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.
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.
Why AI is having an on-prem moment
It’s no secret that Instagram has made changes to its feed, emphasizing video content in an effort to compete with TikTok. Nor is it a secret that these changes have proved unpopular with creators, from Kylie Jenner to independent photographers and other artists. Just another reminder that these platforms are rarely for creators; they’re built to generate revenue. Learn why some companies are moving AI and ML data and models off the cloud and back on premises.Oxide is a rack-scale server with tightly integrated hardware and software. Cofounder and Chief Product Officer Jessie Frazelle was an early core maintainer of Docker. You can find her on GitHub or LinkedIn.Check out FauxPilot, a locally hosted version of GitHub Copilot.Why Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot (of Roomba fame) should trouble us.Earthships are sustainable dwellings constructed from recycled and natural materials. Built for off-the-grid living, they use thermal and solar power, harvest rainwater, and often incorporate gardens to supplement food supply.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user SILENT for their answer to the question In React and Next.js constructor, I am getting “Reference Error: localstorage is not defined”.
Combining the best of engineering cultures from Silicon Valley and Shanghai
Born and raised in China, Liam arrived in the US to attend the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied human-computer interaction. After some initial “culture shock” at the differences between his education in China and the “open and innovative” Berkeley environment, Liam thrived. After graduating, he worked at LinkedIn before returning to China to found a startup called Zaihui, offering ecommerce SaaS solutions for retailers.Liam describes the still-commonplace 9-9-6 schedule (working from nine in the morning until nine at night, six days a week) and the approach of assigning multiple teams to compete on different visions for the same product.In Liam’s view, US and Chinese engineering teams take different approaches to work, work-life balance, innovation, and risk. US teams pursue “breakthrough innovations” that impress customers, while “hustling and hardworking” Chinese teams “want to move fast and break things” to copy what works and make it incrementally better. What would a hybrid of these approaches look like? Liam’s new startup, Immersive, is combining teams from the US and China to find out.Follow Liam on LinkedIn.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Abhijit for their answer to the question Set difference versus set subtraction.
The last technical interview you'll ever take
Since the day a hiring manager first wheeled a whiteboard into a conference room, software engineers have dreaded the technical interview, which can be an all-day process (or multi-day homework assignment). If you’re interviewing for multiple roles, you can expect to write out a bubble sort in pseudocode for each one. These technical interviews do no favors for hiring companies, either, because the investment needed from both parties limits the number of candidates a company can consider. In this age of data-driven decisions, perhaps there’s a way that AI and ML can help candidates and companies find each other. On this episode of the podcast, sponsored by Turing AI, we chat with Chief Revenue Officer Prakash Gupta about building a better hiring process with AI. Turing helps companies scale their engineering programs quickly with remote developers from around the world. We talk about how to vet a profession without standard markers, the benefits of soft skills, and how AI-assisted hiring helps everyone involved. While companies have been outsourcing development for years, COVID made the software industry almost entirely remote. Suddenly, every company has the ability to hire the best developers regardless of location. And good developers can find work at companies of all sizes without packing up and settling in Silicon Valley. But when any company could conceivably interview any candidate, how do you vet candidates at scale? There is no standardized board certification for software engineers, after all. Every interviewer has to vet the candidates themselves, and that’s where human biases come in. On one side, you have Fortune 500 companies developing complex systems and undergoing digital transformation projects, plus startups looking to scale their engineering organizations as their product finds market fit. On the other, you have a new generation of engineers trained on bootcamps and online resources who may not have opportunities where they live. That’s where Turing comes in, matching 1.7 million engineers from over 140 countries with jobs at hundreds of companies. Turing strives to mitigate bias by collecting hundreds of signals about candidates over a four- to six-hour process. This process covers projects candidates have worked on, technology aptitude, and soft skills through 30-minute tests, candidates’ online presence in places like GitHub and Stack Overflow, and qualitative assessments refined over two years of feedback loops. A process that once consisted of ten interviews can now drop to two or three at the most. Some Turing customers have eliminated interviews altogether, relying on Turing’s AI-powered solutions to surface and evaluate the best candidates. To see how Turing can streamline your interview process, either as a candidate or a company, check out turing.com today.
A history of open-source licensing from a lawyer who helped blaze the trail
Heather is a General Partner at OSS Capital, which provides VC backing to seed-stage COSS (commercial open source) startups. Her law practice focuses on intellectual property and open-source licensing, and she serves on the IEEE-ISTO Board of Directors.Connect with Heather on LinkedIn or explore her work on her website.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user keshlam for their answer to the question Why do we need abstract classes in Java?.
