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 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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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)
Codespaces moves into public beta, the virtual real estate worth millions, and how microservices and CI/CD can hurt productivity
Geriatric millennials unite.Learn more about GitHub’s move to put prebuilt Codespaces into public beta, plus check out CodeSandbox, home of self-proclaimed lazy developers.Meanwhile, in blockchain: Polygon, a solution designed to expand transaction efficiency and output for Ethereum, raised $450 million “to consolidate its lead in the race to scale Ethereum.”Is Decentraland the most annoying blockchain project? The competition is fierce.The 2022 Java Developer Productivity Report found that microservices and CI/CD are decreasing developers’ productivity, not increasing it. The team talks through what that means.This week, Ben recommends the book Appleseed by Matt Bell, Cassidy recommends the productivity app Centered, Adam points listeners to Unix-like operating system SerenityOS, and Ceora shouts out Tanya Reilly’s talk-turned-blog-post Being Glue.Find Adam on LinkedIn here.
McDonald’s is to Chipotle what REST APIs are to GraphQL
Danielle’s path to software engineering began when she was accepted into MIT’s Women’s Technology Program, an education and mentorship opportunity for high schoolers interested in engineering or computer science. She later earned her CS degree from MIT.Danielle’s first role out of college was a junior developer working on Meteor, a full-stack JavaScript framework that was just starting a GraphQL project they called Apollo. She tells the team how Meteor started looking at GraphQL and how that became Apollo.If McDonald’s is a REST API, then Chipotle is GraphQL. Think about it!Find Danielle on LinkedIn here.This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user torek for their answer to Why doesn’t Git natively support UTF-16?.
Visual Studio turns 25, new ideas for supporting open source, and of course…NFTs
The team pays tribute to Microsoft’s Visual Studio, an IDE and source code editor that turns 25 this month.Read Simon Willison’s article on how companies can financially support the open-source contributors they rely on. Learn more about open source’s diversity problem, and how to address it, here and here.Why are K-pop NFTs so unpopular with fans? The Atlantic digs in.ICYMI: Listen to our conversation with HashiCorp cofounder Mitchell Hashimoto: Moving from CEO back to IC.
Crypto feels broken. That’s because it’s the internet circa 1996.
David is a CS major who worked in Apple’s music group in the 90s and went on to become CEO of eMusic in the aughts. At Venrock, David invested in early-stage crypto, consumer, and enterprise tech companies. He was early to crypto as a node maintainer on the Bitcoin blockchain and an Ethereum miner, setting up a rig in his basement several years ago.At CoinFund, he focuses on early- and growth-stage crypto and blockchain companies and technologies like Upshot, a platform for crowdsourced NFT appraisals, and Rarible, a digital art NFT platform.ICYMI: Listen to our episode Web3 won’t save us.This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user M-M for their answer to Find the area of an n-interesting polygon.
Who says HTML and CSS aren't real programming?
Learn more about GitHub’s machine learning-based code scanning, which finds security issues before they make it to production.Google invests $100 million in a skills training program for low-income Americans. Is there a catch?Take2 is a New Zealand program that teaches incarcerated people to code: building marketable skills, opening up employment opportunities, and dramatically reducing recidivism. At the time of writing, Take2 has a 100% success rate in preventing recidivism.We have two Lifeboat badges this week: Varad Mondkar, for answering How does the app:layout_goneMarginLeft and its variants affect the view arrangements in constraintlayout?, and Eugene Sh., for answering What is this “a.out” file and what makes it disappear?.
Why David Barrett, CEO of Expensify, still takes his turn on PagerDuty
Expensify is an expense management solution that integrates with your travel, ERP, and finance/accounting software. Check out their full list of integrations.Expensify engineers rely on Stack Overflow for Teams to make knowledge accessible and shareable, rather than wading through swathes of documentation. Read the case study.Flat organizations like Expensify have minimal or no middle management, meaning there’s no management layer between staff and executives. A similar model for decentralized management is Holacracy.Find David Barrett on LinkedIn here.
The Great QR Code Comeback
Ceora shouts out Mermaid, a JavaScript-based diagramming and charting tool that creates diagrams dynamically based on Markdown-inspired text definitions. Coinbase’s bouncing QR code ad proved so popular it crashed the app. Considered passé pre-pandemic, QR codes have obvious value now: they’re touch-free, easy to scan, and ubiquitous. (Just don’t call it a comeback.)In preparation for his move from New Zealand to Canada, Matt is overhauling his hardware and transitioning to an M1 MacBook Pro for performance and efficiency.Speaking of hardware, Intel is buying Israeli chipmaking company Tower Semiconductor for $5.4 billion to build out its Intel Foundry Service division, launched last year to build chips for other companies.This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Basile Starynkevitch for their answer to the question Can you make a computed goto in C++?
Is functional programming the hipster programming paradigm?
Here’s a useful primer on functional programming with JavaScript.This tutorial will guide you in exploring the fundamentals of functional programming with React.If you’re looking for more info on functional programming in React, we’d like to tell you why hooks are the best thing to happen to React.Functional not your thing? Learn why object-oriented programming (OOP) has become such a dominant paradigm.
