Pokémon GO is six years old (it makes us feel old, too). Check out NoobBoy , the Game Boy emulator. Need more nineties nostalgia? You can still play DOOM on almost anything . What kind of game could you build with PowerPoint? Two game developers go head-to-head over 24 hours to show you: Watch the video . Did you know a moose can dive 20 feet deep and swim faster than Michael Phelps? It’s true . Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user zvone for their answer to Error message "TypeError: descriptor 'a...
Jul 22, 2022•25 min•Ep. 477
Today's episode is sponsored by Opentext. You can learn more about their information management solutions here . You can find out more about Claire and here career on her LinkedIn . Opentext has a fascinating history. It began as an academic project at the University of Waterloo. The researchers were looking to digitize the Oxford English Dictionary, and created an early search engine, similar to Project Gutenberg. The private company spun out of that work. No lifeboat badge today, so we'll shou...
Jul 20, 2022•24 min•Ep. 476
Anvil is an open-source web framework for building full-stack applications entirely in Python. Ready to dig deeper into code completion? Check out Meredydd’s talk at PyCon 2022 (he even built a code completion engine live on stage). ICYMI: Listen to our previous episode with Meredydd about countering the complexity of web programming: Full-stack web programming with nothing but Python . Connect with Meredydd on LinkedIn or Twitter . The Lifeboat badge shoutout is back. Today’s badge goes to user...
Jul 19, 2022•31 min•Ep. 475
The GPU shortage is (allegedly) over! Read about it at The Verge . Learn how low code demands more creativity from developers . On the job market? Don’t be afraid to turn the tables on your interviewer . This week’s tech recs: Help foster more equitable compensation conversations by taking Devocate’s Developer Relations Compensation Survey . Cal.com offers scheduling infrastructure for anyone and everyone—and it’s open-source . Appsmith is an open-source, low-code platform for building, shipping...
Jul 15, 2022•29 min•Ep. 474
Devraj Varadhan is the SVP of Engineering at Ripple , which provides crypto and blockchain solutions for businesses. Ripple’s mission is to provide practical access to investment tools that can deliver economic freedom for unbanked and underbanked people around the world. Plenty of companies have pressed pause on recruitment efforts, but Ripple is hiring . Before working at Ripple, Dev spent 15 years at Amazon, building customer experiences and products across a wide swath of categories, includi...
Jul 12, 2022•27 min•Ep. 473
Episode notes Before joining Stack, Jody spent time at Pluralsight and AWS Training, two roles that helped him to understand the growing market for online educational self-taught developers. We interviewed his former colleagues at AWS training in this episode . Enjoy the frustration of debugging your own code. Maybe you it brings you eustress ? Ben does not experience this, nor does he like the classic video game Myst . But it takes all kinds. Interested in learning more about the changing trend...
Jul 08, 2022•29 min•Ep. 472
If you want to dive deeper on lucrative skills, you can read a blog post Mike wrote for us last month. If you want to learn more about Mike's background and career, check out his LinkedIn . Mike was previously on the blog and podcast discussing Skillsoft research about the certifications that are most in demand for top paying roles. You can read up on that and listen to his earlier interview here . As always, we want to shout out the winner of a Lifeboat badge. Today's hero is Philip, who answer...
Jul 07, 2022•30 min•Ep. 471
Episode notes An interesting podcast episode on the multiple delays that have kept Ethereum from its long-anticipated merge and kicked the difficulty bomb down the road. Since we recorded, more news broke about delaying the boom. How to Find Open Source Projects to Contribute https://www.codetriage.com/ https://www.coss.community/ https://goodfirstissue.dev/ A pretty cool write up on the creation of spring animations by a few Figma engineers. Looking to build your own image search engine? Check ...
Jul 05, 2022•30 min•Ep. 470
Huge thanks to the more than 73,000 devs from 180 countries who spent 15 minutes each completing our 2022 Developer Survey . This year’s survey was longer than usual, since we wanted to ask about new topics as well as provide a historical throughline to understand how your responses have changed over the years . Among the takeaways from the survey: 2022 saw a 10% jump in how many folks are learning to code online (versus through a conventional coding school or from textbooks). Nearly 85% of orga...
Jul 01, 2022•25 min•Ep. 469
GitHub Copilot is now available to all developers . There’s also the GitHub Copilot Labs extension for Visual Studio Code, which has some neat tricks up its sleeve. Yes, Copilot is impressive; no, it’s not gunning for your job. ICYMI, check out our blog post exploring whether AI is poised to steal our livelihoods: The robots are coming for (the boring parts of) your job . Mullvad VPN is removing the option to add new subscriptions because they want to know “as little as possible” about their use...
