The Stack Overflow Podcast

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

HarperDB is a startup that focuses on highly scalable databases that handle real-time data.  Harper is built on Node.js and Express with a little help from Fastify .  They know where they excel and where they don't. High data throughput like  gaming and vision, great! High data resolution and transactional software like financial applications, not so great. It's speed over accuracy.  Instead of a...

Read more about the climate debate surrounding NFTs here . We really enjoyed this piece: You either die an MVP, or live long enough to build content moderation. You can find Ben on Twitter here . You can send ideas for blog posts to Ryan Donovan at our  pitch box . You can find Cassidy on Twitter  here  and read the newsletter she helps us curate  here . You can find Ceora on Twitter  here  and ch...

You can learn more about Paul here . You can read more about Physna here . Paul is excited about the Metaverse. So are we !  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Check out more about Microsoft's efforts to ditch passwords here . When  2FA just won't do, 3FA to the rescue. Just pray we aren't headed towards five factors .   See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Right now, most development teams provide visibility into their overall process and lifecycle through standup meetings and spreadsheets. It can be a painfully manual process that uses up valuable engineering time.  Value stream management aims to solve that by mapping out the entire software development life cycle and providing visibility into areas where things are breaking down or getting stuck....

Go get your copy of They Key here . Our frequent collaborator, Cassidy Williams of Netlify, helped design the key and joined this episode to share her love for all things mechanical keyboard.   See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

We talked about obscuring DNS traffic based on this article . Cassidy and Ben are pretty excited about all the new Apple stuff announced recently . Ryan, the curmudgeon, does not.  There are several theories as to where the word dongle came from.  The Conductor framework makes building web apps simpler in a  low-code/no-code  style.  Did the pandemic worsen everyone else's guilt and self-loathing...

Tarn and his brother Zach are the brains behind Dwarf Fortress and the community that rose around it. Dr . Tarn Adams  received a math PhD, but left his post-doc because he was too busy making games.  A bug created the statue Planepacked , a massive structure that contained the entire history of the world as well as 73 copies of the statue itself. Many people, including one of our hosts, found out...

Former co-host Sara Chipps  now manages engineering teams at LinkedIn, but her best content is still on Twitter . Cassidy's former boss, Sarah Drasner , recently wrote a book to help engineers level up to management: Engineering Management for the Rest of Us .  Cassidy's new favorite software tool is Astro , a single-site generator that looks to minimize the amount of client-side JavaScript in a s...

While every developer loves a good story about discovering and fixing a gnarly bug, not everyone enjoys the work of finding those bugs. Most folks would prefer to be writing business logic and solving new problems. But those input validation errors and resource leaks won’t solve themselves.  Or will they? AWS Bug Bust is a global competition launched with the goal of finding and fixing one million...

Weaveworks helps DevOps folks manage their Kubernetes settings entirely  Paul's first computer was a Sinclair ZX-80 , which had a clock speed of 3.25 MHz, 1 KB of static RAM ,and 4 KB of read-only memory. Pretty good for 1980.  Weaveworks based their project on Flux , an open source engine. If you're not a big corporation and you want to use it, it's free! Before there was Kubernetes, Google creat...

You can send ideas for blog posts to Ryan Donovan at our pitch box. You can find Cassidy on Twitter here and read the newsletter she helps us curate here . You can find Ceora on Twitter here and check out more about Apollo GraphQL here . Cassidy's piece on GraphQL, the first item she ever wrote for Stack Overflow, is here .  Want to learn more about AVIF and how it compresses images so well? Check...

You can learn more about Sam on his LinkedIn here . You can find him on Twitter here . Learn more about Oso, check out the code, and join their Slack community here . Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Evgeny Lisin, who answered the question: How to find UIWebView in Project and replace it with WKWebView? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https:...

You can find Angie's blog here , catch her on Twitter here , and connect with her on LinkedIn here . You can check out Applitools and  learn about the visual AI system it uses for testing here . Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to  Alex Klyubin for explaining: What is the difference between Jar signer and Apk signer? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice...

Nick is now Sourcery's CTO.  You can find him on Twitter here . Brendan serves as Sourcery's CEO. You can find him on Twitter here . You can try out Sourcery for free here and check out the company's open positions here . Our lifeboat badge of the week, fittingly, goes to Martin Evans, for explaining how to parse an integer from a string in Python . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy...

Paul is stepping away down as CEO of Postlight to focus more on understanding climate change and how we can address it. The science hurts his brain.  Cassidy Williams, currently at Netlify , has published articles on our blog and provides links in our newsletter. We dig into some of the results of the dev survey , including how kids today are learning to code on the internet. There's so much to le...

Every password can be compromised. Stych helps companies build authentication flows that don't need user passwords.  Julianna grew up in Idaho, where she didn't even know what computer science was. After stints as a software engineer and product manager, she found a role where could figure out what the organization should be building: CTO and founder.  Their first product was email magic links, wh...

In 1987, Anita Borg, AnitaB.org's namesake, saw how few women were at a "systems" conference. A few casual chats turned into the listserv, Systers, which continues to offer a place for women in engineering to meet and discuss.  Grace Hopper—that's Navy Rear Admiral Hopper to you, civilian—was the first to devise a theory of programming languages that were machine-independent. She created the FLOW-...

We're officially part of the Prosus family now that the acquisition has closed. It’s a huge milestone and a big deal for our company and community. Prosus has a global reach and will help us meet the needs of developers and technologists everywhere.  Have no fear: there will not be a paywall on the community sites. We have separate free and paid products for a reason.  We combined our Ads and Tale...