The Stack Overflow Podcast - podcast cover

The Stack Overflow Podcast

The Stack Overflow Podcaststackoverflow.blog
For more than a dozen years, the Stack Overflow Podcast has been exploring what it means to be a software developer and how the art and practice of programming is changing our world. From Rails to React, from Java to Node.js, join the Stack home team for conversations with fascinating guests to help you understand how technology is made and where it’s headed.
Download Metacast podcast app
Podcasts are better in Metacast mobile app
Don't just listen to podcasts. Learn from them with transcripts, summaries, and chapters for every episode. Skim, search, and bookmark insights. Learn more

Episodes

Building for AR with Niantic Labs augmented reality SDK

You can learn more about Lightship, Niantic's AR SDK, here . They are hiring developers, and openings can be found here . Richard can be found on LinkedIn here . Kelly can be found on LinkedIn here . A big thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Karim, for answering the question: Check if value exists in Array object Javascript or Angular?...

Jul 06, 202129 minEp. 356

Bring your own stack: Why developer platforms are going headless

As explained in this piece , "A headless CMS is a back-end only content management system (CMS) built from the ground up as a content repository that makes content accessible via a RESTful API or GraphQL API for display on any device." Shopify has leaned hard into GraphQL and APIs in general. The goal, as Coates describes it, is to allow developers to bring their own stack to the front-end, but provide them with the benefits of Shopify's back-end, like edge data processing for improved speed at ...

Jul 02, 202122 minEp. 355

How product development at Stack Overflow has evolved

If you're full up on technical content and just want funny retweets, follow Adam on Twitter here If you're interested in learning more about tag pages, check out what the community created for Rust . Thanks to Peter Cordes, our lifeboat badge winner of the week, for answering the question: How can I accurately benchmark unaligned access speed on x86_64?...

Jun 29, 202121 minEp. 354

From search trees to neural nets, a deep dive into natural language processing

We chatted with three guests: Miguel Jetté : Head of AI R&D Josh Dong : AI Engineering Manager Jenny Drexler : Senior Speech Scientist When Jette was studying mathematics in the early 2000s, his focus was on computational biology, and more specifically, phylogenetic trees, and DNA sequences. He wanted to understand the evolution of certain traits and the forces that explain why our bones are a certain length or our brains a certain size. As it turned out, the algorithms and techniques he lea...

Jun 23, 202134 minEp. 352

Tickets please! Exploring the joys of being a junior engineer

Bligh explains her love for front end and the simple pleasure of bringing a designer’s vision to life We also talk about making the transition from journalism and digital media to the world of software development. You can find her on Twitter here . You can check out Contact here . Learn more about Makers here . Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Rami Amro Ahmed, who answered the question: What is the difference between Model Factory and a DB seeder in Laravel?...

Jun 18, 202119 minEp. 350

Information foraging: the tricks great developers use to find solutions

You can check out some more of Henley's work on his blog here . Recent pieces include: A theory of how developers seek information All my career rejections Navigate your code like it's 2021 Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago? An inquisitive code editor: Overcome bugs before you know you have them How much time does the average developer spend typing in their editor versus researching, exploring, and pondering? Henley believes half an hour of inputting actual code a day is realistic...

Jun 15, 202119 minEp. 349

Forget view-source, young coders are learning by making Discord bots and hacking Roblox

You can find Jenn on Twitter here . She is the creator of the wonderful website, make8bitart.com . You can check out Glitch here and dig into some of its WebXR projects . Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Ruberandinda Patience , who explained why you got a 404 Not Found, even though the route exist in Laravel ....

Jun 11, 202129 minEp. 348

A good software tutorial explains the How. A great one explains the Why.

Karl is interested in the use of low code tools to extend development work beyond the engineering department. He also believes this approach, when done properly, allows teams to release new iterations more rapidly. Check out his company, draft.dev . Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn . This week's lifefboat badge goes to Günter Zöchbauer , who explained: How to use 2 mixins in State in Flutter?...

Jun 08, 202122 minEp. 347

Don't build it: advice on civic tech from MIT's GOV/LAB

Innocent is a research associate at the MIT Gov /Lab . You can find him on Twitter here . Luke is the Founder and Executive Director of the civic technology organization Grassroot , as a practitioner-in-residence in 2021. You can follow him on Twitter here . Our lifeboat of the week goes to John Rotenstein, who explained: Why some services are called “AWS XXX” and the others “Amazon XXX” ....

Jun 04, 202118 minEp. 346

Unpacking observability and OpenTelemetry with Spiros Xanthos of Splunk

You can read more about Spiros on his LinkedIn or Twitter . There is some good backstory on his first company, Log Insight, here . A rundown of the acquisition that led to Spiros joining Splunk is here . There are also some interesting details in Splunk's blog on the deal, which calls out Omnition as a "a stealth-mode SaaS company that is innovating in distributed tracing, improving monitoring across microservices applications." If you enjoy the conversation and want to hear more, Spiros has don...

