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The Stack Overflow Podcast
For more than a dozen years, the Stack Overflow Podcast has been exploring what it means to be a software developer and how the art and practice of programming is changing our world. From Rails to React, from Java to Node.js, join the Stack home team for conversations with fascinating guests to help you understand how technology is made and where it’s headed.
From startup to Google and back again
Sean hosts Partially Redacted, a podcast about data privacy, security, and compliance.He also hosts the podcast Software Engineering Daily, which features technical interviews on everything from the ethics of GPTs to cloud-native search and WebAssembly. Start with the recent episode Surviving ChatGPT with Christian Hubicki (of Survivor fame).You can also read about how he crowdsourced a behavioral model for Survivor.Sean spent four years working in developer relations (DevRel) at Google. Here’s a Software Engineering Daily episode about the role DevRel plays at Google.Connect with Sean on LinkedIn or Twitter (I mean, X), or check out his website.Kudos to Great Question badge winner Kai Sellgren for asking How to remove an element from a vector given the element?.
30:0601/08/2023
Behind the scenes with the folks building OverflowAI
You can learn more about OverflowAI and sign up to be an alpha tester here.You can check out Ellen and Jody on Linkedin. Congrats to Ben Lindsay, who was awarded a Lifeboat badge for his answer to: How can I divide each element in a tuple by a single integer?
23:0328/07/2023
How the Python team is adapting the language for an AI future
Pablo is a Python core developer, Steering Council member, and release manager of Python 3.10 and 3.11. He’s currently a senior software engineer at Bloomberg.Looking for a comprehensive guide to contributing to Python? The Python Developer’s Guide is the place to start.The Zen of Python is a list of the language’s guiding principles, including, “There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it.”Find Pablo on LinkedIn, Twitter, and GitHub.Find Kyle, a senior software engineer on Stack Overflow’s public platform, on Linked, Twitter, and GitHub.
19:1725/07/2023
What it's like to be on the Python Steering Council
Pablo is a Python core developer, Steering Council member, and release manager of Python 3.10 and 3.11. He splits this work 50/50 with his day job as a senior software engineer at Bloomberg.An astrophysicist by training, he did his PhD on rotating black holes.Whether you’re a new contributor or a seasoned veteran, the Python Developer’s Guide is a comprehensive guide to contributing to Python.Pablo is on LinkedIn, Twitter, and GitHub.Kyle is also on Linked, Twitter, and GitHub.Shoutout to Inquisitive Badge winner trever for asking well-received questions on 30 separate days.
19:4221/07/2023
How AI can help your business, without the hallucinations
DoIT’s sales pitch is simple: they provide technology and expertise to clients who want to use the cloud, free of charge, with the big cloud providers paying the bills.You can check out Sascha’s writing on machine learning on his Medium blog. Connect with him on LinkedIn or subscribe to his YouTube channel.
23:2819/07/2023
How ICs can get recognition for their work on big projects
Cat’s research centers on the socio-cognitive factors and processes that help people learn and succeed. In her role as director of Pluralsight Flow’s Developer Success Lab, she studies what makes software teams thrive and shares that research with the community so teams can learn from her findings.In a recent report, the Dev Success Lab explored how visibility can encourage higher-performing teams and better business outcomes.Pluralsight is an education platform for software developers. Pluralsight Flow, their software delivery intelligence platform, is designed to eliminate developer friction and wasted time.Cat is on LinkedIn and Twitter.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is Kent Kostelac, who gave a terrific answer to One-line if-else in C#.
26:5518/07/2023
How terrifying is giving a conference talk?
ICYMI, listen to our episode with Agile pioneer Jim Highsmith: The meeting that changed how we build software (Ep. 579).Explore Connell’s website or his talks.Connell will be speaking at DDD East Midlands again this year: October 7, 2023 (with apologies to our British listeners for the date format). He’s also on GitHub, Twitter, and Stack Overflow (naturally).Thanks to Connell for answering his own question: Why does this SelectMany perform several SQL queries instead of a single join?.
