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)
A collaborative hub for infrastructure as code
On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Marcin Wyszynski, founder and CEO at Spacelift. Marcin says Spacelift aims to be for infrastructure-as-code what GitHub is to git. It centralizes everything about your IaC system: it runs code, deploys within CI/CD pipelines, tracks the progress of your infrastructure, and gives you insight into who made what changes and why. Today it works with the IaC tools already out there: Terraform, Cloud Formation, Pulumi, and Ansible, with plans to add support for services like Kubernetes in the future. Like a lot of programmers, Marcin got into coding through games. Once he ran through the limited number of Commodore 64 games at his local shop in Poland, he learned to program his own. But he never thought of programming as a career, so when it came time to pick a college major, he followed a group of his peers into sociology. Sociology, with its heavy focus on statistics, brought him back to programming. He landed his first job at Google reviewing copy for Ads, which lasted until he could automate himself out of it. Google gave him increasingly technical roles until he moved into an SRE position handling tape backups, a job that is mostly very boring until it becomes extremely exciting. After that, it was a stint at Facebook spinning up point-of-presence clusters around the world, then CTO at a startup that didn’t catch on as he’d hoped. With this wealth of experience under his belt, he went into consulting. As a consultant, he had his bag of best practices, open-source tools, processes, and scripts that he brought with him, but he also built bespoke pieces of technology for every single one of his clients. One need his clients had in common was a way to manage the code that defined their infrastructure. During Marcin’s career, there were many times when he built the thing he needed: games, automation, scripts. When his consulting clients would leave for a new organization, they would reach out to ask if he could provide them with the solution he had built for infrastructure as code. Realizing that he had created something which addressed a pain point common to many companies, he decided to turn this solution into a new company: Spacelift. Spacelift aims to take the heavy lifting out of infrastructure-as-code, automate it, and make it auditable. When a change gets made, everyone can see it and comment on it. From the product manager to the junior dev, everyone knows what’s going on, even if an infrastructure change doesn’t fit the original architecture docs. Plus, the SRE team no longer need to go on archeological expeditions to find a database secretly running and costing the company five figures a month. To learn more about Spacelift, check out their website at https://spacelift.io/, where you can start a free trial and see it in action.
Next stop, Cryptoland?
The Twitter thread that brought Cryptoland to the team’s attention.Ceora wonders whether participants in a hypothetical, decentralized version of YouTube (a YouTube-like dApp) would need coding skills to contribute meaningfully.Why is Ethereum so expensive and so congested?Ben outlines how Solana has become the fastest-growing blockchain in the world by evolving the Ethereum concept to make it more scalable and less congested.
Using synthetic data to power machine learning while protecting user privacy
You can learn more about Gretel here. The company is hiring for numerous positions. Think your commits are anonymous? Think again: DefCon researchers figured out how to de-anonymize code creators by their style. We published an article about the importance of including privacy in your SDLC: Privacy is an afterthought in the software lifecycle. That needs to change.Our Lifeboat badge shoutout goes to 1983 (the year Ben was born) for their answer to Why can I not use `new` with an arrow function in JavaScript/ES6?
How to defend your attention and find a flow state
The inspiration for today's episode was a terrific article from The Guardian about the many ways in which the modern world, specifically the software we use every day, was designed to steal our attention. During the episode, we discuss Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor know as the "father of flow" for his pioneering research on flow states. Sadly, Prof. Csikszentmihalyi passed away in 2021, but you can find a terrific tribute to him and his work here.In the second half of the episode, we discuss "The California Ideology" and the ways in which hustle culture and libertarian ideals helped to shape Silicon Valley and the world of technology more broadly.Congrats to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, UrbanoJVR, who answered the question: What is the difference between 'mvn verify' vs 'mvn test'?
Who's going to pay to fix open source security?
Will no one think of the maintainers? As The New Stack points out, watching millions of projects fail because of a bug in an open source library has become common enough that we shrug and reply, "Told you so." It's gotten so bad, big tech companies are visiting the White House to discuss the issue as a matter of national security.There is a great post up on the Stack Overflow blog examining this issue, but it's not about color.js, it's about Log4J. Traffic to questions on this logging library grew more than 1000% percent after the recent revelations about a new vulnerability. Also discussed in this episode: cryptographer and Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike stepped down from his role as CEO of the encrypted messaging service. That's news, but he actually made bigger waves in tech circles with an unrelated blog post detailing his first experience with Web3. Spoiler alert: it's not as decentralized or divorced from Web2 as you might have thought.You can find Cassidy Williams on Twitter and her website.Ben Popper can be found on Twitter here.Ryan Donovan can be found on Twitter, or writing for the Stack Overflow blog.
A chat with the folks who lead training and certification at AWS
You can find Maureen here. You can find Scott here.There is a wealth of free courses available through the AWS training website, including Operations, Advanced Networking, Machine Learning, and Data Science.
Safety in numbers: crowdsourcing data on nefarious IP addresses
You can find Philippe on Twitter here and learn more about CrowdSec here.They recently put together a list of the IP addresses trying to exploit the new Log4j vulnerability.For a prescient view of today's cybersecurity challenges, Humeau recommends John Brunner's classic 1975 sci-fi novel, The Shockwave Rider.
