The Stack Overflow Podcast

You can learn more about Clement's career on his LinkedIn and on Twitter (assuming you speak French).You can learn more about Dailymotion here and check out the roles they are hiring for here.You can find Cassidy Williams on Twitter and at her website. You can find Ceora Ford on Twitter and at her website.Our Lifeboat badge winner of the week is Swati Kiran, who helped solve an error causing permission problems in an angular app.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

These days, every company looking at analyzing their data for insights has a data pipeline setup. Many companies have a fast production database, often a NoSQL or key-value store, that goes through a data pipeline.The pipeline process performs some sort of extract-transform-load process on it, then routes it to a larger data store that the analytics tools can access. But what if you could skip some steps and speed up the process with a database purpose-built for analytics?On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Rohit (Ro) Amarnath, the CTO at Vertica, to find out how your analytics engine can speed up your workflow. After a humble beginning with a ZX Spectrum 128, he’s now in charge of Vertica Accelerator, a SaaS version of the Vertica database. Vertica was founded by database researcher Dr. Michael Stonebreaker and Andrew Palmer. Dr. Stonebreaker helped develop several databases, including Postgres, Streambase, and VoltDB. Vertica was born out of research into purpose-built databases. Stonebreaker’s research found that columnar database storage was faster for data warehouses because there were fewer read/writes per request. Here’s a quick example that shows how columnar databases work. Suppose that you want all the records from a specific US state or territory. There are 52 possible values here (depending on how you count territories). To find all instances of a single state in a row-based DB, the search must check every row for the value of the state column. However, searching by column is faster by an order of magnitude: it just runs down the column to find matching values, then retrieves row data for the matches. The Vertica database was designed specifically for analytics as opposed to transactional databases. Ro spent some time at a Wall Street firm building reports—P&L, performance, profitability, etc. Transactions were important to day-to-day operations, but the real value of data came from analyses that showed where to cut costs or increase investments in a particular business. Analytics help with overall strategy, which tends to be more far-reaching and effective. For most of its life, Vertica has been an on-premises database managing a data warehouse. But with the ease of cloud storage, Vertica Accelerator is looking to give you a data lake as a service. If you’re unfamiliar, data lakes take the data warehouse concept—central storage for all your data—and remove limits. You can have “rivers” of data flowing into your stores; if you go from a terabyte to a petabyte overnight, your cloud provider will handle it for you. Vertica has worked with plenty of industries that push massive amounts of data: healthcare, aviation, online games. They’ve built a lot of functionality into the database itself to speed up all manner of applications. One of their prospective customers had a machine learning model with thousands of lines of code that was reduced to about ten lines because so much was being done in the database itself. In the future, Vertica plans to offer more powerful management of data warehouses and lakes, including handling the metadata that comes with them. To learn more about Vertica’s analytics databases, check out our conversation or visit their website.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

It’s not news that, as Cassidy says, “remote has grown wildly fast”—but Remote has gone from about 25 employees in March 2020 to 900 now (a 3,500% increase).Ceora explains to Matt (oh, sweet summer’s child) what it means to get ratioed on Twitter.Inspired by a great read, the team discusses how Gen Z, having grown up without floppy disks, file folders, or directories, thinks about information.This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user 1983 for their answer to the question Why can I not use `new` with an arrow function in JavaScript/ES6?.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

SphereEX builds distributed data systems, making it easier for organizations to load balance massive data stores across multiple servers. Now that open-source software has taken over Western software, it’s China’s turn. Even big companies like Baidu and Bytedance are opening up their projects. Trista is the only female Apache member in China, which is both an honor and a demonstration of how much work needs to be done to support women in STEM. This episode’s Lifeboat badge shoutout goes to swati kiran for her answer to Error: EACCES: permission denied, mkdir '/usr/local/lib/node_modules/node-sass/build'.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ceora has her second brain stored in Notion, complete with GIFs and pretty color to get that aesthetic.Ancient history in blog years: Cassidy talks about the perils of being bleeding-edge instead of cutting-edge: Apollo Mission: The pros and cons of being an early adopter of new technology Everybody is aboard the VS Code train, which has the hottest TikTok around. Cassidy recommends the MonoLisa font helping viewers read your code during a livestream.Today’s lifeboat goes to Bill the Lizard for Using IFF in Python.