The Stack Overflow Podcast

When most people talk about Web3 or cryptocurrencies and related technologies, they usually mean blockchains. But blockchain is only the first generation of distributed ledger technology (DLT). As with any new technology, once people see how it works, new generations come along rapidly to address the faults in the previous ones.  On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan chat with Mat...

Shoemaker spent his childhood in Silicon Valley and learned Assembly when he was just 16 years old. In his early 20s, he applied to work at Apple and was continually rejected. So he went to work for seven startups instead. Finally, in 2009, Shoemaker ended up at Apple overseeing the review process for the App Store. After seven years at Apple, Phillip became interested in cryptocurrency after disc...

In today’s podcast, Matt, Ceora, and Cassidy reflect on Cara’s founder journey. Cara shares her experiences living in New York and San Francisco— and why she and her co-founder ultimately located Stashpad in North Carolina. She elaborates on the exact steps that she took to pivot her startup following limited initial interest in V1 of the product. Despite being in the Bay Area and working at Twili...

When Foursquare launched in 2009, the app was consumer facing, letting you know where friends had checked in and what spots might appeal to you. People competed to be the “mayor” of certain locations and built guides to their favorite neighborhoods., The service expanded to allow merchants to offer discounts to frequent guests and track foot traffic in and out of the stores. While you can still us...

The group laughs about setting up JIRA workflows and Trello boards for our family lives—Matt says heck no. Ceora speaks to the power of homelabbing as a way to gain profitable skills.  JJ talks about the VPN system he has running on his phone to access his home network using tools like WireGuard and ZeroTier . Cassidy suggests setting up a personal knowledge base as a second brain (and recommends...

Katzgraber reflects on his time as a university professor up until 2020 and why he switched to working at Amazon. He walks us through a quantum computing challenge that he hosted with BMW, through his role at Amazon (and what real world applications he sees emerging from these types of collaboration experiments). We discuss what inspires him to stay curious — raising the bar for scientific researc...

We got the chance to sit down with Guillermo Ruach, Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel and co-creator of Next. JS, about the news coming out of today's conference. The most interesting was a new product called Turbopack. You can read more about it here .     See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Freund reflects on his early days at Applied Materials , where he worked on a machine that inspected silicon wafers. It was in this early role that Freund gained an appreciation for rigorous software testing protocols in the manufacturing process. At WeWork, Freund was fascinated by the idea of a full stack business, which is a business building itself. While Freund officially launched Wilco in 20...

John explains that Web3 is about the convergence of technology, economics, and social trends. He elaborates that foundations begin with service-based architecture (SOA), the notion of how to design loosely coupled systems that consist of economic services and components. He goes on to explain how DeFi represents this thinking of a loose composition of services. With all of this, blockchain brings...

Having trouble with understanding your team’s productivity outside of frameworks and tooling? Create a backlog and work through it: Instant Agile! How much of that backlog you work through is a good baseline measure.  The Stack Overflow blog recently featured an article from Stack Overflow’s Director of Engineering, Ben Matthews: Does high velocity lead to burnout? That may be the wrong question t...

Before jumping into driverless car talk, Ben shares a heads up about fake jobs at credible companies that are actually phishing scams meant to steal your identity and hijack your bank accounts. Beware the job offer that seems too good to be true! Jon, Cassidy, Ceora, Matt, and Ben reflect on whether they trust software to operate a vehicle . Cassidy tells us that she once sat in a car that parked...

Despite our hope for the power of robotics, the technology is still far from mainstream. That’s because the amount of effort needed to get hardware to do useful things at scale is…well…hard. When Eliot started Viam , his goal was to address this challenge by creating software that supports a range of hardware builds right out of the box. As the company explains - “we’re addressing these issues by...

Ceora and Cassidy talk about why engineers are so good at job hopping — and why it can pay to upgrade roles every year or two. Ceora speaks openly about the privileges of working in tech compared to other industries. Apparently, in some places, it’s a thing for engineers to leave their teams and then rejoin the organization with a promotion to get ahead. Do you boomerang? Cassidy’s husband’s favor...

