Any large organization with multiple products faces the challenge of keeping their brand identity unified without denying each product its own charisma. That’s where a design system can help developers avoid reinventing the wheel every time, say, a new button gets created On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Demian Borba, Principal Product Manager, and Kelvin Nguyen, Senior Engineering Manager, both of Intuit. We chat about how their design system is evolving into a platform, h...
Jan 11, 2023•29 min•Ep. 537
LogRocket helps software teams create better experiences through a combination of session replay, error tracking, and product analytics. LogRocket’s machine-learning layer, Galileo , cuts through the noise generated by conventional error monitoring and analytics tools to identify critical issues affecting users. LogRocket is hiring, so check out their open roles or connect with Matt Arbesfeld on LinkedIn . You can also give LogRocket a free trial ....
Jan 10, 2023•20 min•Ep. 536
Adobe closed out 2022 and celebrated 40 years with an employee-only Katy Perry concert . Related: Ceora makes the case for virtual concerts. DeepMind is teaching AI to play soccer , which naturally makes us think of QWOP . ICYMI: Ghost calls out Substack and Substack responds . BeReal is the iPhone app of the year . But not even Resident Youth Ceora knows anyone who actually uses it. Some 2023 recommendations from the team: Ceora recommends Realworld (not to be confused with BeReal), an app that...
Jan 06, 2023•30 min•Ep. 535
Over the past five years, Intuit went through a total cloud transformation—they closed the data centers, built out a modern SaaS development environment, and got cloud native with foundational building blocks like containers and Kubernetes. Now they are looking to continue transforming into an AI-driven organization that leverages the data they have to make their customers’ lives easier. Along the way, they realized that their internal systems have the same requirements to leverage the data they...
Jan 04, 2023•26 min•Ep. 534
If you want to read more about Jessica, you can check out the blog we worked on together for the launch of our Overflow Offline initiative. If you've ever wondered what it's like learning to code from an XML file of raw Stack Overflow data, be sure to check this episode out. You can learn more about the Supreme Court case that led to Jessica's release here . Her company's mission is to build a better justice system from the inside, specifically by educating incarcerated individuals so they can t...
Jan 03, 2023•24 min•Ep. 533
You can learn more about Anthony here . His favorite terminal tool at the moment is Warp , which describes itself as "a blazingly fast, Rust-based terminal reimagined from the ground up to work like a modern app." His personal website features a live chat function. Sometimes it's actually Tony, sometimes it's just a bot. No lifeboat badge today. We''ll be taking a break for the holidays and will resume episodes in 2023. Until then, enjoy the holidays....
Dec 20, 2022•25 min•Ep. 532
Ben asks Matt to explain Mastodon to him like he’s five. Matt says the experience feels a lot like…LinkedIn? Matt explains that he took social media apps off his phone for a while…just to chill out. ( Ed. note, they're already back on .) We cover the latest AI to emerge that can write essays, jokes, and yes, some code. While everyone’s confused about the state of social media and AI chat, physicists have created a wormhole using a quantum computer . (Though it may have been a publicity stunt .) ...
Dec 16, 2022•17 min•Ep. 531
Steve was working as an engineering manager at ShopStyle and found that an increasing amount of his team's time was spent working on custom requests from departments like marketing and sales. They tried moving to a headless CMS but the data and components couldn't keep up with ever evolving needs. They wanted a drag and drop system connected to their code, data, and components. This pain point inspired him strike out on his own to create a new product. The vision was a tool that would allow coll...
Dec 13, 2022•24 min•Ep. 530
SPONSORED BY COMMERCE LAYER Around the world, billions of people can sell their wares online, in part thanks to solutions that handle the complexities of securely and reliably managing transactions. Businesses, large and small, can sell directly to customers. But a lot of these ecommerce services provide a heavier surface than many need by managing product catalogs and requiring inflexible interfaces. On this sponsored podcast episode, Ben and Ryan talk with Filippo Conforti, co-founder of Comme...
Dec 12, 2022•26 min•Ep. 529
Webpack has been king for several years. Vercel wants folks to embrace Turbopack, but their claims about speed raised a lot of backlash after it was first announced. Lee explains why he thinks the Rust-based approach will ultimately be a big benefit to developers and how organizations who are deeply ingrained with existing tools can safely and incrementally migrate to what is, for now, a very Alpha and experimental release. We go over the routing and rendering updates in Next.JS 13, exploring wh...
Dec 09, 2022•23 min•Ep. 528
You can learn more about Andrew, from building out a telco in Canada to cyber security at Deloitte, on his LinkedIn . Validation Cloud bills itself as the world’s fastest node infrastructure and cites networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Binance as clients it supports. Learn more at the company’s website here . The company announced the launch of it's latest product, Javelin , earlier today. Shout out to this week’s lifeboat badge winner, Derek, for helping answer the question: How do you open t...