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Neopets: A little-known gateway into a software career. (Nineties kids will remember.)Among the products Mitchell helped build at Hashicorp: Terraform, Vagrant, and Vault.Not many C-level execs return to IC roles, but you might be surprised how many managers move back to being individual contributors.Follow Mitchell on Twitter here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Marcin Wyszynski, founder and CEO at Spacelift. Marcin says Spacelift aims to be for infrastructure-as-code what GitHub is to git. It centralizes everything about your IaC system: it runs code, deploys within CI/CD pipelines, tracks the progress of your infrastructure, and gives you insight into who made what changes and why. Today it works with the IaC tools already out there: Terraform, Cloud Formation, and Pulumi, with plans to add support for services like Ansible and Kubernetes in the future. Like a lot of programmers, Marcin got into coding through games. Once he ran through the limited number of Commodore 64 games at his local shop in Poland, he learned to program his own. But he never thought of programming as a career, so when it came time to pick a college major, he followed a group of his peers into sociology. Sociology, with its heavy focus on statistics, brought him back to programming. He landed his first job at Google reviewing copy for Ads, which lasted until he could automate himself out of it. Google gave him increasingly technical roles until he moved into an SRE position handling tape backups, a job that is mostly very boring until it becomes extremely exciting. After that, it was a stint at Facebook spinning up point-of-presence clusters around the world, then CTO at a startup that didn’t catch on as he’d hoped. With this wealth of experience under his belt, he went into consulting. As a consultant, he had his bag of best practices, open-source tools, processes, and scripts that he brought with him, but he also built bespoke pieces of technology for every single one of his clients. One need his clients had in common was a way to manage the code that defined their infrastructure. During Marcin’s career, there were many times when he built the thing he needed: games, automation, scripts. When his consulting clients would leave for a new organization, they would reach out to ask if he could provide them with the solution he had built for infrastructure as code. Realizing that he had created something which addressed a pain point common to many companies, he decided to turn this solution into a new company: Spacelift. Spacelift aims to take the heavy lifting out of infrastructure-as-code, automate it, and make it auditable. When a change gets made, everyone can see it and comment on it. From the product manager to the junior dev, everyone knows what’s going on, even if an infrastructure change doesn’t fit the original architecture docs. Plus, the SRE team no longer need to go on archeological expeditions to find a database secretly running and costing the company five figures a month. To learn more about Spacelift, check out their website at https://spacelift.io/, where you can start a free trial and see it in action. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The Twitter thread that brought Cryptoland to the team’s attention.Ceora wonders whether participants in a hypothetical, decentralized version of YouTube (a YouTube-like dApp) would need coding skills to contribute meaningfully.Why is Ethereum so expensive and so congested?Ben outlines how Solana has become the fastest-growing blockchain in the world by evolving the Ethereum concept to make it more scalable and less congested.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You can learn more about Gretel here. The company is hiring for numerous positions. Think your commits are anonymous? Think again: DefCon researchers figured out how to de-anonymize code creators by their style. We published an article about the importance of including privacy in your SDLC: Privacy is an afterthought in the software lifecycle. That needs to change.Our Lifeboat badge shoutout goes to 1983 (the year Ben was born) for their answer to Why can I not use `new` with an arrow function in JavaScript/ES6?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The inspiration for today's episode was a terrific article from The Guardian about the many ways in which the modern world, specifically the software we use every day, was designed to steal our attention. During the episode, we discuss Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor know as the "father of flow" for his pioneering research on flow states. Sadly, Prof. Csikszentmihalyi passed away in 2021, but you can find a terrific tribute to him and his work here.In the second half of the episode, we discuss "The California Ideology" and the ways in which hustle culture and libertarian ideals helped to shape Silicon Valley and the world of technology more broadly.Congrats to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, UrbanoJVR, who answered the question: What is the difference between 'mvn verify' vs 'mvn test'?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Will no one think of the maintainers? As The New Stack points out, watching millions of projects fail because of a bug in an open source library has become common enough that we shrug and reply, "Told you so." It's gotten so bad, big tech companies are visiting the White House to discuss the issue as a matter of national security.There is a great post up on the Stack Overflow blog examining this issue, but it's not about color.js, it's about Log4J. Traffic to questions on this logging library grew more than 1000% percent after the recent revelations about a new vulnerability. Also discussed in this episode: cryptographer and Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike stepped down from his role as CEO of the encrypted messaging service. That's news, but he actually made bigger waves in tech circles with an unrelated blog post detailing his first experience with Web3. Spoiler alert: it's not as decentralized or divorced from Web2 as you might have thought.You can find Cassidy Williams on Twitter and her website.Ben Popper can be found on Twitter here.Ryan Donovan can be found on Twitter, or writing for the Stack Overflow blog. