Prosus , one of the world’s largest tech investors, acquired Stack Overflow in 2021. Check out the annual State of AI Report from Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth. Read our CEO’s recent post on Stack Overflow’s approach to Generative AI. Connect with Paul on LinkedIn . Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is suvayu for their answer to How to put a big centered "Thank You" in a LaTeX slide . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-s...
Apr 25, 2023•36 min•Ep. 576
Akita is a monitoring and observability platform that watches API traffic live and automatically infers endpoint structure. Jean, who comes from a family of computer scientists, earned a PhD from MIT and taught in the CS department at Carnegie Mellon University before founding Akita. Read Jean’s post on the Stack Overflow blog: Monitoring debt builds up faster than software teams can pay it off . Jean is on LinkedIn and Twitter . Congrats are in order for Stellar Question badge winner legendary_...
Apr 21, 2023•30 min•Ep. 575
A common refrain you’ll hear these days is that servers should be scaled out, easy to replace, and interchangeable—cattle, not pets. But for the ops folks who run those servers the opposite is true. You can’t just throw any of them into an incident where they may not know the stack or system and expect everything to work out. Every operator has a set of skills that they’ve built up through research or experience, and teams should value them as such. They’re people, not pets, and certainly not ca...
Apr 19, 2023•23 min•Ep. 574
Alura is a Portuguese-language edtech platform where users can learn programming, backend and mobile development, data science, design and UX, DevOps, and more. They started small, grew into a bustling online program, then purchased a majority stake in FIAP , a private university in São Paulo, Brazil. Paulo and Stack Overflow Director of Engineering Roberta Arcoverde cohost a popular Portuguese-language podcast about programming, design, startups, and technology. Paulo’s new open-source project ...
Apr 18, 2023•22 min•Ep. 573
Fermyon offers serverless cloud computing. Spin is their developer tool for building WebAssembly microservices and web applications; check it out on GitHub . Like past podcast guest David Hsu of Retool (and yours truly), Matt earned a degree in the humanities before deciding to prioritize his “side gig” in tech. Follow Fermyon on GitHub . Matt is on LinkedIn . Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner keineahnung2345 for saving Hamming distance between two strings in Python from the dustbin of time. See...
Apr 14, 2023•25 min•Ep. 572
Cerbos is an open-source, scalable authorization-as-a-service that aims to make implementing roles and permissions a cinch. Explore their docs or see how their customers are using Cerbos. Stateless applications like Cerbos don’t retain data from previous activities, giving devs predictable plug-and-play functionality across cloud, hybrid, on-prem, and edge instances. Connect with Alex on LinkedIn and Twitter . Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Hoopje for rescuing Print in bold on a terminal from...
Apr 11, 2023•22 min•Ep. 571
If you prefer, you can read this as a Q&A article or watch the video . Kong is a cloud-native API platform. The first iteration of an API marketplace Marco and his colleagues built was Mashape . Developments like GraphQL and gRPC have become critical as the number of APIs increases over time. Find Marco on LinkedIn and Twitter . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info ....
Apr 07, 2023•19 min•Ep. 570
Right now, plenty of people are building businesses on social media platforms, on streaming platforms, and on market platforms that they don’t control. That platform can make the rules in any way they want and remove access at any time. That means founders are potentially one step away from losing their livelihood. The same goes for consumers buying from these platforms: if you lose access to your account, there goes all your purchases. As it turns out, you were licensing everything, not buying ...
Apr 05, 2023•23 min•Ep. 569
Smart contracts aren’t actually new. Computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer Nick Szabo coined the term in 1994 (possibly earlier, depending on who you ask). Old problems seem to keep coming back. Bret Victor gave a talk in 2013 called “ The Future of Programming ,” where he talked about problems from 1973 that were still relevant. To learn more about the Agoric blockchain, check out their homepage . If you’d rather shape how the blockchain itself operates, much of Agoric’s code is ...
Apr 04, 2023•31 min•Ep. 568
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? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not...
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 . See Privacy...
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? . See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art1...
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
