How could you not love a team with a bio like this: "We’re a young and dynamic team of messy data-scientists who have failed at being employed on the real market. Our experience in losing data and throwing files away is more than amazing! Over the years, we have managed to get rid of so much important data at home and even at work." Find out how you pay other people to throw your data away here . The New York Times reports on the rising prices of old computers and their parts. Retro-computing is...
Jan 12, 2021•27 min•Ep. 305
The starting point for today's conversation was an argument made by Guillermo Rauch in this blog post . "And each time, your frontend has an opportunity to impress, delight, perform, be accessible and memorable. What's more, frontend is an area of technological and artistic differentiation , while backend becomes increasingly commoditized, turnkey and undifferentiated." Sure, programming in PowerPoint isn't very practical. That doesn't mean it can't be lots of fun, and teach you a few things. Sp...
Jan 08, 2021•21 min•Ep. 304
If you're interested in learning a bit of BBC Basic, there is a fun introduction here . You can tweet at this bot , and it will run the contents as code and reply with a video of the results. If you are interested in life-logging and want to see it done with a lot of very pretty graphs, check out this post, My Year in Data . Last but not least we chat about Svelte , which lets you create "cybernetically enhanced web apps." Shout to Murali, a listener who suggested this topic. Our lifeboat of the...
Jan 05, 2021•25 min•Ep. 303
You can find the first episode of the SO podcast here . It was conducted over Asterix , open source telephony software that allowed for fancy operations like voice messaging and recording calls! What would social software look like if we designed them to remove commerce and popularity? Are services like Mightybell an interesting example of where we might be headed? If you want to build a model of something - say traffic patterns in your town or a hypothetical zombie invasion - you should check o...
Jan 01, 2021•37 min•Ep. 302
There is a nice breakdown of the Solarigate attack here , but the most important thing to know is that just seeing the words BusinessLayer.dll is enough to make our eyes glaze over and our defenses go down. One interesting second order effect of this intrusion is that it will be difficult to know when all malicious code and access has really been removed. It brought to mind the classic Turing Award Lecture, Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson. If you're trying to entertain kids over th...
Dec 29, 2020•25 min•Ep. 301
With Bitcoin hitting all time highs, there has been a lot of speculation about what will happen next in the market crypto market. Meanwhile, regulators are targeting Ripple with a lawsuit and arguing that crypto isn't really a currency after all. You have until Jan, 4, 2021 to participate in our annual Winter Bash . By answering questions on Stack Overflow and across Stack Exchange, you can unlock some unique digital flair for your avatar. Don't forget to tune in the first day of the new year fo...
Dec 25, 2020•14 min•Ep. 300
There is a lot to think about when designing trading algorithms , especially in the world of cryptocurrency, where prices can be extremely volatile and limited liquidity means a single trader moving big volume can have a hefty influence on price. Bitcoin is at a record breaking price these days, but investing in it is not for the faint of heart. To learn more, we chat with Li, who is a software engineer at Coinbase. You can find her on Twitter here . If you're interested in learning more about B...
Dec 22, 2020•17 min•Ep. 299
You can read more about Javascriptlandia here . It is part of larger conversation happening on Google's Open Source Blog and through initiatives like Github allowing corporations into their Sponsors program. For a delightfully old school and interactive website about Myles, click here . For his Twitter, go here . You can find Jory's website here and her Twitter presence here . This week's lifeboat badge goes to Marijn van Vliet for answering the question: How do I return a char array from a func...
Dec 18, 2020•32 min•Ep. 298
You can find the original tweet here . AWS will work with them on publicity and open source their version so that there can be a flow of value in both directions. You can learn more about Tim's company, Checkly.hq, which works on active monitoring for developers. The team there also works on Headless Recorder, a Chrome extension that records your browser interactions and generates a Playwright or Puppeteer script. They also operate The Headless Dev , which helps coders learn Playwright and Puppe...
