If you’re not familiar with Stacks , Stack Overflow’s design system, it’s a robust CSS and JavaScript Pattern library that helps users create coherent experiences in line with Stack Overflow’s best practices and design principles. Explore more on Netlify or GitHub . Missed our April Fool’s prank this year? Relive the hilarity and the pain . Atomic CSS is a CSS architecture approach favoring single-purpose classes named based on visual function. Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user ceejayoz for th...
Apr 26, 2022•32 min•Ep. 447
A high school class on Pascal launched Andi’s interest in programming (starting on an Apple IIc). Andi was bored with his university studies and took on an extra-credit programming project that turned into PHP3 , the version that built a million websites. PHP gets a lot of hate , and we have two theories about why. First, it’s primarily brownfield development, and we all know that hell is other people’s code. Second, it democratized development—a great thing in many ways - that nevertheless led ...
Apr 22, 2022•31 min•Ep. 446
Average tenure at Google has been reported at 1.1 years, which stands in contrast to a broader average of 4.2 years for software developers across the board. Tech jobs at many so called titans and disrupters last less than two years, according to research from Dice . Uber is forging an unlikely alliance with two taxi tech firms. The ultimate chron job - ensuring users can access a chronological feed on their favorite social media without sacrificing your recommendation algorithm's potency or dat...
Apr 19, 2022•30 min•Ep. 445
Cassidy is co-organizing Devs for Ukraine, a free online engineering conference from April 25-26 to raise funds in support of Ukraine. Register today and donate if you can. Plex.tv is a hub for live TV, on-demand streaming content, and your own media library. Read the full story of Fast’s speedy shutdown. Following the ultimate personal security checklist will protect your digital security and privacy—but it might also raise eyebrows at the FBI. Today’s tech recs: Ben recommends TENS therapy , a...
Apr 15, 2022•22 min•Ep. 444
Read about how New Relic achieved pay equity —and what, exactly, that means. Last month, hacker group Lapsus$ released screenshots showing it had successfully breached Okta’s internal systems using compromised credentials. What does it all mean? Read about it here and here . Matt recounts a harrowing example of a man-in-the-middle attack that nearly emptied a friend’s bank account Today’s recommendations: Cassidy recs Midjourney , an AI art-making tool currently in beta. (Learn more about Midjou...
Apr 12, 2022•32 min•Ep. 443
Quizzes and games like Roblox are a good way to build your knowledge, whether you’re learning to code or becoming a K-pop expert. ICYMI: Listen to our conversation with HashiCorp cofounder Mitchell Hashimoto , who recently returned to an IC role after serving as CEO and CTO. Connect with Jon on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter . Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Roko C. Buljan for their answer to Pure CSS 3 image slider—without JavaScript or radio inputs ....
Apr 08, 2022•30 min•Ep. 442
React 18 is the latest major version of React. Cassidy also provides an excellent summary of React history. Ceora is working on some CSS art (inspired by K-pop, natch) using CodePen . Cassidy explains why Tanya Reilly’s talk-turned-blog-post Being Glue , which Ceora shouted out in Episode 425, was pivotal in shaping her career decisions. Why do women in software engineering have to worry about being seen as “ not technical enough ”? Today’s tech recs: Ceora recommends the Nintendo Switch™ , Matt...
Apr 05, 2022•38 min•Ep. 441
Read a profile of Mattaniah on People of Color in Tech (POCIT) here . Connect with Mattaniah on LinkedIn or follow her on TikTok . Who remembers Vine ?? This week’s tech recs: Cassidy recommends her Hifiman headphones . Ben recommends his hybrid RAV4 (42 miles on the battery alone). Matt recommends Spline , a design app for 3D web experiences. Ceora’s recommendation is a clear phone case from Five Below , perfect for displaying a photo of your favorite K-pop idol (or, you know, your dog). Plus, ...
Apr 01, 2022•33 min•Ep. 440
Why has this empty NPM package been installed 700,000 times? We’ve got the answer for ya. A nice article and podcast on flow state, including the claim that 23 minutes is the magic number of minutes it takes to find your flow. Thanks to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, Manjusha, for explaining how to: Parse a pipe-delimited file in Python...
Mar 29, 2022•23 min•Ep. 439
Vercel is a developer-first, frontend-focused platform. Together with Google and Meta, Vercel built Next.js , an open-source React framework that helps developers build high-performance web experiences with ease. PlanetScale is a MySQL-compatible serverless database platform that enables infinite SQL horizontal scale. Tools like Webflow and Squarespace have made web development accessible for casual programmers, but what does this mean for professional developers? This week’s Lifeboat badge goes...
