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)

Command Line Heroes
Stories about the people transforming technology from the command line up.
Passwords are dead! Long live the new authentication flows.
Every password can be compromised. Stych helps companies build authentication flows that don't need user passwords. Julianna grew up in Idaho, where she didn't even know what computer science was. After stints as a software engineer and product manager, she found a role where could figure out what the organization should be building: CTO and founder. Their first product was email magic links, which is more complicated than you think. Most importantly, how do you always avoid the spam folder? Copy changes in an email can make all the difference. Developer tooling is undergoing a renaissance now that smaller companies are getting into the game with API offerings. The big thing that differentiates good tools from bad is easy to understand documentation. The right metaphor for API services isn't SaaS, it's eCommerce. Plug it in into your app without giving up design and user experience.
Extending the legacy of Admiral Grace Hopper
In 1987, Anita Borg, AnitaB.org's namesake, saw how few women were at a "systems" conference. A few casual chats turned into the listserv, Systers, which continues to offer a place for women in engineering to meet and discuss. Grace Hopper—that's Navy Rear Admiral Hopper to you, civilian—was the first to devise a theory of programming languages that were machine-independent. She created the FLOW-MATIC programming language, which served as the basis for COBOL. Quincy started in electrical engineering and learned FORTRAN. That experience with how computers operate on hardware helped her teach C++. The difference is like listening to vinyl vs. mp3s. Should UX designers create technology that you need to adapt to or adapts to you? And will different generations create different interaction paradigms?We're out of lifeboat badges, so we summoned a Necromancer winner! Congrats to stealth who was awarded the badge for their answer to the question, Adding multiple columns in MySQL with one statement.
Building a better developer platform
We're officially part of the Prosus family now that the acquisition has closed. It’s a huge milestone and a big deal for our company and community.Prosus has a global reach and will help us meet the needs of developers and technologists everywhere. Have no fear: there will not be a paywall on the community sites. We have separate free and paid products for a reason. We combined our Ads and Talent businesses into Reach & Relevance, which gives companies the opportunity to showcase their products and engineering organizations to software engineers around the world. Remote work is here to stay, and a lot of knowledge workers are starting to adapt the processes that software engineers have been using for years. Our lifeboat shoutout goes to Jordi Castilla for the answer to the question: Convert HH:MM:SS into minutes using JavaScript
Move fast and make sure nobody gets pager alerts at 2AM
Ethan started his career when the marquee tag was king and is bullish on its comeback. His focus as an investor is on developer tools & infrastructure, open source software, space, and emerging compute.We talk about his time as a Product Group Leader at Facebook, and his strong feelings on the state of DevOps.You can find his investor profile here, his blog here, and on Twitter here.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Denys Vuika, who answered the question: How do I configure Yarn as the default package manager for Angular CLI?
Using AI to fake your own voice, podcasting never been easier
Mason began his career as a developer, went on to be a CEO, but also found time to produce 80s alt rock album full of advice on how to run your startup.Slack began life as a video game company, eventually pivoting to make an internal chat tool it had built into its main business. Descript had a similar journey, taking the editing software Mason and his team developed at Detour, and moving it to become the center of a new business after Detour was acquired by Bose.Headquartered in Montreal, Lyrebird is the AI division of Descript . It was founded by PhD students studying under Yoshua Bengio, who won the Turing Prize in 2019 for his pioneering research into deep learning and neural networks.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes Avinash, who explained what to do with a invalid syntax error that arises while running an AWS command
What's the blast radius when your database goes down?
Mark started out on a 4k TRS-80. He had to program it in assembly language, as there wasn't enough memory to use the local Basic copy.Throughout his career, he's oscillated between using databases and building databases. He started at Caltech and NASA, using databases to store and organize space data and chip data. Then he built databases at Oracle, including versions, 5 6, 7, and 8.After that it was back to using databases at NewsCorp for huge student data systems. He built databases at AWS with Amazon RDS, then moved to Grab Taxi, the Uber of Southeast Asia, and finally back to MongoDB, where he is building again.You can find Mark on Twitter here.This week's lifeboat badge goes to Erik Kalkoken, who answered the question: In a Slack, is there a way to see all the members that is part of that channel?