18:1614/07/2023
Jamstack is evolving toward a composable web
Netlify’s all-in-one development platform gives devs access to build, deploy, and backend services for websites and web apps. Get started with their docs.Jamstack is a web development architecture based on JavaScript, APIs, and Markup (the JAM in Jamstack). Learn what Jamstack is and what benefits it offers.Composable architecture has been called “the next big thing” in web development. Netlify defines it as “a development approach [that] provides the ability to more rapidly build technology stacks by making use of logically separated reusable and customizable components.”Dana is on LinkedIn.Warm congrats to Lifeboat badge winner hasectic saif, who rescued the question How can I print to standard error in C with 'printf'? from an answerless void.
21:2511/07/2023
From Sims to supercycle?
VerseProp is a digital real estate platform where users can buy, sell, and rent virtual properties.New to the concept of digital real estate? The Motley Fool has a useful primer for you.If you need to brush up on your investment terms, a supercycle is “a sustained period of expansion, usually driven by robust growth in demand for products and services.”Joel is on LinkedIn.Will is on LinkedIn.Follow VerseProp on Twitter, where the team welcomes questions.Today’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to Omar, for helping 44,000 people and counting with their answer to Event handlers on Message box buttons.
31:0507/07/2023
Developers use AI tools, they just don’t trust them
Our 2023 Developer Survey explored AI’s benefits for developers. Read about the results here.For more WWDC talk, listen to our episode from last month: Chatting with Apple at WWDC: Macros in Swift and the new visionOS (Ep. 578).Squarespace is acquiring Google Domains.Congratulations to Bruno Brant, who won a Lifeboat badge for answering Where can I view LINQ source code?.
24:1104/07/2023
Making computer science more humane at Carnegie Mellon
While he’s been the dean of the School of Computer Science since 2019, Martial started his career at Carnegie Mellon University way back in 1984. Ben covered LIDAR inventor Velodyne while at the Verge, while Martial has LIDAR’s ancestor, the laser rangefinder, which was state of the art in 1986. Martial’s area of research is in computer vision and perception for autonomous systems. Since 1985, he’s been a part of 388 publications. Congrats to Lifeboat winner mx0 for their answer to the question “How to use a reserved keyword in pydantic model?”
27:2830/06/2023
Improving the developer experience in the energy sector
Software might not be top of mind when you think of an energy company like Shell, but software engineering powers a lot of what they do. The tech stack includes React, Golang, Python, GraphQL, MongoDB, Kafka, and the list goes on. The experience their developers have at work is a priority for the organization and its leaders. Episode notes:Find out why others have joined Shell. If you want to experience what being a developer at one of the world’s largest energy companies looks like, they’re hiring.You can connect with Abhai on LinkedIn. Congrats to this episode’s lifeboat badge winner, CertainPerformance, for their answer to Convert different strings to snake_case in JavaScript. You saved the question and got some shinies for your profile.
21:5128/06/2023
The cofounder of Chef is cooking up a less painful DevOps
Adam is the cofounder and former CTO of Chef, which provides DevOps automation tools that help configure, deploy, and manage application infrastructure, including security and compliance.Adam’s new venture, System Initiative, reimagines infrastructure-as-code as collaborative, open-source software. See what they’re up to on their blog, starting with Adam’s article DevOps without papercuts.If you’re interested in playing with a developer build of System Initiative, submit your information here. You can also join System Initiative on Discord (and keep an eye on their open positions).Connect with Adam on LinkedIn or Twitter.
25:3227/06/2023
Throwing away the script on testing
Sofy is a no-code test automation platform for mobile apps. SofySense is their OpenAI-powered AI assistant. See what they’re up to on their blog or check out their open roles.One of the biggest challenges in testing is deciding whether to use mock or live data. Interested in reading about how Stack Overflow is building up our test coverage?Syed is on LinkedIn.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Todd A. Jacobs for interceding between the question How can I check whether a string is an integer in Ruby? and the relentless march of time.