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You can find Maureen here. You can find Scott here.There is a wealth of free courses available through the AWS training website, including Operations, Advanced Networking, Machine Learning, and Data Science. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You can find Philippe on Twitter here and learn more about CrowdSec here.They recently put together a list of the IP addresses trying to exploit the new Log4j vulnerability.For a prescient view of today's cybersecurity challenges, Humeau recommends John Brunner's classic 1975 sci-fi novel, The Shockwave Rider.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Data scientists and engineers don’t always play well together. Data scientists will plan out a solution, carefully build models, test them in notebooks, then throw that solution over the wall to engineering. Implementing that solution can take months.Historically, the data science team has been purely science-driven. Work on methodologies, prove out something that they wanted to achieve, and then hand it over to the engineering organization. That could take many months.Over the past three to five years, they’ve been moving their engineering and data science operations onto the cloud as part of an overall Agile transformation and a move from being sales-led to being product-led. With most of their solutions migrated over, they decided that along with modernizing their infrastructure, they wanted to modernize their legacy systems, add new functions and scientific techniques, and take advantage of new technologies to scale and meet the demand coming their way. While all of the rituals and the rigor of Agile didn't always facilitate the more open-ended nature of the data science work at 84.51°, having both data science and engineering operating in a similar tech stack has been a breath of fresh air. Working cross-functionally has shortened the implementation delay. At the same time, being closer to the engineering side of the house has given the data science team a better sense of how to fit their work into the pipeline. Getting everyone on the same tech stack had a side effect. Between the increasing complexity of the projects, geographic diversity of the folks on these projects, a rise in remote work, and continued growth, locating experts became harder. But with everyone working in the same tech, more people could answer questions and become SMEs. Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t tell you that 84.51° was asking and answering questions on Stack Overflow for Teams. It was helpful when Chris and Michael no longer had to call on the SMEs they knew by name but could suddenly draw more experts out of the woodwork by asking a question. Check out this episode for insights on data science, agile, and building a great knowledge base for a large, increasingly distributed engineering org.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Esther and Matt are graduate students in computer science at the University of Washington, where they study community networks.Esther explains how open-source, community-owned and -operated LTE networks are a good solution for expanding public internet access and ensuring digital equity.Matt walks the team through Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), a shared wireless spectrum that allows users to build their own LTE networks.Chris Webb of the Black Brilliance Research Project lays out how a digital stewardship program in Detroit helped inspire his work.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Developers are leading the Great Resignation, according to some reports. Others feel developers aren't resigning, so much as seizing the moment to find better opportunities. You can find out hosts online at the links belowCassidyCeoraRyanBenHave an experience with the Great Resignation you want to share with our podcast and blog? Hit us up by email:PodcastPitches for the blogThanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Umer, for explaining how to: align an anchor to the rightSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hear why Ben thinks the Workplace Stack Exchange and the Academia Stack Exchange have the richest questions in the Stack Exchange network (or maybe just the most sitcom-worthy).ICYMI: Jack Dorsey stepped down from Twitter. Will he be back?At Twitter, Tess Rinearson is leading a new team focused on crypto, blockchains, and decentralized tech. Follow her on Twitter here.The team winces over a review of a Tesla Model Y hatchback that describes phantom braking so frequent and so dangerous that it’s “a complete deal-breaker.”If you’re a fan of our show, consider leaving us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What exactly is VanillaJS? Tongue-in-cheek, it's the most lightweight JavaScript framework out there and used by pretty much every website on the internet. Seriously though, it's just JavaScript…without a framework. If you're interested in reading and learning more about JavaScript, Chris has a bevy of courses and eBooks over at vanillajsguides.com. Like Chris's ideas so much you want to subscribe to his newsletter? Right over this way!Since you are a connoisseur of podcasts, check out Chris's own at vanillajspodcast.com.Chris has kindly put together a collection of resources for listeners like you at gomakethings.com/overflow. This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to prograils for their answer to How can I read the number of lines in Fortran 90 from a text file? