The Stack Overflow Podcast

As part of an effort to work with students at college and universities, Stack Overflow is partnering with Major League Hacking (MLH) to recruit our first cohort of Student Ambassadors . These folks will represent us on campus and lead the way in tackling challenges, earning rewards, and planning out the future of the program.  Our pizza fund events are open to students in the US and Canada, and Gl...

AssemblyAI is an AI-as-a-service provider focused on speech-to-text and text analysis. Their mission is to make it easy for developers and product teams to incorporate state-of-the-art AI technology into the solutions they’re building. Their customers include Spotify, the Dow Jones, The Wall Street Journal , and the BBC. Need AI to run semantic analysis on your forum comments or automatically prod...

For those not familiar with the MX series, you can read more about the different versions, including the mechanical one, here . If you don't know about Cassidy's passion for keyboards, you can check out her website here or listen to a previous episode diving deep into the details of mechanical keyboards here . Stayed tuned for episode #2, airing next week, when we'll be digging deeper into the sci...

You can find a great essay on AI helping students, and what that means for their teachers, here . Here's a piece on W4 Games plans to monetize the Godot engine. Snap says it now has one million subscribers for its Snapchat+ offering. There were no fresh lifeboats badges this week, so shoutout to Jemo for being awarded the Great Question badge. They asked: What's the difference between thread and c...

ReleaseHub provides on-demand environments for development, staging, and production. Every developer knows that environments can be a bottleneck, so ReleaseHub’s mission is to empower developers to share their ideas with the world more quickly and easily, sidestepping what Tommy calls “the big bottlenecks in development.” As CTO of TrueCar , Tommy was leading an effort to rebuild that company’s te...

What do companies want to gain through monitoring software—and what do they, and their employees, stand to lose? Read more . In Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World , Cal Newport makes the point that our world isn’t geared toward deep, focused, flow-state work; instead, it rewards the appearance of busyness. Workers who see their keystrokes or mouse movements tracked are like...

Varun is the cofounder and CTO of AKASA , which develops purpose-built AI and automation solutions for the healthcare industry. Building a physics simulator for a robot helicopter as a student at Stanford helped Varun connect his interests in physics, machine learning, and AI. Check out that project here . His instructor? Andrew Ng. Along with Ng, Varun was lucky to connect with some brilliant AI...

Learn why some companies are moving AI and ML data and models off the cloud and back on premises. Oxide is a rack-scale server with tightly integrated hardware and software. Cofounder and Chief Product Officer Jessie Frazelle was an early core maintainer of Docker. You can find her on GitHub or LinkedIn . Check out FauxPilot , a locally hosted version of GitHub Copilot . It’s no secret that Instag...

Born and raised in China, Liam arrived in the US to attend the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied human-computer interaction . After some initial “culture shock” at the differences between his education in China and the “open and innovative” Berkeley environment, Liam thrived. After graduating, he worked at LinkedIn before returning to China to found a startup called Zaihui , o...

Since the day a hiring manager first wheeled a whiteboard into a conference room, software engineers have dreaded the technical interview, which can be an all-day process (or multi-day homework assignment). If you’re interviewing for multiple roles, you can expect to write out a bubble sort in pseudocode for each one. These technical interviews do no favors for hiring companies, either, because th...

Heather is a General Partner at OSS Capital , which provides VC backing to seed-stage COSS (commercial open source) startups. Her law practice focuses on intellectual property and open-source licensing, and she serves on the IEEE-ISTO Board of Directors. Connect with Heather on LinkedIn or explore her work on her website . Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user keshlam for their answer to the questio...

Spencer was one of the original creators of open-source, cross-platform image editing software GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) , authored while he was still in college. He went on to spend a decade at Google, plus two years as CTO of Viewfinder, later acquired by Square. In 2014, he cofounded Cockroach Labs to back his creation CockroachDB , a cloud-native distributed SQL database. Database...

DoNotPay offers more than 250 “automated justice” services in every US state, from suing robo-callers to annulling marriages to fighting eviction. It earned Joshua the title “ Robin Hood of the internet .” DoNotPay leverages AI and ML solutions, including GPT-3 , to shape and refine its decision trees. Read about how DoNotPay is helping crypto traders who’ve lost money file suit against fallen lea...

