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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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)
How APIs can take the pain out of legacy system headaches
Today's episode is sponsored by Opentext. You can learn more about their information management solutions here.You can find out more about Claire and here career on her LinkedIn.Opentext has a fascinating history. It began as an academic project at the University of Waterloo. The researchers were looking to digitize the Oxford English Dictionary, and created an early search engine, similar to Project Gutenberg. The private company spun out of that work.No lifeboat badge today, so we'll shout out SDK, who claimed the benefactor badge for placing a bounty on his question: How to make a dynamic slide up transition? Seems like it worked, as the question now has an accepted answer :)
Code completion isn’t magic; it just feels that way
Anvil is an open-source web framework for building full-stack applications entirely in Python.Ready to dig deeper into code completion? Check out Meredydd’s talk at PyCon 2022 (he even built a code completion engine live on stage). ICYMI: Listen to our previous episode with Meredydd about countering the complexity of web programming: Full-stack web programming with nothing but Python. Connect with Meredydd on LinkedIn or Twitter.The Lifeboat badge shoutout is back. Today’s badge goes to user Tomasz Nurkiewicz for their answer to Best performance for string-to-Boolean conversion.
At your next job interview, you ask the questions
The GPU shortage is (allegedly) over! Read about it at The Verge.Learn how low code demands more creativity from developers.On the job market? Don’t be afraid to turn the tables on your interviewer.This week’s tech recs: Help foster more equitable compensation conversations by taking Devocate’s Developer Relations Compensation Survey.Cal.com offers scheduling infrastructure for anyone and everyone—and it’s open-source.Appsmith is an open-source, low-code platform for building, shipping, and maintaining CRUD apps.Finally, if you’re wondering how to get that startup idea from back-of-napkin to exit, start with Kernal.
Money that moves at the speed of information
Devraj Varadhan is the SVP of Engineering at Ripple, which provides crypto and blockchain solutions for businesses. Ripple’s mission is to provide practical access to investment tools that can deliver economic freedom for unbanked and underbanked people around the world. Plenty of companies have pressed pause on recruitment efforts, but Ripple is hiring. Before working at Ripple, Dev spent 15 years at Amazon, building customer experiences and products across a wide swath of categories, including as VP of Delivery Experience. Connect with Dev on LinkedIn and read his blog post about how Ripple is working to accelerate financial inclusion through technology with partnerships with STASIS, the Republic of Palau, and Bhutan.Who remembers Pets.com?We normally shout out a Lifeboat badge winner, but today we’re congratulating user Ram on a Curious badge: they asked a well-received question on five separate days and maintained a positive question record. Stay curious!
A conversation with Stack Overflow's new CTO, Jody Bailey
Episode notesBefore joining Stack, Jody spent time at Pluralsight and AWS Training, two roles that helped him to understand the growing market for online educational self-taught developers. We interviewed his former colleagues at AWS training in this episode.Enjoy the frustration of debugging your own code. Maybe you it brings you eustress? Ben does not experience this, nor does he like the classic video game Myst. But it takes all kinds.Interested in learning more about the changing trends in Developer education? Check out data from our latest Dev Survey and research from the teams at Skillsoft, another member of the Prosus Ed-tech portfolio.Today’s lifeboat badge goes to Anton VBR for explaining: What's the function of dedent() in Python?
Skills that pay the bills for software developers
If you want to dive deeper on lucrative skills, you can read a blog post Mike wrote for us last month.If you want to learn more about Mike's background and career, check out his LinkedIn.Mike was previously on the blog and podcast discussing Skillsoft research about the certifications that are most in demand for top paying roles. You can read up on that and listen to his earlier interview here.As always, we want to shout out the winner of a Lifeboat badge. Today's hero is Philip, who answered the question: Substring is not working as expected if length is greater than length of String
Developers vs the difficulty bomb
Episode notesAn interesting podcast episode on the multiple delays that have kept Ethereum from its long-anticipated merge and kicked the difficulty bomb down the road.Since we recorded, more news broke about delaying the boom.How to Find Open Source Projects to Contributehttps://www.codetriage.com/https://www.coss.community/https://goodfirstissue.dev/A pretty cool write up on the creation of spring animations by a few Figma engineers.Looking to build your own image search engine? Check out APIs from Clarifai and Roboflow that make it easy to train your own ML model.A creative and interesting Codepen from a newly minted Figma engineer. And for those who enjoy the CSS art of yummy snacks, Cassidy’s Codepen has a few treats.Yet another rumor about Apple’s upcoming AR/VR headset. Will it ever arrive, and how would its demands for GPU-intensive work mesh with Apple’s hardware ecosystem?