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Bill gives an overview of edge computing and why it matters.His team wants to enable developers by democratizing access to AI. OpenVINO is an open-source toolkit for high-performing AI inference.DevCloud lets developers prototype, test, and run their workloads for free on Intel hardware and software. For more on OpenVINO, check out this example we shared that increases image resolution. Of course, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention another way Intel is bringing its technology to developers: joining Collectives™ on Stack Overflow.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The pathway to a software developer job has shifted over the years. It used to be that you had to go through a college computer science program before you could get a developer job. But as online education became better and programming jobs became more specialized, people were getting hired on the strength of their bootcamp or certification experience. Our 2021 Developer Survey found that almost 60% of respondents learned to code using online resources. Mike spent most of his time in the worlds of programmer education and publishing, including a 14 year stint at O’Reilly Media. He worked with numerous great technologists, people who wrote popular languages, and other luminaries in the software world. Much of his focus was on analyzing the signals that come from the data he saw and the conversations with people around the world. What those signals told him was the focus for recruiters was on skills instead of educational background. A computer science education used to be the thing that proved you had the skills. But not everyone has the four years to spend getting a degree. In today’s tech industry, many people turn to Skillsoft and other companies for certifications and classes that provide a quick boost in skills to prepare them for a changing job market. It’s not just people who want to break into programming who can benefit from online courses and certifications; working developers who want to continue to succeed need to make learning a habit. That can be hard to manage with a full-time job, so their organizations need to make learning a cultural norm. Setting time aside every day for learning pays dividends, not just for the individual, but for that organization. With the incredible growth of cloud adoption in the past couple of years, one of the hottest skills in demand right now is cloud engineering. Skillsoft offers an AWS certification course that prepares you for the certification exam. Like many of their other courses, it caters to different learning styles and modalities, while also letting you get comfortable and assess your readiness by taking practice exams. With a little bit of intent and planning, you can build a skill path that gets you hired or lets you make the next leap in your career. The world of software is always changing and you as a developer need change with it. With course completions and certifications, you’ll have the skills and the evidence to show employers. If you’re interested in learning more about Skillsoft’s offerings, check out http://www.globalknowledge.com/aws30. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Find Joel Spolsky on Twitter here.Jeff Atwood is on Twitter here.Geoff Dalgas is on Twitter here.Follow Jarrod Dixon on Twitter here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

PlanetScale is built on Vitess, the open-source database clustering system that runs at colossal scale hosting YouTube, Slack, and GitHub.A familiar theme: Big cloud companies aren’t set up for independent developers. Sam and Ceora discuss how serverless can get projects—even businesses—up and running quickly.Choosing the stack for a new business? Tools like Netlify can scale with your product, so you don’t have to change your architecture as you evolve.Staging environments should be a thing of the past. That’s why PlanetScale enables database branching.And finally, a question from Law Stack Exchange: Can satellite images be copyrighted?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This “Trojan source” bug (get it?) could threaten the security of all code.In its annual report on its user community, GitHub found that developers appreciate automation, reusing code, and remote work. (No surprises there.) Ceora explains how automation and code reuse are game changers for independent developers and how this logic is spreading to big tech companies, too.GitHub’s first Chief Security Officer has the company focused on keeping your repo secure.GDPR makes you legally responsible for data someone else shares with you. That’s just one of the reasons it’s not a good idea to solicit personal information through a form and then read those secrets on TikTok.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ethan's book, Once a Bitcoin Miner: Scandal and Turmoil in the Cryptocurrency Wild West, is available now.The metaverse isn’t just inevitable; it’s already here (and it has a booming real estate market).As we move more of our lives online onto platforms controlled by increasingly powerful digital giants, Ethan explains the democratizing power of cryptocurrency and blockchain. On the other hand, China’s new digital currency (government-issued but crypto-inspired) raises questions about privacy and surveillance. And why did China declare all cryptocurrency transactions illegal?Is crypto the new oil—an environmental disaster burning all this energy in the face of climate change? Bitcoin was using as much energy as Finland or Pakistan.