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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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)
The open-source game engine you’ve been waiting for: Godot
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.”To start learning more about Godot, explore some of the best games made with Godot or join the community.Connect with Juan on Twitter, GitHub, or LinkedIn.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is Martijn Pieters for their answer to 'While' loop one-liner.
ML and AI consulting-as-a-service
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 incubating new ventures. As an early employee at CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth equity firm, she advised companies including Airbnb on scaling technical infrastructure, ensuring data security, and boosting growth with machine learning.As we explored on our blog last year, the generative AI space has been expanding rapidly. Many of Tribe’s specialists have opted out of full-time employment, but are willing to provide companies without internal AI expertise with the skills they need to leverage this rapidly evolving technology inside their business. Connect with Jackie on LinkedIn or Twitter.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is PM 2Ring for their answer to Sort a list to form the largest possible number.
Shorten the distance between production data and insight
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 data?On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Stanimira Vlaeva, Developer Advocate at MongoDB, and Fredric Favelin, Technical Director, Partner Presales at MongoDB, about how a serverless database can minimize the distance between producing data and understanding it.Episode notes:Stanimira talked a lot about using BigQuery with MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud Run. If you need to skill up on these three tools, check out this tutorial. Once you’ve got the hang of it, get your data connected with Confluent Connetors. With Atlas, you can transform your data in JavaScript. Connect with Stanimira on LinkedIn and Twitter. Connect with Fredric on LinkedIn. Congrats to Stellar Question winner SubniC for Get name of current script in Python.
Authorization on rails
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 just 5,000 words, Sam is currently at work on a follow-up article called “Why Authorization is Hard Part II.”Sam first learned web development via Rails for Zombies, a beginner-level Rails course. In creating Oso, he tasked himself with “putting rails on authorization.”ICYMI: Read Sam’s post about best practices for securing REST APIs or listen to his previous podcast appearance, where we talked about how Oso makes security easier for developers.Find Sam on LinkedIn or GitHub.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is OscarRyz for their answer to I am trying to solve '15 puzzle', but I get 'OutOfMemoryError'.
The only thing worse than building internal tools is maintaining them
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 convert a list to a dictionary with indexes as values?.
You don’t have to build a browser in JavaScript anymore
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 developers build fast, lightweight web applications. The most recent version is Next.js 13. You can find Guillermo on LinkedIn.We previously talked with Guillermo about the security risks of laziness, how Next.js mixes static site and SPA functions, and the front-end trends that get him excited. Kelsey Hightower is the Principal Developer Advocate at Google Cloud. Find him on Twitter or GitHub, or read about his very personal history with Kubernetes.Kelsey has also distinguished himself on our podcast before. Kyle Mitofsky is a Senior Software Engineer at Stack Overflow. Find him on Twitter or GitHub.
Does your professor pass the Turing test? (Ep. 537)
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 Copilot to do the same thing. How can educators (and students) adapt?Episode notes:Professor Emery Berger is a systems builder who studies “programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that transparently improve reliability, security, and performance.”AI giveth and AI taketh away: an incredible tool for developers is creating new challenges for CS educators and students. Read Emery’s 2022 essay “Coping with Copilot.”You can also find Emery on GitHub or Twitter.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is mbcrump for their answer to How do I generate a random integer in C#?.
Engineering's hidden bottleneck: pull requests
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 deployments down to a day or less; maybe it’s time for continuous merge next. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with COO Dan Lines and CEO Ori Keren, co-founders of LinearB, about why PRs are the chokepoint in the software development lifecycle, uncovering and automating the hidden rules of review requests, and their free tool, gitStream, that’ll find the right reviewer for your PR right now. Episode notes: So why do reviews take so long? Context switches, team leads who review everything, and the bystander effect are top contenders.Dan and Ori hope their gitStream tool can reduce the time PRs take by automating a lot of the hidden rules for reviews. Check it out at gitstream.cm or linearb.io/dev.Dan Lines hosts his own podcast: Dev Interrupted. Check out this episode with Stack Overflow’s very own Ben Matthews. Connect with Dan Lines and Ori Keren on LinkedIn. Shoutout to Rudy Velthuis for throwing a Lifeboat to the question Why should EDX be 0 before using the DIV instruction?
