The Stack Overflow podcast is a weekly conversation about working in software development, learning to code, and the art and culture of computer programming. Hosted by Paul Ford and Ben Popper, the series features questions from our community, interviews with fascinating guests, and hot takes on what’s happening in tech. Founded in 2008, Stack Overflow is empowering the world to develop technology through collective knowledge. It’s best known for being the largest, most trusted online community for developers and technologists. More than 100 million people come to Stack Overflow every month to ask questions, help solve coding problems, and develop new skills.
Similar Podcasts
El Estoico | Estoicismo en español
En este podcast vamos a hablar Estoicismo, figuras estoicas y ejercicios estoicos para mejorar tu vida y tu resiliencia ante las adversidades.
Developer Tea
Developer Tea exists to help driven developers connect to their ultimate purpose and excel at their work so that they can positively impact the people they influence.
With over 13 million downloads to date, Developer Tea is a short podcast hosted by Jonathan Cutrell (@jcutrell), co-founder of Spec and Director of Engineering at PBS. We hope you'll take the topics from this podcast and continue the conversation, either online or in person with your peers. Twitter: @developertea :: Email: developertea@gmail.com
Greater Than Code
For a long time, tech culture has focused too narrowly on technical skills; this has resulted in a tech community that too often puts companies and code over people. Greater Than Code is a podcast that invites the voices of people who are not heard from enough in tech: women, people of color, trans and/or queer folks, to talk about the human side of software development and technology. Greater Than Code is providing a vital platform for these conversations, and developing new ideas of what it means to be a technologist beyond just the code.
Featuring an ongoing panel of racially and gender diverse tech panelists, the majority of podcast guests so far have been women in tech! We’ve covered topics including imposter syndrome, mental illness, sexuality, unconscious bias and social justice. We also have a major focus on skill sets that tech too often devalues, like team-building, hiring, community organizing, mentorship and empathy. Each episode also includes a transcript.
We have an active Slack community that members can join by pledging as little as $1 per month via Patreon. (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode)
Reducing the blast radius of meetings with AI
Clockwise is a time orchestration platform that optimizes schedules to create more time in your day. Clockwise AI, their new GPT-powered scheduling assistant, is launching in beta. Join the waitlist here to get early access. (They’re also hiring!)Ryan wrote a recent article about whether meetings are making developers less productive.Cal Newport’s instant classic Deep Work is about learning to tune out distractions and focus on cognitively demanding tasks.Speaking of classics, Paul Graham of Y Combinator wrote about maker’s vs. manager’s schedules back in 2009.Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.Kudos to Stack Overflow user Joe Caruso, who won a Great Question badge with Get current time in hours and minutes.
Subatomic speed, math misadventures, and the biggest fraud trial in history
California is trying to transform how math is taught. How’s that going?Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for work that allows scientists to see how electrons move by mapping their positions in an atom. Learn more here and here.As Ben says, speaking of things that are difficult to observe and don’t make a lot of sense, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is on trial for a historically huge amount of fraud. Follow the live trial blog from Wired or check out their explainer.Starting next year, Unity is charging developer fees. We explore the back and forth as they try to find a solution that works for the company and the community.Shoutout to user vasco, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering How to test abstract class in Java with JUnit?.
How an algo raver stays in key(boards)
If you want to hear more of her work, check out Alexandra’s Instagram. She uses Tidal Cycles and Supercollider to make algorithms that get people to dance. Interested in algoraves? You may be able to find one near you or run your own. Check out Alexandra in her ad for Logitech, then check out her favorite keyboard.
USB-C for all, PHP 4EVA, and what do LLMs actually know (if anything)?
Ben is watching AI Explained, a YouTube channel that covers the latest AI developments and their implications. Read Ryan’s article Do large language models know what they are talking about?.Is language really unique to humans? New research suggests maybe not.Not for the first time, Ryan recommends the work of Noam Chomsky: Why Only Us: Language and Evolution, an evolutionary account of language acquisition in humans written with Robert C. Berwick.OverflowAI search is now available for alpha testing. Learn more here.Good news for your cable clutter: Apple is switching to USB-C charging ports. Here’s when.The WGA (Writers Guild of America) strike ended with an agreement that “allows for artificial intelligence as a tool, not a replacement,” but the arguments about creativity, copyright, and AI are far from over.If you’re interested in working with PHP, head over to the PHP Collective and check out conversations like Most useful new PHP features for version 8?.
How to write high-performance SQL for your Postgres database
pgnanalyze helps users deliver consistent PostgreSQL performance and availability at any scale. Get started with a free trial or explore their docs. You can also find them on YouTube, where Lukas posts a weekly show called 5mins of Postgres.Lukas was a founding engineer of Citus Data. Citus is an open-source extension to PostgreSQL that was eventually acquired by Microsoft. Find them on GitHub.If you’re new to the topic, SQL (Structured Query Language) is a language for querying databases, introduced in the 1970s. Find Lukas on LinkedIn, Twitter, or GitHub.
