The Stack Overflow Podcast

You can read up on Deno 1.0 here. The star-studded ceremony for the 2020 Webby's can be watched on repeat here (not that we're doing that...) This is the Wired story about Lee Holloway, a brilliant coder who helped build Cloudflare, but then mysteriously fell into decline. It's a sad but beautifully written tale. Thanks to Stack Overflow user htamas for saving a question and winning a lifeboat : G...

Before we can move on to business as usual, the crew has to recount each and every way in which our first live podcast went spectacularly wrong. Laggy video, overwhelming audio, and too many silly hats. But hey, DevAroundTheSun did raise over $60,000 to help folks impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. We chat about Patio 11's law , and the incredible percentage of successful software startups that neve...

This episode was recorded Thursday, May 9th, two days after Stack Overflow announced it was going to furlough 15% of its staff. We talk about how this process played out internally and the ways in which we are hoping to grow our business so we can bring these great people back. You can read more about it in a blog post from our CEO here . After that, we discuss Zoom's acquisition of Keybase . Usag...

In addition to her role as PM's on Microsoft's .NEt team, Claire is an Executive Director of the .NET Foundation. Jeff, meanwhile, is a Twitch Partner, technical educator and founder of @theLiveCoders . He can be found streaming live coding projects and challenges as CsharpFritz on Twitch.  Both have been working with our own Sara Chipps to organize today's DevAroundTheSun event in order to raise...

Sham Kakade is a professor of computer science, statistics, and data science at the University of Washington. A group from his university, along with volunteers from Microsoft, is creating a contact tracing app called Covid Safe. Sham explains how technology could make it possible for democratic nations to fight the pandemic while preserving civil liberties. You can read more about Sham’s app, Cov...

You can read more about Sham's app, Covid Safe, here . You can  find his university bio here . The app isn't live in the iOS or Android app store yet, but you can download an Android demo here and help the team work out the bugs. You can also use that link to find their GitHub community. You can read Paul's take on the contact tracing spec released by Apple and Google here . This is a two part epi...

What happens when the grizzled captain decides they need to stop delegating and put their hands back on the helm? Sara is rewatching Star Trek and trying to find some wisdom in Picard's approach to crisis . Where did React come from? What's the line between a library, a framework, and a whole new language? You can learn lots more in this extensive video from the Women in React conference that happ...

JJ came to our attention when we saw a tweet about his work to get an ETL pipeline with COBOL running on Kubernetes.  Elizabeth comes from the world of Linux Systems Administration, but more recently has been working on COBOL and mainframe computing. She tells us that there is actually a cohort of college students actively learning and using COBOL, both for competitions like Mastering the Mainfram...

In this episode, we pay our respects to John Conway, a legendary mathematician known for the Game of Life and Surreal Numbers. Our math Stack Exchange paid respects to some of his lesser known results. Jon and Adam give us a rundown of some of their favorite April Fools projects from the past, many of which they helped build. Adam has a soft spot for Unikong , while Jon is more of a rubber duck ma...

Jon is the team lead for Public Q&A, which is what we call the platform that hosts the 172 community sites across Stack. Adam is a senior software developer on the community team and a former community manager.  Jon describes his job these days as intercepting all the meetings, phone calls, and busy work that would keep the devs on his team from actually writing code. That, and to deliver prod...

Monday's big story on Bloomberg was that the US unemployment system was being slowed by problems with an "ancient" programming language. Well, yah heard it here first. Also, ancient seems a bit extreme for something that is 60-years-old, but perhaps in the world of software, that does qualify as nearly pre-historic.  After that, we switch to the biggest news in tech, or perhaps in the world, over...

I asked Anna to describe herself in her own words. "Anna Lytical is a drag queen and engineer who creates sickeningly entertaining and educational coding tutorials in order to engage more LGBTQ+ people with coding and the tech industry. Anna shows how to use technology to represent yourself through various projects like websites, Instagram filters, glamorous command prompts and so much more." Sara...

