The Stack Overflow Podcast

Right now, plenty of people are building businesses on social media platforms, on streaming platforms, and on market platforms that they don’t control. That platform can make the rules in any way they want and remove access at any time. That means founders are potentially one step away from losing their livelihood. The same goes for consumers buying from these platforms: if you lose access to your...

Smart contracts aren’t actually new. Computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer Nick Szabo coined the term in 1994 (possibly earlier, depending on who you ask).  Old problems seem to keep coming back. Bret Victor gave a talk in 2013 called “ The Future of Programming ,” where he talked about problems from 1973 that were still relevant.  To learn more about the Agoric blockchain, check ou...

A Principal Engineer at GitHib, Kris is president of the Nivenly Foundation and an admin at Hachyderm , an instance of the decentralized social network powered by Mastodon .  The ongoing changes at Twitter have fueled interest in alternative, decentralized platforms like Mastodon and Discord . Read Leaving the Basement , Kris’s post about scaling and migrating Hachyderm out of her basement. Watch...

Today’s guests from Browser Co. are software engineer Victoria Kirst and design lead Dustin Senos of The Browser Company The Browser Company is building a new kind of browser designed to keep users “focused, organized and in control.” Arc , their browser, is “ full of big new ideas about how we should interact with the web ” and has been called “ the best web browser to come out in the last decade...

In his role at SwissOne Capital , Kenny champions investments in Web3 and the metaverse . A writer on all things crypto since 2013, he’s a regular contributor to the US Chamber of Commerce . The collapse of Three Arrows Capital and FTX eroded investor trust in crypto, but Kenny remains “cautiously optimistic” about the market’s future. Connect with Kenny on LinkedIn or Twitter . Congratulations ar...

The history of computing has been a story of moving up levels of abstraction: from hard-coding algorithms and directly manipulating memory addresses with assembly languages to using more natural language constructs in high-level general purpose languages to abstracting the hardware of the computer in cloud compute. Now serverless functions take that abstraction even further. We’ve made the algorit...

The inbox improvements were Radek’s graduation project. Not bad for a newbie.  Not everyone likes change , and the inbox change was no exception. So we looked into fixing that. Read about what our engineering team learned building and scaling Stack Overflow to support millions of users. Connect with Radek on LinkedIn.  Find Cobih on LinkedIn and Twitter . Longtime Stacker Yaakov Ellis is also on L...

Our recent Pulse Survey showed how technologists visiting Stack Overflow feel about emergent technologies. The consensus is clear: AI assistants will soon be everywhere, and developers aren’t sure how they feel about that. Check out the podcast here or dive into the blog . Learn more about the emergent abilities of large language models (LLMs) .  For more on the intersection of AI and academia, li...

With so many companies offering API products, it can be hard to get your particular APIs discovered and used by the developers who need them most. You might have the best, most useful solutions out there, but if you’re relying on the digital equivalent of foot traffic for discoverability, it might as well not exist. And if an API solution can’t be found, then someone else is going to reinvent it. ...

You can dive deeper into the research, including some lovely matrix charts, on our blog . Erin has also explored tag trends among our most loved languages and job insights from our community. Learn more about Joy on her LinkedIn . Thanks to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, russbishop, for helping to answer the question: Where is the app content folder in the simulator of Xcode?   See Privacy...

Per one count , more than 280,000 people were laid off from tech jobs in 2022 and the first two months of 2023. What do layoffs have in common with farting at a party ? Both are a bad look if you’re the only one doing it . ICYMI: On a recent episode , we talked about how these layoffs are reshaping the job market and where to find software engineering roles outside of tech. Just laid off, or worri...

Writing code that runs without errors—and without all the bugs that only show up when the program runs—is hard enough. But teaching others to write code and understand the underlying concepts takes a deeper understanding. Now imagine doing that for 37 courses.  On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with Bharath Thippireddy, a VIP instructor at Udemy who has taught more than h...

