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For more than a dozen years, the Stack Overflow Podcast has been exploring what it means to be a developer and how the art and practice of software programming is changing our world. From Rails to React, from Java to Node.js, we host important conversations and fascinating guests that will help you understand how technology is made and where it’s headed. Hosted by Ben Popper, Cassidy Williams, and Ceora Ford, the Stack Overflow Podcast is your home for all things code.
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The Stack Overflow Podcast
In his role at SwissOne Capital, Kenny champions investments in Web3 and the metaverse. A writer on all things crypto since 2013, he’s a regular contributor to the US Chamber of Commerce. The collapse of Three Arrows Capital and FTX eroded investor trust in crypto, but Kenny remains “cautiously optimistic” about the market’s future. Connect with Ke…
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The Stack Overflow Podcast
The history of computing has been a story of moving up levels of abstraction: from hard-coding algorithms and directly manipulating memory addresses with assembly languages to using more natural language constructs in high-level general purpose languages to abstracting the hardware of the computer in cloud compute. Now serverless functions take tha…
The inbox improvements were Radek’s graduation project. Not bad for a newbie. Not everyone likes change, and the inbox change was no exception. So we looked into fixing that. Read about what our engineering team learned building and scaling Stack Overflow to support millions of users. Connect with Radek on LinkedIn. Find Cobih on LinkedIn and Twitt…
Our recent Pulse Survey showed how technologists visiting Stack Overflow feel about emergent technologies. The consensus is clear: AI assistants will soon be everywhere, and developers aren’t sure how they feel about that. Check out the podcast here or dive into the blog. Learn more about the emergent abilities of large language models (LLMs). For …
With so many companies offering API products, it can be hard to get your particular APIs discovered and used by the developers who need them most. You might have the best, most useful solutions out there, but if you’re relying on the digital equivalent of foot traffic for discoverability, it might as well not exist. And if an API solution can’t be …
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The Stack Overflow Podcast
You can dive deeper into the research, including some lovely matrix charts, on our blog. Erin has also explored tag trends among our most loved languages and job insights from our community. Learn more about Joy on her LinkedIn. Thanks to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, russbishop, for helping to answer the question: Where is the app content…
Per one count, more than 280,000 people were laid off from tech jobs in 2022 and the first two months of 2023. What do layoffs have in common with farting at a party? Both are a bad look if you’re the only one doing it. ICYMI: On a recent episode, we talked about how these layoffs are reshaping the job market and where to find software engineering …
Writing code that runs without errors—and without all the bugs that only show up when the program runs—is hard enough. But teaching others to write code and understand the underlying concepts takes a deeper understanding. Now imagine doing that for 37 courses. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with Bharath Thippireddy, a V…
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The Stack Overflow Podcast
Flourish is a fintech platform for registered investment advisers (RIAs) that was recently acquired by MassMutual. After studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon, Christine spent almost 12 years at Goldman Sachs, where she was VP of fixed systematic marketing making, responsible for automating electronic trades of interest-rate products like US…
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The Stack Overflow Podcast
A chemist by training, Jamie serves as Senior Research Manager of Quantum Applications and Software at IBM Quantum, which offers cloud access to advanced quantum computers capable of solving highly complex, highly interconnective, and dynamic problems. Learn about the superconducting qubits IBM Quantum uses to program quantum computers. (Need to ba…
W4 Games is dedicated to strengthening the open-source Godot Engine, a cross-platform game engine for 2D and 3D games. Their mission is “to help the video game industry reclaim their control of the technology powering their games and reverse a dramatic trend where they have to rely on proprietary solutions from an ever-shrinking number of vendors.”…
Tribe is a distributed community of AI industry leaders, including ML engineers and data scientists, dedicated to helping companies apply machine learning to their business operations. Explore their case studies to see Tribe’s expertise in action. Founder and CEO Jaclyn Rice Nelson formerly worked at Google, partnering with enterprise companies and…
Modern networked applications generate a lot of data, and every business wants to make the most of that data. Most of the time, that means moving production data through some transformation process to get it ready for the analytics process. But what if you could have in-app analytics? What if you could generate insights directly from production dat…
Oso is authorization as a service. Check out the docs or explore use cases. Sam’s post “Why Authorization is Hard” covered what makes authorization challenging, some approaches to solving it, and their associated tradeoffs. You can also watch Sam’s talk at PyCon US 2022. Since it’s impossible to address everything that makes authorization hard in j…
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The Stack Overflow Podcast
Retool is a development platform that lets users—95% of whom are engineers—build internal tools quickly with a drag-and-drop interface. Read David’s account of how Retool won early sales deals in the company’s Operator Playbook series. Connect with David on LinkedIn. Today we’re shouting out Stellar Question badge winner ahajib for asking How to co…
