Programming Throwdown

189: Agentic Loops

Running AI in loop hands-free.

188: World Models

187: Agentic Coding

In this episode, Patrick and Jason cover Agentic Coding!

186: Becoming a Manager

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

185: Workflow Orchestrators

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

184: Asynchronous Programming

Patrick and Jason explain asynchronous programming and how it differs from traditional multithreading and multiprocessing. They cover coroutines, blocking versus non-bloc

183: Landing a Software Job in 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. The

182: AI Assisted Coding

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 workf

181: Memory Management

Patrick and Jason cover memory management from both the operating-system and language-runtime perspectives. They discuss heap management, virtual memory, garbage collecti

180: Reinforcement Learning

Patrick and Jason introduce reinforcement learning and place it alongside supervised and unsupervised learning. They cover Q-learning, SARSA, policy gradients, actor-crit

179: Project Planning

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

178: Working from Home

Patrick and Jason revisit working from home and the realities of remote engineering work. They cover communication, scheduling, home-office setup, motivation, distraction

177: Vector Databases

Patrick and Jason explain vector databases by starting with embeddings, similarity metrics, and approximate nearest-neighbor search. They discuss how these systems store

176: MLOps at SwampUp

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 t

175: Resume Writing

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, ho

174: Devops

Patrick and Jason explain DevOps and how it relates to site reliability, build systems, testing infrastructure, and release processes. They cover infrastructure as code,

173: Mocking and Unit Tests

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 trad

172: Transformers and Large Language Models

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

171: Compilers and Interpreters

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 cov

170: 2023 Holiday Special Live

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 vehicl