This week Mike and Erik are joined by Kyle Risse. Erik met Kyle Risse at Scale 23x in Pasadena this year while volunteering for the Tech Team. Kyle has a ton of experience in the field working on networks, infrastructure, linux server operations, and doing stressful operations stuff. In short, he has stories and he was kind enough to come on the show and share them with us!

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Some recent articles about research on hash tables made us realize we probably didn't know enough about hash tables, one of the fundamental data structures in the biz. We talk about the history of hashing and hash tables, and some recent results that overturned a 40 year old conjecture on the most efficient way to insert items.

Scientists Find Optimal Balance of Data Storage and Time | Quanta Magazine

[2111.00602] On the Optimal Time/Space Tradeoff for Hash Tables

Speeding Up Hash Tables | Communications of the ACM

https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/1734714.1734729

[2109.04548] Iceberg Hashing: Optimizing Many Hash-Table Criteria at Once

Modern Dictionaries by Raymond Hettinger

FOCS 2024 3B Optimal Bounds for Open Addressing Without Reordering

Optimal Bounds for Open Addressing Without Reordering

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We give a report of our experiences at the 23rd version of the Southern California Linux Expo (Scale 23x) in Pasadena. Erik was a volunteer in the network group this year, so we have some behind the scenes stories in addition to summaries of interesting talks and sessions.

• Scale conf
• Scale-network repo
• Erik Reinert’s Youtube Channel
• Docket
• BMO and bmo-agent-setup
• Cline injection attack Adnan Khan
• Douglas Comer - Wikipedia
• EDB Postgres
• Advent of Computing Podcast

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In this episode we're joined again by Amy Salley, cohost of the Hugo, Girl! podcast, to help us discuss the Murderbot series of books by Martha Wells. We discuss our favorite characters and plots, but also how these books touch on AI, consciousness, and neurodivergence.

Galaxy’s Edge Interviews Martha Wells | Author Interview | Sci Fi Blog

I didn’t know how non-neurotypical I was until Murderbot

We’re Light-Years Away from True Artificial Intelligence, Says Murderbot Author Martha Wells | Scientific American

Martha Wells' next 'Murderbot Diaries' book is 'the family roadtrip from hell on Ringworld' (interview) | Space

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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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