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 farming gold in World of Warcraft, which takes us down a wandering path of wondering how often people have ...
Jun 19, 2020•26 min•Ep. 245
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 project shared across a few dorm rooms to something used by massive public companies. Stay tuned Frid...
Jun 16, 2020•16 min•Ep. 244
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 method will delete about half your database... most of the time. Thanks, as always, to our Lifeboat badg...
Jun 12, 2020•16 min•Ep. 243
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 ....
Jun 09, 2020•22 min•Ep. 242
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 potential clients can rarely meet in person. Paul has been enjoying Whimsical , which advertises itse...
Jun 05, 2020•21 min•Ep. 241
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 believing in. Sara hips us to the 11th anniversary of Node.js and the 25th anniversary of Javascript. The l...
Jun 02, 2020•24 min•Ep. 240
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 missed it, Typescript is now the second most beloved language, based on the results of our 2020 Deve...
May 29, 2020•40 min•Ep. 239
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 am I getting an error when creating a C Struct initialization with char array? See Privacy Policy at ...
May 26, 2020•23 min•Ep. 238
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 : Gradle project refresh failed, unable to get the CMake. Ryan's piece on how coders beg, borrow, and s...
May 22, 2020•27 min•Ep. 237
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 never gain any recognition in the mainstream tech press, but manage to build and grow successful, profit...
May 20, 2020•28 min•Ep. 236
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 . Usage and wider public awareness of Zoom have been growing by leaps and bounds as the world shifts to re...
May 15, 2020•23 min•Ep. 235
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 money for those impacted by the COVID-19 crisis. In addition to this episode, you can tune in this mo...
May 12, 2020•32 min•Ep. 234
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, Covid Safe, here . The app isn’t live in the iOS or Android app store yet, but you can download an Andr...
May 08, 2020•23 min•Ep. 233
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 episode, so tune in Friday for the second half. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and Cali...
May 05, 2020•28 min•Ep. 232
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 happened remotely last weekend. One thing we didn't know about that conference was that they gave out or...
May 01, 2020•27 min•Ep. 231
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 Mainframe , but also because it's a language that can attract a high paying job at a number of big banks, hea...
Apr 28, 2020•32 min•Ep. 230
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 man. Don't forget to check out DevAroundTheSun for ways tech folks can support those impacted by COVID...
Apr 24, 2020•18 min•Ep. 229
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 product on time and to spec, with the hope that a predictable product pipeline is the best way to keep al...
Apr 21, 2020•23 min•Ep. 228
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 the last week. Apple and Google have released a spec for a contact tracing system. As countries aroun...
Apr 17, 2020•26 min•Ep. 227
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 has been a big fan for a while, both on Twitter and YouTube. Below are some highlights: PROFESSIONA...
Apr 14, 2020•32 min•Ep. 226
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, you can help get folks access to the funds they desperately need. In the second half of the episode, w...
Apr 10, 2020•24 min•Ep. 225
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. If we all go into cryosleep, will the bots keep trading the market, and for how long? Sara recommend...
Apr 07, 2020•26 min•Ep. 224
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://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....
Apr 03, 2020•15 min•Ep. 223
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, which is one of the 25 largest communities our users have created. He's there to help guide curious ro...
Mar 31, 2020•31 min•Ep. 222
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 they are 100% disinfected. Then Paul slaps on a little Ubuntu/Lubuntu and those old machines are suddenl...
Mar 27, 2020•25 min•Ep. 221
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 also a software engineer. There can only be so many commits in a committed relationship. But she has d...
Mar 24, 2020•23 min•Ep. 220
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 going back to literally year 4,000 BC including years that were skipped when they re-crafted the calenda...
Mar 17, 2020•25 min•Ep. 219
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 real mouthful to say. Eliot talks about the frustrations he and his co-founder, Dwight Merriman, experie...
Mar 10, 2020•32 min•Ep. 218
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 entrepreneurs find product-market fit.Apply with the code "stackoverflow" and you get $1000 off the ...
Mar 03, 2020•25 min•Ep. 217
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 Creek software and counts Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor as founders. Glimmer is a new web magazine from...
Feb 25, 2020•30 min•Ep. 216