A conversation with Spencer Kimball, creator of GIMP and CockroachDB
Spencer was one of the original creators of open-source, cross-platform image editing software GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), authored while he was still in college. He went on to spend a decade at Google, plus two years as CTO of Viewfinder, later acquired by Square.In 2014, he cofounded Cockroach Labs to back his creation CockroachDB, a cloud-native distributed SQL database.Database sharding is essential for CockroachDB: “a critical part of how Cockroach achieves virtually everything,” says Spencer. Read up on how sharding a database can make it faster.Like many engineers who find themselves in the C-suite, Spencer went from full-time programmer to full-time CEO. He says it’s been a “relatively gentle” evolution, but he can always go back.Like lots of you out there, Spencer started programming on a TI-99/4, the world’s first 16-bit home computer.Connect with Spencer on LinkedIn or learn more about him.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Hughes M. for their answer to the question Multiple keys pointing to a single value in Redis (Cache) with Java.
The internet’s Robin Hood uses robo-lawyers to fight parking tickets and spam calls
DoNotPay offers more than 250 “automated justice” services in every US state, from suing robo-callers to annulling marriages to fighting eviction. It earned Joshua the title “Robin Hood of the internet.”DoNotPay leverages AI and ML solutions, including GPT-3, to shape and refine its decision trees.Read about how DoNotPay is helping crypto traders who’ve lost money file suit against fallen leaders.Why PDFs are unfit for human (or computer) consumption.Follow Joshua on Twitter.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user EM-Creations for their answer to the question The PHP header() function is not redirecting.
Satellite internet: More useful than sending a car into space
A coding error reportedly caused the massive outage at Canadian telecom company Rogers that affected more than 10 million customers—a quarter of Canada’s population.In a rut? Hacker News has some advice for climbing out. (Hint: More screen time won’t help.)The Verge reports on how Starlink and other companies that provide internet connectivity through low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites are shaping an “orbital internet.”Michael Pollan’s 2019 book How to Change Your Mind—an exploration of psychedelic therapy’s history, current status, and future potential—is now a four-part Netflix documentary. We at Stack Overflow DO NOT recommend illegal drug use, but we can recommend the documentary.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Satpal for their answer to the question 'setinterval' with random time in JavaScript.
Monitoring data quality with Bigeye
Bigeye is a data observability platform that helps teams measure, improve, and communicate data quality clearly at any scale.Bigeye cofounders Kyle Kirwan and Egor Gryaznov met at Uber, where Kyle worked on data and Egor was a staff engineer.Kyle and Egor made a clean break with Uber before founding Bigeye, eager to avoid even the appearance of an Anthony Levandowski-like situation. If you’re not familiar with the ex-Google engineer sentenced to prison for stealing trade secrets (and later pardoned by Trump), catch up here.Learn how to save your energy for innovation by choosing boring technology.Connect with Kyle on LinkedIn.Connect with Egor on LinkedIn.
San Francisco? More like San Francisgo
San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed says a seismic shift (definitely not an exodus) is underway as tech workers continue working from home and companies like Salesforce (the city’s largest private employer) reduce office space. Breed says San Francisco lost $400 million in tax revenue in 2021, as companies shuttered offices or moved to other cities. San Francisco offices haven’t been this empty since 2009.The Wall Street Journal reports that 71 cities (and counting) are offering cash grants and other incentives to lure remote workers from Silicon Valley to, say, Tulsa, Oklahoma.If you’re a member in good standing of the Hellfire Club (or any D&D group), check out the free AI image generator from AI Dungeon.Customizable open search platform You.com debuts YouCode, a specialized search engine intended to increase developer efficiency. You.com allows users to deploy AI to customize the sources they want to see, the order in which results appear, and how private results are, reports VentureBeat.Matt is the proud owner of a new tongue scraper (TMI?), and Ben is 3D-printing him a customized holder. What are friends for?Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user LuLuGaGa for their answer to the question Is there a way to create BottomBar using SwiftUI?
Team analytics: Less creepy, more empowering
Multitudes helps managers and CTOs create happier, higher-performing teams, using data they already have. Multitudes is focused on software development teams to start, but their bigger vision is to make it easier for any manager to understand and improve their teams’ culture and performance.“Developers in our audience have expressed skepticism or dismay in the past about software that tracks performance or output,” Lauren explains. Multitudes’ approach is to break down an organization’s approach to ethical team analytics in order to balance delivering value to management with respect and support for the individual developers whose work is being measured. How does that work? Read Lauren’s blog post about data ethics.Lauren founded Multitudes based on insights she acquired running Ally Skills NZ, which supports organizations in building equitable, inclusive teams. Before that, she worked with high-performance, fast-growth companies in Silicon Valley, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and New Zealand. A Stanford grad, Lauren is passionate about making equity the default both at work and in the wider world.Check out Multitudes’ success stories or explore their blog.Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn or Twitter.