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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The Great Bluetooth Trace
Monday's big story on Bloomberg was that the US unemployment system was being slowed by problems with an "ancient" programming language. Well, yah heard it here first. Also, ancient seems a bit extreme for something that is 60-years-old, but perhaps in the world of software, that does qualify as nearly pre-historic. After that, we switch to the biggest news in tech, or perhaps in the world, over the last week. Apple and Google have released a spec for a contact tracing system. As countries around the world work to slowly reopen their economies, contact tracing is a powerful tool for preventing new surges in coronavirus outbreaks. The system the duo of tech giants devised includes specs for bluetooth, cryptography, and APIs. You can read Paul's deep dive take on it at the link above.Last but not least, if you're interested in donating to help those affected by COVID-19, Sara is working with the .NET foundation on a project called Dev Around The Sun. They are providing assistance and mentorship to folks impacted by this pandemic, and you can learn more about how to donate time or funding at the link above. Be safe, be well, and we'll talk to you again on Tuesday.
Coding Tutorials Can Be A Real Drag
I asked Anna to describe herself in her own words. "Anna Lytical is a drag queen and engineer who creates sickeningly entertaining and educational coding tutorials in order to engage more LGBTQ+ people with coding and the tech industry. Anna shows how to use technology to represent yourself through various projects like websites, Instagram filters, glamorous command prompts and so much more."Sara has been a big fan for a while, both on Twitter and YouTube. Below are some highlights: PROFESSIONAL ENGINEER CODES WEBSITE BY ONLY COPYING & PASTINGYOU DIDN'T KNOW YOUR COMMAND PROMPT COULD LOOK THIS GLAM!Speaking of great coding projects, Sara is helping to support DevAroundTheSun. It's a 24-hour coding jam that offers mentorship and tutorials, with all proceeds going to help people impacted by COVID-19. Check out the link above to learn how you can participate.
The Great COBOL Crunch
Earlier this week, New Jersey Governer Phil Murphy announced that the state desperately needed the help of COBOL programmers. The 60-year-old programming language runs the state's unemployment system, and crashed under the historic influx of applications created by the COVID-19 crisis. So, if you're a COBOL programmer listening to this show or know a retired COBOL ace who wants to lend a hand, you can help get folks access to the funds they desperately need. In the second half of the episode, we talk about Ben's many trips to CES over the years a journalist. This annual pilgrimage got him added to lots of email lists from manufacturers and suppliers of electronic components. In the last few weeks, the emails have suddenly shifted: instead of offering widgets and wires, they are pitching the ability to make and deliver critical medical supplies. We dig into the ways in which technology, hardware, and manufacturing have changed over the last few decades and the ripple effects that massive global transformation is having today.
Cryptocurrency-Based Life Form
It's just your hosts this episode - Paul, Sara, and Ben. We chat about the end of the influential open-source events that O'reillly held for many years, conferences that in many ways helped to form the personality of the early web. Engineers love to solve problems and create new tools. So what do you do when the best solution is to stay home? We have a few ideas about how to deal with the moment.If we all go into cryosleep, will the bots keep trading the market, and for how long? Sara recommends a novel - Machines Like Me.
Embrace the Darkness
You can check out more about Aaron at his website. He is a designer, developer, and musician who worked at Github and Adobe prior to joining Stack. You can also read Aaron's post on how he built dark mode here. For the next 48 hours, you also have the option to try out our April Fool's gag, Ultra Dark Mode.
Getting to Know Our Moderators
If you follow community issues on the Stack network, you may be familiar with Aaron Hall. He took the time to respond to a post from our CEO and subsequently came by Stack Overflow to engage more deeply with our leadership and community teams. You can find his summary of events here. Most days, you can find him streaming on Twitch here.Nitsua60 is a moderator over on our RPG Stack Exchange, which is one of the 25 largest communities our users have created. He's there to help guide curious role players through the important questions in life, like: How Can a Unicorn Establish a Foreign Location as its own Lair When its Already The Lair of a Lich? Answer --> ｿ here.We chat a little about the new Instagram account Stack Overflow just launched. We created fun animations that bring to life some of the best questions and answers from across the Stack network. Chatrooms are one of the less well known features of Stack communities. Nitsua60 said that not only has he seen more conversation in the RPG chat, but a new room has been created for folks from across the family of Stack networks to chat about issues and emotions relating to the global pandemic we are all dealing with. It made him think of the recent op-ed from Stanley McChrystal about the importance of "digital leadership" and communication in modern crises. A great example of that is what's happening over at the Academia Stack Exchange. This community has seen a massive influx of activity as schools from kindergarten through university have shut down. In response, they put together an incredible set of resources for folks who are trying to adapt their workflow to the reality of shuttered schools , remote learning, and social distancing. We hope you're staying safe, and thanks as always to the brave folks working on the front lines to keep essential services running and medical care available.