21:0623/06/2023
Stress test your code as you write it
CodiumAI plugs into your IDE and suggests meaningful test suites as you code. See what they’re up to on their blog or scope out their open roles. You can also follow them on Twitter.Connect with Kyle on Linked, Twitter, or GitHub.Connect with Itamar on LinkedIn.Today’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to Héctor M. for answering Convert a string to a Boolean in C#. Thanks for spreading some knowledge.
24:5920/06/2023
Pair Programming? We peek under the hood of Duet, Google’s coding assistant.
Interested in trying Duet? You can get on the waitlist here.You can learn more about tuning and deploying your own version of Google’s foundation models in their Generative AI studio.If tuning your own model sounds overwhelming, you can head to Model Garden, where a wide selection of open-source and third-party models are available to try.Marcos is on LinkedIn.
27:2916/06/2023
The meeting that changed how we build software
Jim is a pioneering software developer who was one of 17 original signatories to the Agile Manifesto. His first engineering job was on a little NASA program you may have heard of: Project Apollo.His latest book is Wild West to Agile: Adventures in software development evolution and revolution; get your copy here.Find Jim on LinkedIn or his website.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is nCod3d for answering How can I find how many useful digits are in any given a number N?. Thanks for spreading some knowledge.
27:5813/06/2023
Chatting with Apple at WWDC: Macros in Swift and the new visionOS
Our guests today are Christopher Thielen, product manager for languages and frameworks at Apple, and Josh Shaffer, a Senior Director of Software at Apple with a focus on Swift frameworks. We discuss the introduction of Swift Macros, improving widgets with App Intents, and some of the new paradigms for crafting apps in visionOS.If you want to get the full picture of all the updates Apple announced for software developers, you can watch this year’s State of the Union or dive into particulars with 175 different videos focused on key elements of the announcements.
22:1709/06/2023
MosaicML: Deep learning models for sale, all shapes and sizes
MosaicML is a platform for training and deploying large AI models at scale. Explore their docs, check out their blog, and keep an eye on their open roles.Jonathan Frankle is the Chief Scientist at MosaicML and an incoming Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvard.Abhinav Venigalla is the NLP Architect at MosaicML.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is singmotor for rescuing How to remove columns with too many missing values in Python from the dustbin of history.
24:2006/06/2023
Balancing a PhD program with a startup career
Rebuy is an AI-powered personalization platform. Check out their developer hub, explore case studies, or keep up with their blog.Cameron is a PhD student in computer science and member of the OptimaLab at Rice University. Autonomous agents are AI-powered programs that can create tasks for themselves in response to a given objective. They “can create tasks for themselves, complete tasks, create new tasks, reprioritize their task list, complete the new top task, and loop until their objective is reached,” according to one beginner’s guide to autonomous agents.Follow Cameron’s work on Twitter or Substack, or his website. Read his publications here.This week’s Lifeboat badge honoree is Mark Setchell for sharing their knowledge with the world: I need to convert a fixed-width file to 'comma-delimited' in Unix.
29:0802/06/2023
This product could help build a more equitable workplace
Joonko is an automated diversity recruiting layer named for Japanese mountain climber Junko Tabei, the first woman to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. You can learn about their talent pool, keep up with their blog, or check out their open positions.ICYMI, read our blog post about how the recent tech layoffs have had a disproportionate impact on women, people of color, and immigrants.Connect with Ilit on LinkedIn.This week’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to pppery for their answer to Why use positional-only parameters in Python 3.8+?.