Flourish is a fintech platform for registered investment advisers (RIAs) that was recently acquired by MassMutual . After studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon, Christine spent almost 12 years at Goldman Sachs , where she was VP of fixed systematic marketing making, responsible for automating electronic trades of interest-rate products like US Treasury bonds and interest rate swaps. Christi...

A chemist by training, Jamie serves as Senior Research Manager of Quantum Applications and Software at IBM Quantum , which offers cloud access to advanced quantum computers capable of solving highly complex, highly interconnective, and dynamic problems. Learn about the superconducting qubits IBM Quantum uses to program quantum computers. (Need to back up a bit? Learn what a qubit is .) Jamie expla...

W4 Games is dedicated to strengthening the open-source Godot Engine , a cross-platform game engine for 2D and 3D games. Their mission is “to help the video game industry reclaim their control of the technology powering their games and reverse a dramatic trend where they have to rely on proprietary solutions from an ever-shrinking number of vendors.” To start learning more about Godot, explore some...

Tribe is a distributed community of AI industry leaders, including ML engineers and data scientists, dedicated to helping companies apply machine learning to their business operations. Explore their case studies to see Tribe’s expertise in action. Founder and CEO Jaclyn Rice Nelson formerly worked at Google, partnering with enterprise companies and incubating new ventures. As an early employee at...

Modern networked applications generate a lot of data, and every business wants to make the most of that data. Most of the time, that means moving production data through some transformation process to get it ready for the analytics process. But what if you could have in-app analytics? What if you could generate insights directly from production data? On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we ta...

Oso is authorization as a service. Check out the docs or explore use cases . Sam’s post “ Why Authorization is Hard ” covered what makes authorization challenging, some approaches to solving it, and their associated tradeoffs. You can also watch Sam’s talk at PyCon US 2022. Since it’s impossible to address everything that makes authorization hard in just 5,000 words, Sam is currently at work on a...

Retool is a development platform that lets users—95% of whom are engineers—build internal tools quickly with a drag-and-drop interface. Read David’s account of how Retool won early sales deals in the company’s Operator Playbook series . Connect with David on LinkedIn . Today we’re shouting out Stellar Question badge winner ahajib for asking How to convert a list to a dictionary with indexes as val...

We talk about how Next is bringing image components , server components , and in-house analytics via split bee —and bundling them all together with Turbopack , powered by Rust, our Developer Survey most loved language of 2022 . Guillermo Rauch is the CEO and cofounder of Vercel and cocreator of Next.js , an open-source React framework that helps developers build fast, lightweight web applications....

Emery Berger, Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, joins Ben for a conversation about the impact of AI on academia. As a young sci-fi fan, he was fascinated by computers that could spit out solutions (a fascination that survived exposure to BASIC and COBOL). Now his CS students are using Copilot to do the same thing. How can educators (and s...

With companies taking a long look at developer experience, it’s time to turn that attention on the humble pull request. The folks at LinearB took a look at a million PRs — four million review cycles involving around 25,000 developers — and found that it takes about five days to get through a review and merge the code. CI/CD has done wonders getting deployments down to a day or less; maybe it’s tim...

It’s not just you: We all need subtitles now . Google introduces MusicLM , a model that generates music from text. The examples are pretty-mind blowing and raise big questions about licensing and copyrights for non-AI creators. Taking the uncanny valley to a new low? Nvidia’s streaming software now includes a feature that deepfakes eye contact . Beware the potentially dangerous intersection of AI...

John spent 25 years at Oracle before joining Google Cloud ’s Office of the CTO (OCTO), a team that’s been called the company’s “secret weapon” in collaborating with major customers to solve their tech problems and drive long-term deals. For more on his approach to tech and business, you can read this article he wrote on the seven points of driving lasting innovation Learn more about OCTO from Busi...

Naturally, tech layoffs are top-of-mind for many of us. Despite comparisons to the dot-com bubble, what we’re seeing right now is different. Here’s what the tech and media layoffs really tell us about the economy . In praise of analog technology: why Millennials and Gen Z are springing for paper maps . Make Time , a way of “rethinking the defaults of constant busyness and distraction so you can fo...