The Stack Overflow Podcast - podcast cover

The Stack Overflow Podcast

The Stack Overflow Podcastart19.com
For more than a dozen years, the Stack Overflow Podcast has been exploring what it means to be a developer and how the art and practice of software programming is changing our world. From Rails to React, from Java to Node.js, we host important conversations and fascinating guests that will help you understand how technology is made and where it’s headed. Hosted by Ben Popper, Cassidy Williams, and Ceora Ford, the Stack Overflow Podcast is your home for all things code.
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Episodes

Non-fungible Talking

Want to try developing with Ethereum? Free Code Camp has you covered . On the other hand, here are some thoughts on why it's not the greatest language for developers . Interested in minting your own NFT? There are lots of options . Ethereum can be more expensive to use (those gas fees, ouch) but it also has the most active network of artists and collectors. Thanks to Phlume, our lifeboat badge winner of the week, for answering the question: How do I remove the double border on this table? See Pr...

Apr 23, 202125 minEp. 334

One in four visitors to Stack Overflow copies code

You can check out our deep dive into the copy paste data here . We saw over 40 million copies in the two weeks worth of activity we analyzed. Kyle Pollard graduated from the University of Northern British Columbia and worked as a computer technician and programmer for the City of Prince George in Canada. You can find him on Github , Twitter , and his website . There’s lots of info about Cassidy’s various projects at cassidoo.co . You can catch her coding live at @cassidoo , Thursdays at 12:30 PT...

Apr 20, 202115 minEp. 333

How to build and maintain online communities, from gaming to open source

You can follow David on Twitter here . If you want to check out his new book, The Business of Belonging, the first chapter is available here . You can find out more about CMX here and learn more about Bevy here . Cesar prefers to remain off social media, but you can find him on LinkedIn. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....

Apr 16, 202137 minEp. 332

Two words for ya: networked spreadsheets

Dave Winer wrote a fun piece on the lost apps of the 80s . We explore the paradox of software that is "too good" to become popular among mainstream consumers. Microsoft has been releasing new versions of its flagship flight simulator each year for a whopping 38 years now. Now we know what makes it seem so very, very real. But just how big can that next patch be? Another day, another data breach. At this point, we've become numb to the notion that our identity is compromised. Is acceptance better...

Apr 13, 202125 minEp. 331

For Twilio's CIO, every internal developer is a customer

You can find Michelle on Twitter here . You can learn more about building apps with Twilio here . Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to TryingToLearn for explaining the error that pops up in Python when: you can't assign to literal. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....

Apr 09, 202122 minEp. 330

Web programming with nothing but Python

Lots of people who work outside of programming learn Python as part of their job. When folks from telecom, academia, or medical science want to build a web app to help with their job or share their findings with the world, they may feel they need to learn Javascript, CSS, HTML, and half a dozen frameworks to get started. Anvil is a platform that hopes to enable the creation of great web apps with nothing but Python code. You can drag and drop your user elements and rely on Anvil to handle your s...

Apr 06, 202132 minEp. 329

What does being a "nerd" even mean these days?

Despite its reputation, there is a Go To for every language. You can dive deeper with the Summer of Go To. There is a lot you can learn from it as a beginner, even if it is worth avoiding as a professional. Paul's children have learned to inspect the element and the document object model. Being deep into computers seems normal in an era of remote school and omnipresent devices. Who doesn't like making tree maps of memory usage or cropping and splicing footage on TikTok? If all kids are into comp...

Apr 02, 202125 minEp. 328

How we keep Stack Overflow's codebase clean and modern

You can find Roberta on Twitter . For anyone who understands Portuguese, you can also check out her podcast . Check out Roberta's recent blog post on best practices, and when to ignore them. If you're interested in Dapper, an open source project built by Stack Overflow folks that works as a simple object mapper .Net, you can check it out here . Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Colonel Panic, for explaining: What the boolean literals in PowerShell are See Privacy Policy at https:/...

Mar 30, 202122 minEp. 327

We chat with Slack developers about building apps, APIs, and open source communities

Shay is a developer advocate building open source tools and writing education content. Outside of work she writes poetry, indulges fad hobbies, and reads whatever’s left out on the coffee table. Steve Gill a Developer Relations Manager, currently managing the SDK tools team at Slack. The tools teams develops all of our open sourced SDK, such as Bolt for JavaScript, Python, and Java. In his spare time, he enjoys playing ice hockey, woodworking and gaming. You can find Shay on LinkedIn and Twitter...