18:0930/05/2023
How the creator of Angular is dehydrating the web
Angular is an open-source web framework used by millions of developers. Explore the Angular community. Miško is currently CTO at Builder, an API-driven, drag-and-drop headless CMS with a visual editor. Explore their docs or see what they’re up to on their blog.Builder’s full-stack web framework is Qwik, which just reached 1.0.Let Miško walk you through why Hydration is Pure Overhead.ICYMI, listen to our episode with Builder CEO Steve Stewell.Connect with Miško on LinkedIn, Twitter, or GitHub. You can also check out his website.This week’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to ORION for their answer to Unicode symbol that represents "download".
27:3426/05/2023
For those who just don't Git it
Pierre-Étienne’s interest in computing began with the functional programming language OCaml, created by Xavier Leroy. Before OCaml, Pierre-Étienne explains, “everyone thought functional programming was doomed to be extremely slow.”Pijul is a free, open-source distributed version control system. You can get started here. Want a GitHub-like interface? Find it here.Read the article that led to this conversation: Beyond Git: The other version control systems developers use. Pierre-Étienne is currently working on a new project with the creators of the open-source game engine Godot. We hosted Godot cofounder and lead developer Juan Linietsky on the podcast a few months back; listen here.Nix is a package management and system configuration tool. Learn how it works or explore the NixOS community. Connect with Pierre-Étienne on LinkedIn.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Rachit for answering Passing objects between fragments.
22:3023/05/2023
Building zero tier systems on bare metal
While Mauricio and team had to get back to bare metal, most programmers are headed in the opposite direction. It’s why MIT switched from Scheme to Python. At Stack Overflow, we’re familiar with what happens to websites during physical failures, like hurricanes. Connect with Mauricio on LinkedIn. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner The Nail, who pinned a solid answer on the question, if->return vs. if->else efficiency.
26:4319/05/2023
Great code isn’t enough. Developers need to brag about it
Visit Dagna’s website, theMindfulDev.com, to learn more about her coaching process, which is built around understanding what fulfillment looks like for each client. Dagna is on LinkedIn.You can also connect with Ceora on Twitter or her website.Ryan is also on Twitter, especially when there’s a good AI joke to be shared.Gold star for Lifeboat badge winner JasonHorsleyTech for rescuing the question Installing PHP 7.3 on a new MacBook Pro with the new A1 chip (Apple silicon).
24:0416/05/2023
Stung by OWASP? Chatting with the creator of the most popular web app scanner
Simon is the founder and longtime project lead of OWASP ZAP, an integrated penetration testing tool that helps uncover vulnerabilities in web apps, including compromised authentication, sensitive data exposure, and SQL injection. ZAP is OWASP’s most active project and the world’s most popular web app scanner. Check out other OWASP projects here or explore ZAP’s docs.Check out our blog post on how you can mitigate the ten most-found OWASP vulnerabilities in Stack Overflow C++ snippets.Jit, where Simon is a distinguished engineer, is a DevSecOps platform that allows high-velocity engineering teams to embed security requirements throughout the DevOps workflow. You can explore Jit’s docs here.Today we’re shouting out the question CSP Alerts by OWASP even though CSP header is added, definitively answered by one Simon Bennetts.Simon is on LinkedIn and Twitter.
16:5312/05/2023
A conversation with the folks building Google's AI models
Learn more about Forrest on his website and check out his newsletter. You can follow Paige on Twitter or her LinkedIn.Get on the list to try out some of the new stuff released today here.
25:0710/05/2023
Read the docs? We prefer to chat with them
Cloudflare offers zero-trust security and performance tools for web and SaaS apps.Cloudflare Workers allows devs to deploy serverless code globally to over 285 data centers around the world.Astro is an open-source web framework built for speed. Houston is a bot that lets you chat with their docs.Check out Confbrew, a conference session Q&A bot from Markprompt and Contenda (where Cassidy is CTO). Connect with Brendan on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.Connect with Michael on Twitter.Connect with Fred on LinkedIn.While you’re at it, follow Ceora and Cassidy on Twitter. Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner The Nail for saving if->return vs. if->else efficiency from oblivion.
