Ceora and Cassidy talk about why engineers are so good at job hopping — and why it can pay to upgrade roles every year or two. Ceora speaks openly about the privileges of working in tech compared to other industries. Apparently, in some places, it’s a thing for engineers to leave their teams and then rejoin the organization with a promotion to get ahead. Do you boomerang? Cassidy’s husband’s favorite interview question to ask is, “If you had a magic wand and could change one thing about this com...
Oct 11, 2022•31 min•Ep. 507
Matt takes us back to the origins of his open source days and the spark that inspired his love for engineering — including the point at which he discovered Linux. He shares how he began learning from the code itself, which was ultimately a different style of learning than what was available to him at university. Then, it was to the stacks, but not Stack Overflow. Think Barnes and Noble, not YouTube videos. Imagine trying to navigate getting your first engineering job during the dot-com crash of ...
Oct 07, 2022•27 min•Ep. 506
Our guests have done most of their ML work on AWS offerings, from AWS Personalize for their initial recommendation engine to SageMaker for model training and deployment pipeline. Now they’re building models from scratch in TensorFlow . Want to see these recommendations in action? Check out the offerings at Discovery+ and HBOMax . If you’re a ML/AL data scientist looking to shape the future of automated curation, check out their open roles . Follow our guests on LinkedIn: Shrikant Desai Sowmya Su...
Oct 05, 2022•33 min•Ep. 505
Mariann shares how she and her UX research team at Stack Overflow are taking steps to create a more inclusive product experience, while reflecting on her experiences as a mother to a neurodiverse daughter. Wesley talks about what it’s like to be a developer with dyslexia and why self-empathy and self-compassion have been important to his evolution as a senior leader. Ceora explains why it’s important to be on a psychologically safe team from her perspective as a Black woman who is also neurodive...
Oct 04, 2022•34 min•Ep. 504
Ceora shares her experience representing Auth0 at REFACTR TECH , reflecting on what it was like being back in-person after years of virtual events. Cassidy announces her move to CTO and how her current leadership role at Contenda fits into her career journey and future aspirations as a technologist. Ben talks about Stack Overflow’s Flow State , the first IRL event he’s attended since 2019 and Stack’s first ever customer conference. In case Cassidy pulled you down a rabbit hole of wondering how e...
Sep 30, 2022•23 min•Ep. 503
Guilo gives building UI components as an example of where software innovation has given him time back: he started building them as static images in Photoshop , then Sketch brought connected, interactive components, and Finally, Figma let you collaborate and build an entire system together. If you missed any of the previous episodes, you can find them waiting for you here . Connect with Paolo Passeri on LinkedIn. Connect with Giulio Barresi on LinkedIn. Check out more mechanical keyboard products...
Sep 28, 2022•30 min•Ep. 502
It finally happened. In the words of the Ethereum Foundation, ETH is now “ready for its interstellar voyage,” having transitioned from proof of work to proof of stake. With no centralized authority insisting on a ship date, we’re witnessing a feat. We’re all wondering what comes next. The Great Debate about hybrid and remote work continues . Is the decentralized talent movement winning? What can we do to prevent cabin fever? What do government workers do with their laptops if they need to cross ...
Sep 27, 2022•19 min•Ep. 501
About three years ago, when our public platform engineering team at Stack started growing, we realized that we needed a more robust formal project management system that could scale with all the creativity coming on board. That’s when we started looking at formal, by-the-book frameworks to empower and coach our teams to their fullest potential. We landed on Agile and Scrum. Admittedly, our development team was nervous about implementing Scrum and Agile at first. So we focused on the goals of int...
Sep 23, 2022•23 min•Ep. 500
Like other folks we’ve talked to on the podcast, Chronosphere was born out of work pioneered at Uber. When you can’t find solutions to help you scale, sometimes you have to build them. Everything in Chronosphere was built from scratch, from the ingestion tier to the query layer. If you’re going to build something cloud native from the ground up, the clear choice for the team was Go . Cloud native observability changes the way developers interact with their code in production. Infrastructure is m...
Sep 22, 2022•28 min•Ep. 499
We dive into some of the ways developers can customize their keyboard with shortcuts, macros, and apps to eliminate repetitive tasks and automate the busywork that stands in the way of bigger, breakthrough innovations. Flow state can be affected by things as simple as the right lighting, so Logitech created keyboards that automatically adjust their keyboard backlighting . For those not familiar with the MX series, you can read more about the different versions, including the mechanical one, here...
Sep 21, 2022•20 min•Ep. 498
Appsmith is an open-source, low-code platform for building and maintaining internal tools like custom dashboards, admin panels, and, of course, CRUD apps . Watch Arpin’s talk on how a low-cost, low-tech solution can simplify online payments. Arpit isn’t the first engineer we’ve talked to whose career was sparked by the digital pets of the 90s. Listen to Episode #431: Words of wisdom for self-taught developers . It’s time to get excited about Hacktoberfest , an annual DigitalOcean event that enco...
