On today’s home team episode, Ben and Ryan discuss the implications of a lapse in section 174 of the tax code. Here’s a great explainer on how it’s affecting startups and software firms, threatening jobs and potentially bankrupting some struggling companies. Video game employees are exploring a union and Microsoft recently announced it will stay neutral in the process. What’s the difference between a bad game, a low effort developer, and shovelware ? Our game development Stack Exchange has some ...
Dec 19, 2023•17 min•Ep. 653
Does ChatGPT have seasonal depression ? AIs aren’t building apps on their own, at least not yet—but they are helping developers build them. Read Isaac Lyman’s article about the three types of AI-assisted programmers . ICYMI: Listen to our interview with linguist Gašper Beguš , director of the Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, about how LLMs and humans acquire language. Shoutout to Stack Overflow user nhgrif , who earned a Lifeboat badge by rescuing Store only date without time in a database f...
Dec 15, 2023•18 min•Ep. 652
SPONSORED BY FIREHYDRANT While FireHydrant is mostly known for their incident management software, they’re introducing Signals to modernize alerting and consolidate it with incident management. FireHydrant was born out of an incident where a database was dropped at 5:30pm on a Friday right before network maintenance started. It also led to Robert’s social media handle, Bobby Tables . This one time… at band camp …Robert got paged in the middle of trumpet practice…on his sabbatical. Congrats to Gr...
Dec 13, 2023•22 min•Ep. 651
Gemini , Google’s new AI model, is great at competitive programming , among other things . AI Explained is a YouTube channel that covers the latest developments in AI. One problem with regulating AI is that the technology evolves (much) faster than regulators can. Wikifunctions is an open repository of code that anyone can use or contribute to. Did we need another study to tell us that longer commutes are bad for mental health? Probably not, but here’s one anyway. Are governments spying on you t...
Dec 12, 2023•21 min•Ep. 650
CommandBar is a user assistance platform (UAP). Their flagship product, Copilot , is an embedded user assistant agent that companies can configure to help their users with on-demand help, including interactive walkthroughs and personalized responses. Read James’s article about why CommandBar built Copilot , then get started with their docs . Follow James on LinkedIn and Twitter . Follow CommandBar on LinkedIn and Twitter . If you’ve ever wondered Why "Yarn 2" is Yarn 3.0.1 , Lifeboat badge winne...
Dec 08, 2023•30 min•Ep. 649
Do LLMs herald the end of computer programming (as we know it)? A Harvard lecture weighs in on this contentious topic. An epic hardware bug story . Question from the academic trenches: How bad will it look to prospective employers if you refuse to defend your PhD ? (Answer: Pretty bad.) Another intriguing question: Were postal pneumatic tubes in Berlin really cleaned with wine ? The Jetsons misled us about many aspects of the future, from flying cars to the role of pneumatics, but they were onto...
Dec 05, 2023•22 min•Ep. 648
As the year winds to a close, some big employers are facing lower-than-expected attrition rates —in other words, fewer people than expected are quitting. What a difference a year or two makes. People have strong opinions on the return-to-office conversation. Read Eira’s article and let us know how you feel. We are just beginning to explore the effects of prompting on the capabilities and performance of LLMs. The Humane AI pin can be described as a cross between two of humanity’s most beloved tec...
Dec 01, 2023•18 min•Ep. 647
Bito AI is an AI coding tool that helps developers work more productively with features like code completion within the IDE and personalized answers drawn from your codebase. Get started with their docs here . ICYMI: Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is a way of addressing LLM hallucinations and outdated training data. Listen to our recent episode about how an original architect of Jira is rethinking meaningful engineering metrics . Connect with Anand on LinkedIn or Twitter.com . Shoutout to ...
Nov 28, 2023•32 min•Ep. 646
Cloudflare is a cloud provider used by almost 20% of all websites . Developers new to Cloudflare can get started here . Cloudflare recently launched Workers AI , an open, pay-as-you-go AI inference-as-a-service platform that lets developers run machine learning models on the Cloudflare network from their own code. Developers can get started here . On a related note, read Ryan’s article exploring the infrastructure and code behind edge functions or check out his conversation with Vercel CTO Malte...
Nov 21, 2023•25 min•Ep. 645
Sana automates user enrollment, training reminders, and other manual/admin tasks associated with onboarding and learning. Sana AI , their AI assistant, is trained on a company’s data so employees can self-serve the knowledge they need. On a related note, listen to our interview with Gašper Beguš , director of the Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, about his research into how LLMs and humans acquire language. You can also read about how Stack Overflow implemented semantic search . Connect with ...
