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.
Why are good Ruby developers so hard to find?
Ilya brought a host of good topics to the table. Bold Penguin went from one offshore developer, to one key dev, to one team, to multiple teams, multiple leaders, multiple external teams, to having a complete reboot only to go through it again. Ilya explains the lessons learned along the way.If you’re trying to grow a software startup, you have to understand and adapt your business. Bold Penguin had to figure out if its focus was being a platform, a product, a SaaS company, an enterprise technology solution company, or all of the above. You can check out Bold Penguin here and find Ilya on LinkedIn here.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Gibin Ealias, who helped to solve the enternal conundrum: Flex align-items: center not centering.
Saying goodbye to our co-host, Sara Chipps
Sara has been part of the open source community since 2001 and was formerly on the board of the .NET foundation. Recently she was elected to the board of the OpenJS foundation and was eager to get back in the trenches, helping people solve computer problems.In this episode we talk about coding interviews and brushing up on your puzzle solving chops.Later we dive into Ember.js, the framework Sara will be using with her new colleagues at LinkedIn.We explore what it’s like to join a team when everyone is still remote and you never get the chance to onboard with your team in person.This week’s lifeboat badge winner is Perfect28, who answered the question: Linq OrderBy custom order. Spoiler alert, there are char arrays involved.
NFT art, Ethereum gas, and a dive into Gemini's data lake
You can find Tommy on Twitter here and check out his NFT collection here.Evan tweets his undying love for The Mets here.Before you lay out your critique of NFTs, here's a great documentary on fraud and forgery in the fine art world. Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Oriol, who answered the question: What is the difference between 'remove' and 'removeChild' method in javascript?
Open source contributors helped a helicopter fly on Mars
You can check out the badge Github gave to folks for helping with the Mars flight here. You can learn more about F´, NASA’s open source flight software and embedded system framework, here.Paul tells the story of a shady financial operator who offered to take his blog public during the dot com boom. Yes, Ftrain.com was once an IPO candidate.Who copies and pastes from Stack Overflow? We dig into some of the data from our April Fools joke to get a sense of the scale and collaboration happening across our community.Paul takes a tutorial on coding with Ethereum but decides decarbonizing is the real future for software.Today's lifeboat badge winner is Scott M., who answered the question: How to remove one line from a txt file?
One founder's journey from personal trainer to "frontend mentor"
You can check out Frontend Mentor here. Try a few challenges or join their Slack, where thousands of students are chatting about how they are approaching the projects.You can follow Matt on Twitter here. If you want to read about how he made the jump from personal trainer to web developer, he did a nice interview with Indie London.Our lifeboat of the week goes to Banex for answering the question: why do we use NULL in strtok()?
From music to trading cards, software is transforming curation and collecting
You can follow David on Twitter here and read his blog here.Check out more about Dapper Labs and it's work with the NBA and NFTs here.David has written some influential pieces on the world of digital music and the role of software platforms. Check out a few of his pieces here.Read about David's adventure's setting up a Minecraft server for his kids and using software for griefer detection. Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Keith Thompson, for answering the question: Go lang differentiate “\n” and line breakAs Keith eloquently explains, "There is no distinction between a 'real' and an 'unreal' line break."
Non-fungible Talking
Want to try developing with Ethereum? Free Code Camp has you covered.On the other hand, here are some thoughts on why it's not the greatest language for developers.Interested in minting your own NFT? There are lots of options. Ethereum can be more expensive to use (those gas fees, ouch) but it also has the most active network of artists and collectors.Thanks to Phlume, our lifeboat badge winner of the week, for answering the question: How do I remove the double border on this table?
One in four visitors to Stack Overflow copies code
You can check out our deep dive into the copy paste data here. We saw over 40 million copies in the two weeks worth of activity we analyzed.Kyle Pollard graduated from the University of Northern British Columbia and worked as a computer technician and programmer for the City of Prince George in Canada. You can find him on Github, Twitter, and his website.There’s lots of info about Cassidy’s various projects at cassidoo.co. You can catch her coding live at @cassidoo, Thursdays at 12:30 PT/2:30 Central/3:30 Eastern.Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is TJ Crowder, who answered the question: How can I see the source of built-in JavaScript functions?
How to build and maintain online communities, from gaming to open source
You can follow David on Twitter here. If you want to check out his new book, The Business of Belonging, the first chapter is available here.You can find out more about CMX here and learn more about Bevy here.Cesar prefers to remain off social media, but you can find him on LinkedIn.
Two words for ya: networked spreadsheets
Dave Winer wrote a fun piece on the lost apps of the 80s. We explore the paradox of software that is "too good" to become popular among mainstream consumers. Microsoft has been releasing new versions of its flagship flight simulator each year for a whopping 38 years now. Now we know what makes it seem so very, very real. But just how big can that next patch be? Another day, another data breach. At this point, we've become numb to the notion that our identity is compromised. Is acceptance better for your health than constantly being on guard? See for yourself.
For Twilio's CIO, every internal developer is a customer
You can find Michelle on Twitter here.You can learn more about building apps with Twilio here.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to TryingToLearn for explaining the error that pops up in Python when: you can't assign to literal.
Web programming with nothing but Python
Lots of people who work outside of programming learn Python as part of their job. When folks from telecom, academia, or medical science want to build a web app to help with their job or share their findings with the world, they may feel they need to learn Javascript, CSS, HTML, and half a dozen frameworks to get started. Anvil is a platform that hopes to enable the creation of great web apps with nothing but Python code. You can drag and drop your user elements and rely on Anvil to handle your server and database. He also created Skulpt, which you can check out here. It's decscribed as follows, "Python. Client Side. Skulpt is an entirely in-browser implementation of Python. No preprocessing, plugins, or server-side support required, just write Python and reload. Want to go deeper? Check out his talk on Full Stack Web Development with nothing but Python here. You can follow him on Twitter here and Github here.
What does being a "nerd" even mean these days?
Despite its reputation, there is a Go To for every language. You can dive deeper with the Summer of Go To.There is a lot you can learn from it as a beginner, even if it is worth avoiding as a professional.Paul's children have learned to inspect the element and the document object model. Being deep into computers seems normal in an era of remote school and omnipresent devices. Who doesn't like making tree maps of memory usage or cropping and splicing footage on TikTok? If all kids are into computer hacking and AV Club activities like film editing and music producing...what does being a nerd mean anymore? Google has a whole slew of online certificates that allow you to find entry points into a career in data analysis, UX design, or project management.
How we keep Stack Overflow's codebase clean and modern
You can find Roberta on Twitter. For anyone who understands Portuguese, you can also check out her podcast. Check out Roberta's recent blog post on best practices, and when to ignore them.If you're interested in Dapper, an open source project built by Stack Overflow folks that works as a simple object mapper .Net, you can check it out here.Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Colonel Panic, for explaining: What the boolean literals in PowerShell are
We chat with Slack developers about building apps, APIs, and open source communities
Shay is a developer advocate building open source tools and writing education content. Outside of work she writes poetry, indulges fad hobbies, and reads whatever’s left out on the coffee table. Steve Gill a Developer Relations Manager, currently managing the SDK tools team at Slack. The tools teams develops all of our open sourced SDK, such as Bolt for JavaScript, Python, and Java. In his spare time, he enjoys playing ice hockey, woodworking and gaming.You can find Shay on LinkedIn and TwitterLearn more about Steve on LinkedIn and Twitter If you're interested in Bolt, there is lots to learn here.No lifeboat this week, but thanks to Alex for emailing us to ask: "alternatives to more better element usage?" If you have ideas, we're all ears.