Dec 06, 2022•21 min•Ep. 527
Data show's Silicon Valley's share of new startup funding deals dropped below 20% for the first time. What does it mean to experiment with big changes to an engineering org, in public and in real time? SBF would like the chance to explain himself . Today's lifeboat badge goes to CodeCaster for explaining: What is E in floating point?...
Dec 02, 2022•20 min•Ep. 526
Srivastava reflects on his upbringing in India, learning to write Assembly, and going to Stanford University to complete his Ph.D in computer science. He shares his early career experiences at big tech names like Yahoo!, Google, Twitter, and Google. The group reflects on some of the engineering challenges at Patreon including technical debt, migrations to open source services, and troubleshooting bugs. Srivastava walks us all through upcoming product features that his engineering team is working...
Nov 29, 2022•28 min•Ep. 525
Cami and Cassidy take us down memory lane, sharing how they got into computer science together, hosted a web series (and still podcast together sometimes ), and overlapped at two jobs together. We discuss the technologies being used to build in/for the Metaverse like Horizon Workroom , Presence Platform , Insights SDK , and of course, React . Cami shares how object and scene recognition work in VR. Cami reveals a family secret — so listen up if you want to know how to beat Cassidy at board games...
Nov 22, 2022•29 min•Ep. 524
SPONSORED BY PLURALSIGHT Early in the days of high-traffic web pages and apps, any engineer operating the infrastructure would have a server room where one or more machines served that app to the world. They named their servers lovingly, took pictures, and watched them grow. The servers were pets. But since the rise of public cloud and infrastructure as code, servers have become cattle—you have as many as you need at any given time and don’t feel personally attached to any given one. And as more...
Nov 21, 2022•29 min•Ep. 522
Over the years Homebrew, an open source package manager, has emerged as the project with the greatest number of individual contributors. Despite all that, it’s creator Max Howell, couldn’t make a living off the occasional charity of the millions of people who used the software he built. This XKCD cartoon is probably the most frequently repeated joke on the podcast over the last three years. While he is not a crypto bull, Max was inspired with a solution for the open source funding dilemma by his...
Nov 18, 2022•33 min•Ep. 523
Eric explains that great jobs are available for developers in Japan, but it can be tough to find these opportunities. We talk about interesting startups that are gaining traction in the Japanese tech sector (like Visual Alpha , Treasure Data , and Exawizards , to name a few examples of companies on the Japan Dev platform). Matt is impressed to learn Japan Dev generates an average of $60,000/month in revenue. Eric reflects on starting Japan Dev as a side project while he was employed full-time as...
Nov 15, 2022•31 min•Ep. 521
Episode notes: The team questions whether a print out of 60-90 days worth of code is the right benchmark for whether to lay someone off. Ben gives our podcast listeners a heads up to reports of repo jacking on GitHub (who got ahead of the issue quickly ). We reflect on whether or not we’re okay with generative AI—and question tradeoffs between copyright and the ability for more people to create stuff. Ben discusses how his internet browser might be becoming his second brain . Matt and Cassidy ge...
Nov 11, 2022•20 min•Ep. 520
When most people talk about Web3 or cryptocurrencies and related technologies, they usually mean blockchains. But blockchain is only the first generation of distributed ledger technology (DLT). As with any new technology, once people see how it works, new generations come along rapidly to address the faults in the previous ones. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan chat with Matt Woodward, head of developer relations at Swirlds Labs . Swirlds Labs created the Hedera ecosystem, ...
Nov 09, 2022•21 min•Ep. 519
Shoemaker spent his childhood in Silicon Valley and learned Assembly when he was just 16 years old. In his early 20s, he applied to work at Apple and was continually rejected. So he went to work for seven startups instead. Finally, in 2009, Shoemaker ended up at Apple overseeing the review process for the App Store. After seven years at Apple, Phillip became interested in cryptocurrency after discovering his personal information on the dark web. His interest grew in the topic of self sovereign i...
Nov 08, 2022•29 min•Ep. 518
In today’s podcast, Matt, Ceora, and Cassidy reflect on Cara’s founder journey. Cara shares her experiences living in New York and San Francisco— and why she and her co-founder ultimately located Stashpad in North Carolina. She elaborates on the exact steps that she took to pivot her startup following limited initial interest in V1 of the product. Despite being in the Bay Area and working at Twilio, she was struggling to meet people because her full brain power was going to her products. She sha...
Nov 04, 2022•29 min•Ep. 517
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 .
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
