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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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.
From Prison to Programming - The Code Cooperative
Alex graduated from NYU with a degree in computer science and worked as a developer and engineer at several startups in New York City, eventually assuming senior roles like engineering team lead and director of technology. Along the way, however, she found herself face with discrimination and harassment. In 2016, she dramatically altered her appearance, an experience she discusses in a humorous and poignant talk - Shaving My Head Made me a Better Developer. In 2016 she read the book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and was inspired to do more to help people impacted by the justice system. She began organizing donations of unused laptops, and then moved on to help found the Code Cooperative in October of 2016. the group describes itself as a community of people who learn, use, and build technology to create life changing possibilities for individuals and communities impacted by incarceration.If you want to get involved, you can donate a laptop or make a financial contribution here. If you would like to volunteer as a mentor, you can apply here.
Scripting the next era of Stack Overflow
Three months ago, we interviewed Prashanth during his first week on the job. Now, with a full quarter of work under his belt, our new CEO reflects on what we accomplished over the last decade and lays out his vision for where Stack Overflow, as a company and community, will be heading over the next year and beyond.Paul explains why engineers prefer to give blunt feedback, even in a public setting.Sara drops some hints about our plans for the future of the Stack Exchange network. One of these big goals is to better integrate knowledge from these with the activity that happens on Stack Overflow, so that the knowledge being shared on Server Fault or Super User can easily be found by users on Stack Overflow, and vice versa. Stay tuned for more details and feel free to share your thoughts for what would work to improve the user experience.Prashanth talks about the forces reshaping the developer landscape: cloud services, machine learning, container orchestration, and more. How can we help new developers, both hobbyists and professionals, find what they need on our sites, and empower them so they feel comfortable asking questions and providing answers.
Occam's Blazor
Software is eating the world, but what's on the menu for dessert?This week we chat about the best way for engineers to give feedback to executives. Paul explains the Purple room method they use at Postlight. Sara references Zero to One and why engineers and marketers have so much trouble communicating.As a member of a marketing department , it's true our job is to see the glass as half full. But sometimes the point of the exercise is to be aspirational. Police learn how to be suspicious, marketers learn how to sell, and engineers look for what's broken so they can fix it.We chat about the ten thousand or so parking meters that went on the fritz in New York City. The company says it was the result of a fraud prevention protocol. Was this a Y2K style glitch or a logic bomb?Sara finds the developer angle on the recent rift in the British Royal Family. New technologies always reshape the Monarchy's relationship to the public. From the first radio address to the televised coronation, to a Wordpress website and an Instagram post, each generation tries to use the modern medium to their advantage.We discuss a fairly devious bit of brilliant parenting. If your young child wants to be a YouTube star, and you can build them their own private version of the platform, with randomly generated likes and none of the cyber-bullying, are you protecting them? Or, perhaps, crafting a Truman Show for the internet age that will have consequences down the road.Last but not least, we check out the Blazor tag, one of the fastest growing areas of interest on Stack Overflow. It's a framework that extends the established Razor syntax. The goal is to enable developers to write client-side code in .NET, backed by WebAssembly.
The Director's Cutts
For many years Matt worked on defending the quality of Google's web search results, and you may know him as the creator of the first version of SafeSearch.As Paul noted on the show, he was seen as one of the few people with whom ordinary folks could communicate about the often inscrutable world of Google search results and rankings. You can read his blog here.In 2016 Matt joined USDS, initially at the Department of Defense. Since 2017, Matt has served as the USDS Administrator and is responsible for setting the overall direction and strategy for projects. He has worked on everything from Healthcare.gov to online services for veterans to fraud prevention at the IRS. Topics discussed on this episode: The 1993 comedy film Dave, in which Kevin Kline plays a presidential body double who manages to fix government and melt the steely heart of Sigourney Weaver. Open source as an ever growing trend, even inside of big government. Which organization has more meeting and process, Google, or the US federal government?
Time For Some Major League Hacking
To kick things off, we talk about Yap, a fun new project from Paul’s company, Postlight. Employees get to partake in a Labs program where they can pursue side projects that interest them. Yap is "an ephemeral, real-time chat room with up to six participants. Your messages appear and disappear as quickly as you type them.” It was built with Elixir...ooooh.For our interview this week we sat down with Jon Gottfried and Mary Siebert from Major League Hacking. Jon is the company’s co-founder and Mary is the Hackathon Community Manager. We discuss how this organization has become a global phenomenon over the past few years, reaching hundreds of thousands of developers. Things that happen these days at Major League Hackathons: Painting succulents Cup stacking competitions Therapy dogs, lots of them If you're interested in sponsoring a Major League Hackathon, check out the info here.This is our last episode of the year. We’ll be back in 2020 with some more amazing guests and brilliant banter. Thanks for tuning in, see ya in the new year.
