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.
TED Talks Daily
Every weekday, TED Talks Daily brings you the latest talks in audio. Join host and journalist Elise Hu for thought-provoking ideas on every subject imaginable — from Artificial Intelligence to Zoology, and everything in between — given by the world's leading thinkers and creators. With TED Talks Daily, find some space in your day to change your perspectives, ignite your curiosity, and learn something new.
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)
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.
Faster feedback loops make for faster developer velocity
Having trouble with understanding your team’s productivity outside of frameworks and tooling? Create a backlog and work through it: Instant Agile! How much of that backlog you work through is a good baseline measure. The Stack Overflow blog recently featured an article from Stack Overflow’s Director of Engineering, Ben Matthews: Does high velocity lead to burnout? That may be the wrong question to askIf you're interested in seeing how Couchbase’s SQL database solutions can help improve your team’s velocity, check out Capella. Cory House helps teams deliver successful React projects through his consulting business, ReactJS Consulting. If you want to learn more about Matt, check out his LinkedIn.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, Alohci, who threw a great answer to rescue the question, Display button with inline CSS.
Driverless cars give us the heebie jeebies
Before jumping into driverless car talk, Ben shares a heads up about fake jobs at credible companies that are actually phishing scams meant to steal your identity and hijack your bank accounts. Beware the job offer that seems too good to be true!Jon, Cassidy, Ceora, Matt, and Ben reflect on whether they trust software to operate a vehicle.Cassidy tells us that she once sat in a car that parked itself and screamed the entire time.Matt brings us back to reality, reminding us that airplane flights have been automated for a while now.Matt and Ben point out that in the medical technology space, robotic surgeons are so advanced that they have become more precise than human hands.Shoutout to lifeboat badge winner GKG4 for a great answer to the question “how can I check if an array index is out of range?” which has been viewed 67,000 times.Follow Jon, Ben, Ceora, Matt, and Cassidy.
The robots are coming… but when?
Despite our hope for the power of robotics, the technology is still far from mainstream. That’s because the amount of effort needed to get hardware to do useful things at scale is…well…hard.When Eliot started Viam, his goal was to address this challenge by creating software that supports a range of hardware builds right out of the box. As the company explains - “we’re addressing these issues by building a novel robotics platform that relies on standardized building blocks rather than custom code to create, configure and control robots intuitively and quickly. We’re empowering engineers – aspiring and experienced – across industries to solve complicated automation problems with our innovative software tools.” The company announced the opening of its public beta earlier this week.While Eliot elaborates on his vision for Viam, Ben reflects on his time covering drones for The Verge and working on robotics at DJI.Inquisitive badge winner, Neeta, gets props for asking well-received questions on 30 separate days.Follow Ben and Eliot on Twitter.
The right way to job hop
Ceora and Cassidy talk about why engineers are so good at job hopping — and why it can pay to upgrade roles every year or two.Ceora speaks openly about the privileges of working in tech compared to other industries.Apparently, in some places, it’s a thing for engineers to leave their teams and then rejoin the organization with a promotion to get ahead. Do you boomerang?Cassidy’s husband’s favorite interview question to ask is, “If you had a magic wand and could change one thing about this company, what would you change?”Ben poses a question about whether LinkedIn AB tests are disadvantageous to some career seekers over others.Matt introduces us to the world of AI generated Pokémon.Ceora, our resident voice of Gen Z, tells us why she thinks millennials are the only true generation to understand tech.High fives to Unique Username for answering the question “how can I print to the console using JavaScript?” You get a Lifeboat Badge for helping 140,000 people.Follow Ben, Ceora, Matt, and Cassidy.
A chat with Redhat CEO Matt Hicks on the path from developer to leader
Matt takes us back to the origins of his open source days and the spark that inspired his love for engineering — including the point at which he discovered Linux.He shares how he began learning from the code itself, which was ultimately a different style of learning than what was available to him at university. Then, it was to the stacks, but not Stack Overflow. Think Barnes and Noble, not YouTube videos.Imagine trying to navigate getting your first engineering job during the dot-com crash of the late 90s and early 2000s.We reflect on Matt's experience building projects with his daughter, including an AI-powered doorbell he built himself.Speaking of insatiable curiousity, we’d like to give a big high five to Wonton, who received the Inquisitive Badge. Thanks for coming on 30 separate days to maintain a positive question track record.Follow Matt, Ben, and Cassidy.
Meet the AI helping you chose what to watch next
Our guests have done most of their ML work on AWS offerings, from AWS Personalize for their initial recommendation engine to SageMaker for model training and deployment pipeline. Now they’re building models from scratch in TensorFlow. Want to see these recommendations in action? Check out the offerings at Discovery+ and HBOMax. If you’re a ML/AL data scientist looking to shape the future of automated curation, check out their open roles. Follow our guests on LinkedIn:Shrikant DesaiSowmya Subramanian
The many strengths of neurodivergence
Mariann shares how she and her UX research team at Stack Overflow are taking steps to create a more inclusive product experience, while reflecting on her experiences as a mother to a neurodiverse daughter.Wesley talks about what it’s like to be a developer with dyslexia and why self-empathy and self-compassion have been important to his evolution as a senior leader.Ceora explains why it’s important to be on a psychologically safe team from her perspective as a Black woman who is also neurodivergent.We talk about giving people the space necessary to do their best work, implementing more inclusive hiring practices, and everyday routines that help us stay our happiest and most productive.We conclude with a note about why supporting neurodiversity is good for everyone of all walks of life.Follow Ceora, Wesley, and Marianne.
We finally return to IRL events and Cassidy becomes a CTO
Ceora shares her experience representing Auth0 at REFACTR TECH, reflecting on what it was like being back in-person after years of virtual events.Cassidy announces her move to CTO and how her current leadership role at Contenda fits into her career journey and future aspirations as a technologist.Ben talks about Stack Overflow’s Flow State, the first IRL event he’s attended since 2019 and Stack’s first ever customer conference. In case Cassidy pulled you down a rabbit hole of wondering how eels reproduce, check out this piece in the New Yorker from 2020.Be sure to follow Ceora and Cassidy on Twitter. Speaking of the power of curiosity, today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user448810 for answering the question, Feasible implementation of a prime-counting function. Thanks for helping 6,000 people gain valuable knowledge.
Don't let software steal your time
Guilo gives building UI components as an example of where software innovation has given him time back: he started building them as static images in Photoshop, then Sketch brought connected, interactive components, and Finally, Figma let you collaborate and build an entire system together. If you missed any of the previous episodes, you can find them waiting for you here. Connect with Paolo Passeri on LinkedIn. Connect with Giulio Barresi on LinkedIn. Check out more mechanical keyboard products from Logitech. Congrats to KnutKnutsen for their answer to How can I specify a one-argument constructor using Lombok?, saving the question and picking up a Lifeboat badge.