The Stack Overflow Podcast

The Stack Overflow Podcast

For well over a decade, the Stack Overflow Podcast has been exploring what it means to be a developer and how the art and practice of software engineering is changing our world. From creating code to running it in production, we host important conversations and fascinating guests that will help you understand how technology is made and where it’s headed. Hosted by Ryan Donovan, the Stack Overflow Podcast is your home for all things software.

Author

The Stack Overflow Podcast

Category

Technology

Podcast website

art19.com

Latest episode

Jul 10, 2026

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Episodes

Helping communities build their own LTE networks 11.01.2022

Esther and Matt are graduate students in computer science at the University of Washington , where they study community networks . Esther explains how open-source, community-owned and -operated LTE networks are a good solution for expanding public internet access and ensuring digital equity . Matt walks the team through Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) , a shared wireless spectrum that allow...

Are developers helping to drive the Great Resignation? 07.01.2022

Developers are leading the Great Resignation, according to some reports . Others feel developers aren't resigning, so much as seizing the moment to find better opportunities.  You can find out hosts online at the links below Cassidy Ceora Ryan Ben Have an experience with the Great Resignation you want to share with our podcast and blog? Hit us up by email: Podcast Pitches for the blog Thanks to ou...

Professional ethics and phantom braking 04.01.2022

Hear why Ben thinks the Workplace Stack Exchange and the Academia Stack Exchange have the richest questions in the Stack Exchange network (or maybe just the most sitcom-worthy). ICYMI: Jack Dorsey stepped down from Twitter. Will he be back? At Twitter, Tess Rinearson is leading a new team focused on crypto, blockchains, and decentralized tech. Follow her on Twitter here . The team winces over a re...

Teaching developers about the most lightweight web “framework” around, VanillaJS 21.12.2021

What exactly is VanillaJS ? Tongue-in-cheek, it's the most lightweight JavaScript framework out there and used by pretty much every website on the internet. Seriously though, it's just JavaScript…without a framework.  If you're interested in reading and learning more about JavaScript, Chris has a bevy of courses and eBooks over at vanillajsguides.com .  Like Chris's ideas so much you want to subsc...

Bringing AI to the edge, from the comfort of your living room 17.12.2021

Bill gives an  overview of edge computing and why it matters. His team wants to enable developers by democratizing access to AI. OpenVINO is an open-source toolkit for high-performing AI inference. DevCloud lets developers prototype, test, and run their workloads for free on Intel hardware and software. For more on OpenVINO, check out this example we shared that increases image resolution.  Of cou...

Skills, not schools, are in demand among developers 16.12.2021

The pathway to a software developer job has shifted over the years. It used to be that you had to go through a college computer science program before you could get a developer job. But as online education became better and programming jobs became more specialized, people were getting hired on the strength of their bootcamp or certification experience. Our 2021 Developer Survey found that almost 6...

An oral history of Stack Overflow - told by its founding team 14.12.2021

Find Joel Spolsky on Twitter here . Jeff Atwood is on Twitter here . Geoff Dalgas is on Twitter here . Follow Jarrod Dixon on Twitter here . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Zero to MVP without provisioning a database 10.12.2021

PlanetScale is built on Vitess , the open-source database clustering system that runs at colossal scale hosting YouTube, Slack, and GitHub. A familiar theme : Big cloud companies aren’t set up for independent developers. Sam and Ceora discuss how serverless can get projects—even businesses—up and running quickly. Choosing the stack for a new business? Tools like Netlify can scale with your product...

Feeling insecure about your code's security? 07.12.2021

This “Trojan source” bug (get it?) could threaten the security of all code. In its annual report on its user community , GitHub found that developers appreciate automation, reusing code, and remote work. (No surprises there.)  Ceora explains how automation and code reuse are game changers for independent developers and how this logic is spreading to big tech companies, too. GitHub’s first Chief Se...

Is crypto the key to a democratizing the metaverse? 03.12.2021

Ethan's book, Once a Bitcoin Miner: Scandal and Turmoil in the Cryptocurrency Wild West , is available now. The metaverse isn’t just inevitable; it’s already here (and it has a booming real estate market ). As we move more of our lives online onto platforms controlled by increasingly powerful digital giants, Ethan explains the democratizing power of cryptocurrency and blockchain.  On the other han...

Does modern parenting have to rely on spyware? 30.11.2021

The conversation was inspired by Epic's decision to make it's Kid's Web Service's parent verification free to all developers. Ben has been grappling with these questions since 2013, when he wrote about allowing screen time into his young son's life.  One thing that old article does remind us; how incredibly indestructible the original iPad was . A true tank of a tablet! Thanks to our lifeboat badg...

Who is building clouds for the independent developer? 23.11.2021

We kick things off by weighing the merits of two gender-neutral regional pronouns: the familiar y’all and the under appreciated yinz . Now that’s covered... The global population of developers will hit 45 million by 2030, up from 26.9 million in 2021 ( EDC ). What platforms will they want to build on? Did Kubernetes solve all your problems? Did it create new ones? It seems there’s always an XKCD r...