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The conversation was inspired by Epic's decision to make it's Kid's Web Service's parent verification free to all developers.Ben has been grappling with these questions since 2013, when he wrote about allowing screen time into his young son's life. One thing that old article does remind us; how incredibly indestructible the original iPad was. A true tank of a tablet!Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, javimuu, for explaining: How to get a Thumbail / Preview image from Server Video Url in Swift 3.0See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We kick things off by weighing the merits of two gender-neutral regional pronouns: the familiar y’all and the under appreciated yinz. Now that’s covered...The global population of developers will hit 45 million by 2030, up from 26.9 million in 2021 (EDC). What platforms will they want to build on?Did Kubernetes solve all your problems? Did it create new ones?It seems there’s always an XKCD relevant to our conversation. Today, it’s How standards proliferate.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Maxwell, a solution architect at xMatters, took a winding road to get to where he is. After a computer engineering education, he held jobs as field support engineer, product manager, SRE, and finally his current role as a solutions architect, where he serves as something of an SRE for SREs, helping them solve incident management problems with the help of xMatters. When he moved to the SRE role, Maxwell wanted to get back to doing technical work. It was a lateral move within his company, which was migrating an on-prem solution into the cloud. It’s a journey that plenty of companies are making now: breaking an application into microservices, running processes in containers, and using Kubernetes to orchestrate the whole thing. Non-production environments would go down and waste SRE time, making it harder to address problems in the production pipeline. At the heart of their issues was the incident response process. They had several bottlenecks that prevented them from delivering value to their customers quickly. Incidents would send emails to the relevant engineers, sometimes 20 on a single email, which made it easy for any one engineer to ignore the problem—someone else has got this. They had a bad silo problem, where escalating to the right person across groups became an issue of its own. And of course, most of this was manual. Their MTTR—mean time to resolve—was lagging. Maxwell moved over to xMatters because they managed to solve these problems through clever automation. Their product automates the scheduling and notification process so that the right person knows about the incident as soon as possible. At the core of this process was a different MTTR—mean time to respond. Once an engineer started working to resolve a problem, it was all down to runbooks and skill. But the lag between the initial incident and that start was the real slowdown. It’s not just the response from the first SRE on call. It’s the other escalations down the line—to data engineers, for example—that can eat away time. They’ve worked hard to make escalation configuration easy. It not only handles who's responsible for specific services and metrics, but who’s in the escalation chain from there. When the incident hits, the notifications go out through a series of configured channels; maybe it tries a chat program first, then email, then SMS. The on-call process is often a source of dread, but automating the escalation process can take some of the sting out of it. Check out the episode to learn more. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You can learn more about Roll, which describes itself as blockchain infrastructure for social money, here.If you want to follow them on social, check out @tryrollhq as well as their personal socials: @bradley_miles_ and @sidkal. If you are interested in this kind of tech, check out previous conversations on Web3 and our chat with Chris Dixon on blockchain.Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Notnooop, who explained how you can :Make An Emoji Enabling AppSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

GitHub's CEO, Nat Friedman, stepped down recently to focus on his startup roots. Chief product officer, Thomas Dohmke, will be moving to CEO. The Verge reviewed our no-longer-a-joke April Fool's keyboard. How many keyboard layouts are there anyway? Including non-English layouts, there's lots. Do you have a mind's eye? How about an inner monologue? We explore why some people have a voice in their head when they think and some don't. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Rennie grew up in Kenya, Honduras, Somalia, and Oklahoma; his parents volunteered for the Peace Corps before working for the US Government overseas. Audio tape drives are real! Check out this Retrocomputing question about how the Commodore 64 audio interface worked. If you want to remember something better, a 2014 study says you should write it out by hand. Rennie worked at Blackberry, and Ben remembered his colleagues at the Verge fondly hoping for their comeback. In fact, here's Ben hoping for their comeback!We did a podcast on moving from engineer to manager, which Rennie said was one of the hardest things to do. Rennie gave a shoutout to the book he's reading now, The Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson. Rennie works on our Platform team, which works on all of our reusable stuff, including our design system, Stacks. This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Vinzzz for explaining how to Create an array of random numbers in Swift.