John spent 25 years at Oracle before joining Google Cloud ’s Office of the CTO (OCTO), a team that’s been called the company’s “secret weapon” in collaborating with major customers to solve their tech problems and drive long-term deals. For more on his approach to tech and business, you can read this article he wrote on the seven points of driving lasting innovation Learn more about OCTO from Business Insider . Settle down for a good read: the full story of how the BBC’s microcomputer changed hi...
Feb 03, 2023•22 min•Ep. 546
Naturally, tech layoffs are top-of-mind for many of us. Despite comparisons to the dot-com bubble, what we’re seeing right now is different. Here’s what the tech and media layoffs really tell us about the economy . In praise of analog technology: why Millennials and Gen Z are springing for paper maps . Make Time , a way of “rethinking the defaults of constant busyness and distraction so you can focus on what matters every day,” was developed in response to always-on Silicon Valley culture. Wifi ...
Jan 31, 2023•23 min•Ep. 545
Astro is a site builder that lets you use the frontend tools you already love (React, Vue, Svelte, and more) to build content-rich, performant websites. Astro extracts your UI into smaller, isolated components (“islands”) and replaces unused JavaScript with lightweight HTML for faster loads and time-to-interactive (TTI). Ben and Nate explain why Astro’s compiler was written in Go (“seemed like fun”). To learn more about Astro, start with their docs or see what people are doing with the framework...
Jan 27, 2023•24 min•Ep. 544
In complex service-oriented architectures, failure can happen in individual servers and containers, then cascade through your system. Good engineering takes into account possible failures. But how do you test whether a solution actually mitigates failures without risking the ire of your customers? That’s where chaos engineering comes in, injecting failures and uncertainty into complex systems so your team can see where your architecture breaks. On this sponsored episode, our fourth in the series...
Jan 25, 2023•20 min•Ep. 543
In a win for accessibility, GitHub Copilot now responds to voice commands , allowing developers to code using their voices. Speaking of accessibility, learn how Santa Monica Studio worked with disabled gamers and the community to build accessibility into God of War Ragnarök . The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has determined that lab-grown meat is safe to eat . Looking for some high-quality entertainment content? Look no further than Simone Giertz’s YouTube channel , where she builds robo...
Jan 24, 2023•16 min•Ep. 542
First, some self-administered back-patting for the Stack Overflow editorial team: great engineering blogs give tech companies an edge ( The New York Times says so). Hiring aside, engineering blogs are fresh sources of knowledge, insight, and entertainment for anyone working in tech. You can learn a lot from, for instance, blog posts that break down an outage or security incident and detail how engineers got things up and running again. One classic of the genre: Amazon’s explanation of how one en...
Jan 20, 2023•21 min•Ep. 541
At an SaaS company like Intuit that has hundreds of services spread out across multiple products, maintaining development velocity at scale means baking some of the features that every service needs into the architecture of their systems. That’s where a service mesh comes in. It automatically adds features like observability, traffic management, and security to every service in the network without adding any code. In this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Anil Attuluri, principal so...
Jan 18, 2023•22 min•Ep. 540
There is a ton of great research to be found on Prof. Kapfhammer's website, including: Flaky Tests : Finding and fixing unpredictable and harmful test cases Database Testing : Automatically testing relational database schemas Web Testing : Detecting and repairing poor responsive web page layout We've written a bit about how Stack Overflow is upping its unit testing game and how you can evaluate multiple assertions in a single test. Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Survivor, for a...
Jan 17, 2023•28 min•Ep. 539
Juri is currently Director of Developer Experience (Global) and Director of Engineering (Europe) at Nrwl , founded by former Googlers/Angular core team members Jeff Cross and Victor Savkin. Nrwl has compiled everything you need to know about monorepos, plus the tools to build them, here . Connect with Juri on LinkedIn or explore his website . Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner penguin2718 for their answer to Storing loop output in a dataframe in R . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy...
Jan 13, 2023•26 min•Ep. 538
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 . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy...
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. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/priv...
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? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....
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
