186: Becoming a Manager

Intro topic: plastic welding kits

News/Links:

• Parse.bot, turn any website into an API
  • https://www.parse.bot/
• Gemini 3
  • https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-3/
• Depth Anything 3
  • https://github.com/ByteDance-Seed/Depth-Anything-3
• Wan 2.2 (run on runpod)
  • https://www.runpod.io/
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick
  • The Thinking Game (DeepMind documentary)
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d95J8yzvjbQ
• Jason
  • Plato: The Republic
    • https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1497
      
      

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Patrick
  • Core Keeper
    • Pc/Switch/Xbox/Playstation
• Jason
  • Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic
    • PC

Topic: Becoming a Manager

• What is a Manager
  • Opportunity
  • Results + Retention
  • Sizing
    • Hiring
      • Philosophy
      • Interviews
    • Downsizing
• How to Manage
  • Company Goals / OKRs
    • Breaking down & claiming company goals.
    • Balancing inspirational & practical goals
  • Coaching
    • One-on-ones
    • Career planning
  • Performance
    • Motivation
    • Performance Management Review
    • Compensation
• Choosing to become a manager
  • Balancing personal and company incentives
  • Why Manage
    • Mentorship
    • Build relationships
  • Why to not manage
    • Less time for your original joy (coding)
    • Less technical influence
    • More uncertainty and less closure
  • How to transition back to Engineer
    • Take the time/energy to get ramped up
    • Act as an advisor to your manager

Intro topic: Asymmetric Returns

News/Links:

• NanoChat by Andrej Karpathy
  • https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat
• Pydantic AI
  • https://www.marktechpost.com/2025/03/25/pydanticai-advancing-generative-ai-agent-development-through-intelligent-framework-design/
• 1000th Starlink this year
  • https://spaceflightnow.com/2025/05/16/live-coverage-spacex-plans-morning-launch-of-starlink-satellites-from-california/
• ChatGPT Apps SDK
  • https://openai.com/index/introducing-apps-in-chatgpt/
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick
  • The Will of the Many by James Islington
    • https://amzn.to/43IfU8Q
• Jason
  • Interview with DHH (Founder of Ruby on Rails)
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vagyIcmIGOQ
      
      

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Patrick
  • Factorio
    • https://www.factorio.com/
• Jason
  • nip.io

Topic: Workflow Orchestrators

• Why
  • Batch jobs (embarrassingly parallel)
  • Long-running tasks (e.g. transcoding video)
  • Checkpointing/resuming
• How
  • Message Queues
  • Containerization
  • Worker Pools & Autoscaling
  • History & Backfill
• Steps to run workflows:
  • Containerize the workflow definition and send to the cloud
  • Containerize all the individual tasks
  • Submit job(s)
• Examples
  • Airflow
    • Legacy but dominant
  • Dagster
    • Great UX for python developers
  • Temporal: https://temporal.io/
    • The new hotness
  • Ray
    • Low-level but very powerful
  • Kubeflow
    • Designed for ML workflows, integrated dashboard

184: Asynchronous Programming

Intro topic: AI Scams

News/Links:

• Coding Adventure: Ray-Tracing Glass and Caustics (Sebastian Lague)
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wA1KVZ1eOuA
• Boson AI announces Higgs Audio V2
  • https://www.boson.ai/technologies/voice
• The Misconception that Almost Stopped AI [How Models Learn Part 1] (Welch Labs)
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrO20Jb-hy0
• A mind-bending conversation with Peter Thiel
  • https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/11/podcasts/interesting-times-a-mind-bending-conversation-with-peter-thiel.html
    
    

Book of the Show

• Patrick
  • The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien)
    • https://amzn.to/4mevuzE
• Jason
  • NYT Word Games

Patreon Plug https://www.patreon.com/programmingthrowdown?ty=h

Tool of the Show

• Patrick
  • Escape Academy
    • https://escapeacademygame.com/en
• Jason
  • Multi-modal LLMs to make calendar meetings
    • www.chatgpt.com
      
      

Topic: Asynchronous Computing

• What/Why
  • Multi-threading in between the lines
  • Many of the benefits of multiprocessing without the overhead/complexity
• How
  • Coroutines
  • Thread-Local Memory
  • Blocking vs Non-Blocking operations
    • Blocking: arithmetic
    • Non-Blocking: Reading from the network card into thread-local memory
  • Interpreter locking
    • Typescript: Single threaded
    • Python: GIL
• Implementations
  • Polling (not-Asynchronous)
  • Callbacks (interrupts)
  • Multithreading (with queues/message passing)
  • Promise/Futures
  • Async/Await