Being creative with math: The immersive artist who traded a sketchpad for a keyboard
Check out Luyang’s work at his website or in this Youtube playlist. To make these animations, Luyang uses Processing, a 20-year-old language that started out as a visual way to teach programming but evolved into a professional development tool. Logitech selected Luyang as one of the ambassadors to show off what you can do with their MX Keys S Combo. Shout out to George Profenza for dropping a top answer on Position of a vector in coordinate system (Processing/p5.js).
Like Python++ for AI developers
If you missed the first part of our conversation with Chris, listen to it here.Modular’s new programming language, Mojo, is built for AI developers. Check out their docs or find them on GitHub.Connect with Chris on LinkedIn. Shoutout to user DanielGibbs, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering what is the difference between getType() and getClass() in java?.
Mojo: The usability of Python with the performance of C
Modular built a new programming language, Mojo, for AI developers. Explore their docs or find them on GitHub.Chris is on LinkedIn. Congratulations to user Shengyuan Lu, whose answer to Priority queue ordering of elements merited a Lifeboat badge.
Forget AGI. Let’s built ADI: Augmented Developer Intelligence
If you missed the first part of this conversation, listen to it here.Replit is a browser-based IDE (integrated development environment). Check out their blog or start coding.ICYMI: Stack Overflow recently implemented semantic search, allowing users to search using natural language.Explore Stack Overflow Labs to learn more about OverflowAI and other projects.Amjad Masad is on LinkedIn, Twitter, and GitHub.Congratulations to Stack Overflow user macxpat, whose answer to How to install Linux packages in Replit earned a Lifeboat badge.
Multiplayer programming on mobile: a chat with Replit CEO Amjad Masad
Replit is a browser-based IDE (integrated development environment). See what they’re up to on their blog or just start coding.RIP Google Wave, one of the greats.Find Amjad on LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, or via his website.
Founder vs Investor: What VCs are really looking for
After founding two companies, including StrongDM, a dynamic management access platform (explore their docs here), Elizabeth took a “break” by co-authoring a book. Founder vs Investor: The Honest Truth About Venture Capital from Startup to IPO is about what she learned as a founder and executive about the founder-investor relationship. Order it on Bookshop or Amazon.Elizabeth’s co-author is investor and advisor Jerry Neumann, managing director of Neu Venture Capital.One option for your next weekend outing: a ride and tie.Connect with Elizabeth on LinkedIn.Connect with Jerry Neumann on LinkedIn.Nice work: User Reap’s answer to Get String Name from Enum in C# earned them a Lifeboat badge.
Computers are learning to read our minds
Gašper’s work combines machine learning, statistical modeling, neuroimaging, and behavioral experiments “to better understand how neural networks learn internal representations in speech and how humans learn to speak.”One thing that surprised him about generative adversarial networks (GANs)? How innovative they are, capable of generating English words they’ve never heard before based on words they have.Read about how AI is restoring a stroke survivor’s ability to speak.Universal grammar proposes a hypothetical structure in the brain responsible for humans’ innate language abilities. The concept is credited to the famous linguist Noam Chomsky; read his take on GenAI.AI expert Yoshua Bengio recently signed an open letter asking AI labs to pause the training of AI systems powerful enough to pass the Turing test. Read about his reasoning.Find the Berkeley Speech and Communication Network here.Find Gašper on his website, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Or dive into his research.Congratulations to Lifeboat badge winner and self-proclaimed data nerd John Rotenstein, who saved How can I delete files older than seven days in Amazon S3? from the ignominy of ignorance.
You can’t spell Zapier without API
Zapier is a no-code automation platform that allows users to create custom workflows for their critical work apps. Learn how it works, peruse the blog, or sign up to try beta AI features.Check out Reid’s article about how to write more effective AI prompts.Zapier built a natural language actions (NLA) API to enable AI models to independently use natural language to complete Zapier actions.You know the doge, but do you know the dog? RIP Balltze.Find Reid on LinkedIn and the social network formerly known as Twitter.Find Kyle on LinkedIn, GitHub, and text-based social media.
Job description: professional workplace bestie
Stack Overflow’s Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) focus on aspects of employees’ personhood, “who you are outside of your role, who you bring to every single room that you enter,” Joey explains. Among our ERGs are Black and Brown, LGBTQ+, MIND (mental illness and neurodiversity), and a group for caregivers and parents. Interested in learning more about our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, plus more about what it’s like to work at Stack Overflow? Start here.Members of Stack’s MIND ERG contributed invaluable perspective, insights, and feedback that helped us write our two-parter on ADHD and neurodiversity: Developer with ADHD? You’re not alone and What developers with ADHD want you to know.Joey is on LinkedIn.Natasha is also on LinkedIn.Kyle is on Linked, GitHub, and text-based social media.Stack Overflow user apostofes earned a Great Question badge for their query How do I get the value of a tensor in PyTorch?, which has helped 175,000 people and counting.
Fighting comment spam at Facebook scale
Rockset is a real-time search and analytics database. Explore their docs and developer tools here.We here at Stack Overflow recently implemented our own vector search. Here’s a technical deep dive into how we did it. Louis is on LinkedIn.Three cheers for Lifeboat badge winner user7610, who rescued C++ application terminates with 143 exit code. What does it mean? with a solid answer.