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You can find Alex's writing for Employ America here. You can find him on Twitter hereYou can find Hassan's blog here and his Twitter here.You can find their writing on the semiconductor industry and shortages here and here.Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is jasme, who helped someone figure out how to fix email validation with Laravel.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What is Web3? The Decentralized Internet of the FutureCassidyCeoraRyanBenThanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Tadeck, for showing us how to design a : Function for Factorial in PythonSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We start out the show talking about this article: I Don't Know How To Count That Low.Is Apple normalizing surveillance?Toyota trucks and Land Cruisers were very popular with ISIS. Instead of a lifeboat, we shoutout this fun question: How do I stop annoyed wizards from killing people all the time? A common problem for us muggles. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Alex comes up with better ways to interact with technology and writes about it on his website. Is there a link between playing music and writing code? A previous article of ours covered the merger of the two in the music programming language, Sonic PI. If you're curious about the weird extremes of operating system development, check out TempleOS. Cassidy and Alex both take copious notes through Obsidian. Alex has a plugin that may help you organize notes automatically. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The infrastructure that networked applications lives on is getting more and more complicated. There was a time when you could serve an application from a single machine on premises. But now, with cloud computing offering painless scaling to meet your demand, your infrastructure becomes abstracted and not really something you have contact with directly. Compound that problem with with architecture spread across dozens, even hundreds of microservices, replicated across multiple data centers in an ever changing cloud, and tracking down the source of system failures becomes something like a murder mystery. Who shot our uptime in the foot? A good observability system helps with that. On this sponsored episode of the Stack Overflow Podcast, we talk with Greg Leffler of Splunk about the keys to instrumenting an observable system and how the OpenTelemetry standard makes observability easier, even if you aren’t using Splunk’s product. Observability is really an outgrowth of traditional monitoring. You expect that some service or system could break, so you keep an eye on it. But observability applies that monitoring to an entire system and gives you the ability to answer the unexpected questions that come up. It uses three principal ways of viewing system data: logs, traces, and metrics.Metrics are a number and a timestamp that tell you particular details. Traces follow a request through a system. And logs are the causes and effects recorded from a system in motion. Splunk wants to add a fourth one—events—that would track specific user events and browser failures. Observing all that data first means you have to be able to track and extract that data by instrumenting your system to produce it. Greg and his colleagues at Splunk are huge fans of OpenTelemetry. It’s an open standard that can extract data for any observability platform. You instrument your application once and never have to worry about it again, even if you need to change your observability platform. Why use an approach that makes it easy for a client to switch vendors? Leffler and Splunk argue that it’s not only better for customers, but for Splunk and the observability industry as a whole. If you’ve instrumented your system with a vendor locked solution, then you may not switch, you may just let your observability program fall by the wayside. That helps exactly no one. As we’ve seen, people are moving to the cloud at an ever faster pace. That’s no surprise; it offers automatic scaling for arbitrary traffic volumes, high availability, and worry-free infrastructure failure recovery. But moving to the cloud can be expensive, and you have to do some work with your application to be able to see everything that’s going on inside it. Plenty of people just throw everything into the cloud and let the provider handle it, which is fine until they see the bill.Observability based on an open standard makes it easier for everyone to build a more efficient and robust service in the cloud. Give the episode a listen and let us know what you think in the comments.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode was inspired by Joma Tech's review of his first ten years in coding. Ben Popper shared a fair amount of his coding journey through the series Ben Popper is the Worst Coder in the World. Should you actually write out code on paper as some of us had to do? Maybe.Modding games gets people into programming. For Ryan, Freedom Force got him into Python. Today, it's Minecraft and Roblox. Want to jump start your career? Find a community on Discord or Twitter and make some contacts. The software industry is made of people. Hackathons helped Cassidy find a deeper love for coding, oh and her husband too.