Making Agile work for data science
Data scientists and engineers don’t always play well together. Data scientists will plan out a solution, carefully build models, test them in notebooks, then throw that solution over the wall to engineering. Implementing that solution can take months.Historically, the data science team has been purely science-driven. Work on methodologies, prove out something that they wanted to achieve, and then hand it over to the engineering organization. That could take many months.Over the past three to five years, they’ve been moving their engineering and data science operations onto the cloud as part of an overall Agile transformation and a move from being sales-led to being product-led. With most of their solutions migrated over, they decided that along with modernizing their infrastructure, they wanted to modernize their legacy systems, add new functions and scientific techniques, and take advantage of new technologies to scale and meet the demand coming their way. While all of the rituals and the rigor of Agile didn't always facilitate the more open-ended nature of the data science work at 84.51°, having both data science and engineering operating in a similar tech stack has been a breath of fresh air. Working cross-functionally has shortened the implementation delay. At the same time, being closer to the engineering side of the house has given the data science team a better sense of how to fit their work into the pipeline. Getting everyone on the same tech stack had a side effect. Between the increasing complexity of the projects, geographic diversity of the folks on these projects, a rise in remote work, and continued growth, locating experts became harder. But with everyone working in the same tech, more people could answer questions and become SMEs. Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t tell you that 84.51° was asking and answering questions on Stack Overflow for Teams. It was helpful when Chris and Michael no longer had to call on the SMEs they knew by name but could suddenly draw more experts out of the woodwork by asking a question. Check out this episode for insights on data science, agile, and building a great knowledge base for a large, increasingly distributed engineering org.
Helping communities build their own LTE networks
Esther and Matt are graduate students in computer science at the University of Washington, where they study community networks.Esther explains how open-source, community-owned and -operated LTE networks are a good solution for expanding public internet access and ensuring digital equity.Matt walks the team through Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), a shared wireless spectrum that allows users to build their own LTE networks.Chris Webb of the Black Brilliance Research Project lays out how a digital stewardship program in Detroit helped inspire his work.
Are developers helping to drive the Great Resignation?
Developers are leading the Great Resignation, according to some reports. Others feel developers aren't resigning, so much as seizing the moment to find better opportunities. You can find out hosts online at the links belowCassidyCeoraRyanBenHave an experience with the Great Resignation you want to share with our podcast and blog? Hit us up by email:PodcastPitches for the blogThanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Umer, for explaining how to: align an anchor to the right
Professional ethics and phantom braking
Hear why Ben thinks the Workplace Stack Exchange and the Academia Stack Exchange have the richest questions in the Stack Exchange network (or maybe just the most sitcom-worthy).ICYMI: Jack Dorsey stepped down from Twitter. Will he be back?At Twitter, Tess Rinearson is leading a new team focused on crypto, blockchains, and decentralized tech. Follow her on Twitter here.The team winces over a review of a Tesla Model Y hatchback that describes phantom braking so frequent and so dangerous that it’s “a complete deal-breaker.”If you’re a fan of our show, consider leaving us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts.
Teaching developers about the most lightweight web “framework” around, VanillaJS
What exactly is VanillaJS? Tongue-in-cheek, it's the most lightweight JavaScript framework out there and used by pretty much every website on the internet. Seriously though, it's just JavaScript…without a framework. If you're interested in reading and learning more about JavaScript, Chris has a bevy of courses and eBooks over at vanillajsguides.com. Like Chris's ideas so much you want to subscribe to his newsletter? Right over this way!Since you are a connoisseur of podcasts, check out Chris's own at vanillajspodcast.com.Chris has kindly put together a collection of resources for listeners like you at gomakethings.com/overflow. This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to prograils for their answer to How can I read the number of lines in Fortran 90 from a text file?
Bringing AI to the edge, from the comfort of your living room
Bill gives an overview of edge computing and why it matters.His team wants to enable developers by democratizing access to AI. OpenVINO is an open-source toolkit for high-performing AI inference.DevCloud lets developers prototype, test, and run their workloads for free on Intel hardware and software. For more on OpenVINO, check out this example we shared that increases image resolution. Of course, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention another way Intel is bringing its technology to developers: joining Collectives™ on Stack Overflow.
Hard skills with Skillsoft
The pathway to a software developer job has shifted over the years. It used to be that you had to go through a college computer science program before you could get a developer job. But as online education became better and programming jobs became more specialized, people were getting hired on the strength of their bootcamp or certification experience. Our 2021 Developer Survey found that almost 60% of respondents learned to code using online resources. Mike spent most of his time in the worlds of programmer education and publishing, including a 14 year stint at O’Reilly Media. He worked with numerous great technologists, people who wrote popular languages, and other luminaries in the software world. Much of his focus was on analyzing the signals that come from the data he saw and the conversations with people around the world. What those signals told him was the focus for recruiters was on skills instead of educational background. A computer science education used to be the thing that proved you had the skills. But not everyone has the four years to spend getting a degree. In today’s tech industry, many people turn to Skillsoft and other companies for certifications and classes that provide a quick boost in skills to prepare them for a changing job market. It’s not just people who want to break into programming who can benefit from online courses and certifications; working developers who want to continue to succeed need to make learning a habit. That can be hard to manage with a full-time job, so their organizations need to make learning a cultural norm. Setting time aside every day for learning pays dividends, not just for the individual, but for that organization. With the incredible growth of cloud adoption in the past couple of years, one of the hottest skills in demand right now is cloud engineering. Skillsoft offers an AWS certification course that prepares you for the certification exam. Like many of their other courses, it caters to different learning styles and modalities, while also letting you get comfortable and assess your readiness by taking practice exams. With a little bit of intent and planning, you can build a skill path that gets you hired or lets you make the next leap in your career. The world of software is always changing and you as a developer need change with it. With course completions and certifications, you’ll have the skills and the evidence to show employers. If you’re interested in learning more about Skillsoft’s offerings, check out http://www.globalknowledge.com/aws30.
An oral history of Stack Overflow - told by its founding team
Find Joel Spolsky on Twitter here.Jeff Atwood is on Twitter here.Geoff Dalgas is on Twitter here.Follow Jarrod Dixon on Twitter here.