Sep 20, 2022•20 min•Ep. 497
Like a lot of good tools, Backstage started as a way to stop using a spreadsheet. They knew it was something worth open-sourcing when conference attendees paid more attention to the tool than the topics of the talks. Backstage treats docs-like-code , keeping markdown files in the same repo as the code. Down with wikis, up with pull requests! If you want to learn more about Backstage, check out our recent webinar with Emma Indal , a web engineer at Spotify....
Sep 16, 2022•29 min•Ep. 496
Show notes If you’re interested in diving deeper into Professor Fritz’s research on developer flow states, check out his list of publications . Flow states can be affected by things as simple as the right lighting, so Logitech created keyboards that automatically adjust their keyboard backlighting . Lights can be used to indicate your interruptibility.; Prof. Fritz did some research on FlowLight , which indicates your willingness to be interrupted with a simple red light/green light protocol. Th...
Sep 14, 2022•28 min•Ep. 495
As part of an effort to work with students at college and universities, Stack Overflow is partnering with Major League Hacking (MLH) to recruit our first cohort of Student Ambassadors . These folks will represent us on campus and lead the way in tackling challenges, earning rewards, and planning out the future of the program. Our pizza fund events are open to students in the US and Canada, and Global Hack Weeks are open to all. You can learn more about how to apply here . ICYMI: Major League Hac...
Sep 13, 2022•23 min•Ep. 494
AssemblyAI is an AI-as-a-service provider focused on speech-to-text and text analysis. Their mission is to make it easy for developers and product teams to incorporate state-of-the-art AI technology into the solutions they’re building. Their customers include Spotify, the Dow Jones, The Wall Street Journal , and the BBC. Need AI to run semantic analysis on your forum comments or automatically produce summaries of blog post submissions? Rent an ML model on-demand from the cloud instead of buildin...
Sep 09, 2022•28 min•Ep. 493
For those not familiar with the MX series, you can read more about the different versions, including the mechanical one, here . If you don't know about Cassidy's passion for keyboards, you can check out her website here or listen to a previous episode diving deep into the details of mechanical keyboards here . Stayed tuned for episode #2, airing next week, when we'll be digging deeper into the science behind keyboards and coders with Prof. Thomas Fritz and Marcel Twohig Head of Design for the MX...
Sep 08, 2022•24 min•Ep. 492
You can find a great essay on AI helping students, and what that means for their teachers, here . Here's a piece on W4 Games plans to monetize the Godot engine. Snap says it now has one million subscribers for its Snapchat+ offering. There were no fresh lifeboats badges this week, so shoutout to Jemo for being awarded the Great Question badge. They asked: What's the difference between thread and coroutine in Kotlin...
Sep 06, 2022•20 min•Ep. 491
ReleaseHub provides on-demand environments for development, staging, and production. Every developer knows that environments can be a bottleneck, so ReleaseHub’s mission is to empower developers to share their ideas with the world more quickly and easily, sidestepping what Tommy calls “the big bottlenecks in development.” As CTO of TrueCar , Tommy was leading an effort to rebuild that company’s tech stack, but he needed an environment management platform, and nothing on the market fit his needs....
Sep 02, 2022•31 min•Ep. 490
What do companies want to gain through monitoring software—and what do they, and their employees, stand to lose? Read more . In Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World , Cal Newport makes the point that our world isn’t geared toward deep, focused, flow-state work; instead, it rewards the appearance of busyness. Workers who see their keystrokes or mouse movements tracked are likely to focus on those behaviors instead of their projects. More than 50 countries are establishing ru...
Aug 30, 2022•26 min•Ep. 489
Varun is the cofounder and CTO of AKASA , which develops purpose-built AI and automation solutions for the healthcare industry. Building a physics simulator for a robot helicopter as a student at Stanford helped Varun connect his interests in physics, machine learning, and AI. Check out that project here . His instructor? Andrew Ng. Along with Ng, Varun was lucky to connect with some brilliant AI folks during his time at Stanford, like Jeffrey Dean , Head of Google AI; Daphne Koller , cofounder ...
Aug 26, 2022•28 min•Ep. 488
Learn why some companies are moving AI and ML data and models off the cloud and back on premises. Oxide is a rack-scale server with tightly integrated hardware and software. Cofounder and Chief Product Officer Jessie Frazelle was an early core maintainer of Docker. You can find her on GitHub or LinkedIn . Check out FauxPilot , a locally hosted version of GitHub Copilot . It’s no secret that Instagram has made changes to its feed, emphasizing video content in an effort to compete with TikTok. Nor...
Aug 23, 2022•19 min•Ep. 487
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? ....
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
