Irvine's Division of Continuing Education. So this is a pretty cool program. They have a variety of different kind of certificates that you could acquire. They have things like Python, they have data science, they have machine learning. And these are things where, you know, if you didn't necessarily get, let's say, a degree in machine learning or you haven't worked as a machine learning engineer

for a bunch of years, this is a way to sort of get a lot of that knowledge, a lot of that expertise. And, you know, I know Patrick and I, we've both done a bunch of courses online. And so it's a really good way to sort of boost, you know, your knowledge and your skills in a particular area. Yeah, I mean, I did tons of online classes when I first started working. And, you know, for me, being part of a class, I mean, it's always interesting, but the curriculum, the self-paced stuff, it works great sometimes. But sometimes having a here's what we're doing each week, marching through their curriculum and going through it, it's very similar to how, you know, just a normal university class works.

In fact, you know, feeling like it's almost exactly the same is just a comfortable thing, a good way to learn. And learning from professors who, you know, that's their thing. They teach, they help others to learn and having access to it, doing the assignments. It really helped me go from, you know, where my undergraduate left off to, you know, to just kind of bootstrapping into more specifics, higher level things, things that were more pertinent to my job at the time. You know, I highly recommend people taking classes, continuing education from a college. Yep. Yep. Yeah. I think getting it through a university is actually really, really stellar. I mean, it's really awesome that universities are starting to get into this. And, you know,

that there's going to be sort of quality lectures and professors there's there's you know there's a very strong brand behind any any sort of major university and you know uc reminds one of the top universities for cs so um so they they you know they've been around since about 1962 i think and they uh you know they have uh you know they've been around a long time they've been doing you know they've been around a long time. They've been doing, you know, they've been teaching a long time. They've been teaching online a long time. And so it's a good place to to go and get this kind of education. Yeah. If you're interested, I think they're still doing enrollment for some late classes for spring, but summer is upcoming. And as we've been talking about this whole episode,

I mean, I think everyone has extra time at home these days. Oh, my gosh. If you're interested, you can check it out at CE.UCI.EDU slash programming throwdown. And we'll put the link in the show notes, of course. But once again, that's CE.UCI.EDu slash programming throwdown yeah and if you uh do sign up and take any courses you know we'd love to get feedback you know please write us in tell us what you think of it um you know we could pass it on to them but also for us it's really good to know um you know what you thought about that uh you know folks out there who are listening so all right back to the show uh now it's time for book of the show my book of the show is influence by robert cialdini um this is a really interesting book um i actually read it a while back um um but but it kind of stuck with me and um it goes through the thing I love about this book. So I recommended, um, um, another book by I think Scott Adams that was about influence, but that book was, um, written by someone who I guess so um they say a lot of you know

the beginning at least they say a lot of things that are kind of obvious um but then they show actually this ties in well with um with our last news article um they kind of show why these things are what they are like they kind of explain the causality there. And then they start jumping into, you know, kind of more advanced topics and things that you wouldn't really expect. One of the things that really stood out for me was they said that if you, let's say you're in a traffic accident and so you're on the highway and let's say you have, I don't know, a broken arm or something, you know, someone just hit you from behind, you have a broken arm and let's say that person sped off. So, um, so you're in the, you're in a bad spot, right? So I said, one thing you should do is, is instead of like waving and trying to get all the car's attention at once, you should actually just stop a car or like pick

one car and focus on them. Or, or imagine the same thing if you're in a line and and you're feeling like you're going to pass out or something um you pick one person in the line and you ask them directly for help and um the reason why is is um basically there's this sort of weird dynamic with influence where if someone isn't totally sure you're trying to influence them or somebody else then then nobody takes you seriously and so um if you pick one person even if that person doesn't help you by by sort of focusing on them and getting rejected by that person you immediately build like a ton of influence with the people right around them um and and so you know that