25:1909/05/2023
Building golden paths for developers
Luca currently heads up product at Humanitec, a platform orchestrator that provides self-service “golden paths” for developers.Get up to speed (or refresh your memory) on what platform engineering involves and what an internal developer platform is.Dynamic configuration management (DCM) is a methodology for configuring compute workloads.Stop by the Platform Engineering Slack channel.Hear from top DevOps and platform engineering leaders at PlatformCon 2023, a virtual event held June 8-9.Find Luca on LinkedIn and Twitter.Cheers to Lifeboat badge winner Devart for rescuing How can I show the table structure in SQL Server query? from the dustbin of history.
24:1005/05/2023
When AI meets IP: Can artists sue AI imitators?
Ben and Ceora talk through some thorny issues around AI-generated music and art, explain why creators are suing AI companies for copyright infringement, and compare notes on the most amusing/alarming AI-generated content making the rounds (Pope coat, anyone?).Episode notes:Getty Images is suing the company behind AI art generator Stable Diffusion for copyright infringement, accusing the company of copying 12 million images without permission or compensation to train its AI model.Meanwhile, a group of artists is suing the companies behind Midjourney, DreamUp, and Stable Diffusion for “scraping and collaging” their work to train AI models. One of those artists, Sarah Anderson, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about seeing her comics gobbled up by AI models and regurgitated as far-right memes.Speaking of copyright violations, did Vanilla Ice really steal that hook from David Bowie and Freddie Mercury? (Yes.)Check out the AI model trained on Kanye’s voice that sounds almost indistinguishable from Ye himself.Read The Verge’s deep dive into the intersection of AI-generated music and IP/copyright laws.Watch the AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti that’s been called “the natural end point for AI development.”ICYMI: The Pope coat was real in our hearts.Columbia University’s Data Science Institute recently wrote about how blockchain can give creators more control over their IP, now that AI-generated art is clearly here to stay.Congrats to today’s Lifeboat badge winner, herohuyongtao, for answering How can I add a prebuilt static library in a project using CMake?.
22:3002/05/2023
How a top-ranked engineering school reimagined CS curriculum
Olin College of Engineering has one of the top-ranked undergrad engineering programs in the US. Its computing curriculum is a concentration within the engineering major, not a standalone major. The upshot is a liberal arts-informed course of study with fewer math and theory requirements than a typical CS degree and a greater emphasis on practical, job-ready skills like code quality, testing, and documentation. To learn more about how software design is taught at Olin, explore the course.Andrew Mascillaro is a senior at Olin majoring in electrical and computer engineering. He’s currently a software engineering intern at Tableau. You can find him on LinkedIn.Steve Matsumoto is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Olin; his academic interests include crypto and cybersecurity. You can find him on GitHub or through his website.
23:5928/04/2023
Is this the AI renaissance?
Prosus, one of the world’s largest tech investors, acquired Stack Overflow in 2021.Check out the annual State of AI Report from Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth.Read our CEO’s recent post on Stack Overflow’s approach to Generative AI.Connect with Paul on LinkedIn. Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is suvayu for their answer to How to put a big centered "Thank You" in a LaTeX slide.
35:3625/04/2023
When setting up monitoring, less data is better
Akita is a monitoring and observability platform that watches API traffic live and automatically infers endpoint structure.Jean, who comes from a family of computer scientists, earned a PhD from MIT and taught in the CS department at Carnegie Mellon University before founding Akita.Read Jean’s post on the Stack Overflow blog: Monitoring debt builds up faster than software teams can pay it off.Jean is on LinkedIn and Twitter.Congrats are in order for Stellar Question badge winner legendary_rob for asking Adding a favicon to a static HTML page.
