A Principal Engineer at GitHib, Kris is president of the Nivenly Foundation and an admin at Hachyderm , an instance of the decentralized social network powered by Mastodon . The ongoing changes at Twitter have fueled interest in alternative, decentralized platforms like Mastodon and Discord . Read Leaving the Basement , Kris’s post about scaling and migrating Hachyderm out of her basement. Watch Kris’s conversation with DigitalOcean Chief Product Officer Gabe Monroy about building decentralized ...
Mar 31, 2023•28 min•Ep. 567
Today’s guests from Browser Co. are software engineer Victoria Kirst and design lead Dustin Senos of The Browser Company The Browser Company is building a new kind of browser designed to keep users “focused, organized and in control.” Arc , their browser, is “ full of big new ideas about how we should interact with the web ” and has been called “ the best web browser to come out in the last decade .” For an introduction to and first look at Arc, start with this video . You can also join the wait...
Mar 28, 2023•23 min•Ep. 566
In his role at SwissOne Capital , Kenny champions investments in Web3 and the metaverse . A writer on all things crypto since 2013, he’s a regular contributor to the US Chamber of Commerce . The collapse of Three Arrows Capital and FTX eroded investor trust in crypto, but Kenny remains “cautiously optimistic” about the market’s future. Connect with Kenny on LinkedIn or Twitter . Congratulations are in order for Lifeboat badge winner xray1986 for their answer to Unicode symbol that represents "do...
Mar 24, 2023•20 min•Ep. 565
The history of computing has been a story of moving up levels of abstraction: from hard-coding algorithms and directly manipulating memory addresses with assembly languages to using more natural language constructs in high-level general purpose languages to abstracting the hardware of the computer in cloud compute. Now serverless functions take that abstraction even further. We’ve made the algorithms that process data simple and natural; MongoDB wants to do the same for how we persist data. On t...
Mar 22, 2023•26 min•Ep. 564
The inbox improvements were Radek’s graduation project. Not bad for a newbie. Not everyone likes change , and the inbox change was no exception. So we looked into fixing that. Read about what our engineering team learned building and scaling Stack Overflow to support millions of users. Connect with Radek on LinkedIn. Find Cobih on LinkedIn and Twitter . Longtime Stacker Yaakov Ellis is also on LinkedIn . Congrats to user HelloCW on receiving a Socratic Badge for asking a well-received question o...
Mar 21, 2023•21 min•Ep. 563
Our recent Pulse Survey showed how technologists visiting Stack Overflow feel about emergent technologies. The consensus is clear: AI assistants will soon be everywhere, and developers aren’t sure how they feel about that. Check out the podcast here or dive into the blog . Learn more about the emergent abilities of large language models (LLMs) . For more on the intersection of AI and academia, listen to our episode with computer science professor Emery Berger or read his essay on how academics a...
Mar 17, 2023•24 min•Ep. 562
With so many companies offering API products, it can be hard to get your particular APIs discovered and used by the developers who need them most. You might have the best, most useful solutions out there, but if you’re relying on the digital equivalent of foot traffic for discoverability, it might as well not exist. And if an API solution can’t be found, then someone else is going to reinvent it. On this sponsored episode, we chat with SmartBear API Technical Evangelist Frank Kilcommins about th...
Mar 15, 2023•27 min•Ep. 561
You can dive deeper into the research, including some lovely matrix charts, on our blog . Erin has also explored tag trends among our most loved languages and job insights from our community. Learn more about Joy on her LinkedIn . Thanks to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, russbishop, for helping to answer the question: Where is the app content folder in the simulator of Xcode?...
Mar 14, 2023•21 min•Ep. 560
Per one count , more than 280,000 people were laid off from tech jobs in 2022 and the first two months of 2023. What do layoffs have in common with farting at a party ? Both are a bad look if you’re the only one doing it . ICYMI: On a recent episode , we talked about how these layoffs are reshaping the job market and where to find software engineering roles outside of tech. Just laid off, or worried you might be? Cohost Ryan Donovan has some advice . Connect with Wesley on LinkedIn ....
Mar 10, 2023•29 min•Ep. 559
Writing code that runs without errors—and without all the bugs that only show up when the program runs—is hard enough. But teaching others to write code and understand the underlying concepts takes a deeper understanding. Now imagine doing that for 37 courses. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with Bharath Thippireddy, a VIP instructor at Udemy who has taught more than half a million students. We talk about how he went from a humble Java developer to one of Udemy’s top ...
Mar 08, 2023•22 min•Ep. 558
Flourish is a fintech platform for registered investment advisers (RIAs) that was recently acquired by MassMutual . After studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon, Christine spent almost 12 years at Goldman Sachs , where she was VP of fixed systematic marketing making, responsible for automating electronic trades of interest-rate products like US Treasury bonds and interest rate swaps. Christine’s time at the world’s second-largest investment bank gave her a healthy wariness of Frankencode ,...
