The Stack Overflow Podcast

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...

Huge thanks to the more than 73,000 devs from 180 countries who spent 15 minutes each completing our 2022 Developer Survey . This year’s survey was longer than usual, since we wanted to ask about new topics as well as provide a historical throughline to understand how your responses have changed over the years . Among the takeaways from the survey: 2022 saw a 10% jump in how many folks are learnin...

GitHub Copilot is now available to all developers . There’s also the GitHub Copilot Labs extension for Visual Studio Code, which has some neat tricks up its sleeve.  Yes, Copilot is impressive; no, it’s not gunning for your job. ICYMI, check out our blog post exploring whether AI is poised to steal our livelihoods: The robots are coming for (the boring parts of) your job . Mullvad VPN is removing...

RIP Internet Explorer (1995-2022), “ a good tool to download other browsers .” Bummer epitaph, but the meme stands. Netlify ’s unified web development workflow has out-of-this-world benefits for developer experience. Learn more by watching A Tale of Web Development in Two Universes . Netlify recently announced Netlify Edge Functions , a fully serverless runtime environment. Here’s what that means...

Docs for Devs: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing can be found here. Jared worked as a technical writer at Google for more than 14 years and recently transitioned to Waymo, the self-driving car company spun out under the Alphabet umbrella. You can find him on Twitter and LinkedIn . Zachary has been a technical writer at GitHub and the Linux Foundation, and now works as a staff technica...

WWDC22 was last week (check out Apple’s highlights here ). Among the most exciting demonstrations: passkeys , a new approach to authentication with the potential to finally replace passwords altogether.  Apple also announced enhancements to Swift , its programming language, and a new flagship processor, the M2 chip . Now that iMessage users will be able to edit or even unsend text messages after t...

  Ever since personal information started flowing into applications on the web, securing that information has become more and more important. General security and privacy frameworks like ISO-27001 and PCI provide guidance in securing systems. Now the law has gotten involved with the European Union’s GDPR and California’s CPRA. More laws are on the way, and these laws (and the frameworks) are chang...