29:4521/04/2023
Ops teams are pets, not cattle (ep. 556)
A common refrain you’ll hear these days is that servers should be scaled out, easy to replace, and interchangeable—cattle, not pets. But for the ops folks who run those servers the opposite is true. You can’t just throw any of them into an incident where they may not know the stack or system and expect everything to work out. Every operator has a set of skills that they’ve built up through research or experience, and teams should value them as such. They’re people, not pets, and certainly not cattle—you can’t just get a new one when you burn out your existing ones. On this episode of the podcast—sponsored by Chronosphere—we talk with Paige Cruz, Senior Developer Advocate at Chronosphere, about how teams can reduce the cognitive load on ops, the best ways to prepare for inevitable failures, and where the worst place to page Paige is. Episode notes:Chronosphere provides an observability platform for ops people, so naturally, the company has an interest in the happiness of those people. If you’re interested in the history of the pets vs. cattle concept , this covers it pretty well. Previously, we spoke with the CEO of Chronosphere about making incidents easier to manage. We’ve covered this topic on the blog before, and two articles came up during our conversation with Paige. You can connect with Paige on Twitter, where she has a pretty apropos handle. Congrats to Stellar Question badge winner Bruno Rocha for asking How can I read large text files line by line, without loading them into memory?, which at least 100 users liked enough to bookmark.
23:2519/04/2023
We bought a university: how one coding school doubled down on brick and mortar
Alura is a Portuguese-language edtech platform where users can learn programming, backend and mobile development, data science, design and UX, DevOps, and more.They started small, grew into a bustling online program, then purchased a majority stake in FIAP, a private university in São Paulo, Brazil. Paulo and Stack Overflow Director of Engineering Roberta Arcoverde cohost a popular Portuguese-language podcast about programming, design, startups, and technology.Paulo’s new open-source project is full of career resources for T-shaped developers.Connect with Alura CEO Paulo Silveira on LinkedIn.Connect with Alura Chief Education Officer Guilherme Silveira on LinkedIn.Connect with Roberta Arcoverde on LinkedIn.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is netblognet for their answer to Get JSON object from URL.
21:4118/04/2023
The philosopher who believes in Web Assembly
Fermyon offers serverless cloud computing. Spin is their developer tool for building WebAssembly microservices and web applications; check it out on GitHub.Like past podcast guest David Hsu of Retool (and yours truly), Matt earned a degree in the humanities before deciding to prioritize his “side gig” in tech.Follow Fermyon on GitHub. Matt is on LinkedIn.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner keineahnung2345 for saving Hamming distance between two strings in Python from the dustbin of time.
25:1314/04/2023
Going stateless with authorization-as-a-service
Cerbos is an open-source, scalable authorization-as-a-service that aims to make implementing roles and permissions a cinch. Explore their docs or see how their customers are using Cerbos. Stateless applications like Cerbos don’t retain data from previous activities, giving devs predictable plug-and-play functionality across cloud, hybrid, on-prem, and edge instances.Connect with Alex on LinkedIn and Twitter.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Hoopje for rescuing Print in bold on a terminal from the dustbin of history.
22:1411/04/2023
Building an API is half the battle
If you prefer, you can read this as a Q&A article or watch the video.Kong is a cloud-native API platform. The first iteration of an API marketplace Marco and his colleagues built was Mashape.Developments like GraphQL and gRPC have become critical as the number of APIs increases over time.Find Marco on LinkedIn and Twitter.
19:0007/04/2023
From cryptography to consensus: Q&A with CTO David Schwartz on building blockchain apps
Right now, plenty of people are building businesses on social media platforms, on streaming platforms, and on market platforms that they don’t control. That platform can make the rules in any way they want and remove access at any time. That means founders are potentially one step away from losing their livelihood. The same goes for consumers buying from these platforms: if you lose access to your account, there goes all your purchases. As it turns out, you were licensing everything, not buying it. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Ripple CTO David Schwartz about the promise that decentralized trust and distributed consensus has for software development — and for more transparency in ownership. Episode notes:Cross-border payments, while they might not be the sexiest app, are one of the best product-market fits for blockchains. Learn more about Ripple at their home page. Check out the documentation to learn more about building on the XRP Ledger. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, asmeurer, for their answer to What does `S` signify in SymPy?