was just one thing i won't go through everything but it talks a lot about social science it explains like why uh you know car salesmen do what they do um explains you know both good and bad influence um and i thought the whole thing was really fascinating. I mean, I think especially for introverts, this is a must read because you can kind of see, you know, for extroverts and for people who are naturally have a lot of influence. You know, I think a lot of these things could come naturally or feel naturally, feel natural. But but for everyone else, you're just getting the information, being exposed to it is extraordinarily valuable. And now you can kind of see, now that I've read the book, I kind of see the attempt to influence in commercials and when people write sales pitches and all of that. You can kind of decompose it, deconstruct, using all of this theory that has come out of this book. So it's a bit of a heavy read. It's written for lay people like us. So you don't have to be a social scientist. It doesn't use a lot of complicated terminology. But, you know,

it's a pretty deep dive. So keep that in mind. But, you know, now's a good time, hopefully, for a lot of folks to do some reading. And I think this is a good one to pick up. You've influenced me. I feel the need to to read this book about influence. All right. Although that's so meta. So this book must be working. So. Yeah. So my my book of the show is a science fiction book called Columbus Day, which is part of a series Expeditionary Force by Craig Allenson. And this, you know, I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy since the last time we've done book of the show. I had actually a pretty long list, but I picked this one.

It's the most recent one I've read. And I really enjoyed this. It was a pretty lighthearted read. Well, a pretty easy read, not in not a sort of deep, deep sci fi book. But it had some interesting ideas, which is, you know, if the it doesn't spoil too much. I checked the Amazon review and it's listed as sort of the summary. But if Earth was invaded by sort of an alien species and then some other alien species came and, you know, did battle with them. And we sort of like, yay, there are saviors.

They fought off the bad guys. We actually have no context for that. We don't know how or why they did what they did to sort of celebrate them as heroes makes sense, but could be wrong. And that if such people actually showed up, we don't know the grand scheme of species and aliens that would be out.

So if someone showed up with vastly superior technology to us, we'd somewhat be subservient to them. But if we had a choice, we would have no broader context of the political scheme of where they came from. Like, who are their enemies? Are we allying ourselves with like, the really bad people of the universe? And like, are we going to become part of the, you know, axis of evil? Like, we don't, you wouldn't really know. And it's sort of an interesting topic that we always think of ourselves as like kind of knowing what's what and if somebody just you know it's fiction right but if someone sort of just popped into the sky there would be actually very little we would understand and

what we were able to be communicated about might be very limited. So we may not know the whole story. All you know is that they don't like the people who are trying to kill you. That's the only piece of information you have, right? Right. But the people trying to kill you, there are various levels of that, right? And so exactly what they, you can always spin it. But then if it gets spun, so they you know you can say oh they only were destroying large cities right maybe they were just trying to prevent uh you know make it less you a less

valuable target um and so is that a kind-hearted thing to do or a terrible thing to do were they trying to help you are they trying to hurt you so yes you're right so if other people showed up and fought them off all we know is that they fought them. Yeah, we don't know. Are they the bad guys or the good guys? Should we go with them? Should we fight them? Yeah, that's usually start with something that happened on Earth, like, you know, that they want to, to explore, and they just want to get rid of basically all the names and the places. But it's really like something that could happen on Earth between countries. Or, or do they do they just start with a blank canvas and say, you know, I want planets made of sodium, and then they just start exploring a blank canvas and say you know i want planets made of sodium and then then they just start exploring all the implications of that yeah i mean i think it happens lots of

different ways if you're curious about this i did stumble across a random reddit the other day um which is the world building reddit so uh if you go to reddit.com slash r slash world building um they actually have a reddit where people give maps for places they've invented. People give feedback, ask questions. What do you think about this? Exactly that. If the world was not mostly silica based sand, but sodium everywhere, like what would be different?

And, you know, they kind of riff off each other, help each other think through the implications and generally just, you know, sort of help out creative people with trying to think through what would happen. Cool subreddit to check out. Yeah, it sounds awesome. It's time for. Oh, well, talking at first, I was going to skip the show, but I forgot I haven't been driving in the car. But, you know, I still find that I haven't been actually reading the books either. I found downtime.