Who owns this outage? Building intelligent, automated escalation chains 22.11.2021

Maxwell, a solution architect at xMatters, took a winding road to get to where he is. After a computer engineering education, he held jobs as field support engineer, product manager, SRE, and finally his current role as a solutions architect, where he serves as something of an SRE for SREs, helping them solve incident management problems with the help of xMatters.  When he moved to the SRE role, M...

What if the value of software platforms ACTUALLY flowed to the users? 19.11.2021

You can learn more about Roll, which describes itself as blockchain infrastructure for social money, here . If you want to follow them on social, check out @tryrollhq  as well as their personal socials:  @bradley_miles_  and  @sidkal .  If you are interested in this kind of tech, check out previous conversations on Web3 and our chat with Chris Dixon on blockchain. Our lifeboat badge winner of the...

250 words per minute on a chorded keyboard? Only if you can think that fast. 16.11.2021

GitHub's CEO, Nat Friedman, stepped down recently to focus on his startup roots. Chief product officer, Thomas Dohmke, will be moving to CEO.  The Verge reviewed our no-longer-a-joke April Fool's keyboard.  How many keyboard layouts are there anyway? Including non-English layouts, there's lots .  Do you have a mind's eye? How about an inner monologue? We explore why some people have a voice in the...

The polyglot who leads Stack Overflow's Platform team 12.11.2021

Rennie grew up in Kenya, Honduras, Somalia, and Oklahoma; his parents volunteered for the Peace Corps before working for the US Government overseas.  Audio tape drives are real!  Check out this Retrocomputing question about how the Commodore 64 audio interface worked.  If you  want  to remember something better, a 2014 study says you should write it out by hand.  Rennie worked at Blackberry, and B...

The semiconductor shortage: explained 09.11.2021

You can find Alex's writing for Employ America here . You can find him on Twitter here You can find Hassan's blog here and his Twitter here . You can find their writing on the semiconductor industry and shortages here and here . Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is jasme, who helped someone figure out how to fix email validation with Laravel. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and...

Web3 won't save us 05.11.2021

What is Web3? The Decentralized Internet of the Future Cassidy Ceora Ryan Ben Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Tadeck, for showing us how to design a : Function for Factorial in Python See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

The big problem with only being able to solve big problems 02.11.2021

We start out the show talking about this article: I Don't Know How To Count That Low . Is Apple normalizing surveillance? Toyota trucks and Land Cruisers were very popular with ISIS.  Instead of a lifeboat, we shoutout this fun question: How do I stop annoyed wizards from killing people all the time? A common problem for us muggles.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California P...

Software for your second brain 29.10.2021

Alex comes up with better ways to interact with technology and writes about it on his website .  Is there a link between playing music and writing code? A previous article of ours covered the merger of the two in the music programming language, Sonic PI.  If you're curious about the weird extremes of operating system development, check out TempleOS .  Cassidy and Alex both take copious notes throu...

A murder mystery: who killed our user experience? 27.10.2021

The infrastructure that networked applications lives on is getting more and more complicated. There was a time when you could serve an application from a single machine on premises. But now, with cloud computing offering painless scaling to meet your demand, your infrastructure becomes abstracted and not really something you have contact with directly. Compound that problem with with architecture...

The first ten years of our programming lives 26.10.2021

This episode was inspired by Joma Tech's review of his first ten years in coding.  Ben Popper shared  a fair amount of his coding journey through the series Ben Popper is the Worst Coder in the World .  Should you actually write out code on paper as some of us had to do? Maybe . Modding games gets people into programming. For Ryan, Freedom Force got him into Python. Today, it's Minecraft and Roblo...

Quality code is the easiest to delete 22.10.2021

Isaac's piece, Code quality: a concern for businesses, bottom lines, and empathetic programmers , ran recently on the Stack Overflow blog.  A simple metric for code quality code be how easy is it to delete any given piece of code.  There's no algorithmic way to judge quality code, but experienced engineers know it when they see it.  Jeff Atwood's Performance is a Feature blog post gets a lot of mi...

Getting your first job off the CSS mailing list 19.10.2021

At LinkedIn scale, it pays to save your developers a few minutes or even seconds on repeat tasks. Sara walks us through her experience managing senior engineers, and trying to improve developer experience and tooling, on a massive, global platform with over a billion user interactions a month. Paul  shares some of his firm's latest work, helping to visualize the impact of climate change at Probabl...

Can AI solve car accidents and find you a parking space? 15.10.2021

Graybeard conference alert! Eran and Ryan both started their technology journeys on the venerable Commodore 64 .  During his academic days, Eran helped to map all the BGP (background gateway protocol) gateways in the world. This got a  fair bit of press recently  during the six hour Facebook outage. Nexar provides smart dashcams and an app that help cars understand the roads around them.  While ne...

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