Jun 28, 2022•25 min•Ep. 468
RIP Internet Explorer (1995-2022), “ a good tool to download other browsers .” Bummer epitaph, but the meme stands. Netlify ’s unified web development workflow has out-of-this-world benefits for developer experience. Learn more by watching A Tale of Web Development in Two Universes . Netlify recently announced Netlify Edge Functions , a fully serverless runtime environment. Here’s what that means and how it works . For more on “The Edge” (not this guy or this guy ), check out this episode of the...
Jun 24, 2022•32 min•Ep. 467
Docs for Devs: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing can be found here. Jared worked as a technical writer at Google for more than 14 years and recently transitioned to Waymo, the self-driving car company spun out under the Alphabet umbrella. You can find him on Twitter and LinkedIn . Zachary has been a technical writer at GitHub and the Linux Foundation, and now works as a staff technical writer at Stripe. You can find all her online accounts at her website . Interested in exploring ap...
Jun 21, 2022•38 min•Ep. 466
WWDC22 was last week (check out Apple’s highlights here ). Among the most exciting demonstrations: passkeys , a new approach to authentication with the potential to finally replace passwords altogether. Apple also announced enhancements to Swift , its programming language, and a new flagship processor, the M2 chip . Now that iMessage users will be able to edit or even unsend text messages after the fact , will your group chat (or your relationship) ever be the same? Multitaskers rejoice: A new i...
Jun 17, 2022•23 min•Ep. 465
Ever since personal information started flowing into applications on the web, securing that information has become more and more important. General security and privacy frameworks like ISO-27001 and PCI provide guidance in securing systems. Now the law has gotten involved with the European Union’s GDPR and California’s CPRA. More laws are on the way, and these laws (and the frameworks) are changing as they meet legal challenges. With the legal landscape for privacy shifting so much, every engine...
Jun 16, 2022•27 min•Ep. 464
Temporal Technologies is a scalable open-source platform for developers to build and run reliable cloud applications. ICYMI, here’s a post we wrote with Ryland Goldstein, Head of Product at Temporal, discussing how software engineering has shifted from a monolithic to a microservices model—thereby introducing a whole new set of challenges for software engineers. Maxim, who grew up in Russia, is renowned in the microservices world. He spent decades architecting mission-critical systems at MSFT, A...
Jun 14, 2022•23 min•Ep. 463
HASH , where Maggie works along with Stack Overflow cofounder Joel Spolsky , is an open-core platform for creating simulations that help people make better decisions. Explore Maggie’s writing on everything from digital anthropology to best practices for illustrating invisible programming concepts . Maggie recommends the Nielsen Norman Group website as the best resource for folks getting up to speed on research-based UX. Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Sten for their answer to Detecting trans...
Jun 10, 2022•29 min•Ep. 462
The first step in quantum computing? Quantum internet : a network capable of sending quantum information between far-distant computing machines (as in, one on Earth and one on Mars). Still have questions? In case it’s been a while since your last physics course: Schrödinger’s cat . Retool’s 2022 State of Engineering Time reveals how software engineers spend their time, what they want to do more (and less) of, and the most frustrating and satisfying parts of their jobs. A great resource from GitH...
Jun 07, 2022•22 min•Ep. 461
The Web3 crime of the century? Seth Green’s Bored Ape NFT is kidnapped by dastardly phishing scammers, kiboshing the TV series Green was developing around the Bored Ape character. Read more . Ceora served as a resident emcee at this year’s Remix Conf . She and Cassidy offer advice for developers who want to give talks or host conferences. In tech industry news: Broadcom acquires VMWare for $61 billion , one of the largest tech acquisitions in history. Today in tech recs: Matt recommends Logitech...
Jun 03, 2022•34 min•Ep. 460
While blockchains are huge right now, finding one to build on that doesn’t use a ton of energy, has good privacy protections, and operates efficiently is harder than it looks. The original breakout blockchain, Bitcoin, was slow to adopt any innovations coming out of research. Other blockchains use the electricity of a small country to play elaborate gambling games. For someone looking to build the future of Web3, what are your options? On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk to Tezos c...
Jun 01, 2022•37 min•Ep. 459
Jason is now a managing director at Redpoint Ventures and has led one investment so far, backing a company called Alchemy that is focused on infrastructure and dev tools for web3. He describes himself as a "very average" programmer, but an excellent engineer, and explains how he parlayed his unique skill set into key roles at Heroku and GitHub. Our lifeboat for the week goes to dfrib for suggesting a solution to: Error "nil requires a contextual type" using Swift...
