Born and raised in China, Liam arrived in the US to attend the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied human-computer interaction . After some initial “culture shock” at the differences between his education in China and the “open and innovative” Berkeley environment, Liam thrived. After graduating, he worked at LinkedIn before returning to China to found a startup called Zaihui , offering ecommerce SaaS solutions for retailers. Liam describes the still-commonplace 9-9-6 schedule ...
Aug 19, 2022•21 min•Ep. 486
Since the day a hiring manager first wheeled a whiteboard into a conference room, software engineers have dreaded the technical interview, which can be an all-day process (or multi-day homework assignment). If you’re interviewing for multiple roles, you can expect to write out a bubble sort in pseudocode for each one. These technical interviews do no favors for hiring companies, either, because the investment needed from both parties limits the number of candidates a company can consider. In thi...
Aug 17, 2022•25 min•Ep. 485
Heather is a General Partner at OSS Capital , which provides VC backing to seed-stage COSS (commercial open source) startups. Her law practice focuses on intellectual property and open-source licensing, and she serves on the IEEE-ISTO Board of Directors. Connect with Heather on LinkedIn or explore her work on her website . Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user keshlam for their answer to the question Why do we need abstract classes in Java? . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and Cal...
Aug 16, 2022•33 min•Ep. 484
Spencer was one of the original creators of open-source, cross-platform image editing software GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) , authored while he was still in college. He went on to spend a decade at Google, plus two years as CTO of Viewfinder, later acquired by Square. In 2014, he cofounded Cockroach Labs to back his creation CockroachDB , a cloud-native distributed SQL database. Database sharding is essential for CockroachDB: “a critical part of how Cockroach achieves virtually everythi...
Aug 12, 2022•30 min•Ep. 483
DoNotPay offers more than 250 “automated justice” services in every US state, from suing robo-callers to annulling marriages to fighting eviction. It earned Joshua the title “ Robin Hood of the internet .” DoNotPay leverages AI and ML solutions, including GPT-3 , to shape and refine its decision trees. Read about how DoNotPay is helping crypto traders who’ve lost money file suit against fallen leaders. Why PDFs are unfit for human (or computer) consumption . Follow Joshua on Twitter . Today’s Li...
Aug 09, 2022•19 min•Ep. 482
A coding error reportedly caused the massive outage at Canadian telecom company Rogers that affected more than 10 million customers—a quarter of Canada’s population. In a rut? Hacker News has some advice for climbing out. (Hint: More screen time won’t help.) The Verge reports on how Starlink and other companies that provide internet connectivity through low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites are shaping an “orbital internet.” Michael Pollan’s 2019 book How to Change Your Mind —an exploration of psyche...
Aug 05, 2022•25 min•Ep. 481
Bigeye is a data observability platform that helps teams measure, improve, and communicate data quality clearly at any scale. Explore more on their YouTube channel . Bigeye cofounders Kyle Kirwan and Egor Gryaznov met at Uber, where Kyle worked on data and Egor was a staff engineer. Kyle and Egor made a clean break with Uber before founding Bigeye, eager to avoid even the appearance of an Anthony Levandowski-like situation. If you’re not familiar with the ex-Google engineer sentenced to prison f...
Aug 02, 2022•35 min•Ep. 480
San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed says a seismic shift (definitely not an exodus) is underway as tech workers continue working from home and companies like Salesforce (the city’s largest private employer) reduce office space. Breed says San Francisco lost $400 million in tax revenue in 2021, as companies shuttered offices or moved to other cities. San Francisco offices haven’t been this empty since 2009 . The Wall Street Journal reports that 71 cities (and counting) are offering cash grants and...
Jul 29, 2022•25 min•Ep. 479
Multitudes helps managers and CTOs create happier, higher-performing teams, using data they already have. Multitudes is focused on software development teams to start, but their bigger vision is to make it easier for any manager to understand and improve their teams’ culture and performance. “Developers in our audience have expressed skepticism or dismay in the past about software that tracks performance or output,” Lauren explains. Multitudes’ approach is to break down an organization’s approac...
Jul 26, 2022•25 min•Ep. 478
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 See Privacy Policy at https://ar...
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