I've still been listening to to Audible. And so Audible, of course, is one of the people who help sponsor our show. And if you go to Audible trial dot com slash programming throw down, you can get your first book free. You could get I don't I didn't check to see if they have influence, but that's where I listen to this Columbus Day book. And I don't drive in the commute, but I still find that I use Audible. Just, you know, the other day I was I think was vacuuming and I put on headphones and was listening to that while I was vacuuming because I guess I'm a weirdo. But I wanted to keep making progress on my on my books. So if you're interested in checking out listening to books and you haven't yet, you could go to audibletrial.com slash programming throwdown. Get yourself a free book.

Also help out the show. Yeah. Yeah. Influence is I read or listen to influence on audible as well. OK. Yeah. I think I think for me, what my routine has been basically in the the evening i'll just lay down and and uh i actually i got these uh um i got a new phone i got the pixel i don't know whatever it is i think i think

i got the three it wasn't the very latest one so yeah i got pixel three it came with um uh earbuds and in the past i've not liked earbuds they always kind of fall out of the ear or you have the weird hoop around the ear. But these ones have a really interesting design where basically they shrink wrapped like a thick piece of plastic around the beginning of the wire coming out of the earbud. And then they took that wire and they like looped it and put it back, threaded it back through the earbud. And you can actually control the size of that loop. And that loop actually, you know, presses very gently against like the inside of your ear and kind of keeps it in place. And so for the first time, I feel like I can have earbuds, I can even like run with them and everything, and they're pretty comfortable.

So what I've been doing is basically laying down. and and that way if you kind of roll over you don't you know kind of squish like you know the the headphone against your ear and just kind of having some time to like kind of just close your eyes and listen to a book um especially with um you know all of us working from home you know we're not um you know i just i find myself looking at screens way more because i'm either you know helping out like the kids and they're they're doing something on a screen or i'm on a screen and so this is just a a good opportunity to not have to like read something or really focus your eyes on something so yeah and so you can totally get Influence for free If you go to audibletrial.com Slash programmingthrowdown

Also if you want to support Support us And you already have an audible Or you don't want to get an audible account You can support us directly on Patreon Also if you are a member On Patreon you get the Patreon Stream which is

As much higher bandwidth so that part is nice um but yeah check us out on patreon and uh and uh we really appreciate all the support okay now it's not too early to say that it's time for tool of the show tool of the show my tool of the show is vcpkg or or I don't know what that's supposed to actually be. Let me see. Yeah, it's vcpkg. It's a sum from Microsoft. It's a C++ library manager.

It works really well. So basically, if you program in, let's say, JavaScript or TypeScript, then you're definitely familiar with NPM or YARN. And so these are package managers. You can basically say, you know, NPM install React. And it will just go through, install React, install all the dependencies. It'll do all the work for you so that in your code, you can just type, you know, import React and it's just done.

You don't have to worry about, you know, what it took to make that happen. You know, for Java, there was Maven, which did this. For Python, there's Anaconda or Pip. But for C++, you know, there's been a variety of different tools. And I did a quick survey myself, there was I think one called Conan. There's one actually that Ethereum uses. I don't remember the name of it. But, but vcpkg from Microsoft seemed to be the best. And it worked really well. It's it's even though it's from Microsoft from Microsoft, you don't have to be on Windows to use it. But basically you install this program

and then it's just vcpkg install whatever the C++ library is. It could be Boost, it could be Protobuf, it could be SDL, whatever you need. After you do that, then you have to be using CMake for this to work. But then in your CMake file for your project, you pass in this vcpkg toolchain file

and then you're good to go. So you could just bang include boost and it's there. So I thought it worked pretty well. With C++ it's difficult because it's much more open-ended in terms of the build system and everything. But this struck a good compromise where it

forces you to use CMake but it's not holding your hand too much there. And on the flip side it has a lot of packages and really good support. Yeah, this is pretty cool. I'm going to check it out. I always struggle with C++

and getting libraries and dependencies. And do you include the source in your source? Do you have everyone build their own libraries? It's always such a mess. Yeah, I mean, I try to include the source in the source. So if you look at Eternal Terminal, or any of the projects I have, there's an external folder, and there's a bunch of Git submodules in there. But for some things like protobuf, it's just not practical. And so I relied on this, and so far it's worked pretty well. Well, keeping with not recommending informational books or tools, I'm recommending a game. That game is Dead Cells. I guess most people probably heard about it, but I'm late to it.

