Will no one think of the maintainers? As The New Stack points out , watching millions of projects fail because of a bug in an open source library has become common enough that we shrug and reply, "Told you so." It's gotten so bad, big tech companies are visiting the White House to discuss the issue as a matter of national security. There is a great post up on the Stack Overflow blog examining this issue, but it's not about color.js, it's about Log4J. Traffic to questions on this logging library ...
Jan 21, 2022•21 min•Ep. 416
You can find Maureen here . You can find Scott here . There is a wealth of free courses available through the AWS training website , including Operations, Advanced Networking, Machine Learning, and Data Science.
Jan 18, 2022•33 min•Ep. 415
You can find Philippe on Twitter here and learn more about CrowdSec here . They recently put together a list of the IP addresses trying to exploit the new Log4j vulnerability. For a prescient view of today's cybersecurity challenges, Humeau recommends John Brunner's classic 1975 sci-fi novel, The Shockwave Rider....
Jan 14, 2022•26 min•Ep. 414
Data scientists and engineers don’t always play well together. Data scientists will plan out a solution, carefully build models, test them in notebooks, then throw that solution over the wall to engineering. Implementing that solution can take months. Historically, the data science team has been purely science-driven. Work on methodologies, prove out something that they wanted to achieve, and then hand it over to the engineering organization. That could take many months. Over the past three to f...
Jan 12, 2022•21 min•Ep. 413
Esther and Matt are graduate students in computer science at the University of Washington , where they study community networks . Esther explains how open-source, community-owned and -operated LTE networks are a good solution for expanding public internet access and ensuring digital equity . Matt walks the team through Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) , a shared wireless spectrum that allows users to build their own LTE networks. Chris Webb of the Black Brilliance Research Project lays ou...
Jan 11, 2022•35 min•Ep. 412
Developers are leading the Great Resignation, according to some reports . Others feel developers aren't resigning, so much as seizing the moment to find better opportunities. You can find out hosts online at the links below Cassidy Ceora Ryan Ben Have an experience with the Great Resignation you want to share with our podcast and blog? Hit us up by email: Podcast Pitches for the blog Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Umer, for explaining how to: align an anchor to the right...
Jan 07, 2022•30 min•Ep. 411
Hear why Ben thinks the Workplace Stack Exchange and the Academia Stack Exchange have the richest questions in the Stack Exchange network (or maybe just the most sitcom-worthy). ICYMI: Jack Dorsey stepped down from Twitter. Will he be back? At Twitter, Tess Rinearson is leading a new team focused on crypto, blockchains, and decentralized tech. Follow her on Twitter here . The team winces over a review of a Tesla Model Y hatchback that describes phantom braking so frequent and so dangerous that i...
Jan 04, 2022•20 min•Ep. 410
What exactly is VanillaJS ? Tongue-in-cheek, it's the most lightweight JavaScript framework out there and used by pretty much every website on the internet. Seriously though, it's just JavaScript…without a framework. If you're interested in reading and learning more about JavaScript, Chris has a bevy of courses and eBooks over at vanillajsguides.com . Like Chris's ideas so much you want to subscribe to his newsletter? Right over this way ! Since you are a connoisseur of podcasts, check out Chris...
Dec 21, 2021•20 min•Ep. 409
Bill gives an overview of edge computing and why it matters. His team wants to enable developers by democratizing access to AI. OpenVINO is an open-source toolkit for high-performing AI inference. DevCloud lets developers prototype, test, and run their workloads for free on Intel hardware and software. For more on OpenVINO, check out this example we shared that increases image resolution. Of course, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention another way Intel is bringing its technology to developer...
Dec 17, 2021•24 min•Ep. 407
The pathway to a software developer job has shifted over the years. It used to be that you had to go through a college computer science program before you could get a developer job. But as online education became better and programming jobs became more specialized, people were getting hired on the strength of their bootcamp or certification experience. Our 2021 Developer Survey found that almost 60% of respondents learned to code using online resources . Mike spent most of his time in the worlds...