22:3505/04/2023
From Smalltalk to smart contracts, reflecting on 50 years of programming
Smart contracts aren’t actually new. Computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer Nick Szabo coined the term in 1994 (possibly earlier, depending on who you ask). Old problems seem to keep coming back. Bret Victor gave a talk in 2013 called “The Future of Programming,” where he talked about problems from 1973 that were still relevant. To learn more about the Agoric blockchain, check out their homepage. If you’d rather shape how the blockchain itself operates, much of Agoric’s code is open source. Connect with Dean on Twitter or Telegram
30:3004/04/2023
How to keep the servers running when your Mastodon goes viral
A Principal Engineer at GitHib, Kris is president of the Nivenly Foundation and an admin at Hachyderm, an instance of the decentralized social network powered by Mastodon. The ongoing changes at Twitter have fueled interest in alternative, decentralized platforms like Mastodon and Discord.Read Leaving the Basement, Kris’s post about scaling and migrating Hachyderm out of her basement.Watch Kris’s conversation with DigitalOcean Chief Product Officer Gabe Monroy about building decentralized IT platforms.Find Kris on Twitter, GitHub, Twitch, or YouTube.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner metakeule for answering How can I get an error message in a string in Go?
27:5131/03/2023
The next gen web browser has no tabs, only spaces
Today’s guests from Browser Co. are software engineer Victoria Kirst and design lead Dustin Senos of The Browser CompanyThe Browser Company is building a new kind of browser designed to keep users “focused, organized and in control.” Arc, their browser, is “full of big new ideas about how we should interact with the web” and has been called “the best web browser to come out in the last decade.” For an introduction to and first look at Arc, start with this video. You can also join the waiting list or subscribe to the Substack.Follow The Browser Company on Twitter.Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn or Twitter.Connect with Dustin on LinkedIn or Twitter.Special thanks to Ellis Hamburger, owner of the best username, for facilitating this terrific conversation with Victoria and Dustin.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Todd for answering How can I name a @Service with multiple names in Spring?.
23:2728/03/2023
After crypto’s reality check, an investor remains cautiously optimistic
In his role at SwissOne Capital, Kenny champions investments in Web3 and the metaverse. A writer on all things crypto since 2013, he’s a regular contributor to the US Chamber of Commerce.The collapse of Three Arrows Capital and FTX eroded investor trust in crypto, but Kenny remains “cautiously optimistic” about the market’s future.Connect with Kenny on LinkedIn or Twitter.Congratulations are in order for Lifeboat badge winner xray1986 for their answer to Unicode symbol that represents "download".
20:0624/03/2023
Moving up a level of abstraction with serverless on MongoDB Atlas and AWS
The history of computing has been a story of moving up levels of abstraction: from hard-coding algorithms and directly manipulating memory addresses with assembly languages to using more natural language constructs in high-level general purpose languages to abstracting the hardware of the computer in cloud compute. Now serverless functions take that abstraction even further. We’ve made the algorithms that process data simple and natural; MongoDB wants to do the same for how we persist data. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Andrew Davidson, SVP Products at MongoDB, about how they’re turning a database into a fully-managed service that developers can use in a more natural way. Along the way, we discuss how the cost bottleneck has moved from the storage media to developers’ minds, how greater abstractions can enable developers, and how to get insights from production data faster. Episode notesTry MongoDB Atlas on AWS for free.You can get started with MongoDB Atlas directly from the AWS Marketplace. If you’re at a startup, you can take advantage of their special offer for startups. The community edition of their classic database is available to download as well. If you’re looking to learn a thing or two before diving in, check out MongoDB University. Our thanks to Great Question badge winner Derek 朕會功夫 for asking How can I reverse an array in JavaScript without using libraries? You know the rarest kung fu of all: asking great questions.