Nov 17, 2023•29 min•Ep. 643
SPONSORED BY CHRONOSPHERE Episode notes: Chronosphere is introducing Lens , a cloud-native observability tool to view data flows between services. At Uber, Rob created M3 , an open-source metrics engine compatible with Prometheus. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, ralf htp , for their answer to How to read an image in Python OpenCV . If you want to meet Rob and the Chronosphere team, they’ll be at AWS re:Invent from Nov. 27 to Dec. 1....
Nov 15, 2023•27 min•Ep. 642
ICYMI, listen to part one of this conversation. Craig is the cofounder and CEO of Stacklok , which helps developers and open-source communities build safer software, secure the supply chain, and choose safer dependencies. Stacklok’s free-to-use service, Trusty , employs a statistical analysis of author/repo activity and a package’s source of origin to assess its trustworthiness. Craig cofounded the Kubernetes project, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of co...
Nov 14, 2023•13 min•Ep. 641
Stacklok helps developers and open-source communities build safer software, secure the supply chain, and choose safer dependencies. Trusty is their free-to-use service that employs a statistical analysis of author/repo activity and a package’s source of origin to assess its trustworthiness. Craig cofounded the Kubernetes project, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. He is also the former VP of Research and Development at VMWare ....
Nov 10, 2023•16 min•Ep. 640
Sleuth helps engineering teams systematically improve efficiency by tracking speed and release quality, preventing slowdowns and bottlenecks, and removing toil and unnecessary friction. Try it for free or see how teams are using Sleuth . Interested in the automations they offer for teams, check out their public marketplace . Dylan was an original architect on JIRA , so he’s not exactly new to issue- and project-tracking software. DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) is a research program that t...
Nov 07, 2023•29 min•Ep. 639
Tomasz is a general partner at Theory Ventures , a venture capital firm focused on early-stage software companies. He coauthored the book Winning with Data , a deep dive into how big data has changed business best practices and organizational culture. Find Tomasz’s writing here . Follow Tomasz on LinkedIn or Twitter.com . In honor of Tomasz’s early career, we’re shouting out Johnny Hujol ’s answer to What exactly is a container in J2EE and how does it help? ....
Nov 03, 2023•20 min•Ep. 638
Giamir is the tech lead for Stacks , Stack Overflow’s design system. Svelte is a tool for building web apps. Delve into their docs or, if you’re brand-new to Svelte, start with this interactive tutorial . More than 90,000 devs responded to our 2023 Developer Survey where Svelte was ranked the second-most admired web framework . Connect with Giamir via his website or LinkedIn . Today we’re shouting out a topical question asked by Félix Paradis , who (like 73,000 others) wanted to know How to pass...
Oct 31, 2023•28 min•Ep. 637
Alex and cofounder/CTO Paul Querna started ConductorOne because they saw that traditional identity governance (IGA) and privileged access management (PAM) needed to be rethought for cloud-forward companies. Before he cofounded Conductor One, Alev Bovee was a senior director of product management for zero trust and security at Okta . Read Ben’s article about how Computers are learning to decode the language of our minds . Would you trade an iris scan for some crypto ? Sure, what could go wrong? C...
Oct 27, 2023•24 min•Ep. 636
Find out why others have joined Shell . Wondering what it’s like to be a developer at one of the world’s biggest energy companies? They’re hiring . Behavior-driven development is a conceptual approach to software development that calls for collaboration and alignment between developers, testers, and domain experts. One of the new technologies James and Tristan helped introduce at Shell is Kafka , an open-source distributed event streaming platform. Check out their docs here . Engineering teams a...
Oct 25, 2023•32 min•Ep. 635
At Netlify Compose 2023, Biilmann announced their new composable web platform . This isn’t Netlify’s first rodeo—we talked to them for episodes 588 and 456 . You can find Matt Biilmann on X or LinkedIn (and perhaps elsewhere). Today’s shoutout goes to Dick Lucas who asked a topical question, How to prevent Netlify from treating warnings as errors because process.env.CI = true? , viewed by over 84,000 people....