Exploring the interesting and strange results from our 2022 Developer Survey
Huge thanks to the more than 73,000 devs from 180 countries who spent 15 minutes each completing our 2022 Developer Survey. This year’s survey was longer than usual, since we wanted to ask about new topics as well as provide a historical throughline to understand how your responses have changed over the years.Among the takeaways from the survey: 2022 saw a 10% jump in how many folks are learning to code online (versus through a conventional coding school or from textbooks). Nearly 85% of organizations represented in the survey have at least some remote workers, while the vast majority of developers are still working remotely at least part of the time. You can read more about the results here.Worth noting: Just because you’ve learned to code doesn’t mean you have to pursue a career as a programmer. Here are four different career paths coders can follow, including product manager and sales engineer.Wondering how Ikea’s Friheten or Fjӓdermoln would actually look in your living room? The company’s new virtual design tool lets you scan rooms in your home, delete your furniture, and replace it with shiny new stuff from Ikea. You can also fill virtual showrooms to your heart’s content.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Jarzon for their answer to Make a hidden field required.
GitHub Copilot is here. But what’s the price?
GitHub Copilot is now available to all developers. There’s also the GitHub Copilot Labs extension for Visual Studio Code, which has some neat tricks up its sleeve. Yes, Copilot is impressive; no, it’s not gunning for your job. ICYMI, check out our blog post exploring whether AI is poised to steal our livelihoods: The robots are coming for (the boring parts of) your job.Mullvad VPN is removing the option to add new subscriptions because they want to know “as little as possible” about their users: “We are constantly looking for ways to reduce the amount of data we store while still providing a usable service.”Data scraping is both ubiquitous and seemingly unavoidable—but it raises serious privacy concerns, writes David Golumbia for Real Life.Tech recs: a ladder to bypass (almost) any paywall, the smartest way to learn a new language, how to explore the JavaScript universe, a great place to listen to longform journalism, and the email-free way to read your favorite newsletters.Thanks to Liam for emailing the podcast to share Physics Girl’s terrific explanation of quantum cryptography.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user martineau for their answer to How to start and stop a thread.
Living on the Edge with Netlify
RIP Internet Explorer (1995-2022), “a good tool to download other browsers.” Bummer epitaph, but the meme stands.Netlify’s unified web development workflow has out-of-this-world benefits for developer experience. Learn more by watching A Tale of Web Development in Two Universes.Netlify recently announced Netlify Edge Functions, a fully serverless runtime environment. Here’s what that means and how it works.For more on “The Edge” (not this guy or this guy), check out this episode of the Remotely Interesting podcast, featuring Phil, Salma, and Cassidy.Jamstack makes developers’ lives “pretty peachy,” to borrow Salma’s phrase. Here, she explains what Jamstack is and how it makes the web (and developers) faster.Salma helps “developers build stuff, learn things, and love what they do.” She loves helping people get into tech, where she started working after a career as a music teacher and comedian. Active in the developer community, she’s a Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies, a partnered Twitch streamer, and a relentless advocate for building a truly accessible web. Salma is the founder of Unbreak.tech, Women Who Stream Tech, and Women of Jamstack, projects that call for social change and equality in tech. Connect with her on Twitter or LinkedIn.Phil is passionate about browser technologies, the web’s empowering properties, and ingenuity and simplicity in the face of overengineering. He has built web apps for Google, Apple, Nike, R/GA, and The London Stock Exchange, and is a coauthor of Modern Web Development on the Jamstack (O’Reilly, 2019). Connect with Phil on Twitter or LinkedIn, or read his blog posts for Netlify.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Anton vBR for their answer to What’s the function of dedent() in Python?.
An Engineer's Field Guide to Great Technical Writing
Docs for Devs: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing can be found here.Jared worked as a technical writer at Google for more than 14 years and recently transitioned to Waymo, the self-driving car company spun out under the Alphabet umbrella. You can find him on Twitter and LinkedIn.Zachary has been a technical writer at GitHub and the Linux Foundation, and now works as a staff technical writer at Stripe. You can find all his online accounts at his website.Interested in exploring approaches for collaboration and knowledge management on engineering teams? Why not try a tool developers already turn to regularly? Check out Stack Overflow for Teams, used by Microsoft, Bloomberg, and many others.Tired of security bottlenecks? Today’s episode is sponsored by Snyk, a developer security platform that automatically scans your code, dependencies, containers, and cloud configs — finding and fixing vulnerabilities in real time, from the tools and workflows you already use. Create your free account at snyk.co/stackoverflow.
