This week we're talking about regular expressions, aka, regex. These are a favorite tool of programmers, but they also have a dark side. Do regex cause more problems than they solve? Can they be evil? We also discuss the origins of regular expressions, formal language theory, and finite automata.

Now You've Got Two Problems

XKCD: Regular Expressions

Representation of Events in Nerve Nets and Finite Automata

OWASP: ReDOS

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A continuation of our discussion about the history of Unix and its development at Bell Labs. Erik wonders why Unix became successful and which features were novel and important. Mike just wants to talk about cool pranks Group 1127 pulled off.

Unix: A History and Memoir - Brian Kernighan

The Unix Time-Sharing System

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This week we talk about the early days of Unix, primarily based on Brian Kernighan's book Unix: A History and Memoir, about his days at Bell Labs and the creation of Unix and C by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and other luminaries.

https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/dp/1695978552

https://dsf.berkeley.edu/cs262/unix.pdf

https://cs3210.cc.gatech.edu/r/unix6.pdf

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This week we dip our toes into the river of theoretical computer science and immediately drown. We discuss the amazing and surprising result of researcher Ryan Williams about how space is a more powerful resource in computing than time.

For Algorithms, Memory Is a Far More Powerful Resource Than Time | WIRED

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17779

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JuWdXrCmWg

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This week we try to make sense of what were once called "NoSQL" databases, focusing on the early entries into the field like Bigtable, Dynamo and Cassandra. We try to explain how they differ from prior database systems and what motivated their creation.

Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data

Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store

Cassandra - A Decentralized Structured Storage System

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This week we host our friends Bobak Farzin and Kevin Fahey to talk about their experiences building applications with AI tools. Both Bob and Kevin are very tech savvy in different ways, but neither is a full-time software developer. Yet both have had good experiences building functional applications with tools like Cursor and Claude Code. We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of these tools, and the challenges that Bob and Kevin found in building their own software.

• “Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)”
• Vibe scraping and vibe coding a schedule app for Open Sauce 2025 entirely on my phone
• “Will the future of software development run on vibes?” Ars Technica

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We're talking about databases again. Or database management systems, we're not totally sure. In any case, they are relational databases (or database management systems).

The relational database has been the go-to system for storing structured data since the 1980s, and is still the most popular type of system to use for applications and business reporting. We discuss their history, what makes them relational, and our experiences with some of the better known commercial and open-source relational systems.

A Relational Model of Shared Databanks - EF Codd

Dr. Michael Stonebraker - A Short History of Database Systems

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Jim Gray was a key innovator in the area of database technology and he won the Turing Prize in 1998. He was particularly influential with respect to the definition and formalization of transactions, and he identified and named the A, C, and D of ACID. Gray, an avid hiker and sailor, disappeared in 2007 while sailing out of San Francisco to the Farallon Islands, and no trace of him was ever found.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/behind-the-code-with-jim-gray/

https://www.wired.com/2007/07/ff-jimgray-2/

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