We talk about how Next is bringing image components, server components, and in-house analytics via split bee—and bundling them all together with Turbopack, powered by Rust, our Developer Survey most loved language of 2022. Guillermo Rauch is the CEO and cofounder of Vercel and cocreator of Next.js, an open-source React framework that helps develope…
Emery Berger, Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, joins Ben for a conversation about the impact of AI on academia. As a young sci-fi fan, he was fascinated by computers that could spit out solutions (a fascination that survived exposure to BASIC and COBOL). Now his CS students are using Copi…
With companies taking a long look at developer experience, it’s time to turn that attention on the humble pull request. The folks at LinearB took a look at a million PRs — four million review cycles involving around 25,000 developers — and found that it takes about five days to get through a review and merge the code. CI/CD has done wonders getting…
It’s not just you: We all need subtitles now. Google introduces MusicLM, a model that generates music from text. The examples are pretty-mind blowing and raise big questions about licensing and copyrights for non-AI creators. Taking the uncanny valley to a new low? Nvidia’s streaming software now includes a feature that deepfakes eye contact. Bewar…
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The Stack Overflow Podcast
John spent 25 years at Oracle before joining Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO (OCTO), a team that’s been called the company’s “secret weapon” in collaborating with major customers to solve their tech problems and drive long-term deals. For more on his approach to tech and business, you can read this article he wrote on the seven points of driving l…
Naturally, tech layoffs are top-of-mind for many of us. Despite comparisons to the dot-com bubble, what we’re seeing right now is different. Here’s what the tech and media layoffs really tell us about the economy. In praise of analog technology: why Millennials and Gen Z are springing for paper maps. Make Time, a way of “rethinking the defaults of …
Astro is a site builder that lets you use the frontend tools you already love (React, Vue, Svelte, and more) to build content-rich, performant websites. Astro extracts your UI into smaller, isolated components (“islands”) and replaces unused JavaScript with lightweight HTML for faster loads and time-to-interactive (TTI). Ben and Nate explain why As…
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The Stack Overflow Podcast
In complex service-oriented architectures, failure can happen in individual servers and containers, then cascade through your system. Good engineering takes into account possible failures. But how do you test whether a solution actually mitigates failures without risking the ire of your customers? That’s where chaos engineering comes in, injecting …
In a win for accessibility, GitHub Copilot now responds to voice commands, allowing developers to code using their voices. Speaking of accessibility, learn how Santa Monica Studio worked with disabled gamers and the community to build accessibility into God of War Ragnarök. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has determined that lab-grown mea…
First, some self-administered back-patting for the Stack Overflow editorial team: great engineering blogs give tech companies an edge (The New York Times says so). Hiring aside, engineering blogs are fresh sources of knowledge, insight, and entertainment for anyone working in tech. You can learn a lot from, for instance, blog posts that break down …
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At an SaaS company like Intuit that has hundreds of services spread out across multiple products, maintaining development velocity at scale means baking some of the features that every service needs into the architecture of their systems. That’s where a service mesh comes in. It automatically adds features like observability, traffic management, an…
There is a ton of great research to be found on Prof. Kapfhammer's website, including: Flaky Tests: Finding and fixing unpredictable and harmful test cases Database Testing: Automatically testing relational database schemas Web Testing: Detecting and repairing poor responsive web page layout We've written a bit about how Stack Overflow is upping it…
Juri is currently Director of Developer Experience (Global) and Director of Engineering (Europe) at Nrwl, founded by former Googlers/Angular core team members Jeff Cross and Victor Savkin. Nrwl has compiled everything you need to know about monorepos, plus the tools to build them, here. Connect with Juri on LinkedIn or explore his website. Shoutout…
Any large organization with multiple products faces the challenge of keeping their brand identity unified without denying each product its own charisma. That’s where a design system can help developers avoid reinventing the wheel every time, say, a new button gets created On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Demian Borba, Principa…
LogRocket helps software teams create better experiences through a combination of session replay, error tracking, and product analytics. LogRocket’s machine-learning layer, Galileo, cuts through the noise generated by conventional error monitoring and analytics tools to identify critical issues affecting users. LogRocket is hiring, so check out the…
Adobe closed out 2022 and celebrated 40 years with an employee-only Katy Perry concert. Related: Ceora makes the case for virtual concerts. DeepMind is teaching AI to play soccer, which naturally makes us think of QWOP. ICYMI: Ghost calls out Substack and Substack responds. BeReal is the iPhone app of the year. But not even Resident Youth Ceora kno…
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Over the past five years, Intuit went through a total cloud transformation—they closed the data centers, built out a modern SaaS development environment, and got cloud native with foundational building blocks like containers and Kubernetes. Now they are looking to continue transforming into an AI-driven organization that leverages the data they hav…
If you want to read more about Jessica, you can check out the blog we worked on together for the launch of our Overflow Offline initiative. If you've ever wondered what it's like learning to code from an XML file of raw Stack Overflow data, be sure to check this episode out. You can learn more about the Supreme Court case that led to Jessica's rele…
