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.
Making Kubernetes work like it's 1999 with Kelsey Hightower
You can find Kelsey on Twitter here. His Github is here. His personal journey with Kubernetes is detailed in a nice piece here.Kelsey has an interesting role at Google. He sits at the director level but is an independent contributor with no direct reports. Instead he works to help galvanize interest in particular tools and topics, driving adoption at a broad scale.
The downside of going viral with your programming joke
That skit made it to the front page of Reddit, and was soon seen across the internet. It's nice to make people laugh, but following the surge of interest, Emily also had to deal with severe harassment and cyber stalking. She wrote a piece about the experience which you can find here.In this episode, we discuss how moderation can be improved and the work that remains to be done to make the software industry feel safe and inclusive for everyone.
Where do game developers fit in the world of software?
Has there ever been a gaming company that brought more joy to the world than Nintendo? They were making playing cards back in 1889 and continue to find ways to be different but fun with inventions like the Switch and Labo.Sara gives us some the scoop on Rimworld. Check out the trailer here and feel free to lend your skill to a new mod if you have ideas for how to improve it.A Excel sheet meltdown led to critical health data about the pandemic being lost in the UK. Rows can go to millions, but they used columns.For those of us who need our reading glasses to see the tiny emoji people post in Slack, Paul has come to your rescue. He asked for the ability to zoom In on Twitter, the CEO of Slack co-signed, and boom, we got a new feature.We discuss what other new Slack features might take off: stories, push-to-talk, and sneakers.
Ben answers his first question on Stack Overflow
You can find some of Jack's art and other projects here.Ben breaks through and answers his first SO question—by copy/pasting from the comments, of course. Sara finds the relevant XKCD.Later, we check out Darling.hq, a MacOS translation layer for Linux If you are in the mood to learn programming with colors and shapes, check out the website that Jack built: Maria.cloud
Talking Arduino, bits, and boards with Dr. Duino
Sara shares the story of a developer conference that was smoke bombed by an Arduino bot gone haywire. It was this chaos that inspired her to dig deeper into Arduino, which would eventually play a big role in helping her to found her company, Jewelbots. Paul unravels the mystery of what's really inside the Goonie Box: a timepiece, puzzle, and mechanical wonder that Guido uses to test his house guests. This week's lifeboat goes to Terminator17, who helped solve a problem around object detection using a Tensorflow-gpu.
Who's afraid of a little merge conflict?
Today's episode was inspired by a question on folks who postpone a merge for fear of being the one to resolve a conflict. Shout out to Candied Orange for the thoughtful answer.Paul and Sara reminisce about the days before Git, when version control was very different from what it is today, and Paul accidentally left many a project in shambles. Do you remember the days of Subversion and CVS? Later, we dig into Sara's new adventure with Jupyter Notebooks. They are extremely useful for developers, but what would it take to make them a tool for any kind of knowledge worker? Default to a PowerPoint style, obviously.Last but not least, we dig into the endless argument over the 10X developer, Reed Hastings' love for the 100X developer, and the true formula for attracting employees that will contribute their genius without wrecking the team. Clive Thompson has a great piece on the myth, meritocracy, and messy reality of rockstar coders.
Chris Anderson on drones, driverless cars, and creating communities around code
Chris is the author of the New York Times bestselling books The Long Tail and Free as well as Makers: The New Industrial Revolution.He is lso the CEO of 3DR, founder of the Linux Foundation's Dronecode Project, and founder of the DIY Drones and DIY Robocars communities, including the ArduPilot autopilot project.Not surprisingly, he also created something called GeekDad.If you want to get involved, you can learn how to build your own Donkey Car racer here.
Episode 272: Pull Requests Are Welcome
"Sorry I missed your comment of many months ago. I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood." Life is lived in stages.Most people are working remotely these days, but offices may return, and even if they don't, these skills could come in handy. Teamwork, persuasion, communication, and leadership, just a few of the things you can learn in this Technion course.Big thanks to TwilioQuest, which has gotten Ben, the worst coder in the world, practicing his Javascript skills again.What gives you that special feeling: a nice, sharp recursive function or a deep, winding ternary statement? Paul and Sara debate the finer points of feeling smugly satisfied with your own code.
