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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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.
A director of engineering explains scaling from dozens of employees to thousands
You can find out more about Suyog and his career here. True story, he once worked on tablets way before tablets were a thing.He's on Twitter here. You can check out Elastic Cloud and it's suite of services here.Suyog talks a bit about data gravity, a concept you can learn more about here.If you're a fan of release notes and want to get a sense of what Suyog worked on at Elastic over the years, check out his blog archives here.Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, lhf, for anwering the question: How can I get the current UTC time in a Lua script?
Dev, meet Ops. Ops, meet Dev.
You can check out more of Tom's work and some of his books on his website, Everything SysAdmin. Tom also wrote a great blog post for our site that explains his method for crafting a positive feedback loop between Dev and Ops using real-time documentation.You can find Tom on Twitter and check out his books on Sys Admin and Cloud System Administration.
Taking a risk and moving to a new team
Ian is Brooklyn bred a tech junkie, NBA stats nerd, hip hop connoisseur, and co-creator of GameFlo and Ujima Now. He graduated from Brown University and was a teaching fellow at FullStack Academy before coming to Stack Overflow. You can find him on Twitter and Github.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.Our lifeboat this week goes to Max Pevsner, who answered a question, but cautioned against taking his advice: Don't reuse cell in UITableView
Covid vaccine websites are frustrating. This developer built a better one.
It was a pandemic, Olivia was on maternity leave after giving birth, and she also had a toddler to take care of. Somehow she still managed to build a website, macovidvaccines.com, that provided far better service than what was available through government and private industry.You can find out more about Olivia on the sites below. TwitterWebsiteLinkedIn
Building a bug bounty program for the Pentagon
Cleghorn works for Defense Digital Services. On Twitter, the group describes itself as "a SWAT team of nerds on tours of duty." You can read more about the group's goals on their website. You can see some of his work over on Hacker One.
How long does good code last?
This week's discussion was inspired by an article from Sandi Metz, which you can find here. It begins with a terrific line, defining the half-life of software as, "the amount of time required for half of an application's code to change so much that it becomes unrecognizable."This topic also connected to a post we ran on the Stack Overflow blog this week, Sacrificial Architecture: learning from abandoned systems. The author, Mohamad Aladdin, suggest that one should "think of your code quality as if it will run forever, but adapt to change as if your code will be obsolete tomorrow."Our lifeboat badge winner for this episode is Ishmael, who explained why JSON dumps your formatting and how to fix it.
Chatting with Google's DeepMind about the future of AI
You can find the paper on MuZero here.He blogs at Furidamu and can be found on Twitter here.The story on drug discovery powered by AI can be found here.
When it comes to package managers, don't forget security
If you’re a programmer working with npm, Sara has some basic advice on best practices that will keep your codebase safe.Today’s discussion was inspired by a blog post from Michel Gorny which you can find here.Need to simplify the address where people can send you bitcoins? Check out https://ens.domains/, which even offers .club for your TLD.Thanks to Tagir Valeev for answering the question: How to Split odd and even numbers and sum of both in collection using Stream. You’re our lifeboat badge winner of the week.