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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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)
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.
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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.
Ethereum finally merges, semiconductors stay scarce
It finally happened. In the words of the Ethereum Foundation, ETH is now “ready for its interstellar voyage,” having transitioned from proof of work to proof of stake. With no centralized authority insisting on a ship date, we’re witnessing a feat. We’re all wondering what comes next. The Great Debate about hybrid and remote work continues. Is the decentralized talent movement winning? What can we do to prevent cabin fever? What do government workers do with their laptops if they need to cross the border?The semiconductor chip shortage hasn’t ended yet, but some companies seem to be hurting more than others. What gives?We conclude with a reflection on the new Apple Watch—and whether it can actually save our lives.Be sure to follow @mattkander and @benpopper on Twitter to keep the convo going.Big thanks to Androidian who is our latest Inquisitive badge recipient for coming to Stack Overflow for 30 separate days, maintaining a positive question record.Catch you all later.
We hate Scrum and Agile too
About three years ago, when our public platform engineering team at Stack started growing, we realized that we needed a more robust formal project management system that could scale with all the creativity coming on board. That’s when we started looking at formal, by-the-book frameworks to empower and coach our teams to their fullest potential. We landed on Agile and Scrum. Admittedly, our development team was nervous about implementing Scrum and Agile at first. So we focused on the goals of introspection and accountability rather than the rigidness of enforcement.Agile and Scrum get a lot of hate. But is that their fault or are you doing it wrong?We talked about this on the podcast a few years ago, when Ben, Paul, and Sara wondered, “Is Scrum making you a worse engineer?” It’s about providing support—not punishing people. Done right, Agile and Scrum can be a force of freedom and autonomy when they start with trust.Connect with Shanda and Jon on LinkedIn.We conclude with a big high five to Lifeboat badge winner jminkler for their answer to how to create an Instagram share link in PHP (thank you).‘Til next time.
Five nines uptime without developer burnout
Like other folks we’ve talked to on the podcast, Chronosphere was born out of work pioneered at Uber. When you can’t find solutions to help you scale, sometimes you have to build them. Everything in Chronosphere was built from scratch, from the ingestion tier to the query layer. If you’re going to build something cloud native from the ground up, the clear choice for the team was Go. Cloud native observability changes the way developers interact with their code in production. Infrastructure is more complex, dev and test environments are gone, and data increases massively while data sources are more ephemeral. Congrats to david, who won a lifeboat badge for their answer to Can we convert a byte array into an InputStream in Java?
Can integrating hardware with software save developers time and energy?
We dive into some of the ways developers can customize their keyboard with shortcuts, macros, and apps to eliminate repetitive tasks and automate the busywork that stands in the way of bigger, breakthrough innovations. Flow state can be affected by things as simple as the right lighting, so Logitech created keyboards that automatically adjust their keyboard backlighting. For those not familiar with the MX series, you can read more about the different versions, including the mechanical one, here.If you don’t know about Cassidy’s passion for keyboards, you can check out her website here or listen to a previous episode diving deep into the details of mechanical keyboards here.If you missed episode two, you can check it out below. In it, we chat with Marcel Twohig, Head of Design for the MX Series at Logitech, and Thomas Fritz, Associate Professor of Human Aspects of Software Engineering at the University of Zurich. We cover the research that Professor Fritz has done on flow states, the design work that Marcel and team have done to incorporate that research, and the tools that you can use to maximize your daily flow.Learn more about Paolo here.Learn more about Guilio here.
A serial entrepreneur finally embraces open source
Appsmith is an open-source, low-code platform for building and maintaining internal tools like custom dashboards, admin panels, and, of course, CRUD apps.Watch Arpin’s talk on how a low-cost, low-tech solution can simplify online payments.Arpit isn’t the first engineer we’ve talked to whose career was sparked by the digital pets of the 90s. Listen to Episode #431: Words of wisdom for self-taught developers.It’s time to get excited about Hacktoberfest, an annual DigitalOcean event that encourages people to contribute to open-source projects throughout the month of October.Connect with Arpit on LinkedIn or Twitter.Last but not least, today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Belzebub for their answer to the question Custom alert dialog with rounded corners and a transparent background.
Hypergrowth headaches
Like a lot of good tools, Backstage started as a way to stop using a spreadsheet. They knew it was something worth open-sourcing when conference attendees paid more attention to the tool than the topics of the talks. Backstage treats docs-like-code, keeping markdown files in the same repo as the code. Down with wikis, up with pull requests!If you want to learn more about Backstage, check out our recent webinar with Emma Indal, a web engineer at Spotify.
What science says about achieving the flow state
Show notesIf you’re interested in diving deeper into Professor Fritz’s research on developer flow states, check out his list of publications. Flow states can be affected by things as simple as the right lighting, so Logitech created keyboards that automatically adjust their keyboard backlighting. Lights can be used to indicate your interruptibility.; Prof. Fritz did some research on FlowLight, which indicates your willingness to be interrupted with a simple red light/green light protocol. These days, you can use your Slack status to the same effect. If you’re looking for apps to improve your daily flow, Cassidy recommends Centered.