Our favorite features and updates from WWDC
WWDC22 was last week (check out Apple’s highlights here). Among the most exciting demonstrations: passkeys, a new approach to authentication with the potential to finally replace passwords altogether. Apple also announced enhancements to Swift, its programming language, and a new flagship processor, the M2 chip.Now that iMessage users will be able to edit or even unsend text messages after the fact, will your group chat (or your relationship) ever be the same?Multitaskers rejoice: A new iPadOS function called Stage Manager organizes apps in a tile formation that allows users to rapidly tap from workspace to workspace.And yes, you can finally check the weather on your iPhone lock screen.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Stephen Docy for their answer to Proving that a two-pointer approach works (pair sum).
Privacy is a moving target. Here’s how engineering teams can stay on track.
Ever since personal information started flowing into applications on the web, securing that information has become more and more important. General security and privacy frameworks like ISO-27001 and PCI provide guidance in securing systems. Now the law has gotten involved with the European Union’s GDPR and California’s CPRA. More laws are on the way, and these laws (and the frameworks) are changing as they meet legal challenges. With the legal landscape for privacy shifting so much, every engineer must ask: How do I keep my application in compliance?On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Rob Pickard and Matt Cooper of Vanta, who get that question every day. Their company makes security monitoring software that helps companies get into compliance quickly. We spoke about the shifting sands of privacy rules and regulations, tracking data flows through systems and across corporate borders, and how security automation can put up guardrails instead of gates. Many security frameworks are undergoing modernization to reflect the way that distributed applications function today. And more countries and US states are passing their own privacy regulations. The privacy space is surprisingly dynamic, forcing companies to keep track of these frequent changes to stay current and compliant. Not everyone has in-house legal experts to follow the daily developments and communicate those to the engineering team. For an engineering team just trying to understand the effort involved, it may be helpful to start figuring out where your data flows. Tracking it between internal services may be overkill; instead, track it across corporate boundaries, from one database, cloud provider, SaaS system, and dependency. Each of those should have their own data privacy agreement—plug into your procurement process to see what each piece of your stack promises on a privacy level. Your DevOps and DevSecOps teams will probably want to automate much of the security engineering process as possible. Unfortunately, automating security is hard. The best path may not be to automate the defenses on your system; it might be better to instead automate the context that you provide to engineers. If someone wants to add a dependency, pop up a reminder that these dependencies can be fickle. Automate the boring stuff—context, reminders, to-dos—and let humans do the complex problem solving we’re so good at. If you’re looking to add an in-house security expert as a service, check out Vanta.com. Their platform monitors connects to your systems and helps you prep for compliance with one or more security frameworks. If those frameworks change, you don’t need to do anything. Vanta changes for you.
Run your microservices in no-fail mode
Temporal Technologies is a scalable open-source platform for developers to build and run reliable cloud applications.ICYMI, here’s a post we wrote with Ryland Goldstein, Head of Product at Temporal, discussing how software engineering has shifted from a monolithic to a microservices model—thereby introducing a whole new set of challenges for software engineers.Maxim, who grew up in Russia, is renowned in the microservices world. He spent decades architecting mission-critical systems at MSFT, Amazon, and Uber, where he designed Cadence and spun it out into Temporal. Netflix, Descript, Instacart, Datadog, Snap, and plenty more are all betting their critical systems on Temporal’s OSS technology, so Maxim has a dedicated following in the dev community.Dominik’s father is a nuclear physicist, so Dominik had early access to computers growing up in Germany. His professional path led him from SAP in Germany to SAP in Palo Alto, then to Cisco, and finally to Temporal.Replay, Temporal’s inaugural developer experience conference, is happening IRL from August 25-26, 2022 in Seattle. Check it out!Connect with Maxim on LinkedIn or Twitter.Connect with Dominik on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Medium.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Thanos for their answer to How to wrap text without regard to space and hyphen. (This makes up for the Snap, right?)
Want to be great at UX research? Take a cue from cultural anthropology.
HASH, where Maggie works along with Stack Overflow cofounder Joel Spolsky, is an open-core platform for creating simulations that help people make better decisions.Explore Maggie’s writing on everything from digital anthropology to best practices for illustrating invisible programming concepts.Maggie recommends the Nielsen Norman Group website as the best resource for folks getting up to speed on research-based UX.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Sten for their answer to Detecting transparency in an image.