Oct 24, 2023•29 min•Ep. 634
The company says v0 is intended to author the first draft of your site or app, then help you iterate quickly. It won't mean the end of junior web developers, says Lee, as a polished final draft still requires a human touch. And it's not a low code no code approach, as the system allows you to switch easily between the GenAI approach and the actual code. You can learn more about v0 here and head over here to join the waitlist. You can find Lee on LinkedIn or his website . Congrats to Stack Overfl...
Oct 20, 2023•32 min•Ep. 633
Listen to our previous episodes with Eliot here and here . Viam is a software platform for building, monitoring, and managing data from smart machines, including industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, smart home appliances, and IoT devices. Get an overview of the Viam platform or dig into their docs . Connect with Eliot on LinkedIn . Three cheers for Stack Overflow user mattl , who won a Great Question badge with How to remove all contents of a directory using Golang? ....
Oct 17, 2023•24 min•Ep. 632
CodeWhisperer is an AI coding companion trained on Amazon and open-source code that gives you coding suggestions in real time. In addition to being general manager for CodeWhisperer, Doug is also the GM for Amazon CodeGuru Security , which uses machine learning to detect security policy violations and vulnerabilities. Connect with Doug on LinkedIn . Asked and answered: user Manodnya B won a Lifeboat badge for answering Cannot find the Start Button under CodeWhisperer in AWS Toolkit ....
Oct 13, 2023•24 min•Ep. 631
Clockwise is a time orchestration platform that optimizes schedules to create more time in your day. Clockwise AI , their new GPT-powered scheduling assistant, is launching in beta. Join the waitlist here to get early access. (They’re also hiring !) Ryan wrote a recent article about whether meetings are making developers less productive. Cal Newport’s instant classic Deep Work is about learning to tune out distractions and focus on cognitively demanding tasks. Speaking of classics, Paul Graham o...
Oct 10, 2023•25 min•Ep. 630
California is trying to transform how math is taught. How’s that going? Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for work that allows scientists to see how electrons move by mapping their positions in an atom. Learn more here and here . As Ben says, speaking of things that are difficult to observe and don’t make a lot of sense, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is on trial for a historically huge amount of fraud. Follow the live trial blog from Wired or ...
Oct 06, 2023•18 min•Ep. 629
If you want to hear more of her work, check out Alexandra’s Instagram . She uses Tidal Cycles and Supercollider to make algorithms that get people to dance. Interested in algoraves? You may be able to find one near you or run your own. Check out Alexandra in her ad for Logitech , then check out her favorite keyboard ....
Oct 04, 2023•30 min•Ep. 628
Ben is watching AI Explained , a YouTube channel that covers the latest AI developments and their implications. Read Ryan’s article Do large language models know what they are talking about? . Is language really unique to humans? New research suggests maybe not. Not for the first time, Ryan recommends the work of Noam Chomsky: Why Only Us: Language and Evolution , an evolutionary account of language acquisition in humans written with Robert C. Berwick. OverflowAI search is now available for a...
Oct 03, 2023•18 min•Ep. 627
pgnanalyze helps users deliver consistent PostgreSQL performance and availability at any scale. Get started with a free trial or explore their docs . You can also find them on YouTube, where Lukas posts a weekly show called 5mins of Postgres . Lukas was a founding engineer of Citus Data . Citus is an open-source extension to PostgreSQL that was eventually acquired by Microsoft. Find them on GitHub . If you’re new to the topic, SQL (Structured Query Language) is a language for querying databases,...
Sep 29, 2023•25 min•Ep. 626
Check out Luyang’s work at his website or in this Youtube playlist . To make these animations, Luyang uses Processing , a 20-year-old language that started out as a visual way to teach programming but evolved into a professional development tool. Logitech selected Luyang as one of the ambassadors to show off what you can do with their MX Keys S Combo . Shout out to George Profenza for dropping a top answer on Position of a vector in coordinate system (Processing/p5.js) ....
Sep 27, 2023•24 min•Ep. 625
If you missed the first part of our conversation with Chris, listen to it here . Modular ’s new programming language, Mojo , is built for AI developers. Check out their docs or find them on GitHub . Connect with Chris on LinkedIn . Shoutout to user DanielGibbs , who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering what is the difference between getType() and getClass() in java? ....
Sep 26, 2023•17 min•Ep. 624
Modular built a new programming language, Mojo , for AI developers. Explore their docs or find them on GitHub . Chris is on LinkedIn . Congratulations to user Shengyuan Lu , whose answer to Priority queue ordering of elements merited a Lifeboat badge ....
Sep 22, 2023•20 min•Ep. 623
