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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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)
This product could help build a more equitable workplace
Joonku is an automated diversity recruiting layer named for Japanese mountain climber Junko Tabei, the first woman to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. You can learn about their talent pool, keep up with their blog, or check out their open positions.ICYMI, read our blog post about how the recent tech layoffs have had a disproportionate impact on women, people of color, and immigrants.Connect with Ilit on LinkedIn.This week’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to pppery for their answer to Why use positional-only parameters in Python 3.8+?.
How the creator of Angular is dehydrating the web
Angular is an open-source web framework used by millions of developers. Explore the Angular community. Miško is currently CTO at Builder, an API-driven, drag-and-drop headless CMS with a visual editor. Explore their docs or see what they’re up to on their blog.Builder’s full-stack web framework is Qwik, which just reached 1.0.Let Miško walk you through why Hydration is Pure Overhead.ICYMI, listen to our episode with Builder CEO Steve Stewell.Connect with Miško on LinkedIn, Twitter, or GitHub. You can also check out his website.This week’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to ORION for their answer to Unicode symbol that represents "download".
For those who just don't Git it
Pierre-Étienne’s interest in computing began with the functional programming language OCaml, created by Xavier Leroy. Before OCaml, Pierre-Étienne explains, “everyone thought functional programming was doomed to be extremely slow.”Pijul is a free, open-source distributed version control system. You can get started here. Want a GitHub-like interface? Find it here.Read the article that led to this conversation: Beyond Git: The other version control systems developers use. Pierre-Étienne is currently working on a new project with the creators of the open-source game engine Godot. We hosted Godot cofounder and lead developer Juan Linietsky on the podcast a few months back; listen here.Nix is a package management and system configuration tool. Learn how it works or explore the NixOS community. Connect with Pierre-Étienne on LinkedIn.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Rachit for answering Passing objects between fragments.
Building zero tier systems on bare metal
While Mauricio and team had to get back to bare metal, most programmers are headed in the opposite direction. It’s why MIT switched from Scheme to Python. At Stack Overflow, we’re familiar with what happens to websites during physical failures, like hurricanes. Connect with Mauricio on LinkedIn. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner The Nail, who pinned a solid answer on the question, if->return vs. if->else efficiency.
Great code isn’t enough. Developers need to brag about it
Visit Dagna’s website, theMindfulDev.com, to learn more about her coaching process, which is built around understanding what fulfillment looks like for each client. Dagna is on LinkedIn.You can also connect with Ceora on Twitter or her website.Ryan is also on Twitter, especially when there’s a good AI joke to be shared.Gold star for Lifeboat badge winner JasonHorsleyTech for rescuing the question Installing PHP 7.3 on a new MacBook Pro with the new A1 chip (Apple silicon).
Stung by OWASP? Chatting with the creator of the most popular web app scanner
Simon is the founder and longtime project lead of OWASP ZAP, an integrated penetration testing tool that helps uncover vulnerabilities in web apps, including compromised authentication, sensitive data exposure, and SQL injection. ZAP is OWASP’s most active project and the world’s most popular web app scanner. Check out other OWASP projects here or explore ZAP’s docs.Check out our blog post on how you can mitigate the ten most-found OWASP vulnerabilities in Stack Overflow C++ snippets.Jit, where Simon is a distinguished engineer, is a DevSecOps platform that allows high-velocity engineering teams to embed security requirements throughout the DevOps workflow. You can explore Jit’s docs here.Today we’re shouting out the question CSP Alerts by OWASP even though CSP header is added, definitively answered by one Simon Bennetts.Simon is on LinkedIn and Twitter.
A conversation with the folks building Google's AI models
Learn more about Forrest on his website and check out his newsletter. You can follow Paige on Twitter or her LinkedIn.Get on the list to try out some of the new stuff released today here.
Read the docs? We prefer to chat with them
Cloudflare offers zero-trust security and performance tools for web and SaaS apps.Cloudflare Workers allows devs to deploy serverless code globally to over 285 data centers around the world.Astro is an open-source web framework built for speed. Houston is a bot that lets you chat with their docs.Check out Confbrew, a conference session Q&A bot from Markprompt and Contenda (where Cassidy is CTO). Connect with Brendan on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.Connect with Michael on LinkedIn.Connect with Fred on LinkedIn.While you’re at it, follow Ceora and Cassidy on Twitter. Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner The Nail for saving if->return vs. if->else efficiency from oblivion.
Building golden paths for developers
Luca currently heads up product at Humanitec, a platform orchestrator that provides self-service “golden paths” for developers.Get up to speed (or refresh your memory) on what platform engineering involves and what an internal developer platform is.Dynamic configuration management (DCM) is a methodology for configuring compute workloads.Stop by the Platform Engineering Slack channel.Hear from top DevOps and platform engineering leaders at PlatformCon 2023, a virtual event held June 8-9.Find Luca on LinkedIn and Twitter.Cheers to Lifeboat badge winner Devart for rescuing How can I show the table structure in SQL Server query? from the dustbin of history.