Next Level Command Line
You can check out more about the Github news here.Here is the farewell to updates from Moment.js.Would you take a nice bonus today for a pay cut in the future? Stripe is offering its employees that option, spurred by an exodus of developers from dense urban areas. A big thanks to Jim Mischel, who was our lifeboat badge winner of the week.
Oracle wants to Tok, Nvidia Arms Up
Oracle is in the midst of trying to negotiate and get approved a deal that would allow it to acquire Tik Tok's US Operations, and allow Tik Tok to avoid a ban on its service in the United States. For US citizens, software being banned over geopolitical concerns is a new reality. What will happen to the code if the deal goes through? Is there a clean room where software updates are inspected before rolling out? Is data segregated to local servers, and if so, will it be siloed from the rest of Tik Tok's global user base? Tik Tok users have thoughts on what is really happening with their private data.In the second half of the episode we talk about Nvidia's purchase of Arm from Softbank. Paul and Sara speculate about what this means for our personal computers and mobile devices, as well as its implications for GPU programming, which has found new homes in burgeoning fields like machine learning and crypto mining.If you're a reader looking to spend some quality time with other book worms, check out this Kickstarter from our friend Jeffrey Zie. No lifeboats this week, but be sure to check out this amazing question on the math behind spider webs.
What tech is like in "Rest of World"
Sophie founded Rest of World in 2019 after a decade of living and working across Asia, Africa & the Middle East, and with companies like Uber and Xiaomi. She graduated from Stanford Graduate School of Business, Harvard Kennedy School and Princeton University. Sophie is based in New York. Read why she started this publication in her founder’s note. You can subscribe to Rest of World's newsletter here.In this week's episode we talk about Okash, a peer-to-peer lending app that show what happens when you gamify public social shaming. We explore honjok, a South Korean sub-culture that emphasizes a movement away from ambitious professionalism and towards a more stoic loner lifestyle. In some ways, the apps, services, and online communities that formed around this tribe perfectly predicted what many people are experiencing in 2020. "The accidental pioneers of a lifestyle that has been forced on all of us," as Sophie explains.And finally, we explore what it takes to break into the world of digital finance in Indonesia, where a board of clerics must certify that your code halal - consistent with Islamic religion and law - before you can break into a market of more than 220 million potential customers.
How developers can become successful writers
Along with her work writing and editing, Stephanie works as a product manager at Microsoft and runs Developer Content Digest, a biweekly newsletter with content tips. She has worked for companies like Digital Ocean, Github, and General Assembly.Twitter: @radiomorilloeBooks: developersguidetocontent.comNewsletter and blog: stephaniemorillo.co/links
The magic of metric, micro frontends, and breaking leases on Silicon Valley offices
Every experienced software engineer can tell you a story about a standardization effort that ended up causing more problems than it solved. Queen Elizabeth's decree adding 280 feet to each mile made it easy to divide up acres, but has haunted those of us stuck with Imperial units ever since. Sara dives into micro frontend services and how they can help to add agility to a modern development team. There is a nice article on the topic here, and Sara found it through the Thought Works Tech Radar.Pinterest paid just under $90 million dollars to break its lease in San Francisco. Paul and Sara are hearing about lots of developers who are fleeing major cities, and it seems clear that Pinterest won't be the last company to abandon expansion plans or ditch fancy corporate offices for at least the next few years. Our lifeboat badge of the week the week goes to Sravya Nagumalli, who explained why Angular is associated with the Single Page App and just what an SPA is anyway. Thanks for sharing some knowledge, Sravya!
Ok, who vandalized Wikipedia?
You can read the hilarious tale of how Paul was alerted to "Frenchpoop Butt" here.Enjoy an all time classic tale of a security expert being outwitted by his daughter. Her approach was not in his threat model. Want to try your hand at a little hacking? Here's a fun online game called Telehack.We asked some teens what would motivate them to participate more on Stack. The answer was obvious: loot boxes. What kind of digital swag would you want receive for helping spread knowledge across our network?
The tiny open-source pillar holding up the entire internet
It's dependencies all the way down...Remote learning is a bad joke. Who has ideas for some tech or gaming inspired solutions? What's your favorite way to refer to software of very large size? Everyone's got their favorite nickname for that big ol' pile of code. Lemon juice is recommended in lots of natural cures and remedies. But could it also be MELTING YOUR BONES?