This is a roguelite Castlevania-inspired action platformer. Okay, I cheated. I read from their website because I didn't know how to describe it. So if you've ever played a Castlevania game and sort of doing the 2D platforming and also having things closed off that you don't know how to get to yet. Yeah, this has kind of those elements. It also has roguelike elements that, you know, you make some amount of progress, but also like if you die, you kind of lose some of the stuff. And I really find it pretty cool. And I first started started playing it although it had been out for a while on other platforms on the um on my ipad and there it's a little tough because some

parts require kind of a lot of precision um but i still thoroughly enjoyed it the art style is pretty cool the the kind of atmosphere of the game is really nice and the awesome thing is it's available um on you know i think like the xbox playstation the switch i know it's on ios um it didn't look like it's on android yet but most people probably have at least one of many of those things uh on the pc as well i believe it's on steam um and so if you haven't checked it out before and that description sounded interesting or you go look it up and see the video, it sounds interesting and check it out. But I really like that game. It's really cool.

I definitely have. So I have not won or made tons of progress, but I do keep playing it. Cool. So it's it's it's a Castlevania game. So you're kind of running around like slashing at things. Yeah, that's right. Yep. And you have various weapons you can switch out or

change or customize your person and you kind of unlock better stuff as you make progress kind of like a rogue oh okay cool check it out there was one called uh wayward souls which was like a um it sounds similar but uh um one thing i didn't like about that game is it was, do you remember those, remember like, you know, like the original Zelda? How it was kind of like a top down, but not really. It's also kind of from the side too, right? Isometric? I think it's isometric.

Is it isometric? Yeah, it could be. Yeah, so this, the Wayward Souls was isometric. And so that made it kind of difficult to judge the distances. So it sounds like the dead cells is like a platform or like a side view it's like a side yeah exactly yes yeah it might be easier um cool yeah i'll check that out i'll probably pick that up i'm a huge huge gamer so i'm actually surprised i'd heard of that so i'm gonna oh really okay it's on it's on mobile

you said uh i don't know if it's on android i looked i couldn't it didn't look like it was but it's on nearly everything else i actually don't know why it's not on android oh okay got it so since you already just said you have a pixel you might be uh you might be left out oh it's coming on june 3rd says android on june all right cool maybe i'll pick it up on pc so for our our topic, we decided to do something a little bit different. So I had this idea and I kind of looked and I became enamored with it. So if everyone hates it, you can send your hate mail to Jason. People say they can't tell our voices apart, so they don't know who's talking.

So I thought, you know, we did 100 episodes. I didn't want to do something super celebratory or patting ourselves on the back because just because we're dumb enough not to quit doesn't mean that we've done something great. But what I did say is it's been nine. So our first episode was in 2011. And people throughout the years have written us and told us how funny it is to go back and listen to early topics. But I wanted to take some of the show notes that we had from our early episodes. I don't know how many we're going to do. We'll just sort of see. And we'll sort of take turns or do it together and just sort of read through some of the topics and talk about

how times have changed or how things have changed. And, you know, just sort of a little bit of a look back. And funny because, you know, we're talking at the beginning even you know video conferencing and how it just takes time for a culture to to sort of grow up around it um and so i'm pretty sure we'll find some uh some insights here about what things have or haven't changed maybe some languages have gone and maybe some languages see are never going to go away um but we're going to take it away so so i'm going to take it with the very first one, Jason, I'm taking it all the way back to February of 2011. Oh, sorry. March of 2011.

