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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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)

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Cleaning up build systems and gathering computer history with Adam Gordon Bell

December 11, 2020 00:29:04 27.89 MB Downloads: 0

As promised, here is the grass hat.You can find out more about Earthly here.We spend a little time talking about Nix OS the operating system you can roll back if you don't like a patch.Raise your hand if you remember learning computer science with Turbo Pascal.Maybe you didn't know, but discs aren't as slow as people think. Adam's recent episode is about upending common assumptions on IO performance. Shoutout to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, Josh Smift, for answering the question: How to delete *.web files only if they exist. 

Connecting apps, data, and the cloud with Apollo GraphQL CEO Geoff Schmidt

December 08, 2020 00:34:16 32.89 MB Downloads: 0

You can read about GraphQL here and Apollo here. Cassidy Williams, who curates our newsletter, wrote about her experience as an early adopter of the technology last summer.You can find more on Meteor here. Schmidt also helped create Monument,  which he describes as "an affordable live/work art event space in downtown San Francisco. The upstairs is 24 private bedrooms and studio spaces and the downstairs is a 200+ capacity person event venue and makerspace. Our goal is to connect creative people across different fields, and in particular build bridges between art and technology." 

Goodbye to Flash, we'll see you in Rust

December 04, 2020 00:23:26 22.49 MB Downloads: 0

Gone in a Flash. Actually it took quite a while. Adobe explains its decision to stop supporting Flash here.You can learn more about Ruffle, the Flash emulator written in Rust, here.Here are some tips on writing a developer resume from a hiring manager who's written an entire book on the topic.You can read more about the Supreme Court case considering the limits of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act here and hereOur Lifeboat badge of the week goes to a user named simply 4386427, who answered the most basic and frustrating question: why does “printf” not work?

Why developers are increasingly demanding ethics in tech

December 01, 2020 00:28:38 27.49 MB Downloads: 0

You can find more about Resner here. Learn more about the topics we discussed by following some of Resner's suggested links below: People to follow on Twitter: Safyia Noble, Ruha Benjamin, and Kamal Sinclair.Ellen Pao and Project Include.Eli Pariser and New Public by Civic Signals.

Big Tech is getting cozy with computer science departments

November 27, 2020 00:25:57 24.91 MB Downloads: 0

You can read more about the operating systems and business principles schools are adopting from their corporate sponsors here.You can read about the latest version of Tailwind and what it has to offer here.  

React, Vue, jQuery: what flavor do you like your Vanilla JS?

November 24, 2020 00:16:23 15.72 MB Downloads: 0

You can find Ferdinandi's post and video here.12 years ago, back when Stack Overflow was a brand new site with just a few thousand users, someone asked a basic question: What is the difference between a framework and a library?FreeCodeCamp has its own take on this question with a pretty interesting answer. "When you use a library, you are in charge of the flow of the application. You are choosing when and where to call the library. When you use a framework, the framework is in charge of the flow. It provides some places for you to plug in your code, but it calls the code you plugged in as needed."There was no Lifeboat badge to call out this week, so we honored a Lifejacket winner instead. Shout out to Andreas for answering the queston: Are byte arrays initialised to zero in Java?

Tim Berners Lee wants to put you in a pod, a web pod.

November 20, 2020 00:20:44 19.9 MB Downloads: 0

You can find out more about Sir Berners-Lee's work on Solid here.Other topics discussed in this episode: Docker puts a limit on free containers. That has to be good for the environment. But is it also good for Docker and the future of its products? Sometimes, forcing yourself to make something worth purchasing  helps drive innovation. The Tao of Programming isn't new, and some of its technical references are a bit out of date. But it's still good for a laugh and little bit of enlightenment-lite.Are you interested in putting on your own drone light show? Intel offers options to fit a range of budgets. This week's lifeboat badge goes to JCL for answering the question: C# compiler: CS0121: The call is ambiguous between the following methods or properties.

How do you make software reliable enough for space travel?

November 17, 2020 00:21:30 20.63 MB Downloads: 0

You can learn more about the Power of 10 here. TIOBE's latest index can be found here.Our lifeboat of the week goes to lealceldeiro for answering the question: What does the multi: true attribute of HTTP_INTERCEPTORS mean?

If you could fix any software or technology, what would you change?

