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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Become a better coder...with this one weird click
Go get your copy of They Key here.Our frequent collaborator, Cassidy Williams of Netlify, helped design the key and joined this episode to share her love for all things mechanical keyboard.
The paranoid style in application development
We talked about obscuring DNS traffic based on this article.Cassidy and Ben are pretty excited about all the new Apple stuff announced recently. Ryan, the curmudgeon, does not. There are several theories as to where the word dongle came from. The Conductor framework makes building web apps simpler in a low-code/no-code style. Did the pandemic worsen everyone else's guilt and self-loathing over decreased productivity or was it just us?Our only point of contact during the height of the pandemic was the Internet connection. Has the loosening of quarantine made us less likely to live online?
You don't need a math PhD to play Dwarf Fortress, just to code it
Tarn and his brother Zach are the brains behind Dwarf Fortress and the community that rose around it.Dr. Tarn Adams received a math PhD, but left his post-doc because he was too busy making games. A bug created the statue Planepacked, a massive structure that contained the entire history of the world as well as 73 copies of the statue itself.Many people, including one of our hosts, found out about Dwarf Fortress through a Let's Play session in a fortress called Boatmurdered. If you want a more human readable version of Dwarf Fortress, you can wishlist it on Steam or use one of the Lazy Newb packs.
Writing the roadmap from engineer to manager
Former co-host Sara Chipps now manages engineering teams at LinkedIn, but her best content is still on Twitter.Cassidy's former boss, Sarah Drasner, recently wrote a book to help engineers level up to management: Engineering Management for the Rest of Us. Cassidy's new favorite software tool is Astro, a single-site generator that looks to minimize the amount of client-side JavaScript in a site. The two books Ms. Chipps mention as the old standbys for new engineering managers are Peopleware and Smart and Gets Things Done.
This AI-assisted bug bash is offering serious prizes for squashing nasty code
While every developer loves a good story about discovering and fixing a gnarly bug, not everyone enjoys the work of finding those bugs. Most folks would prefer to be writing business logic and solving new problems. But those input validation errors and resource leaks won’t solve themselves. Or will they?AWS Bug Bust is a global competition launched with the goal of finding and fixing one million bugs in codebases around the world. It takes the traditional bug bash and turns it into a competition that anyone can enter. Got a repo or two that you’ve been meaning to clean up? Enter the Bug Bust and start squashing. This competition awards points to organizations, as well as individuals within an organization, for every bug that they fix in their own repos. A little friendly competition can motivate developers to fix more bugs in order to move up the leaderboards. How do you think we built Stack Overflow? Fake internet points are very important around here. With the Bug Bust competition, it’s not just fake internet points and personal glory; top bug squashers—overall and within top organizations—can win all expense paid trips to re:Invent 2021. In a traditional bug bust, someone has to find the bugs, file tickets on all of them, then collect them for squashing. In the Bug Bust, Amazon has managed to automate that part of the process. That’s because the Bug Bust is built on their AI-powered code review and profiling tool, CodeGuru. CodeGuru uses static analysis and machine learning with some additional automated reasoning to find bugs in code; everything from best practices to concurrency issues, resource leaks, security problems, and more. AI isn’t here to take your jobs, it’s here to automated away the tedious stuff. Developers get to harness the power of artificial intelligence in their everyday lives.Concurrency and resource leak issues tend to drain the soul out of the developers. You could spend all day trying to optimize and close those. CodeGuru includes a function profiler that looks for a codebase’s most expensive calls. It’s a lightweight agent actively running and looking for ways to reduce the cost of the running application. These bugs, along with security issues and AWS API calls, are the ones that earn the most points. But all bugs earn their bashers points; CodeGuru spots code inefficiencies, duplications, and general code quality detectors, and performs input validation. The model behind this is pretrained on years of Amazon bug hunting experience. The system does learn from you as to what is a good bug in your codebase, but it’s not training on your code. It’s your feedback that makes CodeGuru a better bug hunter.If you have Java and Python code in a GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, Bitbucket, or AWS CodeCommit repository, you can jump into the competition. Sign up with your email and you get 30 days to run as many Bug Busts as you want for free. The top ten individual bug busters get VIP treatment at the 2021 re:Invent conference (and an all-expense-paid trip there), which is being held in person this year. Top participating organizations get a ticket to give to one of their developers as well. For those bashers outside of the top ten, you can still earn some sweet swag by passing some point milestones. The contest to win the trip to re:Invent 2021 runs through September, but you can still automate your bug bashes and get swag anytime. Want to get started? Head over to the AWS Bug Bust site now.
Managing Kubernetes entirely in Git? Meet GitOps
Weaveworks helps DevOps folks manage their Kubernetes settings entirely Paul's first computer was a Sinclair ZX-80, which had a clock speed of 3.25 MHz, 1 KB of static RAM ,and 4 KB of read-only memory. Pretty good for 1980. Weaveworks based their project on Flux, an open source engine. If you're not a big corporation and you want to use it, it's free!Before there was Kubernetes, Google created Borg, an internal cluster manager. It has yet to be assimilated by Kubernetes. Ben thinks that, if it gets too easy to manage Kubernetes clusters, we'll be out of a job talking about the pain of cluster manages. Today's lifeboat badge goes to Daniel Ribeiro for the answer to How can I run Go binary files?
How valuable is your screen name?
You can send ideas for blog posts to Ryan Donovan at our pitch box.You can find Cassidy on Twitter here and read the newsletter she helps us curate here.You can find Ceora on Twitter here and check out more about Apollo GraphQL here.Cassidy's piece on GraphQL, the first item she ever wrote for Stack Overflow, is here. Want to learn more about AVIF and how it compresses images so well? Check out good read from Netflix's tech blog here.Instead of a lifeboat badge we're highlighting an amazing question: Can celestial objects be used in cryptography?
Authorization is complex. Oso is a library designed to help you structure it.
You can learn more about Sam on his LinkedIn here. You can find him on Twitter here.Learn more about Oso, check out the code, and join their Slack community here.Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Evgeny Lisin, who answered the question: How to find UIWebView in Project and replace it with WKWebView?
Why yes, I do have a patent on a time machine
You can find Angie's blog here, catch her on Twitter here, and connect with her on LinkedIn here.You can check out Applitools and learn about the visual AI system it uses for testing here.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Alex Klyubin for explaining: What is the difference between Jar signer and Apk signer?
Exploring the magic of instant python refactoring with Sourcery
Nick is now Sourcery's CTO. You can find him on Twitter here.Brendan serves as Sourcery's CEO. You can find him on Twitter here.You can try out Sourcery for free here and check out the company's open positions here.Our lifeboat badge of the week, fittingly, goes to Martin Evans, for explaining how to parse an integer from a string in Python.
Changing of the guards: one co-host departs, and a new one enters
Paul is stepping away down as CEO of Postlight to focus more on understanding climate change and how we can address it. The science hurts his brain. Cassidy Williams, currently at Netlify, has published articles on our blog and provides links in our newsletter.We dig into some of the results of the dev survey, including how kids today are learning to code on the internet. There's so much to learn from now!Did everyone step back from working full time? Our survey data shows a decrease in full time employed respondents. Was there an existential moment for everyone during the pandemic where they thought that there must be something else?Our surveyed devs love Svelte but get paid the most for Ruby on Rails. This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Suren Raj for his answer to Java convert bytes[] to File.
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?