Earlier this week, New Jersey Governer Phil Murphy announced that the state desperately needed the help of COBOL programmers . The 60-year-old programming language runs the state's unemployment system, and crashed under the historic influx of applications created by the COVID-19 crisis. So, if you're a COBOL programmer listening to this show or know a retired COBOL ace who wants to lend a hand, yo...

It's just your hosts this episode - Paul, Sara, and Ben. We chat about the end of the influential open-source events that O'reillly held for many years, conferences that in many ways helped to form the personality of the early web.  Engineers love to solve problems and create new tools. So what do you do when the best solution is to stay home? We have a few ideas about how to deal with the  moment...

You can check out more about Aaron at his website . He is a designer, developer, and musician who worked at Github and Adobe prior to joining Stack.  You can also read Aaron's post on how he built dark mode here . For the next 48 hours, you also have the option to try out our April Fool's gag, Ultra Dark Mode . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https:...

If you follow community issues on the Stack network, you may be familiar with Aaron Hall . He took the time to respond to a post from our CEO and subsequently came by Stack Overflow to engage more deeply with our leadership and community teams.  You can find his summary of events here . Most days, you can find him streaming on Twitch here . Nitsua60 is a moderator over on our RPG Stack Exchange, w...

Ben is now the full time IT department for his two sons, one of whom is in kindergarten and one in first grade. The children have transitioned from public school to Zoom, Google Classroom, Konstella, FaceTime, and five million other services.  Paul's neighbors in his apartment building are digging old laptops out of storage and leaving them in front of his door. They bleach them first, so that the...

Many countries around the world have now ordered citizens to work from home, exempting only those in essential industries. We have some tips on our blog about how to make remote work the best it can be, and a new piece up on how to handle remote hiring if your company is trying to fill positions during these unusual circumstances.  Sara is nervous about working from home with her husband, who is a...

When Robinhood went down at the beginning of March, many speculated it might have been caused by the extra  day, February 29th. This is a leap year after all. Robinhood blamed the outage on an unprecedented spike in usage. Either way, it go us thinking about time.  For example, Postgres has a great understanding of time as a database. Like, it really knows all the different things that happened go...

Sara reveals that she won a $500 gift card at a MongoDB hackathon, building an app that removed mustaches from people's pictures.  This was many years ago, and no we were not paid in JetBlue gift cards to have Eliot on the show, although MongoDB is a client of Stack Overflow in other areas. Mongo comes from humongous, cause, ya know, scale. That, plus HumongousDB.com was already taken and is a rea...

Echeruo's new venture is called Love and Magic , a startup studio that helps companies of all sizes maximize their ability to innovate.  For anyone that has an idea they have been hoping to turn into a startup, Echeruo and his collaborators just introduced the Startup School of Alchemy . It's being taught at WeWork and Princeton University. It offers a six-week curriculum designed to help aspiring...

Glitch, a platform that makes it easy for anyone to create or remix a web app, has seen over five million apps created by users. You can read more about how it works here . If you want to learn a little about how it works with Docker, check out this piece here . If you want to know more about the shared history of Stack and Glitch, you can read up on it here . TLDR; Glitch was born out of Fog Cree...

Paul and Sara walk us through the teetering tower of abstraction . Ben still hasn't mastered a single language, so it's a tough for him to know if it's better to start with the difficult fundamentals or stay in the simplified sandbox. Flatiron tries to teach developers how to code, but also how to communicate. Every student has to do some public writing or speaking about their education. We check...

You can find the podcast and article that inspired our chat here . It's the second of Kelsey Hightower's "Unpopular Opinions" series.  We have heard the requests for full episodes transcripts and we know accessibility is important, so we're working on a solution. Stay tuned.  The recipients of the lifeboat badges this episode were for questions that were between three and six years old . It's a te...

What happens when millions of minimum byte packets start pinging off your network every few seconds? Bandwidth is a restriction most network engineers are familiar with. It's less often they have to think about packets per second. Teresa shares an awesome story of how a new feature for AOL Instant Messenger, AIM for you 90s nerds, turned up the heat on AOL's servers. After regaling us with war sto...