Mar 25, 2022•37 min•Ep. 438
Once a company reaches a certain size, their customers might start asking for proof that it has good security and data habits. They want to know if there’s a business continuity plan in place in case disaster strikes. For many companies, formalizing this proof means submitting to an auditing process known as SOC 2. If you’re a developer at one of these companies, particularly if you provide or use SaaS applications, you’ll end up having to implement the controls these audits require. On this spo...
Mar 23, 2022•26 min•Ep. 437
Geriatric millennials unite. Learn more about GitHub’s move to put prebuilt Codespaces into public beta , plus check out CodeSandbox , home of self-proclaimed lazy developers. Meanwhile, in blockchain: Polygon, a solution designed to expand transaction efficiency and output for Ethereum, raised $450 million “to consolidate its lead in the race to scale Ethereum.” Is Decentraland the most annoying blockchain project? The competition is fierce. The 2022 Java Developer Productivity Report found tha...
Mar 22, 2022•35 min•Ep. 436
Danielle’s path to software engineering began when she was accepted into MIT’s Women’s Technology Program , an education and mentorship opportunity for high schoolers interested in engineering or computer science. She later earned her CS degree from MIT. Danielle’s first role out of college was a junior developer working on Meteor , a full-stack JavaScript framework that was just starting a GraphQL project they called Apollo. She tells the team how Meteor started looking at GraphQL and how that ...
Mar 18, 2022•37 min•Ep. 435
The team pays tribute to Microsoft’s Visual Studio , an IDE and source code editor that turns 25 this month. Read Simon Willison’s article on how companies can financially support the open-source contributors they rely on. Learn more about open source’s diversity problem, and how to address it, here and here . Why are K-pop NFTs so unpopular with fans? The Atlantic digs in. ICYMI: Listen to our conversation with HashiCorp cofounder Mitchell Hashimoto: Moving from CEO back to IC ....
Mar 15, 2022•29 min•Ep. 434
David is a CS major who worked in Apple’s music group in the 90s and went on to become CEO of eMusic in the aughts. At Venrock , David invested in early-stage crypto, consumer, and enterprise tech companies. He was early to crypto as a node maintainer on the Bitcoin blockchain and an Ethereum miner, setting up a rig in his basement several years ago. At CoinFund , he focuses on early- and growth-stage crypto and blockchain companies and technologies like Upshot , a platform for crowdsourced NFT ...
Mar 11, 2022•20 min•Ep. 433
Learn more about GitHub’s machine learning-based code scanning , which finds security issues before they make it to production. Google invests $100 million in a skills training program for low-income Americans . Is there a catch? Take2 is a New Zealand program that teaches incarcerated people to code: building marketable skills, opening up employment opportunities, and dramatically reducing recidivism. At the time of writing, Take2 has a 100% success rate in preventing recidivism. We have two ...
Mar 08, 2022•31 min•Ep. 432
Expensify is an expense management solution that integrates with your travel, ERP, and finance/accounting software. Check out their full list of integrations . Expensify engineers rely on Stack Overflow for Teams to make knowledge accessible and shareable, rather than wading through swathes of documentation. Read the case study . Flat organizations like Expensify have minimal or no middle management, meaning there’s no management layer between staff and executives. A similar model for decentrali...
Mar 04, 2022•38 min•Ep. 430
Ceora shouts out Mermaid , a JavaScript-based diagramming and charting tool that creates diagrams dynamically based on Markdown-inspired text definitions. Coinbase’s bouncing QR code ad proved so popular it crashed the app . Considered passé pre-pandemic, QR codes have obvious value now: they’re touch-free, easy to scan, and ubiquitous. (Just don’t call it a comeback .) In preparation for his move from New Zealand to Canada, Matt is overhauling his hardware and transitioning to an M1 MacBook Pro...
Mar 01, 2022•25 min•Ep. 429
Here’s a useful primer on functional programming with JavaScript. This tutorial will guide you in exploring the fundamentals of functional programming with React . If you’re looking for more info on functional programming in React, we’d like to tell you why hooks are the best thing to happen to React . Functional not your thing? Learn why object-oriented programming (OOP) has become such a dominant paradigm ....
Feb 25, 2022•28 min•Ep. 428
Learn more about AlphaCode here . Check out an amazing video essay critiquing the NFT market, The Line Goes Up . Read up on Josh Wardle, the developer who built Wordle for his partner to help pass the time during the pandemic, then sold it to the NY Times for a sweet seven figures....