Dec 16, 2021•27 min•Ep. 408
Find Joel Spolsky on Twitter here . Jeff Atwood is on Twitter here . Geoff Dalgas is on Twitter here . Follow Jarrod Dixon on Twitter here ....
Dec 14, 2021•28 min•Ep. 406
PlanetScale is built on Vitess , the open-source database clustering system that runs at colossal scale hosting YouTube, Slack, and GitHub. A familiar theme : Big cloud companies aren’t set up for independent developers. Sam and Ceora discuss how serverless can get projects—even businesses—up and running quickly. Choosing the stack for a new business? Tools like Netlify can scale with your product, so you don’t have to change your architecture as you evolve. Staging environments should be a thin...
Dec 10, 2021•22 min•Ep. 405
This “Trojan source” bug (get it?) could threaten the security of all code. In its annual report on its user community , GitHub found that developers appreciate automation, reusing code, and remote work. (No surprises there.) Ceora explains how automation and code reuse are game changers for independent developers and how this logic is spreading to big tech companies, too. GitHub’s first Chief Security Officer has the company focused on keeping your repo secure. GDPR makes you legally responsibl...
Dec 07, 2021•17 min•Ep. 404
Ethan's book, Once a Bitcoin Miner: Scandal and Turmoil in the Cryptocurrency Wild West , is available now. The metaverse isn’t just inevitable; it’s already here (and it has a booming real estate market ). As we move more of our lives online onto platforms controlled by increasingly powerful digital giants, Ethan explains the democratizing power of cryptocurrency and blockchain. On the other hand, China’s new digital currency (government-issued but crypto-inspired) raises questions about privac...
Dec 03, 2021•26 min•Ep. 403
The conversation was inspired by Epic's decision to make it's Kid's Web Service's parent verification free to all developers. Ben has been grappling with these questions since 2013, when he wrote about allowing screen time into his young son's life. One thing that old article does remind us; how incredibly indestructible the original iPad was . A true tank of a tablet! Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, javimuu, for explaining: How to get a Thumbail / Preview image from Server Vide...
Nov 30, 2021•20 min•Ep. 402
We kick things off by weighing the merits of two gender-neutral regional pronouns: the familiar y’all and the under appreciated yinz . Now that’s covered... The global population of developers will hit 45 million by 2030, up from 26.9 million in 2021 ( EDC ). What platforms will they want to build on? Did Kubernetes solve all your problems? Did it create new ones? It seems there’s always an XKCD relevant to our conversation. Today, it’s How standards proliferate ....
Nov 23, 2021•25 min•Ep. 401
Maxwell, a solution architect at xMatters, took a winding road to get to where he is. After a computer engineering education, he held jobs as field support engineer, product manager, SRE, and finally his current role as a solutions architect, where he serves as something of an SRE for SREs, helping them solve incident management problems with the help of xMatters. When he moved to the SRE role, Maxwell wanted to get back to doing technical work. It was a lateral move within his company, which wa...
Nov 22, 2021•23 min•Ep. 400
You can learn more about Roll, which describes itself as blockchain infrastructure for social money, here . If you want to follow them on social, check out @tryrollhq as well as their personal socials: @bradley_miles_ and @sidkal . If you are interested in this kind of tech, check out previous conversations on Web3 and our chat with Chris Dixon on blockchain. Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Notnooop, who explained how you can : Make An Emoji Enabling App...
Nov 19, 2021•30 min•Ep. 399
GitHub's CEO, Nat Friedman, stepped down recently to focus on his startup roots. Chief product officer, Thomas Dohmke, will be moving to CEO. The Verge reviewed our no-longer-a-joke April Fool's keyboard. How many keyboard layouts are there anyway? Including non-English layouts, there's lots . Do you have a mind's eye? How about an inner monologue? We explore why some people have a voice in their head when they think and some don't ....
Nov 16, 2021•25 min•Ep. 398
Rennie grew up in Kenya, Honduras, Somalia, and Oklahoma; his parents volunteered for the Peace Corps before working for the US Government overseas. Audio tape drives are real! Check out this Retrocomputing question about how the Commodore 64 audio interface worked. If you want to remember something better, a 2014 study says you should write it out by hand. Rennie worked at Blackberry, and Ben remembered his colleagues at the Verge fondly hoping for their comeback. In fact, here's Ben hoping for...