Matt takes us back to the origins of his open source days and the spark that inspired his love for engineering — including the point at which he discovered Linux. He shares how he began learning from the code itself, which was ultimately a different style of learning than what was available to him at university. Then, it was to the stacks, but not Stack Overflow. Think Barnes and Noble, not YouTub...

Our guests have done most of their ML work on AWS offerings, from AWS Personalize for their initial recommendation engine to SageMaker for model training and deployment pipeline. Now they’re building models from scratch in TensorFlow .  Want to see these recommendations in action? Check out the offerings at Discovery+ and HBOMax .  If you’re a ML/AL data scientist looking to shape the future of au...

Mariann shares how she and her UX research team at Stack Overflow are taking steps to create a more inclusive product experience, while reflecting on her experiences as a mother to a neurodiverse daughter. Wesley talks about what it’s like to be a developer with dyslexia and why self-empathy and self-compassion have been important to his evolution as a senior leader. Ceora explains why it’s import...

Ceora shares her experience representing Auth0 at REFACTR TECH , reflecting on what it was like being back in-person after years of virtual events. Cassidy announces her move to CTO and how her current leadership role at Contenda fits into her career journey and future aspirations as a technologist. Ben talks about Stack Overflow’s Flow State , the first IRL event he’s attended since 2019 and Stac...

Guilo gives building UI components as an example of where software innovation has given him time back: he started building them as static images in Photoshop , then Sketch brought connected, interactive components, and Finally, Figma let you collaborate and build an entire system together.   If you missed any of the previous episodes, you can find them waiting for you here .  Connect with Paolo Pa...

It finally happened. In the words of the Ethereum Foundation, ETH is now “ready for its interstellar voyage,” having transitioned from proof of work to proof of stake. With no centralized authority insisting on a ship date, we’re witnessing a feat. We’re all wondering what comes next.  The Great Debate about hybrid and remote work continues . Is the decentralized talent movement winning? What can...

About three years ago, when our public platform engineering team at Stack started growing, we realized that we needed a more robust formal project management system that could scale with all the creativity coming on board. That’s when we started looking at formal, by-the-book frameworks to empower and coach our teams to their fullest potential. We landed on Agile and Scrum.  Admittedly, our develo...

Like other folks we’ve talked to on the podcast, Chronosphere was born out of work pioneered at Uber. When you can’t find solutions to help you scale, sometimes you have to build them.  Everything in Chronosphere was built from scratch, from the ingestion tier to the query layer. If you’re going to build something cloud native from the ground up, the clear choice for the team was Go .  Cloud nativ...

We dive into some of the ways developers can customize their keyboard with shortcuts, macros, and apps to eliminate repetitive tasks and automate the busywork that stands in the way of bigger, breakthrough innovations.  Flow state can be affected by things as simple as the right lighting, so Logitech created keyboards that automatically adjust their keyboard backlighting .  For those not familiar...

Appsmith is an open-source, low-code platform for building and maintaining internal tools like custom dashboards, admin panels, and, of course, CRUD apps . Watch Arpin’s talk on how a low-cost, low-tech solution can simplify online payments. Arpit isn’t the first engineer we’ve talked to whose career was sparked by the digital pets of the 90s. Listen to Episode #431: Words of wisdom for self-taugh...

Like a lot of good tools, Backstage started as a way to stop using a spreadsheet. They knew it was something worth open-sourcing when conference attendees paid more attention to the tool than the topics of the talks.  Backstage treats docs-like-code , keeping markdown files in the same repo as the code. Down with wikis, up with pull requests! If you want to learn more about Backstage, check out ou...

Show notes If you’re interested in diving deeper into Professor Fritz’s research on developer flow states, check out his list of publications .  Flow states can be affected by things as simple as the right lighting, so Logitech created keyboards that automatically adjust their keyboard backlighting .  Lights can be used to indicate your interruptibility.; Prof. Fritz did some research on FlowLight...