The Stack Overflow Podcast

Tik Tok has been accused of spying on users and siphoning up their data, although it's important to point out the same criticism has been leveled at many American tech giant's apps and web services. In working to address security flaws, it seemed that Tik Tok programming  was just as often sloppy as malicious .  All that hasn't stopped reports from surfacing that Microsoft might be wiling to pay a...

You can read our story on Rachel and the work she is doing with the React community here . Nabors' is the author of Animation at Work , which you can find on A Book Apart. If you want to get a feel for an animated web project Rachel worked on, check out DevToolsChallenger , an interactive site she helped create for Mozilla.  Nabors has digitized a lot of her work, signal boosting members of the Re...

Is there any more fitting end to a day of working from home, deep into months of a fully remote world, than using your smartphone to finish up a little Python code with your head resting on your pillow? Paul has no regrets. If you look at that big, bright, shiny computer monitor late at night, you'll never fall asleep.  Sara helps us trace the origin of the word software . It was originally meant...

No list of great hacks would be complete without the Samy worm that ran amok on Myspace back in 2005. As Rachel points out, lots of hackers start out as experimenters, naturally curious coders who enjoy learning the rules and seeing how far they will bend before they break.  If any hack made it's way into the mainstream consciousness over the last decade, it was WannaCry . It introduced a mainstre...

For this episode we spoke again with Georges Saab, Vice President of Software Development at the Java Platform Group and Manish Gupta, Vice President of Global Marketing for Java and GraalVM.  The very first feature that made a massive impact wasn’t a change in the Java language at all. It was the vastly improved library support that happened in the early releases. Between 1.0 and 1.3, these libra...

For this episode we chatted with Georges Saab, Vice President of Software Development at the Java Platform Group and Manish Gupta, Vice President of Global Marketing for Java and GraalVM.  In the beginning, the nascent Java language project, codenamed Project Green and later Oak , was designed to create interactive televisions. Think of the kind of overlays and interactivity that you see with most...

If you're wondering why GPT-3 matters and how it compares to prior efforts in this area, here is a good summary . If you want to dive deeper into the effect anxiety has on the interview process and hiring in tech, you can read up on the research here . This week's lifeboat badge goes to PerformanceDBA, who left an incredbily long and detailed answer, complete with charts and code snippets, on the...

You can learn all about 100 Days of Code on their website . Alex also published a newsletter about habit forming and self-improvement. You can learn more about that and subscribe here . If you want to follow Alex on Twitter, you can find him here . This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Chris, who helped a user understand why ComponentDidCatch was not working in their react-native app . See Privacy Po...

Saron explains how she went from working in the marketing department of a startup to learning code, creating a supportive community for novice developers, and founding two podcasts about the art and science of learning to program.  You can read more about the Dev acquisition and what the dynamic duo have planned here . Sara and Paul spend some time bantering with Saron on that classic developer de...

What began as a question on our Software Engineering Stack Exchange graduated into a blog post for further discussion.  Paul points out that modern tooling has internalized so much of agile methodology that developers tend to work this way without having to explicitly create a culture or process around Scrum.  And as Sara points out, if it turns out you're being driven to optimize for finished wor...

Syeeda and Ian talk with Sara and Paul about how affinity groups came to exist within Stack Overflow, and how the  BNB group helped to lead the design of the company's short and long response to issues of systemic racism. You can find more about Stack's plans here . More generally, the group discusses how people at all levels of their organizations are putting a renewed emphasis on diversity and i...

This is a great crash course on just-in-time compilers written by Lin Clark, who works in advanced development at Mozilla on Rust and Web Assembly. It references the film Arrival and kicked off our discussion on the podcast.  Paul talks about his first love, XSLT , and how that language actually foreshadowed a lot of what would become popular staples of modern programming languages.  Sara and Paul...

When it comes to hardware that cranks, Paul is a fan of Micro Center's in-house brand - PowerSpec . This week we chew through a great post from Jon Chan about how Stack Overflow hires developers. Sara recalls flunking her first few code screenings while applying for jobs. The hard lesson she learned? Sometimes, it pays to skip the collaboration and just show off. Ben wishes that he had known about...

From Mars rovers to Minecraft to the makeup of our DNA - these are some of the Java apps that may leave a mark on  the world of software for decades to come. Thanks to Hizbul25, our winner of the week, for answering a question and earning a lifeboat badge: query to order by the last three characters of a column.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at http...

You can read about the IRS and its Sisyphean efforts to modernize its computer systems here . Ben's Twitter thread on amazing and obscure trade periodicals you can find online is here . You can read more about what Apple is doing with biometric identity on the web here . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

This week, Ben and Paul are flying as a duo, a true dad-cast. We walk through the slow build of increasingly complex keyboard macros, followed by the inevitable cleansing and renewal of an empty slate. Pus, type systems and type safety, the galaxy brain edition. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You can learn more about today's event and all the livestream broadcasts here. If you want to learn more about Robin, you can get in touch here .   See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Cassidy helps to write The Overflow newsletter and is two months into a new gig as a Principal Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify. That's where she broke Prod, but it turned out ok. We chat about Hey what it means for software engineers when prominent coders are arguing with big mobile platforms about the fees that the owners of the OS collect. What's old is new again.  Bot armies are farmin...

Dries explains how Drupal began: as a intranet, not internet, message board for his college community. It's now the technology underpinning tens of millions of websites, including some of the biggest in the world.  We get the story behind the name, an accident  overlap of language that became the software's iconic mascot. And we talk about the process that allowed this to scale from an open source...

This week on the pod, we chat about Cloudflare.tv , a 24/7 streaming channel dedicated to discussions of software, startups, and technology.  We also dig into a new offering called Github Classroom . Do pedagogy and programming mix well? Can this approach to collaborative work be useful beyond the computer science classroom? So, you want to delete half your database? Well, I can guarantee this met...

If you're in the market for a used car and some retro web design, look no further . Thanks to our Lifeboater of the week, Günter Zöchbauer , for explaining how to use the MyHomePage widget in Flutter. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

You can find Textmoji here . A few taps and you're the hippest typographer in your company's work chat.  Seek , the app from iNaturalist, is available on Android and iOS. You can find it here. Ben has over 30 plants, a dozen insects, and five amphibians, so if you're feeling competitive, it's gonna be a long hike to catch up. It can be hard selling software or design in a period where vendors and...

Has there ever been a tech startup that raised shy of $3 billion, inflation-adjusted for any era, while barely making a ripple with actual customers? Magic Leap just pocketed a fresh $350 million in funding, on the condition that its co-founder and CEO Rony Abovitz, agree to step aside and allow new leadership to take the reins. We chat AR/VR, dot-com flameouts, and why crazy tech is worth believi...

Brian is a contributor to Deno, and walks us through what this project has to offer.  He also made it easy to work with Deno right in the browser. You can check it out here . You can learn more about Begin here . If you want to follow Brian, you can find him on Twitter here and on Github here . We spend a bunch of time digging into the overlaps between Deno, Rust, Java, and Typescript. In case you...

Sara is spending her time as a fully remote worker trying to learn more about open source governance and foundations. Turns out there is a lot of overlap with the work Stack does alongside its community.  Paul has a project for playing with math in your storytelling. You can check it out here . Our lifeboat of the week goes to Stack Overflow user Scolytus, who answered the following question: Why...