Finally, an AI bot that can ace technical interview questions
Learn more about AlphaCode here.Check out an amazing video essay critiquing the NFT market, The Line Goes Up.Read up on Josh Wardle, the developer who built Wordle for his partner to help pass the time during the pandemic, then sold it to the NY Times for a sweet seven figures.
An algorithm that optimizes for avoiding ennui
You can learn more about Clement's career on his LinkedIn and on Twitter (assuming you speak French).You can learn more about Dailymotion here and check out the roles they are hiring for here.You can find Cassidy Williams on Twitter and at her website. You can find Ceora Ford on Twitter and at her website.Our Lifeboat badge winner of the week is Swati Kiran, who helped solve an error causing permission problems in an angular app.
Column by your name: The analytics database that skips the rows
These days, every company looking at analyzing their data for insights has a data pipeline setup. Many companies have a fast production database, often a NoSQL or key-value store, that goes through a data pipeline.The pipeline process performs some sort of extract-transform-load process on it, then routes it to a larger data store that the analytics tools can access. But what if you could skip some steps and speed up the process with a database purpose-built for analytics?On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Rohit (Ro) Amarnath, the CTO at Vertica, to find out how your analytics engine can speed up your workflow. After a humble beginning with a ZX Spectrum 128, he’s now in charge of Vertica Accelerator, a SaaS version of the Vertica database. Vertica was founded by database researcher Dr. Michael Stonebreaker and Andrew Palmer. Dr. Stonebreaker helped develop several databases, including Postgres, Streambase, and VoltDB. Vertica was born out of research into purpose-built databases. Stonebreaker’s research found that columnar database storage was faster for data warehouses because there were fewer read/writes per request. Here’s a quick example that shows how columnar databases work. Suppose that you want all the records from a specific US state or territory. There are 52 possible values here (depending on how you count territories). To find all instances of a single state in a row-based DB, the search must check every row for the value of the state column. However, searching by column is faster by an order of magnitude: it just runs down the column to find matching values, then retrieves row data for the matches. The Vertica database was designed specifically for analytics as opposed to transactional databases. Ro spent some time at a Wall Street firm building reports—P&L, performance, profitability, etc. Transactions were important to day-to-day operations, but the real value of data came from analyses that showed where to cut costs or increase investments in a particular business. Analytics help with overall strategy, which tends to be more far-reaching and effective. For most of its life, Vertica has been an on-premises database managing a data warehouse. But with the ease of cloud storage, Vertica Accelerator is looking to give you a data lake as a service. If you’re unfamiliar, data lakes take the data warehouse concept—central storage for all your data—and remove limits. You can have “rivers” of data flowing into your stores; if you go from a terabyte to a petabyte overnight, your cloud provider will handle it for you. Vertica has worked with plenty of industries that push massive amounts of data: healthcare, aviation, online games. They’ve built a lot of functionality into the database itself to speed up all manner of applications. One of their prospective customers had a machine learning model with thousands of lines of code that was reduced to about ten lines because so much was being done in the database itself. In the future, Vertica plans to offer more powerful management of data warehouses and lakes, including handling the metadata that comes with them. To learn more about Vertica’s analytics databases, check out our conversation or visit their website.
Gen Z doesn’t understand file structures
It’s not news that, as Cassidy says, “remote has grown wildly fast”—but Remote has gone from about 25 employees in March 2020 to 900 now (a 3,500% increase).Ceora explains to Matt (oh, sweet summer’s child) what it means to get ratioed on Twitter.Inspired by a great read, the team discusses how Gen Z, having grown up without floppy disks, file folders, or directories, thinks about information.This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user 1983 for their answer to the question Why can I not use `new` with an arrow function in JavaScript/ES6?.
China’s only female Apache member on the rise of open source in China
SphereEX builds distributed data systems, making it easier for organizations to load balance massive data stores across multiple servers. Now that open-source software has taken over Western software, it’s China’s turn. Even big companies like Baidu and Bytedance are opening up their projects. Trista is the only female Apache member in China, which is both an honor and a demonstration of how much work needs to be done to support women in STEM. This episode’s Lifeboat badge shoutout goes to swati kiran for her answer to Error: EACCES: permission denied, mkdir '/usr/local/lib/node_modules/node-sass/build'.
There’s no coding Oscars. Write software that works
Ceora has her second brain stored in Notion, complete with GIFs and pretty color to get that aesthetic.Ancient history in blog years: Cassidy talks about the perils of being bleeding-edge instead of cutting-edge: Apollo Mission: The pros and cons of being an early adopter of new technology Everybody is aboard the VS Code train, which has the hottest TikTok around. Cassidy recommends the MonoLisa font helping viewers read your code during a livestream.Today’s lifeboat goes to Bill the Lizard for Using IFF in Python.
Moving from CEO back to IC: A chat with Mitchell Hashimoto on his love for code
Neopets: A little-known gateway into a software career. (Nineties kids will remember.)Among the products Mitchell helped build at Hashicorp: Terraform, Vagrant, and Vault.Not many C-level execs return to IC roles, but you might be surprised how many managers move back to being individual contributors.Follow Mitchell on Twitter here.