Jun 01, 202134 minEp. 345

WFH? Developers learn to be their own operations department

You can check out our piece how developers can be their own operations department here . Our piece on preventing scope creep while working from home is here . You can follow Mike on Twitter here and learn more about building apps for Slack here . This week's lifeboat badge goes to averroes for helping us to : Check if integer == null...

May 28, 202132 minEp. 344

Blocking the haters as a service

Chou, a Stanford educated computer scientist and electrical engineer, cut her teeth in Silicon Valley with stints at Facebook, Quora, and Pinterest, where she advocated for a stronger focus on diversity. Block Party describes its mission as building "anti-harassment tools against online abuse, but more fundamentally we are building solutions for user control, protection, and safety." As CEO and lead engineer, Chou gets to choose the company's tools. Block Party is built with technologies like Re...

May 25, 202137 minEp. 343

Build engineering at Apple and the future of deploy previews

Eric was a build engineer at Apple for many years, then started a FeaturePeek which went through Y-combinator. He talks about what he learned from those experiences and how he'll be applying that knowledge to his new job at Netlify. The teams combined forces to make the process of submitting and gathering feedback on deploy previews easier and more broadly accessible outside technical teams. As Cassidy explained: “Based on technology from FeaturePeek, Deploy Previews enables reviewers to comment...

May 21, 202124 minEp. 342

Where design meets development inside Stack Overflow

David helps us understand where great designers fit on web companies these days, somewhere between front-of-the-front-end and back-of-the-front-end . Right now a lot of projects have to be maintained in multiple places - one for marketing, one for design, one for development. David shares thoughts on how to combine workspaces and where design systems can be integrated with tools. Congrats to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Jon, for helping unpack this riddle: Execution failed for task ':f...

May 18, 202132 minEp. 341

Why are good Ruby developers so hard to find?

Ilya brought a host of good topics to the table. Bold Penguin went from one offshore developer, to one key dev, to one team, to multiple teams, multiple leaders, multiple external teams, to having a complete reboot only to go through it again. Ilya explains the lessons learned along the way. If you’re trying to grow a software startup, you have to understand and adapt your business. Bold Penguin had to figure out if its focus was being a platform, a product, a SaaS company, an enterprise technol...

May 14, 202124 minEp. 340

Saying goodbye to our co-host, Sara Chipps

Sara has been part of the open source community since 2001 and was formerly on the board of the .NET foundation. Recently she was elected to the board of the OpenJS foundation and was eager to get back in the trenches, helping people solve computer problems. In this episode we talk about coding interviews and brushing up on your puzzle solving chops. Later we dive into Ember.js, the framework Sara will be using with her new colleagues at LinkedIn. We explore what it’s like to join a team when ev...

May 11, 202122 minEp. 339

NFT art, Ethereum gas, and a dive into Gemini's data lake

You can find Tommy on Twitter here and check out his NFT collection here . Evan tweets his undying love for The Mets here . Before you lay out your critique of NFTs, here's a great documentary on fraud and forgery in the fine art world. Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Oriol, who answered the question: What is the difference between 'remove' and 'removeChild' method in javascript?...

May 07, 202131 minEp. 338

Open source contributors helped a helicopter fly on Mars

You can check out the badge Github gave to folks for helping with the Mars flight here . You can learn more about F´, NASA’s open source flight software and embedded system framework, here. Paul tells the story of a shady financial operator who offered to take his blog public during the dot com boom. Yes, Ftrain.com was once an IPO candidate. Who copies and pastes from Stack Overflow? We dig into some of the data from our April Fools joke to get a sense of the scale and collaboration happening a...

May 04, 202124 minEp. 337

One founder's journey from personal trainer to "frontend mentor"

You can check out Frontend Mentor here . Try a few challenges or join their Slack, where thousands of students are chatting about how they are approaching the projects. You can follow Matt on Twitter here . If you want to read about how he made the jump from personal trainer to web developer, he did a nice interview with Indie London. Our lifeboat of the week goes to Banex for answering the question: why do we use NULL in strtok()?...

Apr 30, 202121 minEp. 336

From music to trading cards, software is transforming curation and collecting

You can follow David on Twitter here and read his blog here . Check out more about Dapper Labs and it's work with the NBA and NFTs here . David has written some influential pieces on the world of digital music and the role of software platforms. Check out a few of his pieces here . Read about David's adventure's setting up a Minecraft server for his kids and using software for griefer detection. Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Keith Thompson, for answering the question: Go lang ...

Apr 27, 202132 minEp. 335

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?...

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....

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.

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...

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
For the best experience, listen in Metacast app for iOS or Android
Open in Metacast