A coding error reportedly caused the massive outage at Canadian telecom company Rogers that affected more than 10 million customers—a quarter of Canada’s population. In a rut? Hacker News has some advice for climbing out. (Hint: More screen time won’t help.) The Verge reports on how Starlink and other companies that provide internet connectivity through low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites are shaping...

Bigeye is a data observability platform that helps teams measure, improve, and communicate data quality clearly at any scale. Explore more on their YouTube channel . Bigeye cofounders Kyle Kirwan and Egor Gryaznov met at Uber, where Kyle worked on data and Egor was a staff engineer. Kyle and Egor made a clean break with Uber before founding Bigeye, eager to avoid even the appearance of an Anthony...

San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed says a seismic shift (definitely not an exodus) is underway as tech workers continue working from home and companies like Salesforce (the city’s largest private employer) reduce office space. Breed says San Francisco lost $400 million in tax revenue in 2021, as companies shuttered offices or moved to other cities. San Francisco offices haven’t been this empty sin...

Multitudes helps managers and CTOs create happier, higher-performing teams, using data they already have. Multitudes is focused on software development teams to start, but their bigger vision is to make it easier for any manager to understand and improve their teams’ culture and performance. “Developers in our audience have expressed skepticism or dismay in the past about software that tracks perf...

Pokémon GO is six years old (it makes us feel old, too).  Check out NoobBoy , the Game Boy emulator. Need more nineties nostalgia? You can still play DOOM on almost anything . What kind of game could you build with PowerPoint? Two game developers go head-to-head over 24 hours to show you: Watch the video . Did you know a moose can dive 20 feet deep and swim faster than Michael Phelps? It’s true ....

Today's episode is sponsored by Opentext. You can learn more about their information management solutions here . You can find out more about Claire and here career on her LinkedIn . Opentext has a fascinating history. It began as an academic project at the University of Waterloo. The researchers were looking to digitize the Oxford English Dictionary, and created an early search engine, similar to...

Anvil is an open-source web framework for building full-stack applications entirely in Python. Ready to dig deeper into code completion? Check out Meredydd’s talk at PyCon 2022 (he even built a code completion engine live on stage).  ICYMI: Listen to our previous episode with Meredydd about countering the complexity of web programming: Full-stack web programming with nothing but Python .  Connect...

The GPU shortage is (allegedly) over! Read about it at The Verge . Learn how low code demands more creativity from developers . On the job market? Don’t be afraid to turn the tables on your interviewer . This week’s tech recs: Help foster more equitable compensation conversations by taking Devocate’s Developer Relations Compensation Survey . Cal.com offers scheduling infrastructure for anyone and...

Devraj Varadhan is the SVP of Engineering at Ripple , which provides crypto and blockchain solutions for businesses. Ripple’s mission is to provide practical access to investment tools that can deliver economic freedom for unbanked and underbanked people around the world. Plenty of companies have pressed pause on recruitment efforts, but Ripple is hiring .  Before working at Ripple, Dev spent 15 y...

Episode notes Before joining Stack, Jody spent time at Pluralsight and AWS Training, two roles that helped him to understand the growing market for online educational self-taught developers. We interviewed his former colleagues at AWS training in this episode . Enjoy the frustration of debugging your own code. Maybe you it brings you eustress ? Ben does not experience this, nor does he like the cl...

If you want to dive deeper on lucrative skills, you can read a blog post Mike wrote for us last month. If you want to learn more about Mike's background and career, check out his LinkedIn . Mike was previously on the blog and podcast discussing Skillsoft research about the certifications that are most in demand for top paying roles. You can read up on that and listen to his earlier interview here...

Episode notes An interesting podcast episode on the multiple delays that have kept Ethereum from its long-anticipated merge and kicked the difficulty bomb down the road. Since we recorded, more news broke about delaying the boom. How to Find Open Source Projects to Contribute https://www.codetriage.com/ https://www.coss.community/ https://goodfirstissue.dev/ A pretty cool write up on the creation...