November 13, 2020 00:16:22 15.7 MB Downloads: 0

Paul spent the weekend building a parser, cause who doesn't? He needed a Regex, found one on Stack Overflow, looked over the characters, and realized this is not the way to get folks interested or excited about code. "You come across a problem and you think to yourself, I know I'll use a regular expression. Now you have two problems." This sets Sara off on a tangent about CSS. What's wrong with CSS in her opinion. Well, all of it. She shares a few thoughts on how it could have been built right. Ben dives into the endless annoyances Bluetooth has been bringing to his life recently. When you have four people in a family sharing six mobile devices and five sets of headphones, audio signals are constantly getting piped to the wrong ears. Now his car wants to connect. When Bluetooth tells you it's forgetting a device, how come it never keeps it promise?Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Zero Piraeus for answering the question: Why must dictionary keys be immutable? He provided his answer in the form an elegant short essay, and it's definitely worth checking out.

Turning your coding career into an RPG with Sai Vennam

November 10, 2020 00:25:37 24.59 MB Downloads: 0

You can find Sai's videos here. Come for the deep dives on Docker, stay for the live lightboard  magic. Yes, I know what the comments say, but no, he isn't writing backwards. Sai also does a lot of work around OpenShift, the containerization software products created by Red Hat. He talks about what the tie up between IBM and Red Hat has been like and how the enterprise is increasingly learning to work with open source. Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Alex for explaining why you're Getting this as undefined when using arrow function.If you want to find more from Sai, you can follow him on Twitter here.   

The pros and cons of the SPA

November 06, 2020 00:15:25 14.79 MB Downloads: 0

Pawel Skolski wrote this definition of the SPA in 2016. "A single-page application is an app that works inside a browser and does not require page reloading during use. You are using these type of applications every day. These are, for instance: Gmail, Google Maps, Facebook or GitHub.SPAs are all about serving an outstanding UX by trying to imitate a “natural” environment in the browser — no page reloads, no extra wait time. It is just one web page that you visit which then loads all other content using JavaScript — which they heavily depend on."Tom McWright recently sparked some good discussion in the developer world with his article, If Not SPAs, What? He had written before about his belief that SPAs had done little to reduce the complexity of web development, but hadn't really given readers other options. In his latest post, he tried to offer some possible alternatives. Our lifeboat of the week of the week goes to Glortho for explaining how to add http:// to url if no protocol is defined in javascript?   

Cleaning up the cloud to help fight climate change

November 03, 2020 00:29:37 28.43 MB Downloads: 0

You can find some more of Holly's work and bio here. She gave a great talk at KubeCon 2020, How to Love K8s and Not Wreck the Planet, which you can watch on YouTube here.And here's a lovely presentation, Containers Will Not Fix Your Broken DevOps Cultures, drawing on her long history of programming and consulting. 

Stack Overflow's CEO reflects on his first year

October 30, 2020 00:22:58 22.04 MB Downloads: 0

You can find a more in depth discussion of these topics on our blog. Prashanth shares his ideas about the importance of community and what it means to be a product led company.

The story behind Stack Overflow in Russian with Nicolas Chabanovsky

October 27, 2020 00:22:15 21.36 MB Downloads: 0

Nicolas will be the first to tell you that the version of Stack Overflow he helped to create began as a clone. It developed into a very popular site on RuNet and through persistent emails, Nic was able to find a way to make it an official part of the Stack family. Nic talks a bit about the unique culture of SO's Russian community and how each regional version of SO, from English to Spanish to Japanese, has developed its own etiquette and approach to moderation and Q&A. Nic and Sara also share some updates on their love of Jupyter Notebooks and how they make it easy to combine blogging with data analysis and presentation. Shout out to our life boat badge of the week, Aliaksandr Kavalenka , for answering the question: How to use DatePickerDialog in Kotlin? 

How should tech titans act when productizing tiny open source projects?

October 23, 2020 00:26:55 25.83 MB Downloads: 0

We break down some thoughts on this issue, which came to light after a tweet from Tim Nolet.Later in the episode we talk about the debate raging right now around elections and technology. What role should software play and where is regulation appropriate? Last but not least, we consider what the next US administration might do with regards to regulating big tech. Will they lean towards a European model or continue to be more hands off? Shout out to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Kin3Tix, for helping to identify good tutorials for SDL 2.0 for C (Not C++) programming.