Searching For The Next Frontier With Chris Dixon
You can check out the back story of Dixon’s first company, SiteAdvisor, here. It was built during a time when spyware was a booming business and browsers had few systems in place to combat bad actors. The company was acquired by McAfee in 2006. It's a great trip through the history of web security at the time. Dixon next turned his attention to machine learning. He and his co-founders created Hunch, which worked to learn users’ tastes and recommend items they might enjoy. It was an early attempt to build the taste graph, a parallel to the social graph. It was acquired by eBay in 2011. Many of these techniques are now widely used across the biggest social networks in the world.Dixon then moved into the world of venture capital. You can read more about the Crypto Fund he helps to lead and the new startup school a16Zz is launching to help educate a new generation of programmers and founders. Application are still open.If you're interested in learning more about the background of Hashcash, which foreshadowed a lot of the ideas found in Bitcoin, there is some good info here.
A Conversation with the Author of Black Software
We discuss how a demand for more diverse clip art helped lay the foundation for some of the first black owned and operated software companies in the United States, and the ways in which social media has helped to empower a new generation of voices to demand change in the tech industry and beyond. You can check out some of the pioneering work on building digital community at Afrolink, NetNoir, and UBP.McIlwain also draws attention to the history of computer technology as a tool of police surveillance, going all the way back to the Police Beat algorithm in 1968. You can find out more about Prof McIlwain here. You can purchase his book here.We also spend some time this week talking about our new community initiatives. Sara, along with Juan Garza from our community team, wrote a big post outlining all the work we’re hoping to do in 2020 and how we’re using data to inform the changes we are making. Keep an eye out for future posts in this series, The Loop, and let us know what you want to see by lending your voice to our Through The Loop survey.
TFW You Accidentally Delete Your Database
Brian shares a delightful tale of the time one of his co-workers accidentally deleted the company's database, and how they recovered it through binary transaction logs. No better way to learn than a trial by fire.Juan explains why typing is taking over frontend development. First off, we discovered unit tests, and learned types can take care of it.Paul dreams of a day when object-oriented PHP runs in the browsers. Sara has had nightmares about similar scenarios.Splice has lots of interesting products for musicians and technologists and they're hiring.Brian helped to build the amazing Brooklyn JS, so if you're in the NYC area, be sure to check it out.Juan helps to run an amazing community of developers in Colombia, as well as the Bogota JS meetup.Dylan TallChief made a drum machine in Excel and it's something special.
How Would You React?
Part 1The crew chats about how Paul and Sara made the transition from individual contributors to managers overseeing teams of engineers. Sara used to see this transition as a form of selling out, but has a new perspective after having made the shift. Paul admits he still doesn’t feel like a “CEO” and how he approaches his role as the co-founder who focuses on creating signal instead of operations. OF course, we argue about Bitcoin, and finally we examine the role luck plays in life, especially for The Rock. Interview - Kent C DoddsKent admits that when he first tried programming, he just couldn’t understand strings, and decided the career path wasn’t for him. He ended up on a track that would have made him an accountant or business intelligence analyst. From that perch, however, he began to find ways to automate and improve his workflows. Not only did this help him stand out at work, it reawakened his interest in coding, which is now his full time career. Part 2 Sara talks about the difference between writing code for software applications, and writing firmware, which she got into while helping to launch and run Jewelbots. Paul and Sara recall what it was like working in tech during the 90s, when they had to constantly worry about how to conserve RAM. We also talk about the days before Git, when folks passed a hard drive around from hand to hand. The kids today have no idea how good they have it.
Too DEV.to Quit
Part 1Paul and Sara chat about what language is best to choose as your first when you're just getting started on your journey as a programmer. Probably not Mathmatica, but it's a neat one.Jupyter Notebooks - an in-browser notebook for working with Python. You can write your words, have your code right next to it, and see how things play out. Or as Tom Butterworth put it on DEV."Jupyter Notebook is an interactive web application that interfaces with the iPython repl, allowing you to run structured but iterative Python scripts. It is the de facto choice for data scientists to rapidly prototype pipelines, visualise data, or perform ad hoc analysis."Interview: Jess LeeJess Lee had some great perspectives to share on what it means to balance being an entrepreneur and a coder.Issac Lyman kicked off a community project on DEV to create a book that would help guide readers through their first year in code. 15 contributors ended up writing chapters for the book, which is available for free here.DEV is open source, and they have decided it can be a software platform other organizations can use to build their own communities. As Ben Halpern writes, "The future of our company will be based on delivering the DEV open-source software to power new standalone communities. We will work with a network of partners both inside and outside of the software ecosystem."Part 2We dig into D3.JS. Stack Overflow has a lot to teach folks on this subject.What's the best way to make a d3.js visualization layout responsive?Just don't ask about a good book for learning the subject!And finally, what's the difference between d3.js and jQuery? It's a silly question with some interesting answers and a nice history of the web in the background.