Oh, sorry. You're going to tell people what they tell people is, is, is Patrick's agreed to do the odd episodes and I've agreed to the even, and we've also agreed not to read the other one. So this is going to be a surprise to me and mine are going to be pretty surprising to Patrick too. Yep. Okay. So, so episode one. So here it goes. So the first thing that I have in the show notes that we talked about was the fail overflow PS3 hack, which we warn people not to watch the video that we posted a link to because we didn't want someone to get into trouble for

all the takeout. Oh man, I remember that. So actually so actually my uh because of that oh no no never mind there was actually an unrelated hack and a bunch of remember when when the playstation was the store was hacked and all of our credit cards got leaked out oh yes but i think this is different this is hacking the actual hardware so the next one is going to be, we know it's there, but it's coming. So this was, we talked about Bitcoin. Yes, we talked about Bitcoin in March of 2011. And yes, if we had bought $100 of it, even today, I think we would still have millions of dollars. So Bitcoin, Jason, what do you think about Bitcoin?

You think it's got a future? No, it's not going anywhere. It's not going anywhere it's not going anywhere I think what we should do is we should take the Bitcoin that we mined on our university computer and software take all those coins and sell them for six dollars a piece that's what we should do yeah what would you say what would you say if I would sell you some Bitcoins for like 10 cents yeah that'd be awesome yeah i'll take it how many would you like to buy uh so we talked about the bitcoin java client and what bitcoin was oh man then we talked

about uh comics c-o-m-i-x which i believe is a uh like an e-comic yeah that's right man wow that's why that was before that was before like comiXology and Amazon having like Kindle comics which is how I view myself today that was before you had all that subscription stuff so that's changed a lot yeah yeah I mean a whole and Marvel movies and yeah yeah the way comics work today and and how they're in mainstream culture is super different so this is this is a good one episode two uh um well there was a there was a ted talk for a guy who tells some pretty funny jokes using math but i actually really like this uh we had a video making fun of of hillary clinton not knowing what firefox was and uh so spoiler alert patrick and jason know who wins every election we could just call it right here oh that was uh in march 25th 2011 um yeah that's hilarious so on the news you know ios uh four that was on the news and uh um and uh yeah apple 2 emulator it's pretty cool yeah this is a wild throwback so

so is there anything uh anything interesting in some of the uh some of the episode three stuff yeah so here so i'm looking at episode three now and i mean so i see that the tool of the day for me was key pass so apparently i used to actually give useful tools of the day not games and i still use key pass uh it's i'll use this for a second as a little a little different but someone was asking me someone recently had a death in their family um and they were sort of saying you know how do you make sure that like other people would be able to access it and i don't have a great story for like if both my wife and i passed away but i was like you know basically for my wife and i you know we keep all of our passwords

in a key pass save that we have sort of backed up and synced really well so that if something happened to me, she could get into all my accounts. And then we have a very long, unique password with strong instructions to never use that password anywhere else

for that key pass save. And I felt pretty good about that. And so that's sort of my strategy. But apparently I must have started, I've been using KeePass for nine years, so since April of 2011. And you use it too? Yeah, yeah, I've been using it since we found it

and that show, which is totally bonkers. So that's a product that's really solid. So here's another, here's a good news article. Google hires the inventor of java to work on android oh i remember that yeah um this is james gosling that was talked about yeah that's right you know so i have a funny story actually so i i um i ended up meeting james gosling and uh um he gave a presentation and he came to the presentation with a shirt that said, well, it said F word PowerPoint. So the shirt just said that.

And like, I think he must have made it himself because it just was like an aerial, like whatever the default font is that comes with MS Paint. You know, he just got that and then went to a t-shirt transfer company or something it's just an f powerpoint and then and then he he just gave a whole presentation um with with no screen at all like he just talked and i thought that was hilarious and then i think about six months after he joined Google, he quit. And he went to work on some robotics thing. Yeah, I don't know how long he was there for.

But yeah, he's not at Google anymore, I don't think. I think he's moved on. Yeah. All right. In episode eight. What about episode? Oh, I was going to jump to eight. We talked about developer versus programmer versus computer scientist, which I think that's actually still today a pretty relevant thing.

