Podcast · Tech & Science
Programming Throwdown
by Patrick Wheeler and Jason Gauci · English · Tech & Science
Programming Throwdown educates Computer Scientists and Software Engineers on a cavalcade of programming and tech topics. Every show will cover a new programming language, so listeners will be able to speak intelligently about any programming language.
- New episodes
- Now and then
- Typical length
- 1 hr 31 min
- Latest
- 24 Aug 2026
- Language
- English
Latest episode
Earlier episodes 29 most recent
-
E188 · 9 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 36 min
188: World Models
-
E187 · 2 May 2026 · 1 hr 38 min
187: Agentic Coding
-
E186 · 3 Feb 2026 · 1 hr 28 min
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, team goals, and when moving into management is or is not the right choice.
-
E185 · 4 Nov 2025 · 1 hr 32 min
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 Airflow, Dagster, Temporal, Ray, and Kubeflow while explaining the infrastructure patterns behind them.
-
E184 · 23 Sep 2025 · 1 hr 31 min
184: Asynchronous Programming
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.
-
E183 · 31 Jul 2025 · 1 hr 47 min
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. They cover sourcing strategies, reverse interviews, negotiation, hiring-manager expectations, and common mistakes candidates should avoid.
-
E182 · 30 Jun 2025 · 1 hr 38 min
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 workflows and tools such as Copilot, Cursor, and command-line assistants while talking through where these systems help most.
-
E181 · 12 May 2025 · 1 hr 46 min
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 collection, ownership models, and practical techniques for diagnosing and reducing excessive memory use.
-
E180 · 17 Mar 2025 · 1 hr 52 min
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-critic methods, PPO, imitation learning, and why training and evaluating RL systems is so challenging.
-
E179 · 3 Feb 2025 · 1 hr 43 min
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, and Kanban fit together, and how to deal with uncertainty, dependencies, and scheduling risk.
-
E178 · 3 Dec 2024 · 1 hr 45 min
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, distractions, and why remote work is not equally effective for every team or every person.
-
E177 · 4 Nov 2024 · 1 hr 28 min
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 and query high-dimensional vectors and where tools like pgvector, Weaviate, Pinecone, and Milvus fit.
-
E176 · 24 Sep 2024 · 1 hr 59 min
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 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…
-
E175 · 16 Aug 2024 · 1 hr 41 min
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, how automated screening changes resume writing, and how career choices shape the resume you build over time.
-
E174 · 10 Jun 2024 · 1 hr 26 min
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, CI/CD, deployment strategies, operational metrics, and the kinds of failures good DevOps practices are meant to prevent.
-
E173 · 29 Apr 2024 · 1 hr 35 min
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 tradeoffs, and the practical role of testing libraries across several major languages.
-
E172 · 11 Mar 2024 · 1 hr 26 min
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 key architectural ideas that made modern LLMs possible.
-
E171 · 12 Feb 2024 · 1 hr 25 min
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 cover bytecode, JIT compilation, intermediate representations, and the tradeoffs between portability and performance.
-
E170 · 24 Dec 2023 · 1 hr 39 min
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 vehicles reaching orbit Early career, finding role at FAANG, liaising vs shipping code. Upcoming in tech What are essential programmer knowledge items?
-
E169 · 27 Nov 2023 · 1 hr 30 min
169: HyperLogLog
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.
-
E168 · 20 Nov 2023 · 1 hr 29 min
168: Godot
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.
-
E167 · 23 Oct 2023 · 1 hr 26 min
167: Desktop User Interfaces
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.
-
E166 · 16 Oct 2023 · 1 hr 12 min
166: Speedy Database Queries with Lukas Fittl
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.
-
E165 · 25 Sep 2023 · 1 hr 17 min
165: Differential Equations
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.
-
E164 · 11 Sep 2023 · 1 hr 31 min
164: Choosing a Database For Your Project With Kris Zyp
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.
-
E163 · 14 Aug 2023 · 1 hr 29 min
163: Recursion
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.
-
E162 · 24 Jul 2023 · 1 hr 8 min
162: Interactive Fiction
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.
-
E161 · 10 Jul 2023 · 1 hr 33 min
161: Leveraging Generative AI Models with Hagay Lupesko
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.
-
E160 · 26 Jun 2023 · 1 hr 30 min
160: Position Localization
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.
About Programming Throwdown
Programming Throwdown educates Computer Scientists and Software Engineers on a cavalcade of programming and tech topics. Every show will cover a new programming language, so listeners will be able to speak intelligently about any programming language.
Programming Throwdown is a English tech & science podcast from Patrick Wheeler and Jason Gauci. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.
- Publisher
- Patrick Wheeler and Jason Gauci
- Language
- English
- Category
- Tech & Science
- New episodes
- Now and then
- Typical length
- 1 hr 31 min
- Latest episode
- 24 Aug 2026
- Feed
- RSS — paste into any podcast app
- Apple Podcasts
- podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id427166321
- Website
- programmingthrowdown.com
- Rights
- ℗ & © 2011 Programming Throwdown
More English tech & science 6
Take it with you
The Melo app keeps playing with the screen off, works in the car and on your watch, wakes you to your station, and browses the whole catalogue offline. Free, no ads, no account.
