The Stack Overflow Podcast

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...

Temporal Technologies is a scalable open-source platform for developers to build and run reliable cloud applications. ICYMI, here’s a post we wrote with Ryland Goldstein, Head of Product at Temporal, discussing how software engineering has shifted from a monolithic to a microservices model—thereby introducing a whole new set of challenges for software engineers. Maxim, who grew up in Russia, is re...

HASH , where Maggie works along with Stack Overflow cofounder Joel Spolsky , is an open-core platform for creating simulations that help people make better decisions. Explore Maggie’s writing on everything from digital anthropology to best practices for illustrating invisible programming concepts . Maggie recommends the Nielsen Norman Group website as the best resource for folks getting up to spee...

The first step in quantum computing? Quantum internet : a network capable of sending quantum information between far-distant computing machines (as in, one on Earth and one on Mars). Still have questions? In case it’s been a while since your last physics course: Schrödinger’s cat . Retool’s 2022 State of Engineering Time reveals how software engineers spend their time, what they want to do more (a...

The Web3 crime of the century? Seth Green’s Bored Ape NFT is kidnapped by dastardly phishing scammers, kiboshing the TV series Green was developing around the Bored Ape character. Read more . Ceora served as a resident emcee at this year’s Remix Conf . She and Cassidy offer advice for developers who want to give talks or host conferences.  In tech industry news: Broadcom acquires VMWare for $61 bi...

While blockchains are huge right now, finding one to build on that doesn’t use a ton of energy, has good privacy protections, and operates efficiently is harder than it looks. The original breakout blockchain, Bitcoin, was slow to adopt any innovations coming out of research. Other blockchains use the electricity of a small country to play elaborate gambling games. For someone looking to build the...

Jason is now a managing director at Redpoint Ventures and has led one investment so far, backing a company called Alchemy that is focused on infrastructure and dev tools for web3. He describes himself as a "very average" programmer, but an excellent engineer, and explains how he parlayed his unique skill set into key roles at Heroku and GitHub. Our lifeboat for the week goes to dfrib for suggestin...

Following the success of the Mac Mini, Windows is getting into the tiny computer business . Oh, and it’s running on ARM chips. Oh, and Visual Studio and VS Code will now offer native ARM support. Video games got a lot of us into programming thanks to their openness to mods. It’s what made The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind such a hit 20 years ago.  Minecraft may live forever thanks to its modding commun...

Companies like Meta, Twitter , and Netflix are enacting hiring freezes and layoffs, a situation that’s not great for anybody but is likely to have outsize effects on people of color in tech . Gen Z may not understand file structures , but they sure understand Twitter toxicity. MegaBlock from Gen Z Mafia allows users to block bad tweets, their authors, and every single account that liked the offend...

Highly-touted cryptocurrencies like TARA don’t always solve the problems they’re supposed to, as Bloomberg reports . If you’re looking for a compelling deep-dive into a crypto scammer, Cassidy recommends BBC podcast The Missing Cryptoqueen . Ceora is working to improve the quality of her commit messages in order to turn what’s now a personal project into an open-source project that others can cont...

You may be running your code in containers. You might even have taken the plunge and orchestrated it all with YAML code through Kubernetes. But infrastructure as code becomes a whole new level of complicated when setting up a managed Kubernetes service.  On this sponsored episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with David Dymko and Walt Ribeiro of Vultr about what they went throug...

Supabase , the open-source database-as-a-service company, raised $80 million in Series B funding in a round led by Felicis Ventures. In case you were wondering: YYes, the company is named for the Nicki Minaj song !. Today in tech recs: Cassidy recommends budgeting app Lunch Money for everything from crypto to cash. Matt recommends Magnet for window management. Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user d...

Ian and Corey met at Microsoft, where they built Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 (which boasted its own CD-ROM). They went on to found Mattermost in 2016 to give developers one platform for collaborating across tools and teams. Ian, who previously founded the game company SpinPunch , calls Mattermost “yet another of those video game companies turned B2B software companies,” like S...

Check out a manager’s toolkit for preventing burnout put together by Gitlab  Cassidy once asked Stephen Colbert for his favorite website. His answer may surprise you. Today in tech recs: Pokémon GO (for extra motivation to get outside) and the Apple Watch activity tracker (to track activity and remind you to move around). Jon recommends that you not get a treadmill desk.  Today’s Lifeboat badge go...

You can check out Michael’s bio here and tune in to his podcast Cloud Unfiltered . If you're interested in some of open source work Michael and his colleagues are doing, check out API Clarity . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Stack Overflow’s 2019 Developer Survey found that respondents overwhelmingly considered Elon Musk to be the person with the greatest influence on technology. Now that Musk is taking over Twitter , it’s safe to say that influence will increase. James Stanier, engineering director at Shopify, has some thoughts on one of our perennial topics: transitioning from IC to manager. He’s proposed a 90-day t...

The crew has complicated feelings about products like Apple’s augmented reality glasses and Google Glass . Ceora put it best: “I'm very cautious about any big tech company having any more access to my perception of reality.”  On the other hand, products like Envision smart glasses that help visually-impaired people navigate their environments exemplify how AR technology can enable accessibility an...

If you’re not familiar with Stacks , Stack Overflow’s design system, it’s a robust CSS and JavaScript Pattern library that helps users create coherent experiences in line with Stack Overflow’s best practices and design principles. Explore more on Netlify or GitHub . Missed our April Fool’s prank this year? Relive the hilarity and the pain . Atomic CSS is a CSS architecture approach favoring single...

A high school class on Pascal launched Andi’s interest in programming (starting on an Apple IIc). Andi was bored with his university studies and took on an extra-credit programming project that turned into PHP3 , the version that built a million websites. PHP gets a lot of hate , and we have two theories about why. First, it’s primarily brownfield development, and we all know that hell is other pe...

Average tenure at Google has been reported at 1.1 years,  which stands in contrast to a broader average of 4.2 years for software developers across the board. Tech jobs at many so called titans and disrupters last less than two years, according to research from Dice . Uber is forging an unlikely alliance with two taxi tech firms. The ultimate chron job - ensuring users can access a chronological f...