Hackathons and free pizza: All about Stack Overflow’s new Student Ambassador Program
As part of an effort to work with students at college and universities, Stack Overflow is partnering with Major League Hacking (MLH) to recruit our first cohort of Student Ambassadors. These folks will represent us on campus and lead the way in tackling challenges, earning rewards, and planning out the future of the program. Our pizza fund events are open to students in the US and Canada, and Global Hack Weeks are open to all. You can learn more about how to apply here.ICYMI: Major League Hacking cofounder Jon Gottfried and Hackathon Community Manager Mary Siebert previously came on the podcast to describe what a Major League Hackathon looks like (the succulents were a surprise).Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Manquer for their answer to the question How can I upgrade Yii 1.x to Yii 2.0?.
Plug-and-play AI for your own projects
AssemblyAI is an AI-as-a-service provider focused on speech-to-text and text analysis. Their mission is to make it easy for developers and product teams to incorporate state-of-the-art AI technology into the solutions they’re building. Their customers include Spotify, the Dow Jones, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. Need AI to run semantic analysis on your forum comments or automatically produce summaries of blog post submissions? Rent an ML model on-demand from the cloud instead of building a solution from scratch.Just three months after its $28M Series A, AssemblyAI raised another $30M in a Series B round led by Insight Partners, Y Combinator, and Accel. In this economy?When it comes to new and cutting-edge AI developments, what’s Dylan excited about right now? This open-source implementation of AlphaFold from GitHub user lucidrains.Connect with Dylan on LinkedIn.Today we’re shouting out the winner of an Inquisitive Badge: User Edson Horacio Junior asked a well-received question on 30 separate days and maintained a positive question record.
Flow state at your fingertips - how keyboards impact developer productivity
For those not familiar with the MX series, you can read more about the different versions, including the mechanical one, here.If you don't know about Cassidy's passion for keyboards, you can check out her website here or listen to a previous episode diving deep into the details of mechanical keyboards here.Stayed tuned for episode #2, airing next week, when we'll be digging deeper into the science behind keyboards and coders with Prof. Thomas Fritz and Marcel Twohig Head of Design for the MX series.
Does AI-assisted coding make it too easy for student to cheat on schoolwork?
You can find a great essay on AI helping students, and what that means for their teachers, here.Here's a piece on W4 Games plans to monetize the Godot engine.Snap says it now has one million subscribers for its Snapchat+ offering.There were no fresh lifeboats badges this week, so shoutout to Jemo for being awarded the Great Question badge. They asked: What's the difference between thread and coroutine in Kotlin
Environments on-demand
ReleaseHub provides on-demand environments for development, staging, and production. Every developer knows that environments can be a bottleneck, so ReleaseHub’s mission is to empower developers to share their ideas with the world more quickly and easily, sidestepping what Tommy calls “the big bottlenecks in development.”As CTO of TrueCar, Tommy was leading an effort to rebuild that company’s tech stack, but he needed an environment management platform, and nothing on the market fit his needs. The homegrown environment management system he developed with his cofounders would become ReleaseHub.Tommy joined Y Combinator in 2009.Connect with Tommy on LinkedIn.Today we’re shouting out the winner of an Inquisitive Badge: L-Samuels asked a well-received question on 30 separate days and maintained a positive question record.
What companies lose when they track worker productivity
What do companies want to gain through monitoring software—and what do they, and their employees, stand to lose? Read more.In Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport makes the point that our world isn’t geared toward deep, focused, flow-state work; instead, it rewards the appearance of busyness. Workers who see their keystrokes or mouse movements tracked are likely to focus on those behaviors instead of their projects.More than 50 countries are establishing rules to control their digital information and achieve data sovereignty. Read more.Gather round for the latest in cautionary crypto tales: The Crypto Geniuses Who Vaporized a Trillion Dollars. If you’re in the market, you can buy their yacht, the Much Wow (we kid you not).Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Tonyyyy for their answer to the question In what way does wait(NULL) work exactly in C?.
The luckiest guy in AI
Varun is the cofounder and CTO of AKASA, which develops purpose-built AI and automation solutions for the healthcare industry.Building a physics simulator for a robot helicopter as a student at Stanford helped Varun connect his interests in physics, machine learning, and AI. Check out that project here. His instructor? Andrew Ng.Along with Ng, Varun was lucky to connect with some brilliant AI folks during his time at Stanford, like Jeffrey Dean, Head of Google AI; Daphne Koller, cofounder of Coursera; and Sebastian Thrun, cofounder of Udacity.When Varun earned his PhD in computer science and AI, Koller and Thrun served as his advisors. You can read their work here.In 2017, Udacity acquired Varun’s startup, CloudLabs, the company behind Terminal. Connect with Varun on LinkedIn.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user John Woo for their answer to the question Update the row that has the current highest (maximum) value of one field.