The Stack Overflow Podcast

Every experienced software engineer can tell you a story about a standardization effort that ended up causing more problems than it solved. Queen Elizabeth's decree adding 280 feet to each mile made it easy to divide up acres, but has haunted those of us stuck with Imperial units ever since.  Sara dives into micro frontend services and how they can help to add agility to a modern development team....

You can read the hilarious tale of how Paul was alerted to "Frenchpoop Butt" here . Enjoy an all time classic tale of a security expert being outwitted by his daughter. Her approach was not in his threat model.  Want to try your hand at a little hacking? Here's a fun online game called Telehack . We asked some teens what would motivate them to participate more on Stack. The answer was obvious: loo...

It's dependencies all the way down ... Remote learning is a bad joke . Who has ideas for some tech or gaming inspired solutions?  What's your favorite way to refer to software of very large size ? Everyone's got their favorite nickname for that big ol' pile of code.  Lemon juice is recommended in lots of natural cures and remedies. But could it also be MELTING YOUR BONES?   See Privacy Policy at h...

Here is the Reddit comment that inspired us to reach out to Garry.  This is the Vice news article that started the thread.  As you can see, the ban has affected a lot of books that would seem to have little bearing on cybersecurity. "Rejected books that are geared towards hacking, such as Justin Seitz’s Black Hat Python, may represent a clearer threat to the Department of Corrections, which fears...

Our guests this week were two of our employees: Yaakov Ellis and Stephanie Cantor. Yaakov is a Principal Web Developer, Community Advocate on the Public Platform team at Stack Overflow, and Former Team Lead for Internal Development at Stack. Stephanie is the Program Manager for Community Strategy at Stack.  Want to learn more about how the Community-athon worked? Read up on it here . And yes, of c...

To start things off, we talk about the launch of Articles, a new content type for Stack Overflow Teams that lets you write longer, subjective pieces. Sometimes it's best to share knowledge through Q&A, but other times you've got complicated, narrative, DevOps recipes or a policy paper and FAQ. Now your knowledge artifacts can all live in one place.  "The FAQ is the great folk form of the inter...

Juvoni describes himself as someone who helps people explore ideas and strategies for improvement. He focuses on combining multiple skills, better thinking and tools for thought, inner engineering healthy habits, and discovering how systems in the world affect us. You can follow him on Twitter:  https://twitter.com/juvoni You can join the Personal Development Nerds Facebook group here: https://www...

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...