Right Back At Ya: We're Doubling Our Podcast
Ben is now the full time IT department for his two sons, one of whom is in kindergarten and one in first grade. The children have transitioned from public school to Zoom, Google Classroom, Konstella, FaceTime, and five million other services. Paul's neighbors in his apartment building are digging old laptops out of storage and leaving them in front of his door. They bleach them first, so that they are 100% disinfected. Then Paul slaps on a little Ubuntu/Lubuntu and those old machines are suddenly zippy netbooks that help adults and kids work and study from home. Sara reveals she has an amazing "resting interested face" - a skill that makes her the most popular person at any live talk in front of an audience. That box of old cables finally came in handy! We shout out our lifeboat badge winners, as we near the major milestone of 1000 lifeboats. Keep them coming.
NYC on Pause
Many countries around the world have now ordered citizens to work from home, exempting only those in essential industries. We have some tips on our blog about how to make remote work the best it can be, and a new piece up on how to handle remote hiring if your company is trying to fill positions during these unusual circumstances. Sara is nervous about working from home with her husband, who is also a software engineer. There can only be so many commits in a committed relationship. But she has double the space per person of Paul, who shares a 1200 square foot Brooklyn abode with a wife and two kids. Ben, meanwhile, has decamped for upstate New York. Buzzfeed asks, if this sudden experiment in mass remote work goes well for certain companies, will they simply opt to transition to full remote forever after the pandemic ends. Stack Overflow was born remote, an idea that germinated across blogs and Skype calls. The very first episode of the Stack Overflow podcast tells the tale. Our community saved us from major egg on our face, warning us about a Let's Encrypt bug that would have left Stack Overflow with expired certificates. You can hear a more detailed explanation of how this works here.If you're cracking out an old computer to use for home schooling you children or lending to a neighbor, Paul asks you to consider that now, in this wild moment of uncertainty, an Ubuntu Linux machine might be just the solution you need.
Time Keeps On Slipping
When Robinhood went down at the beginning of March, many speculated it might have been caused by the extra day, February 29th. This is a leap year after all. Robinhood blamed the outage on an unprecedented spike in usage. Either way, it go us thinking about time. For example, Postgres has a great understanding of time as a database. Like, it really knows all the different things that happened going back to literally year 4,000 BC including years that were skipped when they re-crafted the calendar and just like bananas stuff that happens with calendars over time. An excellent source of truth if it fits with your project.Next, a user shared the story of a wild interaction between Docker and the driver used by Razor peripherals. You can't have your fancy gaming mouse fired up and also be working on some container orchestration. Apparently they request the same GUID and get a bit confused if one already exists. If you're still feeling a little uncertain about exactly how Docker/Kubernetes works, Paul suggests this lovely illustrated guide for children or this comic, which is for grown ups.We chat about MySpace and whether it was ever cutting edge during its rise to prominence? Last, we dive into the pronunciation of "char", by the end of which, half of us have turned into full blown pirate impersonators.
