The Stack Overflow Podcast

When Robinhood went down at the beginning of March, many speculated it might have been caused by the extra  day, February 29th. This is a leap year after all. Robinhood blamed the outage on an unprecedented spike in usage. Either way, it go us thinking about time.  For example, Postgres has a great understanding of time as a database. Like, it really knows all the different things that happened go...

Sara reveals that she won a $500 gift card at a MongoDB hackathon, building an app that removed mustaches from people's pictures.  This was many years ago, and no we were not paid in JetBlue gift cards to have Eliot on the show, although MongoDB is a client of Stack Overflow in other areas. Mongo comes from humongous, cause, ya know, scale. That, plus HumongousDB.com was already taken and is a rea...

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...

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 Cree...

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...

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 te...

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 sto...

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 a...

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...

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...

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 , initi...

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 w...

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 H...

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 , an...

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 ru...

  Part 1 The 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 operatio...

Part 1 Paul 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 Noteboo...

SHOW NOTES Part 1 (0:00-9:58) the crew discusses Google's declaration of Quantum Supremacy and tries to wrap their mind around qubits and superpositions. Ben mangles the pronunciation of ASP.net, Sara finds a name for her new pet snake, and Paul wonders how JFK would have pronounced quantum. Also, updates on the Stack Overflow helicopter. From our Physics and Quantum Computing Stack Exchanges:  Is...

Chloe Condon has a great post about how she created her medication reminder app and an official endorsement from Smash Mouth .  You can find some writing from Iheanyi Ekechukwu on our blog here and you can find his podcast here .  Learn about the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 . It’s not funny so don’t laugh.    Decades old code is putting millions of critical devices at risk . Should we be regulati...

Tilde Club : It’s your chance to LARP as a 70s sys admin!  What you do on your computer is your business. Don’t be tricked by scammers . Paul makes the mistake of sharing his Anxiety Box on This American Life Sara’s favorite Kanye tweet is available, beautifully framed, for only $75.  cKeys is an amazing Seattle non-profit that teaches folks how to make their own keyboards! When we recorded this e...

Is it legal for source code containing undefined behavior to crash the compiler? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57652799/is-it-legal-for-source-code-containing-undefined-behavior-to-crash-the-compiler True, you’re the boss, and the compiler works for you. But that doesn’t mean it always behaves just as you instructed. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. https://stackoverflow.com/questions...

In this episode, Host Jon Skeet takes the reins along with Jay, Jess, Ilana, and special guests Casey Ashenhurst (SO Inclusion Manager & Senior People Ops Partner) and Cassie Montrose (SO Executive Assistant) to chat about hitting a million rep on Stack Overflow; Jon's thoughts on feminism and inclusion and how those have evolved over the years; and a rant about a regrettable Applebee's experi...

Happy Holidays from The Stack Overflow Podcast! On today's episode: Winter Bash 2017 details are revealed, Abby Reads Nice Tweets, and we ponder the questionable morality behind Santa's favorite narc, The Elf on the Shelf. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Today's hijinks include: Talking about engineering management (and pranks)with Ben Kamens; discussing a new study on how to ask a question on Stack Overflow, and chatting way too much about Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Today's episode is a real scream. Recorded in a haunted house, this week's host is longtime podcast friend Anil Dash, joined by Fog Creek's Jenn Schiffer, Stack Overflow engineering manager Matt Sherman, news editor Ilana Yitzhaki, and executive producer Kaitlin Pike. Special guest is Leon Young of Cogniss. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://ar...