The Stack Overflow Podcast

Astro is a site builder that lets you use the frontend tools you already love (React, Vue, Svelte, and more) to build content-rich, performant websites.  Astro extracts your UI into smaller, isolated components (“islands”) and replaces unused JavaScript with lightweight HTML for faster loads and time-to-interactive (TTI). Ben and Nate explain why Astro’s compiler was written in Go (“seemed like fu...

In complex service-oriented architectures, failure can happen in individual servers and containers, then cascade through your system. Good engineering takes into account possible failures. But how do you test whether a solution actually mitigates failures without risking the ire of your customers? That’s where chaos engineering comes in, injecting failures and uncertainty into complex systems so y...

In a win for accessibility, GitHub Copilot now responds to voice commands , allowing developers to code using their voices. Speaking of accessibility, learn how Santa Monica Studio worked with disabled gamers and the community to build accessibility into God of War Ragnarök . The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has determined that lab-grown meat is safe to eat . Looking for some high-quality...

First, some self-administered back-patting for the Stack Overflow editorial team: great engineering blogs give tech companies an edge ( The New York Times says so).  Hiring aside, engineering blogs are fresh sources of knowledge, insight, and entertainment for anyone working in tech. You can learn a lot from, for instance, blog posts that break down an outage or security incident and detail how en...

At an SaaS company like Intuit that has hundreds of services spread out across multiple products, maintaining development velocity at scale means baking some of the features that every service needs into the architecture of their systems. That’s where a service mesh comes in. It automatically adds features like observability, traffic management, and security to every service in the network without...

There is a ton of great research to be found on Prof. Kapfhammer's website, including:  Flaky Tests : Finding and fixing unpredictable and harmful test cases Database Testing : Automatically testing relational database schemas Web Testing : Detecting and repairing poor responsive web page layout We've written a bit about how Stack Overflow is upping its unit testing game and how you can evaluate m...

Juri is currently Director of Developer Experience (Global) and Director of Engineering (Europe) at Nrwl , founded by former Googlers/Angular core team members Jeff Cross and Victor Savkin. Nrwl has compiled everything you need to know about monorepos, plus the tools to build them, here . Connect with Juri on LinkedIn or explore his website . Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner penguin2718 for their...

Any large organization with multiple products faces the challenge of keeping their brand identity unified without denying each product its own charisma. That’s where a design system can help developers avoid reinventing the wheel every time, say,  a new button gets created  On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Demian Borba, Principal Product Manager, and Kelvin Nguyen, Senior Eng...

LogRocket helps software teams create better experiences through a combination of session replay, error tracking, and product analytics. LogRocket’s machine-learning layer, Galileo , cuts through the noise generated by conventional error monitoring and analytics tools to identify critical issues affecting users. LogRocket is hiring, so check out their open roles or connect with Matt Arbesfeld on L...

Adobe closed out 2022 and celebrated 40 years with an employee-only Katy Perry concert . Related: Ceora makes the case for virtual concerts. DeepMind is teaching AI to play soccer , which naturally makes us think of QWOP . ICYMI: Ghost calls out Substack and Substack responds . BeReal is the iPhone app of the year . But not even Resident Youth Ceora knows anyone who actually uses it. Some 2023 rec...

Over the past five years, Intuit went through a total cloud transformation—they closed the data centers, built out a modern SaaS development environment, and got cloud native with foundational building blocks like containers and Kubernetes. Now they are looking to continue transforming into an AI-driven organization that leverages the data they have to make their customers’ lives easier. Along the...

If you want to read more about Jessica, you can check out the blog we worked on together for the launch of our Overflow Offline initiative. If you've ever wondered what it's like learning to code from an XML file of raw Stack Overflow data, be sure to check this episode out. You can learn more about the Supreme Court case that led to Jessica's release here . Her company's mission is to build a bet...