Nov 12, 2021•29 min•Ep. 397
You can find Alex's writing for Employ America here . You can find him on Twitter here You can find Hassan's blog here and his Twitter here . You can find their writing on the semiconductor industry and shortages here and here . Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is jasme, who helped someone figure out how to fix email validation with Laravel....
Nov 09, 2021•36 min•Ep. 396
What is Web3? The Decentralized Internet of the Future Cassidy Ceora Ryan Ben Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Tadeck, for showing us how to design a : Function for Factorial in Python...
Nov 05, 2021•38 min•Ep. 395
We start out the show talking about this article: I Don't Know How To Count That Low . Is Apple normalizing surveillance? Toyota trucks and Land Cruisers were very popular with ISIS. Instead of a lifeboat, we shoutout this fun question: How do I stop annoyed wizards from killing people all the time? A common problem for us muggles....
Nov 02, 2021•22 min•Ep. 431
Alex comes up with better ways to interact with technology and writes about it on his website . Is there a link between playing music and writing code? A previous article of ours covered the merger of the two in the music programming language, Sonic PI. If you're curious about the weird extremes of operating system development, check out TempleOS . Cassidy and Alex both take copious notes through Obsidian . Alex has a plugin that may help you organize notes automatically....
Oct 29, 2021•28 min•Ep. 393
The infrastructure that networked applications lives on is getting more and more complicated. There was a time when you could serve an application from a single machine on premises. But now, with cloud computing offering painless scaling to meet your demand, your infrastructure becomes abstracted and not really something you have contact with directly. Compound that problem with with architecture spread across dozens, even hundreds of microservices, replicated across multiple data centers in an ...
Oct 27, 2021•29 min•Ep. 392
This episode was inspired by Joma Tech's review of his first ten years in coding. Ben Popper shared a fair amount of his coding journey through the series Ben Popper is the Worst Coder in the World . Should you actually write out code on paper as some of us had to do? Maybe . Modding games gets people into programming. For Ryan, Freedom Force got him into Python. Today, it's Minecraft and Roblox . Want to jump start your career? Find a community on Discord or Twitter and make some contacts. The ...
Oct 26, 2021•23 min•Ep. 391
Isaac's piece, Code quality: a concern for businesses, bottom lines, and empathetic programmers , ran recently on the Stack Overflow blog. A simple metric for code quality code be how easy is it to delete any given piece of code. There's no algorithmic way to judge quality code, but experienced engineers know it when they see it. Jeff Atwood's Performance is a Feature blog post gets a lot of mileage with our writers. But code quality isn't on the same axis; it's not a feature you can prioritize....
Oct 22, 2021•22 min•Ep. 390
At LinkedIn scale, it pays to save your developers a few minutes or even seconds on repeat tasks. Sara walks us through her experience managing senior engineers, and trying to improve developer experience and tooling, on a massive, global platform with over a billion user interactions a month. Paul shares some of his firm's latest work, helping to visualize the impact of climate change at Probable Futures . Interested in doing work in software focused on climate change? Paul recommends you learn...
Oct 19, 2021•19 min•Ep. 389
Graybeard conference alert! Eran and Ryan both started their technology journeys on the venerable Commodore 64 . During his academic days, Eran helped to map all the BGP (background gateway protocol) gateways in the world. This got a fair bit of press recently during the six hour Facebook outage. Nexar provides smart dashcams and an app that help cars understand the roads around them. While networked cameras on every car could be a privacy nightmare, Nexar says that they have privacy as a founda...
Oct 15, 2021•25 min•Ep. 388
HarperDB is a startup that focuses on highly scalable databases that handle real-time data. Harper is built on Node.js and Express with a little help from Fastify . They know where they excel and where they don't. High data throughput like gaming and vision, great! High data resolution and transactional software like financial applications, not so great. It's speed over accuracy. Instead of a Lifeboat badge today, we shared a relevant question: Q: How to create HarperDB table with lambda....
Oct 12, 2021•24 min•Ep. 387