It's actually surprising that almost a decade later, we still just call everyone software engineer. Although now there's machine learning engineer. So at least there's like, I guess type of distinction yeah so i see in here the in episode oh where was it uh in episode five i was gonna say that uh that was the first time apparently we thought it was newsworthy that ios would allow you to do updates over the air you wouldn't have to plug into your computer to update your phone that's amazing oh my gosh that's that's pretty good oh man things were so different i don't even know that i had a smartphone at that time oh okay in in episode 10

um minecraft was still owned by notch and uh and and uh someone um someone was claiming Bethesda, actually. Wow, I didn't even, I totally forgot about this. So Bethesda, I guess, had a game and Notch was making another game and they had the same name. And Bethesda said they were going to sue. And Notch said he'll play their best player in Quake 3. And if Notch wins, he gets the name. And if the Bethesda employee 3 and if notch wins he gets the name and if the bethesda

employee wins and bethesda gets the name that game never came out though right no yeah yeah he did make another game called fun with blocks which um uh which i bought foolishly thinking that you know any game notch makes would be amazing and it was it was actually terrible to be honest but uh well i can't believe this is this long ago so moving into 2012 episode 15 we covered that uh facebook was gonna ipo oh my gosh oh no i guess that they did ipo but they ipo'd and they went down and we were saying how it was like i guess a little bit of schadenfreude probably at the time but people were covering that they were blaming that they went down 11 right after they ipo'd in in 2012 i i'm pretty sure i would take it at the ipo price now yeah yeah i think the ipo price was uh

was like 15 and it went to 12 or something yeah i would definitely take that oh man yeah it's crazy perspective man so yeah uh yeah it's that but it doesn't feel that long ago yeah in episode 12 we introduced the raspberry pie oh and i don't think it had come out much before that i mean raspberry pie is like yeah raspberry party and even people largely have been well no i guess that's not true arduino and raspberry pi i guess they're just such staples now like it's it's kind of hard to imagine what it would be like without those yep uh in episode 14 we announced the pebble and they're out of business they got acquired right then intel buy them or no well kind of i mean they basically went out of business i mean they were acquired but it was not a good price if i remember

correctly yeah okay so episode 17 or in august of 2012 and we talked about the uh gangbuster selling of the ooya oh my gosh i remember that i remember looking at that and being like that is amazing it's exactly the console i want it plays all these awesome android games and then uh yeah like six months later it was gone right it's wild yeah i mean yeah i don't think uh they yeah they raised eight points i'm clicked on the kickstarter page now they raised 8.6 million dollars i don't think anyone probably plays uya today right maybe someone does there's no way i mean i would say even stronger than that i don't think anyone played uya a year after they got it oh man in episode 16 we announced the very first microsoft

surface oh wow do you remember surface used to be like a tabletop like presentation oh yeah companies and then they just like decided the name was too good to use on that and so they decided to use it for tablets yeah i remember that actually i remember watching a video of people playing dnd on that on that huge uh that huge screen that was horizontal like that it looked amazing wait were they in the same room though yeah it was a bunch of people in the same room playing on the surface and they had they had their own like 3d models that they had printed and put on top of the table it looked amazing oh that's cool yeah uh yeah here we go the w Wii U is getting ready to come out, man. It's 2012. Do you think that's going to be a success?

I don't know. Here's something that will never work. In 2012, Apple buys Fingerprint Scanning Company. What? Oh, man, I cannot believe we've been doing this this long. They don't even do fingerprints anymore. Everything's on Face ID now so yeah that's crazy so we're there long enough to they acquired a company delivered a product changed everything and then deprecated it yep uh yeah wow history moves a lot faster than you think yeah that's nuts oh man all right

i can look at these and i know immediately who found this like wooden computer kit this definitely came from patrick in episode 22 that is absolutely true that is absolutely true uh yeah that's true the the news articles definitely have a fingerprint on them yeah so so yeah so i and i remember talking about this stuff i can't believe well whatever anyways i can't believe this is seven years ago in january i and i remember talking about this stuff i can't believe well whatever anyways i can't believe this is seven years ago in january of 2013 i remember talking about the bigelow inflatable space station modules that they were going to send up to the iss they ended up sending some up and testing it but i mean i don't think anything's come of it i don't hear about it