May 31, 2022•36 min•Ep. 458
Following the success of the Mac Mini, Windows is getting into the tiny computer business . Oh, and it’s running on ARM chips. Oh, and Visual Studio and VS Code will now offer native ARM support. Video games got a lot of us into programming thanks to their openness to mods. It’s what made The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind such a hit 20 years ago. Minecraft may live forever thanks to its modding community and parent-friendly tools. Just don’t be surprised when you have to ban local kids for virtual ar...
May 27, 2022•22 min•Ep. 457
Companies like Meta, Twitter , and Netflix are enacting hiring freezes and layoffs, a situation that’s not great for anybody but is likely to have outsize effects on people of color in tech . Gen Z may not understand file structures , but they sure understand Twitter toxicity. MegaBlock from Gen Z Mafia allows users to block bad tweets, their authors, and every single account that liked the offending tweet. There, doesn’t that feel better? Apple’s WWDC 2022 is just around the corner. What are yo...
May 24, 2022•30 min•Ep. 456
Highly-touted cryptocurrencies like TARA don’t always solve the problems they’re supposed to, as Bloomberg reports . If you’re looking for a compelling deep-dive into a crypto scammer, Cassidy recommends BBC podcast The Missing Cryptoqueen . Ceora is working to improve the quality of her commit messages in order to turn what’s now a personal project into an open-source project that others can contribute to. One great resource she’s found: Zen and the art of writing good commit messages . Attenti...
May 20, 2022•30 min•Ep. 455
You may be running your code in containers. You might even have taken the plunge and orchestrated it all with YAML code through Kubernetes. But infrastructure as code becomes a whole new level of complicated when setting up a managed Kubernetes service. On this sponsored episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with David Dymko and Walt Ribeiro of Vultr about what they went through to build their managed Kubernetes service as a cloud offering. It was a journey that ended not just...
May 18, 2022•26 min•Ep. 454
Supabase , the open-source database-as-a-service company, raised $80 million in Series B funding in a round led by Felicis Ventures. In case you were wondering: YYes, the company is named for the Nicki Minaj song !. Today in tech recs: Cassidy recommends budgeting app Lunch Money for everything from crypto to cash. Matt recommends Magnet for window management. Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user dfrib for their answer to Error "nil requires a contextual type" using Swift ....
May 17, 2022•16 min•Ep. 453
Ian and Corey met at Microsoft, where they built Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 (which boasted its own CD-ROM). They went on to found Mattermost in 2016 to give developers one platform for collaborating across tools and teams. Ian, who previously founded the game company SpinPunch , calls Mattermost “yet another of those video game companies turned B2B software companies,” like Slack and Discord . Says Ian: “Games are all the risk of a movie plus all the complexity of a B2B Saa...
May 13, 2022•33 min•Ep. 452
Check out a manager’s toolkit for preventing burnout put together by Gitlab Cassidy once asked Stephen Colbert for his favorite website. His answer may surprise you. Today in tech recs: Pokémon GO (for extra motivation to get outside) and the Apple Watch activity tracker (to track activity and remind you to move around). Jon recommends that you not get a treadmill desk. Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user JLRishe for their answer to Error "TypeError: $(...).children is not a function" . Follow J...
May 10, 2022•27 min•Ep. 451
You can check out Michael’s bio here and tune in to his podcast Cloud Unfiltered . If you're interested in some of open source work Michael and his colleagues are doing, check out API Clarity .
May 05, 2022•23 min•Ep. 450
Stack Overflow’s 2019 Developer Survey found that respondents overwhelmingly considered Elon Musk to be the person with the greatest influence on technology. Now that Musk is taking over Twitter , it’s safe to say that influence will increase. James Stanier, engineering director at Shopify, has some thoughts on one of our perennial topics: transitioning from IC to manager. He’s proposed a 90-day trial period for IC engineers moving into management roles. Listen to Stanier on the Dev Interrupted ...
May 03, 2022•27 min•Ep. 449
The crew has complicated feelings about products like Apple’s augmented reality glasses and Google Glass . Ceora put it best: “I'm very cautious about any big tech company having any more access to my perception of reality.” On the other hand, products like Envision smart glasses that help visually-impaired people navigate their environments exemplify how AR technology can enable accessibility and empower users. Speaking of different perceptions of reality, New York mayor Eric Adams dusts off th...
Apr 29, 2022•33 min•Ep. 448