Dec 15, 2020•29 min•Ep. 297
As promised, here is the grass hat . You can find out more about Earthly here. We spend a little time talking about Nix OS the operating system you can roll back if you don't like a patch. Raise your hand if you remember learning computer science with Turbo Pascal . Maybe you didn't know, but discs aren't as slow as people think. Adam's recent episode is about upending common assumptions on IO performance. Shoutout to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, Josh Smift, for answering the question:...
Dec 11, 2020•29 min•Ep. 296
You can read about GraphQL here and Apollo here. Cassidy Williams, who curates our newsletter, wrote about her experience as an early adopter of the technology last summer. You can find more on Meteor here . Schmidt also helped create Monument , which he describes as "an affordable live/work art event space in downtown San Francisco. The upstairs is 24 private bedrooms and studio spaces and the downstairs is a 200+ capacity person event venue and makerspace. Our goal is to connect creative peopl...
Dec 08, 2020•34 min•Ep. 295
Gone in a Flash. Actually it took quite a while. Adobe explains its decision to stop supporting Flash here . You can learn more about Ruffle , the Flash emulator written in Rust, here . Here are some tips on writing a developer resume from a hiring manager who's written an entire book on the topic. You can read more about the Supreme Court case considering the limits of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act here and here Our Lifeboat badge of the week goes to a user named simply 4386427, who answered...
Dec 04, 2020•23 min•Ep. 294
You can find more about Resner here . Learn more about the topics we discussed by following some of Resner's suggested links below: People to follow on Twitter: Safyia Noble , Ruha Benjamin , and Kamal Sinclair. Ellen Pao and Project Include. Eli Pariser and New Public by Civic Signals. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....
Dec 01, 2020•29 min•Ep. 293
You can read more about the operating systems and business principles schools are adopting from their corporate sponsors here . You can read about the latest version of Tailwind and what it has to offer here . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....
Nov 27, 2020•26 min•Ep. 292
You can find Ferdinandi's post and video here . 12 years ago, back when Stack Overflow was a brand new site with just a few thousand users, someone asked a basic question: What is the difference between a framework and a library? FreeCodeCamp has its own take on this question with a pretty interesting answer. "When you use a library, you are in charge of the flow of the application. You are choosing when and where to call the library. When you use a framework, the framework is in charge of the f...
Nov 24, 2020•16 min•Ep. 291
You can find out more about Sir Berners-Lee's work on Solid here . Other topics discussed in this episode: Docker puts a limit on free containers . That has to be good for the environment. But is it also good for Docker and the future of its products? Sometimes, forcing yourself to make something worth purchasing helps drive innovation. The Tao of Programming isn't new, and some of its technical references are a bit out of date. But it's still good for a laugh and little bit of enlightenment-lit...
Nov 20, 2020•21 min•Ep. 290
You can learn more about the Power of 10 here . TIOBE's latest index can be found here . Our lifeboat of the week goes to lealceldeiro for answering the question: What does the multi: true attribute of HTTP_INTERCEPTORS mean? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....
Nov 17, 2020•21 min•Ep. 289
Paul spent the weekend building a parser, cause who doesn't? He needed a Regex, found one on Stack Overflow, looked over the characters, and realized this is not the way to get folks interested or excited about code. "You come across a problem and you think to yourself, I know I'll use a regular expression. Now you have two problems." This sets Sara off on a tangent about CSS. What's wrong with CSS in her opinion. Well, all of it. She shares a few thoughts on how it could have been built right. ...
Nov 13, 2020•16 min•Ep. 288
You can find Sai's videos here . Come for the deep dives on Docker , stay for the live lightboard magic. Yes, I know what the comments say, but no, he isn't writing backwards. Sai also does a lot of work around OpenShift , the containerization software products created by Red Hat. He talks about what the tie up between IBM and Red Hat has been like and how the enterprise is increasingly learning to work with open source. Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Alex for explaining why you're Getti...
Nov 10, 2020•26 min•Ep. 287
Pawel Skolski wrote this definition of the SPA in 2016. "A single-page application is an app that works inside a browser and does not require page reloading during use. You are using these type of applications every day. These are, for instance: Gmail, Google Maps, Facebook or GitHub. SPAs are all about serving an outstanding UX by trying to imitate a “natural” environment in the browser — no page reloads, no extra wait time. It is just one web page that you visit which then loads all other cont...
