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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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)
Never program in bed
Is there any more fitting end to a day of working from home, deep into months of a fully remote world, than using your smartphone to finish up a little Python code with your head resting on your pillow? Paul has no regrets. If you look at that big, bright, shiny computer monitor late at night, you'll never fall asleep. Sara helps us trace the origin of the word software. It was originally meant as a joke, a clever play on computer "hardware" used in casual conversation, not as an iron clad piece of marketing. Over time, as it was used in correspondence - at public talks, and eventually in academic papers - it began to take on serious weight as a term of art for the product you produce with computers and code.Ben would prefer to be Less Wrong, and is starting to use the podcast to put his deference to a supreme AI into the historical record, just in case Roko's basilisk rears its ugly head. Our lifeboat this week is about an error in some non-standard syntax. Who among has not missed a paren, but hey, sometimes you just need another pair of eyes. Two kind members of our community answered this question, elaborated on how to improve the code, and earned a lifeboat. Congrats! And finally, a bit of recommended reading on just how much power is consumed by the data centers that make cloud computing run 24/7, and what that means for our planet.
A few of our favorite haxx
No list of great hacks would be complete without the Samy worm that ran amok on Myspace back in 2005. As Rachel points out, lots of hackers start out as experimenters, naturally curious coders who enjoy learning the rules and seeing how far they will bend before they break. If any hack made it's way into the mainstream consciousness over the last decade, it was WannaCry. It introduced a mainstream audience to the concept of ransomware and, because of the impact it had on critical hospital equipment, showed just how far software has embedded itself into our society.If you want to learn more about the Fullstack Cyber Bootocamp, you can check it out here. You can find Rachel here or email her- rachel dot troy at fullstackacademy dot com.This week, as part of our security theme, we skipped the lifeboat, and picked this gem from our Information Security Stack Exchange. Remember, when in doubt, if you absolutely need to erase all data off a drive, a plasma cutter will always come in handy.
25 Years of Java - the present to the future
For this episode we spoke again with Georges Saab, Vice President of Software Development at the Java Platform Group and Manish Gupta, Vice President of Global Marketing for Java and GraalVM. The very first feature that made a massive impact wasn’t a change in the Java language at all. It was the vastly improved library support that happened in the early releases. Between 1.0 and 1.3, these libraries included the Swing window toolkit, the Collections framework, a RPC-like API for remote calls, JDBC for interacting with databases, and more. The standard libraries grew richer, more sophisticated, and allowed Java to become a real enterprise language. In 2004, Java added generics, which allowed types, methods, and interfaces to be specified with the associated data types to be specified when that item was instantiated without sacrificing type safety. “At the time, generics were a challenge and people had strong opinions about them,” said Saab. Today, generics are one of the enduring features of the language. Java may have been designed as a completely object oriented language, but when Java SE 8 was released in 2014, it added Lamda expressions (aka closures), which added some functional programming elements. Not every problem is best served by OOP, and by adding Lambdas, Java became more flexible. Despite its prominence across numerous industries, Java isn’t sitting still. Saab mentioned four big projects coming to Java that had him excited, all designated by codenames: Loom, Valhalla, Leyden, and ZGC. You can read all about them on our blog.If you want to learn more, Oracle has put together a wealth of resources to celebrate Java's 25th anniversary.
25 Years of Java - the past to the present
For this episode we chatted with Georges Saab, Vice President of Software Development at the Java Platform Group and Manish Gupta, Vice President of Global Marketing for Java and GraalVM. In the beginning, the nascent Java language project, codenamed Project Green and later Oak, was designed to create interactive televisions. Think of the kind of overlays and interactivity that you see with most flat screen TVs today. Back in 1995, this was brand new territory. There was no hardware or operating system standard for a computing platform within a TV, so the team had to figure out how to create a programming language that could run on virtually anything. Code it once and run it everywhere through a virtual machine. Interactive TV was ahead of its time in the early 90s, but Java found a strong foothold for its cross-platform ideas in web applets and WebStart programs that downloaded and ran an application entirely from a web address. This evolved over time, and today it provides a lot of the processing muscle for server-side web apps and cloud-based SaaS applications. Here at Stack Overflow, the Java tag has remained one of the most popular over the years, with 1.7 million total questions on the site. When Sun announced Java in 1995, they did so with Marc Andreessen—then cofounder and “rockstar” at Netscape—on stage with them. Andreessen had agreed to integrate Java into the Navigator browser, a major coup for a brand new language. At the time, Navigator was the clear leader in the browser market, taking over 75% of the share. Even before this announcement at the SunWorld conference, the volume of downloads of the language became so great that it overwhelmed the T1 line attached to the java.sun.com web server. Today's episode covers the past and present of Java. Tomorrow, we'll air episode two, which takes us from the present and looks towards the future. If you want to learn more, Oracle has put together a wealth of resources to celebrate Java's 25th anniversary.
You down with GPT-3? Yeah you know me!
If you're wondering why GPT-3 matters and how it compares to prior efforts in this area, here is a good summary.If you want to dive deeper into the effect anxiety has on the interview process and hiring in tech, you can read up on the research here.This week's lifeboat badge goes to PerformanceDBA, who left an incredbily long and detailed answer, complete with charts and code snippets, on the following question: how to organize a relational data model for double entry accounting?