anymore yeah wow episode 32 how to start a machine learning startup i was back in 2014 yeah so many of my friends uh around this time left to start machine learning companies and uh um well it depends on your it depends on your definition of failure i mean so so know, if the company gets acquired and you get paid basically what you would have made if you had just kept your regular job, like machine learning startup that i know failed which is i think at the end of the day machine learning is uh like a good tool to make something better and and that thing that you made better should be the company you know like like you could argue like google you know has a better search engine because of machine learning and or maybe statistics, whatever you want to say. And but at the end of the day, they weren't like a statistics company. They built a search engine. It's all the people who set out to say, like, you know, we're going

to do deep learning and charge people for it. That didn't really work out. Yeah, I'll do a couple more. So in Septemberember of 2013 episode 29 we had an article that nissan was going to have self-driving by 2020 oh man nissan would have they got dude they got eight months they have eight months left still holding out i think uh you know i think well you know here's the thing if If they do, not Nissan, they're out. But in general, if anyone does self-driving highway, which I think Tesla already has, right? Depending on your definition. Oh, really?

Yeah, I mean, I think if you could go rest stop to rest stop without touching the steering wheel, that's my definition. Oh, so you're trying to say that we should take show notes for predictions for our 200th episode is that what i hear you saying yeah right oh my gosh can you imagine what it's gonna look like 2022 2029 wow it'll be nuts oh episode 36 twitch bought by amazon september 2014 that was six years ago. Wow, this feels much more recent. Here's the Lytro camera. That's another thing that got pretty big and then died. Oh, yeah. Yep.

2014, episode 33. Oh, man. Looking at these languages, I must say, the languages we covered are all pretty robust. Yeah. You know, one of the things that I'm seeing is I had a lot of views on machine learning and statistics stuff. And one of the things that's that that this is like a lesson for a lot of people is like there's things that now like are we have an unconscious understanding for that in 2014 and definitely in 2011.

We had we it was really a struggle to understand like uh i have this markov chains for simulation and i remember at the time there's a really hard thing to understand um but now i've been using them so much that it's just like a second nature yeah that's right if it's easy to forget how little we knew like you yeah you get used to what you know now and you feel like you've always known it yeah oh there's a um episode wow wait a minute is that right so windows 10 came out in 2015 windows 10 is five years old that can't be right really i mean i've secretly been going back and editing all of our show notes to just be more hilarious oh no this is an article talking about windows 10

which is going to come out in the future but still it's like it's going to be about four years old so yeah in episode four we're talking about windows 10 so talking about all this stuff that changes but you know looking back at this like a lot of these tools a lot of these things i still do and use and like like you point out like wooden computers there's still things i'm interested in or have hobbies for that that have persisted around like six seven eight nine years like i think i change a lot but actually looking back it's kind of like huh i'm not sure we really do change that much like you still do the you know machine learning and i still have like embedded programming stuff like we you might things might change lot, but actually they sort of stay the same. Yeah, it's like you sort of normalize the changes, right?

So no matter how much things are changing, it kind of feels like a certain rate. And then you look back and you say, wow, it's actually not that. Apple opens source Swift. Did they ever do that? Yeah, I think that happened i think you can just uh let me see apple swift github oh yeah there it is yeah so this is pretty pertinent in episode 48 do you want to know what my tool of the show was jason let's hear it wayward souls no way

oh my gosh i actually uh um i i must have got that game because of you. But then I don't remember it and you say you loved it. Oh, man. Also, we talked a lot about source control and there's a lot of what I would call sort of roughly dead source control. I feel like it's all just Git and GitHub now. Like, I really don't hear anyone talking about anything else.

Yep. And that was just not clear in 2013 or 2014 based on what we were talking about yeah all right well i made it through episode 50 so in episode 46 um we talk about there's a there's a github gist like a little github um little snippet of code which are things that you can put in in a c++ file that will not make the program crash but will basically make the person's life really difficult so um i still talk about this today yeah because of this article define if while yeah so do things like put an if statement that every one in 100 times just evaluates true regardless. And it just makes it super hard to debug.