Highlights from our 2021 Developer Survey
This year over 80,000 respondents took the time to share their feedback on the tools and trends that are shaping software development.We learned a lot about the way developers learn. For the rising cohort of coders under the age of 18, online resources like videos and blogs are more popular than books and school combined, a statistic that doesn’t hold for any of our other age cohorts. Roughly a third of respondents responded to our question on mental health. This is twice the percentage that offered feedback in 2020 and may reflect a growing awareness of the importance of mental health’s and the impact of the ongoing pandemic.Another trend that may be linked to the pandemic is work status. We see a greater percentage of respondents working part-time or in school, while those indicating full time employment decreased. This may reflect the effects of the pandemic, which saw workers from all industries stepping back and reevaluating their relationship to a five day work week and in-person employment.Check out the full results of the 2021 Dev Survey here.
Exploring the cutting edge of privacy and encryption with Very Good Security
We chat discrete mathematics, differential privacy, and homomorphic encryption. But don't worry, we also break it down in laymen's terms.Interested in working in security? Mahmoud will personally extend an offer to anyone who solves this puzzle.Puzzles not your thing? You can still learn more about Very Good Security and its open positions here.Mahmoud is on Twitter here.
Why startups should use Kubernetes from day one
You can read Max's full article on Kubernetes on our blog here.You can find Max on Twitter here and his personal website here.Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Mantas, who answered the question: Determine if all the values in a PHP array are null
From AOL chat rooms to Wikipedia, Reddit, and now, Stack Overflow
Beaudette cut his teeth in the days of AOL chat rooms, then became an early Wikipedian. More recently he worked at Reddit, where his team of ten professional community managers supported 300 million monthly unique visitors. Before his recent promotion to VP, Beaudette was on the Trust and Safety team at Stack Overflow. For more detail on his experience, check out his LinkedIn here.Our lifefboat badge of the week goes to Arty-chan for answering the question:What is gitlab instance url, and how can i get it?
Crafting software and games for the selfie generation
You can find Tara on Twitter here. Sam is on Twitter here.You can learn more about Loveshark's latest games and the roles they are hiring for here.Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Elliott Frisch, for answering the question: Convert list of integer into comma separated string?
Github Copilot can write code for you. We put it to the test.
You can find some fun video of Cassidy putting Copilot to the test here.If you want to take the Jamstack survey, check it out here.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Andomar, who answered the question: Will multiple calls to `now()` in a single postgres query always give same result?
Leaving your job to pursue an indie project as a solo developer
We discuss how Simões learned to code and the feature set that allowed Poker Now to differentiate itself in a crowded space. Simões shares the tech stack he used to craft the first version of Poker Now, and how he rebuilt the service after it crashed under the weight of a massive wave of new users. During the peak of lockdown, his site went from an average of 100 concurrent users to more than 10,000 at a time.Lastly, we chat about the allure of leaving a regular job behind to work on a passion project, and about the challenges of maintaining a service and earning a living as a solo developer.Today we're celebrating Divakar, who was awarded a lifeboat badge for answering the question: Searching a sequence in a NumPy array.
So you're not getting along with your engineering team
If you want to catch up on the first half of the episode, you can find it here.
Is everyone starting to work like a developer?
The massive shift to remote work that so many companies undertook over the last year has pushed many to adopt an asynchronous, merge driven workflow that has been pioneered and perfected by software developers. With tools like Airtable, and Coda, the boundary between programming and other forms of media and knowledge work is beginning to blur. What happened to Google Wave? Can products with passionate fans get pushed into the Commons after they are sunset?Peek under the hood, and it's spreadsheets all the way down. Some companies are now turning a simple spreadsheet into an interactive web app. Spreadsheets on steroids, what could go wrong?No Lifeboat badge this episode, but tune in tomorrow, we'll have Part 2 of our live episode from the Fishbowl.