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.
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)
Talking UX philosophies and deployment best practices with Patreon's VP of Engineering
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, migrations to open source services, and troubleshooting bugs.Srivastava walks us all through upcoming product features that his engineering team is working to implement.Andy wins a Lifeboat Badge for answering this question about a list of all tags on Stack Overflow.Follow Ben, Matt, Cassidy, and Utkarsh.
Here’s what it’s like to develop VR at Meta
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 shares how object and scene recognition work in VR.Cami reveals a family secret — so listen up if you want to know how to beat Cassidy at board games.Blackbishop wins the Illuminator Badge for answering and editing 500 different questions on Stack Overflow.Follow Ben, Matt, Cassidy, and Cami.We’re taking a break for the Thanksgiving holiday so no podcast this Friday…have a good one, and see you next week.
Cloudy with a chance of… the state of cloud in 2022
SPONSORED BY PLURALSIGHTEarly 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 infrastructure as code, servers have become cattle—you have as many as you need at any given time and don’t feel personally attached to any given one. And as more and more organizations find their way to the cloud, more and more engineers need to figure out how to herd cattle instead of feed pets. Show notesGartner forecasts that around $500 billion will be spent worldwide on end user cloud computing during 2022. Firment says that’s only 25% of IT budgets today, but he expects it to grow to 65% by 2025.Don’t doubt the power of your people. Gartner estimates that 50% of all cloud IT migration projects are delayed up to two years simply because of the lack of skills.Pluralsight just published its State of the Cloud report. 75% of of all leaders want to build new products and services in the cloud, but only 8% of the technologists have the experience to actually work with cloud related tools. Today we’re highlighting a Great Question badge winner—a question with a score of 100 or more—awarded to Logan Besecker for their question: How do you cache an image in JavaScript?Want to start earning your cloud certificates? Head over to Pluralsight.Connect with Ben or Ryan on Twitter. Find Drew on LinkedIn.
The creator of Homebrew has a plan to fix the funding problem in open source
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 joke on the podcast over the last three years.While he is not a crypto bull, Max was inspired with a solution for the open source funding dilemma by his efforts to buy and sell an NFT. A contract written in code and shared in public enforced a rule sending a portion of his proceeds to the digital objects original creator. What if the same funding mechanism could be applied to open source projects? In March of 2022, Max and his co-founder launched Tea, a sort of spirtual successor to Homebrew. It has a lot of new features Max wanted in a package manager, plus a blockchain based approach to ensuring that creators, maintainers, and contributors of open source software can all get paid for their efforts. You can read Max’s launch post on Tea here and yes, of course there is a white paper. Follow him on Twitter here.
Want to work as a developer in Japan?
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 Japan Dev generates an average of $60,000/month in revenue.Eric reflects on starting Japan Dev as a side project while he was employed full-time as an engineer.Eric elaborates on why he doesn’t think venture capital is a good fit for Japan Dev.Night owls unite! Eric says that his most productive hours are between midnight to 4AM.Follow Matt and Eric.
Another hard week in tech
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 copyright and the ability for more people to create stuff.Ben discusses how his internet browser might be becoming his second brain.Matt and Cassidy get props from Ben for their rising popularity on Stack Overflow’s YouTube channel.Follow Ben, Matt, and Cassidy.
Hashgraph: The sustainable alternative to blockchain
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 episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan chat with Matt Woodward, head of developer relations at Swirlds Labs. Swirlds Labs created the Hedera ecosystem, a DLT built on a hashgraph, not a blockchain. We chat about what the difference is between a blockchain and a hashgraph, Hedera’s focus on environmental sustainability, and why the Web3 version of “Hello, World!” takes a little more effort. Show notesHedera’s hashgraph is a third-generation DLT: it’s an open-source consensus algorithm and a data structure that uses a direct acyclic graph and two novel inventions, the gossip about gossip protocol and virtual voting. Where Bitcoin can only handle between three and seven transactions per second, a hashgraph can support upwards of 10,000. There’s been a lot of talk about the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies. Woodward says that a single Bitcoin transaction uses 1000kW-hours—the equivalent of driving a Tesla Model S 5,500 km—while Hedera uses 160 MW-hours of energy per year, about 2.5 million times less.Congrats to the winner of a Stellar Question badge, g.revolution, for their question What is an anti-pattern? 100 users saved it for later. Find out more about Hedera and hit the start button. Connect with Matt, Ben, or Ryan on Twitter.
Fighting to balance identity and anonymity on the web(3)
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, Phillip became interested in cryptocurrency after discovering his personal information on the dark web.His interest grew in the topic of self sovereign identities, which led him to become CEO and co-founder of Identity.com.Phillip and Ben reflect on the utility of Web3 in gaming.Follow Ben and Phillip.Thank you to lifeboat badge winner Marchingband for their answer to the question about running C or C++ code from Node.js in an efficient way.
