This episode we look into the history of the web server NGINX and of web servers more generally. We play myth buster and try to investigate the widespread story that NGINX arose from a need to scale porn sites.

Igor Sysoev - Wikipedia

Free Software Interview with Sysoev

History of Apache

How Sysoev Ended Up at Rambler

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Does anyone program just for fun anymore? This episode we're talking about recreational programming, with a focus on A.K. Dewdney's Computer Recreations column from the 1980s. Also, taco shops.

https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/recreational-cs.pdf

FUN 2026

The New Turing Omnibus

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To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Scheme, we decided to talk about functional programming: what it is, how's it going these days, and does it still matter in the era of AI. Although there's been 70 years of research into FP it still hasn't become mainstream. Will AI reverse or accelerate that trend?

TIOBE Index

The Next 700 Programming Languages

An Introduction to Functional Programming Through Lambda Calculus

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For our first episode of 2026 (and Season 4), we're talking about Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3). S3 is probably the biggest cloud service, or at least we think it is, because it is super freakin' huge. We talk about how it's built, how it works, and how people use it.

• Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3
• How AWS S3 Achieves 1 Petabyte Per Second on Hard Disk Drives
• Using Lightweight Formal Methods to Validate a Key-Value Storage Node in Amazon S3
• Picture Me Coding 2025 Spotify Playlist

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In this episode we discuss working in the Salesforce environment, and low-code platforms generally, with software engineer Kyle Willcox. Kyle's dev journey from a CS degree at UNC Wilmington to Salesforce dev to web app developer reveals a lot about both the benefits and pitfalls of working in isolated environments like Salesforce. Kyle is also a sponsored skimboarder and came to California to ride the surf, so he and Erik nerd out on weather and waves.

Low Code

Exile Skimboards

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For the holiday we're doing another news roundup, although it's mostly about data centers and AI to be honest.

Inside the Data Centers...

Korean Data Center

Oracle Data Center Debt

Cloudflare Outage

Rust Adoption Drives Android Memory Safety Bugs Below 20%

Adversarial Poetry

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Erik became fascinated with CRDTs while working on a project, so we're talking about how they work, how they simplify some distributed systems, and how they might protect you from zombies.

Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types

A Comprehensive Study of Convergent and Commutative Replicated Data Types

Counters - Aviral Goel

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This episode is about the Turing Test, and Alan Turing's original description of the test in Computing Machinery and Intelligence. We also discuss a recent work by two UCSD researchers that claims that current LLMs pass the Turing Test.

Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test

Pragmatic Engineer Podcast with Armin Ronacher

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