Feb 22, 2022•21 min•Ep. 427
You can learn more about Clement's career on his LinkedIn and on Twitter (assuming you speak French). You can learn more about Dailymotion here and check out the roles they are hiring for here . You can find Cassidy Williams on Twitter and at her website . You can find Ceora Ford on Twitter and at her website . Our Lifeboat badge winner of the week is Swati Kiran, who helped solve an error causing permission problems in an angular app....
Feb 18, 2022•20 min•Ep. 426
These days, every company looking at analyzing their data for insights has a data pipeline setup. Many companies have a fast production database, often a NoSQL or key-value store, that goes through a data pipeline.The pipeline process performs some sort of extract-transform-load process on it, then routes it to a larger data store that the analytics tools can access. But what if you could skip some steps and speed up the process with a database purpose-built for analytics? On this sponsored epis...
Feb 16, 2022•25 min•Ep. 425
It’s not news that, as Cassidy says, “remote has grown wildly fast”—but Remote has gone from about 25 employees in March 2020 to 900 now (a 3,500% increase). Ceora explains to Matt (oh, sweet summer’s child) what it means to get ratioed on Twitter. Inspired by a great read , the team discusses how Gen Z, having grown up without floppy disks, file folders, or directories, thinks about information. This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user 1983 for their answer to the question Why can I not use `new...
Feb 15, 2022•22 min•Ep. 424
SphereEX builds distributed data systems, making it easier for organizations to load balance massive data stores across multiple servers. Now that open-source software has taken over Western software, it’s China’s turn. Even big companies like Baidu and Bytedance are opening up their projects. Trista is the only female Apache member in China, which is both an honor and a demonstration of how much work needs to be done to support women in STEM. This episode’s Lifeboat badge shoutout goes to swati...
Feb 11, 2022•27 min•Ep. 423
Ceora has her second brain stored in Notion , complete with GIFs and pretty color to get that aesthetic. Ancient history in blog years: Cassidy talks about the perils of being bleeding-edge instead of cutting-edge: Apollo Mission: The pros and cons of being an early adopter of new technology Everybody is aboard the VS Code train, which has the hottest TikTok around. Cassidy recommends the MonoLisa font helping viewers read your code during a livestream. Today’s lifeboat goes to Bill the Lizard f...
Feb 08, 2022•28 min•Ep. 422
Neopets : A little-known gateway into a software career. (Nineties kids will remember.) Among the products Mitchell helped build at Hashicorp: Terraform , Vagrant , and Vault . Not many C-level execs return to IC roles, but you might be surprised how many managers move back to being individual contributors . Follow Mitchell on Twitter here ....
Feb 04, 2022•35 min•Ep. 421
On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Marcin Wyszynski, founder and CEO at Spacelift . Marcin says Spacelift aims to be for infrastructure-as-code what GitHub is to git. It centralizes everything about your IaC system: it runs code, deploys within CI/CD pipelines, tracks the progress of your infrastructure, and gives you insight into who made what changes and why. Today it works with the IaC tools already out there: Terraform, Cloud Formation, and Pulumi, with plans to add suppo...
Feb 02, 2022•23 min•Ep. 420
The Twitter thread that brought Cryptoland to the team’s attention. Ceora wonders whether participants in a hypothetical, decentralized version of YouTube (a YouTube-like dApp ) would need coding skills to contribute meaningfully. Why is Ethereum so expensive and so congested? Ben outlines how Solana has become the fastest-growing blockchain in the world by evolving the Ethereum concept to make it more scalable and less congested....
Feb 01, 2022•37 min•Ep. 419
You can learn more about Gretel here . The company is hiring for numerous positions. Think your commits are anonymous? Think again: DefCon researchers figured out how to de-anonymize code creators by their style . We published an article about the importance of including privacy in your SDLC: Privacy is an afterthought in the software lifecycle. That needs to change. Our Lifeboat badge shoutout goes to 1983 (the year Ben was born) for their answer to Why can I not use `new` with an arrow functio...
Jan 28, 2022•27 min•Ep. 418
The inspiration for today's episode was a terrific article from The Guardian about the many ways in which the modern world, specifically the software we use every day, was designed to steal our attention. During the episode, we discuss Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor know as the "father of flow" for his pioneering research on flow states. Sadly, Prof. Csikszentmihalyi passed away in 2021, but you can find a terrific tribute to him and his work here . In the second half of the episode, we di...
Jan 25, 2022•23 min•Ep. 417
