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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En este podcast vamos a hablar Estoicismo, figuras estoicas y ejercicios estoicos para mejorar tu vida y tu resiliencia ante las adversidades.
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.
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.
It Ain't Real Till You Break Prod
Cassidy helps to write The Overflow newsletter and is two months into a new gig as a Principal Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify. That's where she broke Prod, but it turned out ok.We chat about Hey what it means for software engineers when prominent coders are arguing with big mobile platforms about the fees that the owners of the OS collect. What's old is new again. Bot armies are farming gold in World of Warcraft, which takes us down a wandering path of wondering how often people have access to powerful computers, but limited access to money they can spend on essentials.Last but not least, we try to dissect a great question from our Software Engineering Stack Exchange: ways to explain code when told it doesn't make sense.Shout out to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, "wizard", who answered the following question: is there an equivalent method to C's scanf in Java.
Dropping knowledge with Drupal's creator, Dries
Dries explains how Drupal began: as a intranet, not internet, message board for his college community. It's now the technology underpinning tens of millions of websites, including some of the biggest in the world. We get the story behind the name, an accident overlap of language that became the software's iconic mascot. And we talk about the process that allowed this to scale from an open source project shared across a few dorm rooms to something used by massive public companies. Stay tuned Friday, when we'll publish part two of our chat with Dries.As always, shout out to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, for helping to answer the question: Can you use React Native to create a desktop app? As to whether or not you should, well, that's another question for another time. You can find more about Dries at his website. You can read more about his experience with Acquia here.
Turn on, tune in, drop out, log off
This week on the pod, we chat about Cloudflare.tv, a 24/7 streaming channel dedicated to discussions of software, startups, and technology. We also dig into a new offering called Github Classroom. Do pedagogy and programming mix well? Can this approach to collaborative work be useful beyond the computer science classroom?So, you want to delete half your database? Well, I can guarantee this method will delete about half your database...most of the time. Thanks, as always, to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week!
You're Over Reacting
If you're in the market for a used car and some retro web design, look no further.Thanks to our Lifeboater of the week, Günter Zöchbauer, for explaining how to use the MyHomePage widget in Flutter.
New tools for new times
You can find Textmoji here. A few taps and you're the hippest typographer in your company's work chat. Seek, the app from iNaturalist, is available on Android and iOS. You can find it here. Ben has over 30 plants, a dozen insects, and five amphibians, so if you're feeling competitive, it's gonna be a long hike to catch up.It can be hard selling software or design in a period where vendors and potential clients can rarely meet in person. Paul has been enjoying Whimsical, which advertises itself as allowing users to "communicate visually at the speed of thought." We also spend some time discussing Supabase, an open source Firebase alternative.As discussed in the intro to this episode, we wanted to share some resources connected to the ongoing protests and memorials happening in the US. Black and Brown, a group of employees within Stack Overflow, put together some recommendations of social media accounts to follow.Antiracism Center: TwitterAudre Lorde Project: Twitter | Instagram | FacebookBlack Women’s Blueprint: Twitter | Instagram | FacebookEqual Justice Initiative (EJI): Twitter | Instagram | Facebook
Javascript is ready to get its own place
Has there ever been a tech startup that raised shy of $3 billion, inflation-adjusted for any era, while barely making a ripple with actual customers? Magic Leap just pocketed a fresh $350 million in funding, on the condition that its co-founder and CEO Rony Abovitz, agree to step aside and allow new leadership to take the reins. We chat AR/VR, dot-com flameouts, and why crazy tech is worth believing in.Sara hips us to the 11th anniversary of Node.js and the 25th anniversary of Javascript. The latter has the distinction of being the only language to appear in the top 10 for most loved and most hated languages on our 2020 developer survey. Paul and Sara reminisce about Javascript callbacks. Hard work builds character, don't ya know.This episode was recorded before the recent protests, and so does not contain any discussion of current events in the United States. We will touch on it in future episodes, but you can find Stack Overflow's statement on it here.
I would D.I.E. for that IDE
Brian is a contributor to Deno, and walks us through what this project has to offer. He also made it easy to work with Deno right in the browser. You can check it out here.You can learn more about Begin here. If you want to follow Brian, you can find him on Twitter here and on Github here.We spend a bunch of time digging into the overlaps between Deno, Rust, Java, and Typescript. In case you missed it, Typescript is now the second most beloved language, based on the results of our 2020 Developer Survey.
Mayor of Open Source Town
Sara is spending her time as a fully remote worker trying to learn more about open source governance and foundations. Turns out there is a lot of overlap with the work Stack does alongside its community. Paul has a project for playing with math in your storytelling. You can check it out here.Our lifeboat of the week goes to Stack Overflow user Scolytus, who answered the following question: Why am I getting an error when creating a C Struct initialization with char array?
Digging into Deno 1.0
You can read up on Deno 1.0 here.The star-studded ceremony for the 2020 Webby's can be watched on repeat here (not that we're doing that...)This is the Wired story about Lee Holloway, a brilliant coder who helped build Cloudflare, but then mysteriously fell into decline. It's a sad but beautifully written tale.Thanks to Stack Overflow user htamas for saving a question and winning a lifeboat : Gradle project refresh failed, unable to get the CMake.Ryan's piece on how coders beg, borrow, and steal can be found here.