26:0822/03/2023
What our engineers learned building Stack Overflow
The inbox improvements were Radek’s graduation project. Not bad for a newbie. Not everyone likes change, and the inbox change was no exception. So we looked into fixing that.Read about what our engineering team learned building and scaling Stack Overflow to support millions of users.Connect with Radek on LinkedIn. Find Cobih on LinkedIn and Twitter.Longtime Stacker Yaakov Ellis is also on LinkedIn.Congrats to user HelloCW on receiving a Socratic Badge for asking a well-received question on 100 separate days and maintaining a positive question record.
21:2621/03/2023
Let’s talk large language models
Our recent Pulse Survey showed how technologists visiting Stack Overflow feel about emergent technologies. The consensus is clear: AI assistants will soon be everywhere, and developers aren’t sure how they feel about that. Check out the podcast here or dive into the blog.Learn more about the emergent abilities of large language models (LLMs). For more on the intersection of AI and academia, listen to our episode with computer science professor Emery Berger or read his essay on how academics are coping with AI that can ace exams and do everyone’s homework.Catch up on the adventures of the worst coder in the world.Congrats to user d1337, whose question How to assign a name to the size() column? won a Stellar Question badge.
24:0717/03/2023
Visible APIs get reused, not reinvented
With so many companies offering API products, it can be hard to get your particular APIs discovered and used by the developers who need them most. You might have the best, most useful solutions out there, but if you’re relying on the digital equivalent of foot traffic for discoverability, it might as well not exist. And if an API solution can’t be found, then someone else is going to reinvent it. On this sponsored episode, we chat with SmartBear API Technical Evangelist Frank Kilcommins about the growing challenges of API visibility and how to outsmart the invisibility trap with the right development strategies and tools. Episode notes:Kilcommins suggests you can get better visibility for your APIs with SmartBear's new free API exploration tool. Open specifications like the Open API Initiative help make your endpoints easier to understand—both by humans and computers. Connect with Frank Kilcommins on Twitter and LinkedIn. Congrats to Stack Overflow user WorstCase, who asked five well-received questions on five separate days and earned themselves a shiny new Curious badge.
27:1215/03/2023
Developers believe AI will soon be everywhere, but aren't sure how to feel about it
You can dive deeper into the research, including some lovely matrix charts, on our blog.Erin has also explored tag trends among our most loved languages and job insights from our community.Learn more about Joy on her LinkedIn.Thanks to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, russbishop, for helping to answer the question: Where is the app content folder in the simulator of Xcode?
20:4914/03/2023
Quiet quitting and loud layoffs
Per one count, more than 280,000 people were laid off from tech jobs in 2022 and the first two months of 2023.What do layoffs have in common with farting at a party? Both are a bad look if you’re the only one doing it.ICYMI: On a recent episode, we talked about how these layoffs are reshaping the job market and where to find software engineering roles outside of tech.Just laid off, or worried you might be? Cohost Ryan Donovan has some advice.Connect with Wesley on LinkedIn.
28:3210/03/2023
From writing code to teaching code
Writing code that runs without errors—and without all the bugs that only show up when the program runs—is hard enough. But teaching others to write code and understand the underlying concepts takes a deeper understanding. Now imagine doing that for 37 courses. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with Bharath Thippireddy, a VIP instructor at Udemy who has taught more than half a million students. We talk about how he went from a humble Java developer to one of Udemy’s top instructors (and a budding movie star!). Along the way, we discuss whether Java or Python is better for beginners and how to balance theory with syntax. Episode notes:Like a lot of today’s content creators, Bharath got his start posting videos on his Youtube channel in 2012.Today, you can find all of Bharath’s courses on his Udemy page.You can find out more about Bharath from his website or connect with him on LinkedIn. Udemy is one of our launch partners for our online course recommendations. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner desertnaut for their answer to What is the meaning of exclamation and question marks in Jupyter Notebook?.
22:2108/03/2023