You can learn more about Anthony here . His favorite terminal tool at the moment is Warp , which describes itself as "a blazingly fast, Rust-based terminal reimagined from the ground up to work like a modern app."  His personal website features a live chat function. Sometimes it's actually Tony, sometimes it's just a bot.  No lifeboat badge today. We''ll be taking a break for the holidays and will...

Ben asks Matt to explain Mastodon to him like he’s five. Matt says the experience feels a lot like…LinkedIn? Matt explains that he took social media apps off his phone for a while…just to chill out. ( Ed. note, they're already back on .) We cover the latest AI to emerge that can write essays, jokes, and yes, some code. While everyone’s confused about the state of social media and AI chat, physicis...

Steve was working as an engineering manager at ShopStyle and found that an increasing amount of his team's time was spent working on custom requests from departments like marketing and sales. They tried moving to a headless CMS but the data and components couldn't keep up with ever evolving needs. They wanted a drag and drop system connected to their code, data, and components. This pain point ins...

SPONSORED BY COMMERCE LAYER Around the world, billions of people can sell their wares online, in part thanks to solutions that handle the complexities of securely and reliably managing transactions. Businesses, large and small, can sell directly to customers. But a lot of these ecommerce services provide a heavier surface than many need by managing product catalogs and requiring inflexible interfa...

Webpack has been king for several years. Vercel wants folks to embrace Turbopack, but their claims about speed raised a lot of backlash after it was first announced. Lee explains why he thinks the Rust-based approach will ultimately be a big benefit to developers and how organizations who are deeply ingrained with existing tools can safely and incrementally migrate to what is, for now, a very Alph...

You can learn more about Andrew, from building out a telco in Canada to cyber security at Deloitte, on his LinkedIn . Validation Cloud bills itself as the world’s fastest node infrastructure and cites networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Binance as clients it supports. Learn more at the company’s website here . The company announced the launch of it's latest product, Javelin , earlier today. Shout...

Data show's Silicon Valley's share of new startup funding deals dropped below 20% for the first time. What does it mean to experiment with big changes to an engineering org, in public and in real time? SBF would like the chance to explain himself . Today's lifeboat badge goes to CodeCaster for explaining: What is E in floating point? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California P...

Srivastava reflects on his upbringing in India, learning to write Assembly, and going to Stanford University to complete his Ph. D in computer science. He shares his early career experiences at big tech names like Yahoo!, Google, Twitter, and Google. The group reflects on some of the engineering challenges at Patreon including technical debt, migrations to open source services, and troubleshooting...

Cami and Cassidy take us down memory lane, sharing how they got into computer science together, hosted a web series (and still podcast together sometimes ), and overlapped at two jobs together. We discuss the technologies being used to build in/for the Metaverse like  Horizon Workroom ,  Presence Platform , Insights SDK , and of course, React .  Cami shares how object and scene recognition work in...

SPONSORED BY PLURALSIGHT Early in the days of high-traffic web pages and apps, any engineer operating the infrastructure would have a server room where one or more machines served that app to the world. They named their servers lovingly, took pictures, and watched them grow. The servers were pets. But since the rise of public cloud and infrastructure as code, servers have become cattle—you have as...

Over the years Homebrew, an open source package manager, has emerged as the project with the greatest number of individual contributors. Despite all that, it’s creator Max Howell, couldn’t make a living off the occasional charity of the millions of people who used the software he built. This XKCD cartoon is probably the most frequently repeated joke on the podcast over the last three years. While...

Eric explains that great jobs are available for developers in Japan, but it can be tough to find these opportunities. We talk about interesting startups that are gaining traction in the Japanese tech sector (like Visual Alpha , Treasure Data , and Exawizards , to name a few examples of companies on the Japan Dev platform). Matt is impressed to learn Japan Dev generates an average of $60,000/month...

Episode notes: The team questions whether a print out of 60-90 days worth of code is the right benchmark for whether to lay someone off.  Ben gives our podcast  listeners a heads up to reports of repo jacking on GitHub (who got ahead of the issue quickly ). We reflect on whether or not we’re okay with generative AI—and question tradeoffs between copyright and the ability for more people to create...