Mar 26, 202124 minEp. 326

A director of engineering explains scaling from dozens of employees to thousands

You can find out more about Suyog and his career here . True story, he once worked on tablets way before tablets were a thing. He's on Twitter here . You can check out Elastic Cloud and it's suite of services here . Suyog talks a bit about data gravity, a concept you can learn more about here . If you're a fan of release notes and want to get a sense of what Suyog worked on at Elastic over the years, check out his blog archives here . Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, lhf, for anw...

Mar 23, 202130 minEp. 325

Dev, meet Ops. Ops, meet Dev.

You can check out more of Tom's work and some of his books on his website, Everything SysAdmin . Tom also wrote a great blog post for our site that explains his method for crafting a positive feedback loop between Dev and Ops using real-time documentation. You can find Tom on Twitter and check out his books on Sys Admin and Cloud System Administration . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....

Mar 19, 202125 minEp. 324

Taking a risk and moving to a new team

Ian is Brooklyn bred a tech junkie, NBA stats nerd, hip hop connoisseur, and co-creator of GameFlo and Ujima Now . He graduated from Brown University and was a teaching fellow at FullStack Academy before coming to Stack Overflow. You can find him on Twitter and Github . Kyle Pollard graduated from the University of Northern British Columbia and worked as a computer technician and programmer for the City of Prince George in Canada. You can find him on Github , Twitter , and his website . Our life...

Mar 16, 202129 minEp. 323

Covid vaccine websites are frustrating. This developer built a better one.

It was a pandemic, Olivia was on maternity leave after giving birth, and she also had a toddler to take care of. Somehow she still managed to build a website, macovidvaccines.com , that provided far better service than what was available through government and private industry. You can find out more about Olivia on the sites below. Twitter Website LinkedIn See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....

Mar 12, 202125 minEp. 322

Building a bug bounty program for the Pentagon

Cleghorn works for Defense Digital Services. On Twitter, the group describes itself as "a SWAT team of nerds on tours of duty." You can read more about the group's goals on their website . You can see some of his work over on Hacker One. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....

Mar 09, 202122 minEp. 321

How long does good code last?

This week's discussion was inspired by an article from Sandi Metz, which you can find here . It begins with a terrific line, defining the half-life of software as, "the amount of time required for half of an application's code to change so much that it becomes unrecognizable." This topic also connected to a post we ran on the Stack Overflow blog this week, Sacrificial Architecture: learning from abandoned systems. The author, Mohamad Aladdin, suggest that one should "think of your code quality a...

Mar 05, 202121 minEp. 320

Chatting with Google's DeepMind about the future of AI

You can find the paper on MuZero here . He blogs at Furidamu and can be found on Twitter here . The story on drug discovery powered by AI can be found here . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....

Mar 02, 202127 minEp. 319

When it comes to package managers, don't forget security

If you’re a programmer working with npm, Sara has some basic advice on best practices that will keep your codebase safe. Today’s discussion was inspired by a blog post from Michel Gorny which you can find here . Need to simplify the address where people can send you bitcoins? Check out https://ens.domains/ , which even offers .club for your TLD. Thanks to Tagir Valeev for answering the question: How to Split odd and even numbers and sum of both in collection using Stream . You’re our lifeboat ba...

Feb 26, 202123 minEp. 318

How to use interference to your advantage - a quantum computing catch up

Blake has a PhD in physics from Yale and is the quantum platform lead. You can find him on Twitter here and read some of his recent writing here . Robert is VP of IBM Quantum Ecosystem Development, IBM Research. He's the author of Dancing with Qubits and has put together a great list of tutorial videos on his website. No Lifeboat badge winner today, but if you're a fan of Schrödinger's cat, be sure to check out this question from our Quantum Computing Stack Exchange. See Privacy Policy at https:...

Feb 23, 202130 minEp. 317

Introducing The Stack Overflow Podcast

Welcome to The Stack Overflow Podcast! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

Feb 22, 20212 minEp. 647

How do digital nomads pay their taxes?

A nice story on how to avoid the Nomad Tax Trap. Got a lot of employees moving to Texas? The state is notorious for the number of patent lawsuits filed there, and having employees living in the area may expose companies to great legal liability. If the work from home boom is here to stay, get ready for a lot of "cost-of-living" adjustments to follow . Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to kd12 for explaining: How to get an element by its data-id in jQuery See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com...

Feb 19, 202116 minEp. 316

What makes for a great API?

Pattern matching in Python 3 - a nice new feature, a gift to Stack Overflow point seekers, or a big pain in the neck? Curious about the Jamstack? You can find lots of great information on how it works and who works with it here . Want to follow Matt? He's on Twitter here . Our lifeboat badge winner for this episode is Jim Mischel, who explained how to: Find the first character in a string that is a letter. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://a...