The AI that writes music from text
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.Beware the potentially dangerous intersection of AI and stan Twitter.Thanks to Siavash Kayal, a fan of the show and data engineer at Cleo, who sent along a great list of open-source data engineering projects folks can work on.Today we’re shouting out Stellar Question badge winner Paragon for asking how to Open two instances of a file in a single Visual Studio session.
Why developer experience is the key to better software, straight from the OCTO’s mouth
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 lasting innovationLearn more about OCTO from Business Insider.Settle down for a good read: the full story of how the BBC’s microcomputer changed history.Connect with John on LinkedIn or Twitter.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is vscjones for their answer to How can I find the number of business days in the current month with JavaScript?.
What do the tech layoffs really tell us?
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 constant busyness and distraction so you can focus on what matters every day,” was developed in response to always-on Silicon Valley culture.Wifi routers can now be used to detect the physical positions of humans and map their bodies in 3D. Terrifyingly dystopian or interestingly practical? Why not both?In recent accessibility news, a brain-computer interface (BCI) that converts speech-related neural activity into text allows a person with paralysis due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to communicate at 62 words per minute, nearly 3.5 times faster than before. From the abstract: “These results show a feasible path forward for using intracortical speech BCIs to restore rapid communication to people with paralysis who can no longer speak.” Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Holger for their answer to Sort an array containing numbers using a 'for' loop.
The less JavaScript, the better
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 Astro’s compiler was written in Go (“seemed like fun”).To learn more about Astro, start with their docs or see what people are doing with the framework.Connect with Ben on LinkedIn, GitHub, or via his website.Connect with Nate on GitHub.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Aurand for their answer to How to convert list to queue to achieve FIFO.
How chaos engineering preps developers for the ultimate game day
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 failures and uncertainty into complex systems so your team can see where your architecture breaks. On this sponsored episode, our fourth in the series with Intuit, Ben and Ryan chat with Deepthi Panthula, Senior Product Manager, and Shan Anwar, Principal Software Engineer, both of Intuit about how use self-serve chaos engineering tools to control the blast radius of failures, how game day tests and drills keep their systems resilient, and how their investment in open-source software powers their program. Episode notes: Sometimes old practices work in new environments. The Intuit team uses Failure Mode Effect Analysis, (FMEA), a procedure developed by the US military in 1949, to ensure that their developers understand possible points of failure before code makes it to production. The team uses Litmus Chaos to inject failures into their Kubernetes-based system and power their chaos engineering efforts. It’s open source and maintained by Intuit and others. If you’ve been following this series, you’d know that Intuit is a big fan of open-source software. Special shout out to Argo Workflow, which makes their compute-intensive Kubernetes jobs work much smoother. Connect on LinkedIn with Deepthi Panthula and Zeeshan (Shan) Anwar.If you want to see what Stack Overflow users are saying about chaos engineering, check out Chaos engineering best practice, asked by User NingLee two years ago.
From your lips to AI’s ears
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 meat is safe to eat.Looking for some high-quality entertainment content? Look no further than Simone Giertz’s YouTube channel, where she builds robots to (among other things) wash her hair and wake her up with a slap in the face.Blast from the past: Listen to our episode with MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner ralf htp for their answer to How to listen for and react to Ace Editor change events.
How to build a universal computation machine with Tetris
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 an outage or security incident and detail how engineers got things up and running again. One classic of the genre: Amazon’s explanation of how one engineer brought the internet to its knees. And here’s an example from our own blog. When you’ve finished catching up on the Stack Overflow blog, check out those from Netflix and Uber.Good news for late-night impulse shoppers: Instagram is removing the shopping tag from the home feed, reports The Verge. Is this a response to widespread user pushback, and does this herald the end of New Instagram? We can hope.Sony announces Project Leonardo, an accessibility controller kit for PS5.Did you know? Using only Tetris, you can build a machine capable of universal computation.Developer advocate Matt Kiernander is moving on to his next adventure. If you’re looking for a developer advocate or engineer, connect with him on LinkedIn or email him.One of Matt’s favorite conversations on the podcast was our episode with Mitchell Hashimoto, cofounder and CEO of HashiCorp. It’s worth a (re)listen.