When AI meets IP: Can artists sue AI imitators?
Ben and Ceora talk through some thorny issues around AI-generated music and art, explain why creators are suing AI companies for copyright infringement, and compare notes on the most amusing/alarming AI-generated content making the rounds (Pope coat, anyone?).Episode notes:Getty Images is suing the company behind AI art generator Stable Diffusion for copyright infringement, accusing the company of copying 12 million images without permission or compensation to train its AI model.Meanwhile, a group of artists is suing the companies behind Midjourney, DreamUp, and Stable Diffusion for “scraping and collaging” their work to train AI models. One of those artists, Sarah Anderson, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about seeing her comics gobbled up by AI models and regurgitated as far-right memes.Speaking of copyright violations, did Vanilla Ice really steal that hook from David Bowie and Freddie Mercury? (Yes.)Check out the AI model trained on Kanye’s voice that sounds almost indistinguishable from Ye himself.Read The Verge’s deep dive into the intersection of AI-generated music and IP/copyright laws.Watch the AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti that’s been called “the natural end point for AI development.”ICYMI: The Pope coat was real in our hearts.Columbia University’s Data Science Institute recently wrote about how blockchain can give creators more control over their IP, now that AI-generated art is clearly here to stay.Congrats to today’s Lifeboat badge winner, herohuyongtao, for answering How can I add a prebuilt static library in a project using CMake?.
How a top-ranked engineering school reimagined CS curriculum
Olin College of Engineering has one of the top-ranked undergrad engineering programs in the US. Its computing curriculum is a concentration within the engineering major, not a standalone major. The upshot is a liberal arts-informed course of study with fewer math and theory requirements than a typical CS degree and a greater emphasis on practical, job-ready skills like code quality, testing, and documentation. To learn more about how software design is taught at Olin, explore the course.Andrew Mascillaro is a senior at Olin majoring in electrical and computer engineering. He’s currently a software engineering intern at Tableau. You can find him on LinkedIn.Steve Matsumoto is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Olin; his academic interests include crypto and cybersecurity. You can find him on GitHub or through his website.
Is this the AI renaissance?
Prosus, one of the world’s largest tech investors, acquired Stack Overflow in 2021.Check out the annual State of AI Report from Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth.Read our CEO’s recent post on Stack Overflow’s approach to Generative AI.Connect with Paul on LinkedIn. Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is suvayu for their answer to How to put a big centered "Thank You" in a LaTeX slide.
When setting up monitoring, less data is better
Akita is a monitoring and observability platform that watches API traffic live and automatically infers endpoint structure.Jean, who comes from a family of computer scientists, earned a PhD from MIT and taught in the CS department at Carnegie Mellon University before founding Akita.Read Jean’s post on the Stack Overflow blog: Monitoring debt builds up faster than software teams can pay it off.Jean is on LinkedIn and Twitter.Congrats are in order for Stellar Question badge winner legendary_rob for asking Adding a favicon to a static HTML page.
Ops teams are pets, not cattle (ep. 556)
A common refrain you’ll hear these days is that servers should be scaled out, easy to replace, and interchangeable—cattle, not pets. But for the ops folks who run those servers the opposite is true. You can’t just throw any of them into an incident where they may not know the stack or system and expect everything to work out. Every operator has a set of skills that they’ve built up through research or experience, and teams should value them as such. They’re people, not pets, and certainly not cattle—you can’t just get a new one when you burn out your existing ones. On this episode of the podcast—sponsored by Chronosphere—we talk with Paige Cruz, Senior Developer Advocate at Chronosphere, about how teams can reduce the cognitive load on ops, the best ways to prepare for inevitable failures, and where the worst place to page Paige is. Episode notes:Chronosphere provides an observability platform for ops people, so naturally, the company has an interest in the happiness of those people. If you’re interested in the history of the pets vs. cattle concept , this covers it pretty well. Previously, we spoke with the CEO of Chronosphere about making incidents easier to manage. We’ve covered this topic on the blog before, and two articles came up during our conversation with Paige. You can connect with Paige on Twitter, where she has a pretty apropos handle. Congrats to Stellar Question badge winner Bruno Rocha for asking How can I read large text files line by line, without loading them into memory?, which at least 100 users liked enough to bookmark.
We bought a university: how one coding school doubled down on brick and mortar
Alura is a Portuguese-language edtech platform where users can learn programming, backend and mobile development, data science, design and UX, DevOps, and more.They started small, grew into a bustling online program, then purchased a majority stake in FIAP, a private university in São Paulo, Brazil. Paulo and Stack Overflow Director of Engineering Roberta Arcoverde cohost a popular Portuguese-language podcast about programming, design, startups, and technology.Paulo’s new open-source project is full of career resources for T-shaped developers.Connect with Alura CEO Paulo Silveira on LinkedIn.Connect with Alura Chief Education Officer Guilherme Silveira on LinkedIn.Connect with Roberta Arcoverde on LinkedIn.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is netblognet for their answer to Get JSON object from URL.