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.
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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.
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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)
Building an API is half the battle
If you prefer, you can read this as a Q&A article or watch the video.Kong is a cloud-native API platform. The first iteration of an API marketplace Marco and his colleagues built was Mashape.Developments like GraphQL and gRPC have become critical as the number of APIs increases over time.Find Marco on LinkedIn and Twitter.
From cryptography to consensus: Q&A with CTO David Schwartz on building blockchain apps
Right now, plenty of people are building businesses on social media platforms, on streaming platforms, and on market platforms that they don’t control. That platform can make the rules in any way they want and remove access at any time. That means founders are potentially one step away from losing their livelihood. The same goes for consumers buying from these platforms: if you lose access to your account, there goes all your purchases. As it turns out, you were licensing everything, not buying it. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Ripple CTO David Schwartz about the promise that decentralized trust and distributed consensus has for software development — and for more transparency in ownership. Episode notes:Cross-border payments, while they might not be the sexiest app, are one of the best product-market fits for blockchains. Learn more about Ripple at their home page. Get started learning about the XRP Ledger with their documentation. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, asmeurer, for their answer to What does `S` signify in SymPy?
From Smalltalk to smart contracts, reflecting on 50 years of programming
Smart contracts aren’t actually new. Computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer Nick Szabo coined the term in 1994 (possibly earlier, depending on who you ask). Old problems seem to keep coming back. Bret Victor gave a talk in 2013 called “The Future of Programming,” where he talked about problems from 1973 that were still relevant. To learn more about the Agoric blockchain, check out their homepage. If you’d rather shape how the blockchain itself operates, much of Agoric’s code is open source. Connect with Dean on Twitter or Telegram
How to keep the servers running when your Mastodon goes viral
A Principal Engineer at GitHib, Kris is president of the Nivenly Foundation and an admin at Hachyderm, an instance of the decentralized social network powered by Mastodon. The ongoing changes at Twitter have fueled interest in alternative, decentralized platforms like Mastodon and Discord.Read Leaving the Basement, Kris’s post about scaling and migrating Hachyderm out of her basement.Watch Kris’s conversation with DigitalOcean Chief Product Officer Gabe Monroy about building decentralized IT platforms.Find Kris on Twitter, GitHub, Twitch, or YouTube.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner metakeule for answering How can I get an error message in a string in Go?
The next gen web browser has no tabs, only spaces
Today’s guests from Browser Co. are software engineer Victoria Kirst and design lead Dustin Senos of The Browser CompanyThe Browser Company is building a new kind of browser designed to keep users “focused, organized and in control.” Arc, their browser, is “full of big new ideas about how we should interact with the web” and has been called “the best web browser to come out in the last decade.” For an introduction to and first look at Arc, start with this video. You can also join the waiting list or subscribe to the Substack.Follow The Browser Company on Twitter.Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn or Twitter.Connect with Dustin on LinkedIn or Twitter.Special thanks to Ellis Hamburger, owner of the best username, for facilitating this terrific conversation with Victoria and Dustin.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Todd for answering How can I name a @Service with multiple names in Spring?.
After crypto’s reality check, an investor remains cautiously optimistic
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 Kenny on LinkedIn or Twitter.Congratulations are in order for Lifeboat badge winner xray1986 for their answer to Unicode symbol that represents "download".
Moving up a level of abstraction with serverless on MongoDB Atlas and AWS
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 that abstraction even further. We’ve made the algorithms that process data simple and natural; MongoDB wants to do the same for how we persist data. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Andrew Davidson, SVP Products at MongoDB, about how they’re turning a database into a fully-managed service that developers can use in a more natural way. Along the way, we discuss how the cost bottleneck has moved from the storage media to developers’ minds, how greater abstractions can enable developers, and how to get insights from production data faster. Episode notesTry MongoDB Atlas on AWS for free.You can get started with MongoDB Atlas directly from the AWS Marketplace. If you’re at a startup, you can take advantage of their special offer for startups. The community edition of their classic database is available to download as well. If you’re looking to learn a thing or two before diving in, check out MongoDB University. Our thanks to Great Question badge winner Derek 朕會功夫 for asking How can I reverse an array in JavaScript without using libraries? You know the rarest kung fu of all: asking great questions.
What our engineers learned building Stack Overflow
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 Twitter.Longtime Stacker Yaakov Ellis is also on LinkedIn.Congrats to user HelloCW on receiving a Socratic Badge for asking a well-received question on 100 separate days and maintaining a positive question record.
Let’s talk large language models
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 more on the intersection of AI and academia, listen to our episode with computer science professor Emery Berger or read his essay on how academics are coping with AI that can ace exams and do everyone’s homework.Catch up on the adventures of the worst coder in the world.Congrats to user d1337, whose question How to assign a name to the size() column? won a Stellar Question badge.
Visible APIs get reused, not reinvented
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 found, then someone else is going to reinvent it. On this sponsored episode, we chat with SmartBear API Technical Evangelist Frank Kilcommins about the growing challenges of API visibility and how to outsmart the invisibility trap with the right development strategies and tools. Episode notes:Kilcommins suggests you can get better visibility for your APIs with SmartBear's new free API exploration tool. Open specifications like the Open API Initiative help make your endpoints easier to understand—both by humans and computers. Connect with Frank Kilcommins on Twitter and LinkedIn. Congrats to Stack Overflow user WorstCase, who asked five well-received questions on five separate days and earned themselves a shiny new Curious badge.
Developers believe AI will soon be everywhere, but aren't sure how to feel about it
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 folder in the simulator of Xcode?
Quiet quitting and loud layoffs
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 roles outside of tech.Just laid off, or worried you might be? Cohost Ryan Donovan has some advice.Connect with Wesley on LinkedIn.
From writing code to teaching code (ep. 545)
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 VIP instructor at Udemy who has taught more than half a million students. We talk about how he went from a humble Java developer to one of Udemy’s top instructors (and a budding movie star!). Along the way, we discuss whether Java or Python is better for beginners and how to balance theory with syntax. Episode notes:Like a lot of today’s content creators, Bharath got his start posting videos on his Youtube channel in 2012.Today, you can find all of Bharath’s courses on his Udemy page.You can find out more about Bharath from his website or connect with him on LinkedIn. Udemy is one of our launch partners for our online course recommendations. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner desertnaut for their answer to What is the meaning of exclamation and question marks in Jupyter Notebook?.
“Move fast and break things” doesn’t apply to other people’s savings
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 Treasury bonds and interest rate swaps.Christine’s time at the world’s second-largest investment bank gave her a healthy wariness of Frankencode, the scourge of legacy stacks everywhere.Find Christine on LinkedIn.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner amirali for their answer to I can't set up JDK on Visual Studio Code.
The nature of simulating nature: A Q&A with IBM Quantum researcher Dr. Jamie Garcia
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 back up a bit? Learn what a qubit is.)Jamie explains how a heavy hex architecture allows IBM to limit crosstalk between qubits to ensure coherence times long enough to complete practical calculations within hours, not years.IBM Quantum’s Qiskit Runtime allows users to optimize workloads and efficiently execute them on quantum systems at scale. As you might expect, Jamie and her colleagues are already thinking hard about the intersection of quantum and AI. Learn about System Two, IBM’s next-generation quantum system.Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn or Twitter.Congrats are in order for Stellar Question badge winner Dmitry z for asking How can I use environment variables in docker-compose?.