Forming new habits with 100 Days of Code
You can learn all about 100 Days of Code on their website.Alex also published a newsletter about habit forming and self-improvement. You can learn more about that and subscribe here.If you want to follow Alex on Twitter, you can find him here.This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Chris, who helped a user understand why ComponentDidCatch was not working in their react-native app.
Code Newbie's approach to education and community
Saron explains how she went from working in the marketing department of a startup to learning code, creating a supportive community for novice developers, and founding two podcasts about the art and science of learning to program. You can read more about the Dev acquisition and what the dynamic duo have planned here.Sara and Paul spend some time bantering with Saron on that classic developer debate: why learn computer science? Besides the ego boost and the desire to avoid imposter syndrome, how much of a four-year-degree is actually useful when you're a new graduate trying to land your first job? Later on, we dig into the debate over toxic positivity. During these challenging times, it can be addictive to watch others flaunt their hustle and hard work on social media. But there is a downside to tuning out the failures and negative emotions we all live with. You can read more about it here.Ever wondered about the difference between a subview and a superview? Find out more with this week's lifeboat badge.
Is Scrum making you a worse engineer?
What began as a question on our Software Engineering Stack Exchange graduated into a blog post for further discussion. Paul points out that modern tooling has internalized so much of agile methodology that developers tend to work this way without having to explicitly create a culture or process around Scrum. And as Sara points out, if it turns out you're being driven to optimize for finished work over quality work, the problem may not be Scrum, but the pressures of your particular manager or company. Our lifeboat of the week goes to an old school Excel question with over half a million views. Thanks to Michelle for earning a badge while answering this query: How do I append the same text to every cell in a column in Excel?
A conversation on diversity and representation
Syeeda and Ian talk with Sara and Paul about how affinity groups came to exist within Stack Overflow, and how the BNB group helped to lead the design of the company's short and long response to issues of systemic racism. You can find more about Stack's plans here.More generally, the group discusses how people at all levels of their organizations are putting a renewed emphasis on diversity and inclusion, and how individual contributors, managers, and executives can come together to find new ways to listen and learn.You can find Ian on Twitter and Github. He has also written for the Stack Overflow blog. You can find Syeeda's images and writing on Instagram and more about her education and career on LinkedIn. Our lifeboat badge for this episode goes out to IsVForAll, who answered the following question: How to check if a value exists in an object using JavaScript?
How to interpret the compiler
This is a great crash course on just-in-time compilers written by Lin Clark, who works in advanced development at Mozilla on Rust and Web Assembly. It references the film Arrival and kicked off our discussion on the podcast. Paul talks about his first love, XSLT, and how that language actually foreshadowed a lot of what would become popular staples of modern programming languages. Sara and Paul share their thoughts on what it takes to craft a new language as a programmer and why they have never embarked on this arduous intellectual adventure. This brought to mind a well written essay from one of the creators of Redis, who is stepping back from managing the project to work on something new. Here is, in my opinion, a profound quote from that piece: "I write code in order to express myself, and I consider what I code an artifact, rather than just something useful to get things done. I would say that what I write is useful just as a side effect, but my first goal is to make something that is, in some way, beautiful. In essence, I would rather be remembered as a bad artist than a good programmer."Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Farhan Amjad, who answered the question - How can I implement PageView in SwiftUI?
How We Hire Developers at Stack
When it comes to hardware that cranks, Paul is a fan of Micro Center's in-house brand - PowerSpec.This week we chew through a great post from Jon Chan about how Stack Overflow hires developers. Sara recalls flunking her first few code screenings while applying for jobs. The hard lesson she learned? Sometimes, it pays to skip the collaboration and just show off. Ben wishes that he had known about real-time tests back when he was hiring bloggers.Last but not least, this week's lifeboat goes to Yigit, who answered the following question: "In Android Rooms persistence library, how would I write the following SQL statement: SELECT * FROM table WHERE field LIKE %:value% As a @Query? This syntax is invalid, and I can't find anything about it in the docs."Thanks Yigit for sharing your knowledge and helping the Stack Overflow community to grow and thrive.
Java goes to outer space
From Mars rovers to Minecraft to the makeup of our DNA - these are some of the Java apps that may leave a mark on the world of software for decades to come.Thanks to Hizbul25, our winner of the week, for answering a question and earning a lifeboat badge: query to order by the last three characters of a column.
Can't Pay Your Taxes if The Website Won't Load
You can read about the IRS and its Sisyphean efforts to modernize its computer systems here.Ben's Twitter thread on amazing and obscure trade periodicals you can find online is here.You can read more about what Apple is doing with biometric identity on the web here.
Paul Explains It All
This week, Ben and Paul are flying as a duo, a true dad-cast. We walk through the slow build of increasingly complex keyboard macros, followed by the inevitable cleansing and renewal of an empty slate. Pus, type systems and type safety, the galaxy brain edition.
Chatting with Robin Ginn, executive director of the OpenJS Foundation
You can learn more about today's event and all the livestream broadcasts here.If you want to learn more about Robin, you can get in touch here.