Nov 06, 2020•15 min•Ep. 286
You can find some more of Holly's work and bio here . She gave a great talk at KubeCon 2020, How to Love K8s and Not Wreck the Planet , which you can watch on YouTube here . And here's a lovely presentation, Containers Will Not Fix Your Broken DevOps Cultures , drawing on her long history of programming and consulting. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....
Nov 03, 2020•30 min•Ep. 285
You can find a more in depth discussion of these topics on our blog . Prashanth shares his ideas about the importance of community and what it means to be a product led company. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....
Oct 30, 2020•23 min•Ep. 284
Nicolas will be the first to tell you that the version of Stack Overflow he helped to create began as a clone . It developed into a very popular site on RuNet and through persistent emails, Nic was able to find a way to make it an official part of the Stack family. Nic talks a bit about the unique culture of SO's Russian community and how each regional version of SO, from English to Spanish to Japanese, has developed its own etiquette and approach to moderation and Q&A. Nic and Sara also sha...
Oct 27, 2020•22 min•Ep. 283
We break down some thoughts on this issue, which came to light after a tweet from Tim Nolet . Later in the episode we talk about the debate raging right now around elections and technology. What role should software play and where is regulation appropriate? Last but not least, we consider what the next US administration might do with regards to regulating big tech. Will they lean towards a European model or continue to be more hands off? Shout out to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Kin3Ti...
Oct 23, 2020•27 min•Ep. 282
You can find Kelsey on Twitter here . His Github is here . His personal journey with Kubernetes is detailed in a nice piece here . Kelsey has an interesting role at Google. He sits at the director level but is an independent contributor with no direct reports. Instead he works to help galvanize interest in particular tools and topics, driving adoption at a broad scale. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....
Oct 20, 2020•30 min•Ep. 281
That skit made it to the front page of Reddit, and was soon seen across the internet. It's nice to make people laugh, but following the surge of interest, Emily also had to deal with severe harassment and cyber stalking. She wrote a piece about the experience which you can find here . In this episode, we discuss how moderation can be improved and the work that remains to be done to make the software industry feel safe and inclusive for everyone. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy an...
Oct 16, 2020•32 min•Ep. 280
Has there ever been a gaming company that brought more joy to the world than Nintendo? They were making playing cards back in 1889 and continue to find ways to be different but fun with inventions like the Switch and Labo. Sara gives us some the scoop on Rimworld. Check out the trailer here and feel free to lend your skill to a new mod if you have ideas for how to improve it. A Excel sheet meltdown led to critical health data about the pandemic being lost in the UK. Rows can go to millions, but ...
Oct 13, 2020•22 min•Ep. 279
You can find some of Jack's art and other projects here . Ben breaks through and answers his first SO question —by copy/pasting from the comments, of course. Sara finds the relevant XKCD . Later, we check out Darling.hq, a MacOS translation layer for Linux If you are in the mood to learn programming with colors and shapes, check out the website that Jack built: Maria.cloud See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-in...
Oct 09, 2020•19 min•Ep. 278
Sara shares the story of a developer conference that was smoke bombed by an Arduino bot gone haywire. It was this chaos that inspired her to dig deeper into Arduino, which would eventually play a big role in helping her to found her company, Jewelbots . Paul unravels the mystery of what's really inside the Goonie Box: a timepiece, puzzle, and mechanical wonder that Guido uses to test his house guests. This week's lifeboat goes to Terminator17, who helped solve a problem around object detection u...
Oct 06, 2020•24 min•Ep. 277
Today's episode was inspired by a question on folks who postpone a merge for fear of being the one to resolve a conflict. Shout out to Candied Orange for the thoughtful answer. Paul and Sara reminisce about the days before Git, when version control was very different from what it is today, and Paul accidentally left many a project in shambles. Do you remember the days of Subversion and CVS ? Later, we dig into Sara's new adventure with Jupyter Notebooks . They are extremely useful for developers...
Oct 02, 2020•21 min•Ep. 276