You can learn more about Anthony here. His favorite terminal tool at the moment is Warp, which describes itself as "a blazingly fast, Rust-based terminal reimagined from the ground up to work like a modern app." His personal website features a live chat function. Sometimes it's actually Tony, sometimes it's just a bot. No lifeboat badge today. We''…
Ben asks Matt to explain Mastodon to him like he’s five. Matt says the experience feels a lot like…LinkedIn? Matt explains that he took social media apps off his phone for a while…just to chill out. (Ed. note, they're already back on.) We cover the latest AI to emerge that can write essays, jokes, and yes, some code. While everyone’s confused about…
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The Stack Overflow Podcast
Steve was working as an engineering manager at ShopStyle and found that an increasing amount of his team's time was spent working on custom requests from departments like marketing and sales. They tried moving to a headless CMS but the data and components couldn't keep up with ever evolving needs. They wanted a drag and drop system connected to the…
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The Stack Overflow Podcast
SPONSORED BY COMMERCE LAYER Around the world, billions of people can sell their wares online, in part thanks to solutions that handle the complexities of securely and reliably managing transactions. Businesses, large and small, can sell directly to customers. But a lot of these ecommerce services provide a heavier surface than many need by managing…
Webpack has been king for several years. Vercel wants folks to embrace Turbopack, but their claims about speed raised a lot of backlash after it was first announced. Lee explains why he thinks the Rust-based approach will ultimately be a big benefit to developers and how organizations who are deeply ingrained with existing tools can safely and incr…
You can learn more about Andrew, from building out a telco in Canada to cyber security at Deloitte, on his LinkedIn. Validation Cloud bills itself as the world’s fastest node infrastructure and cites networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Binance as clients it supports. Learn more at the company’s website here. The company announced the launch of it'…
Data show's Silicon Valley's share of new startup funding deals dropped below 20% for the first time. What does it mean to experiment with big changes to an engineering org, in public and in real time? SBF would like the chance to explain himself. Today's lifeboat badge goes to CodeCaster for explaining: What is E in floating point?…
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The Stack Overflow Podcast
Srivastava reflects on his upbringing in India, learning to write Assembly, and going to Stanford University to complete his Ph.D in computer science. He shares his early career experiences at big tech names like Yahoo!, Google, Twitter, and Google. The group reflects on some of the engineering challenges at Patreon including technical debt, migrat…
Cami and Cassidy take us down memory lane, sharing how they got into computer science together, hosted a web series (and still podcast together sometimes), and overlapped at two jobs together. We discuss the technologies being used to build in/for the Metaverse like Horizon Workroom, Presence Platform, Insights SDK, and of course, React. Cami share…
SPONSORED BY PLURALSIGHT Early in the days of high-traffic web pages and apps, any engineer operating the infrastructure would have a server room where one or more machines served that app to the world. They named their servers lovingly, took pictures, and watched them grow. The servers were pets. But since the rise of public cloud and infrastructu…
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Over the years Homebrew, an open source package manager, has emerged as the project with the greatest number of individual contributors. Despite all that, it’s creator Max Howell, couldn’t make a living off the occasional charity of the millions of people who used the software he built. This XKCD cartoon is probably the most frequently repeated jok…
Eric explains that great jobs are available for developers in Japan, but it can be tough to find these opportunities. We talk about interesting startups that are gaining traction in the Japanese tech sector (like Visual Alpha, Treasure Data, and Exawizards, to name a few examples of companies on the Japan Dev platform). Matt is impressed to learn J…
Episode notes: The team questions whether a print out of 60-90 days worth of code is the right benchmark for whether to lay someone off. Ben gives our podcast listeners a heads up to reports of repo jacking on GitHub (who got ahead of the issue quickly). We reflect on whether or not we’re okay with generative AI—and question tradeoffs between copyr…
When most people talk about Web3 or cryptocurrencies and related technologies, they usually mean blockchains. But blockchain is only the first generation of distributed ledger technology (DLT). As with any new technology, once people see how it works, new generations come along rapidly to address the faults in the previous ones. On this sponsored e…
Shoemaker spent his childhood in Silicon Valley and learned Assembly when he was just 16 years old. In his early 20s, he applied to work at Apple and was continually rejected. So he went to work for seven startups instead. Finally, in 2009, Shoemaker ended up at Apple overseeing the review process for the App Store. After seven years at Apple, Phil…
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The Stack Overflow Podcast
In today’s podcast, Matt, Ceora, and Cassidy reflect on Cara’s founder journey. Cara shares her experiences living in New York and San Francisco— and why she and her co-founder ultimately located Stashpad in North Carolina. She elaborates on the exact steps that she took to pivot her startup following limited initial interest in V1 of the product. …
When Foursquare launched in 2009, the app was consumer facing, letting you know where friends had checked in and what spots might appeal to you. People competed to be the “mayor” of certain locations and built guides to their favorite neighborhoods., The service expanded to allow merchants to offer discounts to frequent guests and track foot traffi…
