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.
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)
Command Line Heroes
Stories about the people transforming technology from the command line up.
Taming multiple design systems with a single plugin
Any large organization with multiple products faces the challenge of keeping their brand identity unified without denying each product its own charisma. That’s where a design system can help developers avoid reinventing the wheel every time, say, a new button gets created On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Demian Borba, Principal Product Manager, and Kelvin Nguyen, Senior Engineering Manager, both of Intuit. We chat about how their design system is evolving into a platform, how AI keeps their brand consistent, and why a design system doesn’t have to solve every use case. Episode notesTreating a design system as a platform means providing a baseline of tokens—colors, typography, themes—and allowing developers to deviate so long as they use the right tokens. Alongside a company-wide push towards greater AI usage, Intuit’s design system team is beginning to leverage AI to help developers make better design decisions. As an example, they’re including typeahead functionality to suggest possible solutions to design decisions. The team is using a Figma plugin to manage a lot of the heavy lifting. Their presentation at Config 2022 built a lot of excitement for what’s possible. Congrats to RedVelvet, who won a great question badge for The most efficient way to remove first N elements in a list?Find Kelvin and Demian on Linkedin.
From CS side project to the C-suite
LogRocket helps software teams create better experiences through a combination of session replay, error tracking, and product analytics.LogRocket’s machine-learning layer, Galileo, cuts through the noise generated by conventional error monitoring and analytics tools to identify critical issues affecting users.LogRocket is hiring, so check out their open roles or connect with Matt Arbesfeld on LinkedIn. You can also give LogRocket a free trial.
Our favorite apps, books, and games of 2023
Adobe closed out 2022 and celebrated 40 years with an employee-only Katy Perry concert. Related: Ceora makes the case for virtual concerts.DeepMind is teaching AI to play soccer, which naturally makes us think of QWOP.ICYMI: Ghost calls out Substack and Substack responds.BeReal is the iPhone app of the year. But not even Resident Youth Ceora knows anyone who actually uses it.Some 2023 recommendations from the team: Ceora recommends Realworld (not to be confused with BeReal), an app that guides you through tasks and decisions big and small, from deciding on health insurance to improving your credit.Cassidy recommends Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott.Matt suggests fellow side hustlers check out The Freelance Manifesto: A Field Guide for the Modern Motion Designer by School of Motion founder Joey Korenman.Ben recommends Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a terrific novel about a love triangle between indie video game creators, especially fun if you grew up with Oregon Trail, Myst, and Super Mario.
The future of software engineering is powered by AIOps and open source
Over the past five years, Intuit went through a total cloud transformation—they closed the data centers, built out a modern SaaS development environment, and got cloud native with foundational building blocks like containers and Kubernetes. Now they are looking to continue transforming into an AI-driven organization that leverages the data they have to make their customers’ lives easier. Along the way, they realized that their internal systems have the same requirements to leverage the data they have for AI-driven insights. Episode notesWadher notes that Intuit uses development velocity, not developer velocity. The thinking is that an engineering org should focus on shipping products and features faster, not making individual devs more productive. No, the robots aren’t coming for your jobs. Wadher says their AI strategy relies on helping experts make better insights. The goal is to arm those experts, not replace them. In terms of sheer volume, the AI/ML program at Intuit is massive. They make 58 billion ML predictions daily, enable 730 million AI-driven customer interactions every year, and maintain over two million personalized AI models. Intuit’s not here to hoard secrets. They’ve outsourced their DevOps pipeline tool, Argo. They found that a lot of companies used it for AI and data pipelines, and have recently launched Numaproj, which open sources a lot of the tools and capabilities that they use internally. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Bill Karwin for their answer to Understanding MySQL licensing.
From life without parole to startup CTO
If you want to read more about Jessica, you can check out the blog we worked on together for the launch of our Overflow Offline initiative. If you've ever wondered what it's like learning to code from an XML file of raw Stack Overflow data, be sure to check this episode out.You can learn more about the Supreme Court case that led to Jessica's release here.Her company's mission is to build a better justice system from the inside, specifically by educating incarcerated individuals so they can teach the next generation and have valuable skills upon release. Read more about Unlocked Labs here.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to mx0 for answering the question: How do you extract the 'src' attribute from an 'img' tag using Beautiful Soup?Follow Ben on Twitter and if you enjoy the show, be sure to leave us a rating and review.
Let's talk about our favorite terminal tools
You can learn more about Anthony here.His favorite terminal tool at the moment is Warp, which describes itself as "a blazingly fast, Rust-based terminal reimagined from the ground up to work like a modern app." His personal website features a live chat function. Sometimes it's actually Tony, sometimes it's just a bot. No lifeboat badge today. We''ll be taking a break for the holidays and will resume episodes in 2023. Until then, enjoy the holidays.