All Your Data is Base
Sara reveals that she won a $500 gift card at a MongoDB hackathon, building an app that removed mustaches from people's pictures. This was many years ago, and no we were not paid in JetBlue gift cards to have Eliot on the show, although MongoDB is a client of Stack Overflow in other areas.Mongo comes from humongous, cause, ya know, scale. That, plus HumongousDB.com was already taken and is a real mouthful to say. Eliot talks about the frustrations he and his co-founder, Dwight Merriman, experienced while working together at DoubleClick and ShopWiki. DoubleClick began as a New York City ad tech company and evolved into the heart of Google’s real-time ad business after being acquired. Frustrations with the database systems available at both these companies led the pair to decide it was time for a better mousetrap. Today, MongoDB is a public company worth north of $7 billion and a staff of more than 1900 peopleWe chat about why relational databases are still the core of computer science education in high school and college across the United States, and whether or not this will ever change. During the show we skimmed some of the latest questions on Stack Overflow related to Mongo. Eliot took it back to his team and Tom Hollander, the PM for Mongo's chart product, delivered a great answer! Can you believe this website is free?
How to Find Your Next Stop
Echeruo's new venture is called Love and Magic, a startup studio that helps companies of all sizes maximize their ability to innovate. For anyone that has an idea they have been hoping to turn into a startup, Echeruo and his collaborators just introduced the Startup School of Alchemy. It's being taught at WeWork and Princeton University. It offers a six-week curriculum designed to help aspiring entrepreneurs find product-market fit.Apply with the code "stackoverflow" and you get $1000 off the course, a 40% discount.Echeruo says his time working in finance and with Microsoft Excel was what gave him the ability to think of how data from maps could be optimized by an algorithm and built into a useful mobile app. For those who don't know, our co-founder and Chairmam, Joel Spolsky, was part of the team at Microsoft that built Excel. Here is legendary 2015 talk, You Suck at Excel, where he organizes a spreadsheet to keep track of what he pays his Pokemon, ahem,I mean, uh, employees. You can take a deeper dive into the backstory of how Chinedu built HopStop below, related in his own words.I've always had difficulty with directions. When I grew up in Nigeria, I remember getting lost in my own house. It wasn’t like it was a mansion, it was a four-bedroom house. So you can imagine how I felt when I got to NYC and had to get around with the subway and bus system! I remember walking up once to one of those blown up maps in the subway station. My nose was a feet away from the dust laden map. The subway lines looked like tangled noodles. Complexity galore! New Yorkers used to walk around with these pocket guides—Hagstrom maps. I was going on a date in the Lower East Side. It doesn’t have the grid like the rest of the city. I got lost and was very late getting to the bar.I can't remember how, the date went but I remember what I did first thing next morning. I walked over to the subway station, grabbed a subway MAP and laid it on the floor and tried to figure it out. There’s driving directions. But there weren’t subway directions. So I was solving my own problems. I was looking for the complete directions—leave your house, turn left, go into this particular entrance, get on this train, get off at this station, use this exit. Because I was, in a lot of ways, the ultimate user, we ended up building a product that solved the complete problem—get me from where I am now to where I need to be. I was non-technical, I worked for a hedge fund. I may have been thinking algorithmically, I knew that this was computationally possible. But I didn’t know how to make it a reality. In conceiving the problem, I threw all the data into spreadsheets. I interned at this company when I was in college, where I learned about spreadsheets. I found the work very tedious, but I learned how to think about data, to think in tables. It allowed me to conceptualize complexity. To conceptualize the first subway data as a spreadsheet, I started by staring at the subway map laid on the wood floor of my apartment. The most obvious features were colors, lines, and stops. So those are the tables I typed into Excel first. Then I realized the lines also represented two train directions so I redid the spreadsheet. Then I realized the stops served multiple subway lines, so I redid the spreadsheet. Then I realized some of the stops would only be active during certain periods, so I redid the spreadsheet. We kept on learning and adjusting. It took us a long time before we had a data model that robustly described NYC's subway system. We even figured out how to automatically account for the frequent weekend NYC subway diversions.To build the first version of the app, I went to eLance, described to these computer scientists the data set in Excel, routes, stops, exits, entrances, and I sent it in. This developer in Siberia, Russia, emailed me, came up with a solution. But he turned out to be a complete genius, he built the core of the first version of Hopstop. Here I was, a Nigerian, sitting in my apartment using messenger, email, on a laptop. And I never met Alex for four years. We built Hopstop over four years without ever meeting each other.We ran very lean. Alex did all the coding. I did the subway data and user experience. I'd have to ride to different subway stations to note each subway entrance and exit, etc. When we added the bus system, Rajeev and his data team in India helped input the bus stops and schedules. And four years later, we were purchased by Apple, so quite the ride.
