When Foursquare launched in 2009, the app was consumer facing, letting you know where friends had checked in and what spots might appeal to you. People competed to be the “mayor” of certain locations and built guides to their favorite neighborhoods., The service expanded to allow merchants to offer discounts to frequent guests and track foot traffic in and out of the stores. While you can still use the Swarm app to find the best Manhattan in Manhattan, the company realized that real estate and d...
Nov 02, 2022•24 min•Ep. 516
The group laughs about setting up JIRA workflows and Trello boards for our family lives—Matt says heck no. Ceora speaks to the power of homelabbing as a way to gain profitable skills. JJ talks about the VPN system he has running on his phone to access his home network using tools like WireGuard and ZeroTier . Cassidy suggests setting up a personal knowledge base as a second brain (and recommends Obsidian ). JJ shares how homelabbing is popular among kids under 18 as a pathway for them to get int...
Nov 01, 2022•28 min•Ep. 515
Katzgraber reflects on his time as a university professor up until 2020 and why he switched to working at Amazon. He walks us through a quantum computing challenge that he hosted with BMW, through his role at Amazon (and what real world applications he sees emerging from these types of collaboration experiments). We discuss what inspires him to stay curious — raising the bar for scientific research, crowdsourcing breakthroughs, and opening up the playing field for more people to jump in. Follow ...
Oct 28, 2022•31 min•Ep. 514
We got the chance to sit down with Guillermo Ruach, Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel and co-creator of Next.JS, about the news coming out of today's conference. The most interesting was a new product called Turbopack. You can read more about it here . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....
Oct 25, 2022•20 min•Ep. 513
Freund reflects on his early days at Applied Materials , where he worked on a machine that inspected silicon wafers. It was in this early role that Freund gained an appreciation for rigorous software testing protocols in the manufacturing process. At WeWork, Freund was fascinated by the idea of a full stack business, which is a business building itself. While Freund officially launched Wilco in 2021, the origin story for the company dates back to 2013 when he was hiring and managing a team of en...
Oct 25, 2022•23 min•Ep. 512
John explains that Web3 is about the convergence of technology, economics, and social trends. He elaborates that foundations begin with service-based architecture (SOA), the notion of how to design loosely coupled systems that consist of economic services and components. He goes on to explain how DeFi represents this thinking of a loose composition of services. With all of this, blockchain brings together technology and economic incentives into a holistic equation—people contribute because they ...
Oct 21, 2022•30 min•Ep. 511
Having trouble with understanding your team’s productivity outside of frameworks and tooling? Create a backlog and work through it: Instant Agile! How much of that backlog you work through is a good baseline measure. The Stack Overflow blog recently featured an article from Stack Overflow’s Director of Engineering, Ben Matthews: Does high velocity lead to burnout? That may be the wrong question to ask If you're interested in seeing how Couchbase’s SQL database solutions can help improve your tea...
Oct 19, 2022•29 min•Ep. 510
Before jumping into driverless car talk, Ben shares a heads up about fake jobs at credible companies that are actually phishing scams meant to steal your identity and hijack your bank accounts. Beware the job offer that seems too good to be true! Jon, Cassidy, Ceora, Matt, and Ben reflect on whether they trust software to operate a vehicle . Cassidy tells us that she once sat in a car that parked itself and screamed the entire time. Matt brings us back to reality, reminding us that airplane flig...
Oct 18, 2022•34 min•Ep. 509
Despite our hope for the power of robotics, the technology is still far from mainstream. That’s because the amount of effort needed to get hardware to do useful things at scale is…well…hard. When Eliot started Viam , his goal was to address this challenge by creating software that supports a range of hardware builds right out of the box. As the company explains - “we’re addressing these issues by building a novel robotics platform that relies on standardized building blocks rather than custom co...
Oct 14, 2022•24 min•Ep. 508
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. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com...
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 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at ...
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