Feb 16, 202136 minEp. 315

We're building a web app, got any advice?

Thanks to Marceli Wac for sending us a question about cron jobs. We love getting mail from listeners and try our best to read interesting questions on the show. The goal for Ben's app is simple: let anyone register their intention to show up to the dog park at a certain time so that strangers can have a better chance of arriving at the same time and get some exercise for the pups. What's the simplest web app that would collect the least personal information and reset every 24 hours. Bonus points...

Feb 12, 202127 minEp. 314

How to think in React

You can check out Cassidy's course on React here. It will teach you how to "build a reusable and declarative React component library. It's perfect for developers who are looking to build a scalable design system for their team and product." If you're not in the mood to subscribe, Cassidy would recommend Free Code Camp . There's lots of info about Cassidy's various projects at cassidoo.co . You can catch her coding live at twitter.com/cassidoo , Thursdays at 12:30 PT/2:30 Central/3:30 Eastern. Sa...

Feb 09, 202129 minEp. 313

Command Line Utilities: Fix-Server

Check out the great post from Laura Nolan, a senior engineer at Slack, breaking down their outage. Paul wants some simple command line utilities for "fix-server" and "boot-it-all-up." Clubhouse was known early on for being popular with Silicon Valley, but it's increasingly becoming a global phenomenon. You don't have to wait for it to go public to invest, you can buy shares right now in Agora, the Chinese company powering its real time audio chat. Got ideas for how we can version Q&A on Stac...

Feb 05, 202126 minEp. 312

Can't stop, won't stop, GameStop.

Maybe you don't think GameStop is a tech story, but rest assured, the screenwriting duo behind The Social Network and 21 will inject plenty of nerdery into the Hollywood version. Sara is eager to share the history of CSS , and all the ways it has let her down. We dig into a wise act of self-prersevation from Ben B Johnson. As he writes : "Similar to SQLite , Litestream is open source but closed to contributions. This keeps the code base free of proprietary or licensed code but it also helps me c...

Feb 02, 202132 minEp. 311

What are young developers into? They're all getting AWS certified

You can follow Brian on Twitter. and check out the Cloudcast here. If you're just getting started, he has a cloud basics podcast that covers a new topic each month. And if you are just really, really into containers, well he's got you covered . Paul was talking with someone who mentors a lot of young coders. What are they all into these days? Typescript? Web Assembly? Nope, they're all getting AWS certified. A certification for AWS , Azure, and GCP has become an efficient way to break into the j...

Jan 29, 202132 minEp. 310

Owning the code, from integration to delivery

Today's conversation was inspired by a great blog post from Charity Majors. We also discuss the Chrome team's decision to migrate Puppeteer to Typescript , and the way in which large tech organizations are increasingly interconnected by a set of open source tools and platforms. Lastly, we discuss the impact expanded funding for community colleges could have on the pipeline of software engineers entering the job market. Today's lifeboat badge winner is Abdul Saboor , who answered the question: Ho...

Jan 26, 202116 minEp. 309

Gaming PCs to heat your home, oceans to cool your data centers

Joe Biden just wants to ride his Peleton, but equipment connected to WiFi with a camera and microphone can pose a real security risk . If you've got a chicken coop or greenhouse that needs a little warmth this winter, maybe team it up with your gaming PC or bitcoin mining rig , which tend to give off a lot of heat. Speaking of heat, we dive into datacenters that were sunk under the ocean in an effort to create more economically efficient and environmentally friendly computing. Our favorite meme ...

Jan 22, 202117 minEp. 308

What exactly does it mean to be a "senior" software engineer

Joocelyn hosts the Git Cute podcast, which you can find here . She's working on a book about seniority in the software industry, which you can pre-order here . You can follow her on Twitter at javavvitch . Our lifeboat badge goes to LMc for explaining how one can: Count the Letter Frequency in a String with Python See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....

Jan 19, 202121 minEp. 307

Our stack is HTML and CSS

The title of this week's episode comes from a Hacker News thread where Guillermo argued that the complexity of front end performance goes beyond simplifying your stack to bare web primitives. You can find out more about Vercel , which recently raised a $40 million round , on Guillermo's blog, where he details what the company has planned for the future . You can find more info on Next.JS here . It's a very active tag on Stack Overflow with dozens of new questions a day. Our lifeboat badge for th...

Jan 15, 202128 minEp. 306
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