Going from engineer to entrepreneur takes more than just good code
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.Despite being in the Bay Area and working at Twilio, she was struggling to meet people because her full brain power was going to her products.She shares what it was like for her and her co-founder to hire Stashpad’s first employees.The group discusses Stashpad’s pathway to monetization in the context of developers wanting free tools.Follow, Ceora, Matt, Cassidy, and Cara.Marchingband gets today’s lifeboat badge for their answer to the question about running C or C++ code from Node.js in an efficient way.
Making location easier for developers with new data primitives
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 traffic in and out of the stores. While you can still use the Swarm app to find the best Manhattan in Manhattan, the company realized that real estate and data share the same three key rules: location, location, location. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with Vin Sharma, VP of Engineering at Foursquare, about how they’re finding the atomic data that makes up their location data—their location data—and going from giving insight to individual app users about the locations around them to APIs that serve these location-based insights to developers at organizations like Uber, Nextdoor, and Redfin, who want to build location based insights and features into their own apps. Show notesIf you still want to check in at your local bakery and remember all the place you’ll go, the original Foursquare app is now Swarm. If you’re looking to build on their data instead, you can start with their developer documentation. They have almost 70 location attributes that they are starting to deconstruct and decompose into fundamental building blocks of their location data. Like data primitives—integers, booleans, etc.—these small bites of data can be remade with agility and at scale. Through the recent acquisition of Unfolded, Foursquare allows you to visualize and map location data at any scale. Want to see patterns across the country? Zoom out. Want to focus on a square kilometer? Zoom in and watch the data move. Today’s lifeboat shoutout goes to Rohith Nambiar for their answer to Visual Studio not installed; this is necessary for Windows development. You can find Vin Sharma on Twitter.
Homelabbing tricks to level up your WFH game
The group laughs about setting up JIRA workflows and Trello boards for our family lives—Matt says heck no.Ceora speaks to the power of homelabbing as a way to gain profitable skills. JJ talks about the VPN system he has running on his phone to access his home network using tools like WireGuard and ZeroTier.Cassidy suggests setting up a personal knowledge base as a second brain (and recommends Obsidian). JJ shares how homelabbing is popular among kids under 18 as a pathway for them to get into the tech industry.Follow, Ceora, Matt, Cassidy, and JJ.High fives to Lifeboat Badge winner Manquer for the answer to his question How can I upgrade the Yii 1.x version to the Yii 2.0 latest release version?
How to get more engineers entangled with quantum computing
Katzgraber reflects on his time as a university professor up until 2020 and why he switched to working at Amazon.He walks us through a quantum computing challenge that he hosted with BMW, through his role at Amazon (and what real world applications he sees emerging from these types of collaboration experiments).We discuss what inspires him to stay curious — raising the bar for scientific research, crowdsourcing breakthroughs, and opening up the playing field for more people to jump in.Follow Ben, Ryan, Matt, and Helmut.‘Til next time, all.
Goodbye Webpack, Hello Turbopack! The big news from today’s Next.JS conference
We got the chance to sit down with Guillermo Ruach, Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel and co-creator of Next.JS, about the news coming out of today's conference. The most interesting was a new product called Turbopack. You can read more about it here.
A flight simulator for developers to practice real world challenges and surprises
Freund reflects on his early days at Applied Materials, where he worked on a machine that inspected silicon wafers.It was in this early role that Freund gained an appreciation for rigorous software testing protocols in the manufacturing process.At WeWork, Freund was fascinated by the idea of a full stack business, which is a business building itself.While Freund officially launched Wilco in 2021, the origin story for the company dates back to 2013 when he was hiring and managing a team of engineers—he saw a need in the market to help developers build critical skills to problems-solve in real-time.You can think of Wilco as the equivalent of a flight simulator for engineers.Shoutout to Lifeboat Badge winner Zico for their awesome answer to the question, “Hiding sensitive information in response”Follow On and Ben.
He went from .NET and VS Code to working on Web3
John explains that Web3 is about the convergence of technology, economics, and social trends.He elaborates that foundations begin with service-based architecture (SOA), the notion of how to design loosely coupled systems that consist of economic services and components.He goes on to explain how DeFi represents this thinking of a loose composition of services.With all of this, blockchain brings together technology and economic incentives into a holistic equation—people contribute because they want to contribute.Nonsense it is not, says baby Yoda.Crypto isn’t the end game. It’s a segue along the way.Follow Ben, Matt, and John.Learn more about the Global Blockchain Business Council and John’s company, ngEnterprise.Speaking of awesomeness, we’d like to give a shout out to Stellar Question Badge winner GateKiller for asking a question “How can I get the DateTime for the start of the week?” that has been bookmarked by a hundred people.