A Dash of Anil, a Pinch of Glimmer, a splash of Glitch
Glitch, a platform that makes it easy for anyone to create or remix a web app, has seen over five million apps created by users. You can read more about how it works here. If you want to learn a little about how it works with Docker, check out this piece here.If you want to know more about the shared history of Stack and Glitch, you can read up on it here. TLDR; Glitch was born out of Fog Creek software and counts Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor as founders. Glimmer is a new web magazine from the folks at Glitch. It focuses on creators and makers, with a special emphasis on unearthing the human stories of people building today's software.While you're here, don't forget to take 15-20 minutes and share your opinions in our 2020 Developer Survey. Whether Stack Overflow helped you during your journey as a programmer or not, we want to hear from everyone who codes. Some fun background for younger listeners: Geocities - a popular platform for building and hosting a personal website and linking it with others that share similar themes. BetaBeat - a website launched by The NY Observer that covered the SIlicon Alley tech scene. It was how Ben first met Anil, Joel, and many others. HerokuDockerIf you have comments, questions, or suggestions, please send us an email at podcast@stackoverflow.comToday’s episode is brought to you by Refinitiv. Unlock new possibilities with consistent, high-value market data from Refinitiv. Try the Refinitiv Eikon Data API for the largest breadth and depth of data and community tools with native Python support. Check out refinitiv.com/stackpodcast to try the Eikon Data API today. Refinitiv. Data is just the beginning.
Coaching A Developer Interview
Paul and Sara walk us through the teetering tower of abstraction. Ben still hasn't mastered a single language, so it's a tough for him to know if it's better to start with the difficult fundamentals or stay in the simplified sandbox.Flatiron tries to teach developers how to code, but also how to communicate. Every student has to do some public writing or speaking about their education. We check out Human Readable Magazine and the painfully honest Reddit thread of early reviews.Rebekah tries to coach Ben through a mock interview for a junior web developer position. A torrent of word salad ensues. Paul and Sara show no mercy.New York City parking meters aren't the only systems being taken down by calendar bugs. We chat about the delightful Twitter thread on Y2038.You can follow Rebekah here and learn more about The Flatiron School here.
Make My Monolith A Micro
You can find the podcast and article that inspired our chat here. It's the second of Kelsey Hightower's "Unpopular Opinions" series. We have heard the requests for full episodes transcripts and we know accessibility is important, so we're working on a solution. Stay tuned. The recipients of the lifeboat badges this episode were for questions that were between three and six years old. It's a testament to the ongoing value of the knowledge shared on our network and to the contributions of our community to help others through questions and answers. Last but not least, our 2020 Developer Survey is open. It takes about 15-20 minutes to complete, and we want to hear from as many coders as possible, regardless of age, experience, or occupation.
Your Buddy is Typing
What happens when millions of minimum byte packets start pinging off your network every few seconds? Bandwidth is a restriction most network engineers are familiar with. It's less often they have to think about packets per second. Teresa shares an awesome story of how a new feature for AOL Instant Messenger, AIM for you 90s nerds, turned up the heat on AOL's servers.After regaling us with war stories from the days of dial-up internet, we chat about what the job of a chief product officer is today. At a place like Stack Overflow, how do you unite functional departments across the company - from marketing to sales to engineering? How do you figure out the right incentives, so that the data you're measuring against is aligned with the long term health of the company and the community?"I don't focus on shipping, I focus on impact," Teresa told us. "That's where product management, engineering, and design come together. Product management is focused on value. Engineering is focused on quality, and design is focused on usability. If you think of that as Venn diagram, impact is where those three things overlap and happen."Lastly, we chat about the incredible velocity with which new coding languages and development frameworks emerge in the tech industry. Teresa shares her philosophy for encouraging an engineering team to level up and learn new skills while ensuring that this kind of continuous evolution doesn't create a lot of friction for the overall organization."That which we measure, we incentivize towards," is one of her favorite sayings, and Teresa applies it to scoping an overall product roadmap for a company, including what tools, new and old, to use along the way.