An honest end-of-year rundown
Ben asks Matt to explain Mastodon to him like he’s five. Matt says the experience feels a lot like…LinkedIn?Matt explains that he took social media apps off his phone for a while…just to chill out. (Ed. note, they're already back on.)We cover the latest AI to emerge that can write essays, jokes, and yes, some code.While everyone’s confused about the state of social media and AI chat, physicists have created a wormhole using a quantum computer. (Though it may have been a publicity stunt.)Follow Ben and Matt.Shout out to Lifeboat Badge winner ralf htp for their answer to the question ‘how to listen for and react to Ace Editor change events.’ Your answer has helped more than 20,000+ people, so rock on.
Talking about drag and drop tech stacks with Builder.io's Steve Sewell
Steve was working as an engineering manager at ShopStyle and found that an increasing amount of his team's time was spent working on custom requests from departments like marketing and sales. They tried moving to a headless CMS but the data and components couldn't keep up with ever evolving needs. They wanted a drag and drop system connected to their code, data, and components.This pain point inspired him strike out on his own to create a new product. The vision was a tool that would allow colleagues from across a company to make changes to web pages without requesting dev time, but would also ensure that any changes made would be up to the standards of the design department and not introduce errors that engineering would then have to fix. Hence, the company's pitch for a plug & play system that integrates with your existing sites & apps. It relies on a few key ideas:API-based infrastructure that is native to your tech stackWorks with any frontend or backendBuild with your own data, like product catalogs or customer data platforms, to create rich, dynamic experiencesYou can check it out for yourself over at Builder.io.Follow Steve on Twitter and TikTok where he breaks down websites and effects he finds interesting.Congrats to phoenisx for being awarded the Necromaner badge after answering the question: Property 'share' does not exist on type 'Navigator"?
The next step in ecommerce? Replatform with APIs and micro frontends
SPONSORED BY COMMERCE LAYERAround the world, billions of people can sell their wares online, in part thanks to solutions that handle the complexities of securely and reliably managing transactions. Businesses, large and small, can sell directly to customers. But a lot of these ecommerce services provide a heavier surface than many need by managing product catalogs and requiring inflexible interfaces. On this sponsored podcast episode, Ben and Ryan talk with Filippo Conforti, co-founder of Commerce Layer, an API-only ecommerce platform that focuses on the transaction engine. We talk about his early years building ecommerce at Italian luxury brands, the importance of front-ends (and micro-frontends) to ecom, and how milliseconds of page load speed can cost millions. Episode notesConforti was the first Gucci employee building out their ecommerce, so he got to experience life in a fast-moving startup within a big brand. When he left five years later, the team had grown to around 100 people. The ecommerce space is crowded—one of Commerce Layer’s recent clients evaluated around 40 other platforms—but Conforti thinks Commerce Layer stands out by making any web page a shoppable experience. Conforti thinks composable commerce back ends that neglect the front end neutralize the benefits. Commerce Layer provides micro-frontends—standard web components that you can inject into any web page to create shoppable experiences. Getting your ecommerce platform as close to your customer makes real monetary difference. A report from Deloitte finds that a 100ms response time increase on mobile translates to an 8% increase in the conversion rate. Thanks to Mitch, today’s Lifeboat badge winner, for their answer to the question, How to get all weekends within a date range in C#?
Ready to optimize your JavaScript with Rust?
Webpack has been king for several years. Vercel wants folks to embrace Turbopack, but their claims about speed raised a lot of backlash after it was first announced. Lee explains why he thinks the Rust-based approach will ultimately be a big benefit to developers and how organizations who are deeply ingrained with existing tools can safely and incrementally migrate to what is, for now, a very Alpha and experimental release. We go over the routing and rendering updates in Next.JS 13, exploring where it might offer developers more flexibility and the ability to use React server components to ship less, maybe a lot less, JavaScript. As Lee says in the episode: “So to your point about wanting to ship less JavaScript, that was a kinda fundamental architectural decision of where we headed with the app directory. And the core of this is because it's built on React server components. The key thing with React server components is that as your application grows in size from one component to a hundred thousand components, the amount of client-side JavaScript you send can be exactly the same. It can be constant because you can render every single component on the server. And that's a lot different from the world of React applications today, where every new component you add for data fetching or just putting some HTML on the screen also adds additional client-side JavaScript.So this is kind of inverting the default, back from the client to be server first. Now, of course, we still love client-side interactivity that React provides making really interactive and rich UI experiences, but the default for data fetching or just getting HTML to the browser happens from the server, and that's gonna help us reduce the amount of JavaScript.”You can learn more about Lee on his website, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
The tech to build in a crypto winter
You can learn more about Andrew, from building out a telco in Canada to cyber security at Deloitte, on his LinkedIn.Validation Cloud bills itself as the world’s fastest node infrastructure and cites networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Binance as clients it supports. Learn more at the company’s website here.Shout out to this week’s lifeboat badge winner, Derek, for helping answer the question: How do you open the file chooser in an Android app using Kotlin?
Taking stock of the crypto crash and tech turbulence
Data show's Silicon Valley's share of new startup funding deals dropped below 20% for the first time.What does it mean to experiment with big changes to an engineering org, in public and in real time?SBF would like the chance to explain himself.Today's lifeboat badge goes to CodeCaster for explaining: What is E in floating point?
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.