Mar 07, 2023•20 min•Ep. 557
A chemist by training, Jamie serves as Senior Research Manager of Quantum Applications and Software at IBM Quantum , which offers cloud access to advanced quantum computers capable of solving highly complex, highly interconnective, and dynamic problems. Learn about the superconducting qubits IBM Quantum uses to program quantum computers. (Need to back up a bit? Learn what a qubit is .) Jamie explains how a heavy hex architecture allows IBM to limit crosstalk between qubits to ensure coherence ti...
Mar 03, 2023•24 min•Ep. 556
W4 Games is dedicated to strengthening the open-source Godot Engine , a cross-platform game engine for 2D and 3D games. Their mission is “to help the video game industry reclaim their control of the technology powering their games and reverse a dramatic trend where they have to rely on proprietary solutions from an ever-shrinking number of vendors.” To start learning more about Godot, explore some of the best games made with Godot or join the community . Connect with Juan on Twitter , GitHub , o...
Feb 28, 2023•20 min•Ep. 555
Tribe is a distributed community of AI industry leaders, including ML engineers and data scientists, dedicated to helping companies apply machine learning to their business operations. Explore their case studies to see Tribe’s expertise in action. Founder and CEO Jaclyn Rice Nelson formerly worked at Google, partnering with enterprise companies and incubating new ventures. As an early employee at CapitalG , Alphabet’s growth equity firm, she advised companies including Airbnb on scaling technica...
Feb 24, 2023•25 min•Ep. 554
Modern networked applications generate a lot of data, and every business wants to make the most of that data. Most of the time, that means moving production data through some transformation process to get it ready for the analytics process. But what if you could have in-app analytics? What if you could generate insights directly from production data? On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Stanimira Vlaeva, Developer Advocate at MongoDB, and Fredric Favelin, Technical Director, Pa...
Feb 22, 2023•20 min•Ep. 553
Oso is authorization as a service. Check out the docs or explore use cases . Sam’s post “ Why Authorization is Hard ” covered what makes authorization challenging, some approaches to solving it, and their associated tradeoffs. You can also watch Sam’s talk at PyCon US 2022. Since it’s impossible to address everything that makes authorization hard in just 5,000 words, Sam is currently at work on a follow-up article called “Why Authorization is Hard Part II.” Sam first learned web development via ...
Feb 21, 2023•20 min•Ep. 552
Retool is a development platform that lets users—95% of whom are engineers—build internal tools quickly with a drag-and-drop interface. Read David’s account of how Retool won early sales deals in the company’s Operator Playbook series . Connect with David on LinkedIn . Today we’re shouting out Stellar Question badge winner ahajib for asking How to convert a list to a dictionary with indexes as values? ....
Feb 17, 2023•20 min•Ep. 551
We talk about how Next is bringing image components , server components , and in-house analytics via split bee —and bundling them all together with Turbopack , powered by Rust, our Developer Survey most loved language of 2022 . Guillermo Rauch is the CEO and cofounder of Vercel and cocreator of Next.js , an open-source React framework that helps developers build fast, lightweight web applications. The most recent version is Next.js 13 . You can find Guillermo on LinkedIn . We previously talked w...
Feb 14, 2023•24 min•Ep. 550
Emery Berger, Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, joins Ben for a conversation about the impact of AI on academia. As a young sci-fi fan, he was fascinated by computers that could spit out solutions (a fascination that survived exposure to BASIC and COBOL). Now his CS students are using Copilot to do the same thing. How can educators (and students) adapt? Episode notes: Professor Emery Berger is a systems builder who studies “programming ...
Feb 10, 2023•17 min•Ep. 549
With companies taking a long look at developer experience, it’s time to turn that attention on the humble pull request. The folks at LinearB took a look at a million PRs — four million review cycles involving around 25,000 developers — and found that it takes about five days to get through a review and merge the code. CI/CD has done wonders getting deployments down to a day or less; maybe it’s time for continuous merge next. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with COO Dan Lines an...
Feb 08, 2023•26 min•Ep. 548
It’s not just you: We all need subtitles now . Google introduces MusicLM , a model that generates music from text. The examples are pretty-mind blowing and raise big questions about licensing and copyrights for non-AI creators. Taking the uncanny valley to a new low? Nvidia’s streaming software now includes a feature that deepfakes eye contact . Beware the potentially dangerous intersection of AI and stan Twitter . Thanks to Siavash Kayal , a fan of the show and data engineer at Cleo , who sent ...
Feb 07, 2023•20 min•Ep. 547
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 ....
Jan 13, 2023•26 min•Ep. 538