Yeah, that's right. Define if X to be if X and rand is less than 0.99. Could you imagine? Oh, my God. If you did that, it would be just total chaos for whoever came after you and it would be so hard to find all right well that's been pretty fun uh jason it's been nine years yeah i don't know what the future holds but uh hopefully less latent video conferencing and more awesome tech news yeah i mean well we need to finish with a prediction

uh oh no let me see i'm gonna you know i've been you know i've been making a prediction but i'll make i predict that uh within nine years that uh well this is i'm gonna it's gotta be bold so within nine years that i think that the way that high-speed internet works is going to be transformed by the satellite internet stuff that there's going to be so many extra satellites in orbit space is going to change i think the way that the world has changed just like how high-speed internet works by getting it via satellites from one of the many companies trying it uh the amount of rockets we're sending up um i'm pretty bullish on space i think people are going to be going into and out of space more than they do today and i know people have predicted

this for decades and decades but i think the time is coming i think there's going to be more travel to and from space we've got spacex blue origin renewed interest in it the starlink stuff is happening i think in the next 10 years we're're gonna see a huge transformation in space. And I think I don't know what the impact will be. But I think it'll be big. I think there'll be a lot of jobs around that industry. And I think it's going to change a lot of how stuff works. Wow, that's bold. So you're thinking like no cable internet, like basically everything is wireless? Not everything. But I think i think like yeah you'll be able to just get high speed internet pretty like your laptop for instance like your laptop today basically gets wi-fi and not many people would pay to have their you know computer have a sim

card in it i mean maybe people do i don't know and have hot spots i think that kind of thing will just become so cheap and ubiquitous that your laptop will, yeah, just use satellite for internet everywhere. Yeah, that makes sense. Makes sense. All right. My prediction is that I think university education will massively, massively change. I think that people won't get loans anymore. What will happen is there will be, I mean, there'll still be a loan, but I think basically there'll be a contract where people will invest in college students and then the college student will pay a certain portion of their salary back to give the return on investment instead of what we have now, where it's a loan system. So I think we'll, I think all of secondary, is that right, secondary?

Is that what you call college, secondary education? Yes. Yeah, right. I think all of secondary education will move from a loan system to an investment system where people literally invest in the future. And I think that that is going to radically change

so many other things. I think that that is going to like radically change um you know so many other things i think that that uh you know for one like the immediate change is that like like degrees will have to become commercially like like worthwhile right um you know and i think it's going to cause like more regulation and more like the people who give out these investments will will um you know they'll want to have some guarantees that they don't have now um but yeah i think secondary education will change enormously i think that you know the the the subjects that are not economically viable i think that they'll they'll find other ways to sort of teach people outside of like the university um like or or people will will pay out

of pocket i guess um but i think that you know if you look at for example stem um i think that we'll have like all these this sort of investment system set up where people say you know instead of you spending you know 120 000 on credit um you know i'll pay for your college but then i want you know i don't know 130 000 or like i want you 10 of your salary for the next 15 years i don't know whatever however it works out um and i think it'll move to that yeah yeah that'll have a huge ramifications interesting i think that's called it's isa right Sharing Agreement. Having a personal ISA or whatever. Oh, I'd never heard of that. Yeah, I think that's the like finance industry term for it.

Income Sharing Agreement. All right. Yeah. So I think college is going to go to at least not all majors. It's already more formal. It's happening. Your prediction is coming true. Done. Solved. But yeah, I think that will be the default way that folks do college, at least for some of these degrees. That's also bold. Also bold. I like it. All right. Thanks, everyone. Cool. All right. We'll catch you folks later. Next month, we're going to talk about working from home and all of that. Thank you so much for your support. Last month we did, you know, we were really in the midst of, you know, quarantine. Some people don't know this, but, you know, Patrick and I live in the counties that were the first to get quarantined. So we've been in quarantine for a long time. And so last month, you know, I just live streamed just myself writing some code.

And it was really cool to kind of talk to folks and the whole live stream thing. If you like the live stream and being able to talk back and forth during the stream, let us know. That's a format we don't typically do. But if people have interest in that, let us know. But either way, thanks a lot for your support

and be safe out there. The intro music is Axo by Binar Pilot. Programming Throwdown is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 2.0 license. You're free to share, copy, distribute, transmit the work, to remix, adapt the work, but you must provide attribution to Patrick and I and sharealike in kind.