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Isaac's piece, Code quality: a concern for businesses, bottom lines, and empathetic programmers, ran recently on the Stack Overflow blog. A simple metric for code quality code be how easy is it to delete any given piece of code. There's no algorithmic way to judge quality code, but experienced engineers know it when they see it. Jeff Atwood's Performance is a Feature blog post gets a lot of mileage with our writers. But code quality isn't on the same axis; it's not a feature you can prioritize. It's part of the development process. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At LinkedIn scale, it pays to save your developers a few minutes or even seconds on repeat tasks. Sara walks us through her experience managing senior engineers, and trying to improve developer experience and tooling, on a massive, global platform with over a billion user interactions a month.Paul shares some of his firm's latest work, helping to visualize the impact of climate change at Probable Futures. Interested in doing work in software focused on climate change? Paul recommends you learn a bit about NetCDF files.Follow Sara on Twitter here.Follow Paul on Twitter here.Enjoy our brain teaser of the week: a new way to cut pizza.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Graybeard conference alert! Eran and Ryan both started their technology journeys on the venerable Commodore 64. During his academic days, Eran helped to map all the BGP (background gateway protocol) gateways in the world. This got a fair bit of press recently during the six hour Facebook outage.Nexar provides smart dashcams and an app that help cars understand the roads around them. While networked cameras on every car could be a privacy nightmare, Nexar says that they have privacy as a foundational part of the SDLC.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

HarperDB is a startup that focuses on highly scalable databases that handle real-time data. Harper is built on Node.js and Express with a little help from Fastify. They know where they excel and where they don't. High data throughput like gaming and vision, great! High data resolution and transactional software like financial applications, not so great. It's speed over accuracy. Instead of a Lifeboat badge today, we shared a relevant question: Q: How to create HarperDB table with lambda.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Read more about the climate debate surrounding NFTs here.We really enjoyed this piece: You either die an MVP, or live long enough to build content moderation.You can find Ben on Twitter here.You can send ideas for blog posts to Ryan Donovan at our pitch box.You can find Cassidy on Twitter here and read the newsletter she helps us curate here.You can find Ceora on Twitter here and check out more about Apollo GraphQL here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You can learn more about Paul here.You can read more about Physna here.Paul is excited about the Metaverse. So are we! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Check out more about Microsoft's efforts to ditch passwords here.When 2FA just won't do, 3FA to the rescue. Just pray we aren't headed towards five factors. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Right now, most development teams provide visibility into their overall process and lifecycle through standup meetings and spreadsheets. It can be a painfully manual process that uses up valuable engineering time. Value stream management aims to solve that by mapping out the entire software development life cycle and providing visibility into areas where things are breaking down or getting stuck. It borrows ideas from Agile and the automate-all-the-things attitude from DevOps to ensure engineering teams are moving fast with direction, avoiding bottlenecks, and reaching the the key objectives management planned weeks ago.In this episode, we chat with Nick Mathison and Sylvan Carbonell from HCL Software DevOps about value stream management and how their product, HCL Accelerate, brings visibility into the entire gamut of the SDLC, from the request coming in from a customer to deploying code to the production servers. At the foundation of this process is a good map of the company’s value stream. Think of it as bringing all your teams together to map out the entire workflow of your development cycle on a whiteboard, from receiving feature requests and bug reports, assigning out tickets, merging code, requesting code reviews, passing build tests, QA processes, and finally deploying to production. The value stream map brings that whiteboard to life. Once the process is mapped out and the data flows revealed, it is very easy to track where the work is at any given time and how fast it is flowing through the value stream. Every company has little idiosyncrasies that make their process unique: their specific slowdowns, time sinks, and manual approvals that grind development to a halt. Value stream management spots those and helps you eliminate them. In a value stream, you’re no longer watching individual devs; your best metrics cover the “two-pizza team,” a team small enough to be fed by two pizzas. This team’s interactions—working through epic tickets, code reviews, internal support, etc.—provides the best metrics to identify ways to increase the value that a team provides. With many technology companies working fully remotely during the pandemic, understanding each team’s process is critical. HCL offers a way to accomplish this without bringing lengthy standups back in the picture.Start benefiting from value stream management today with the forever-free Community Edition of HCL Accelerate. Try HCL Accelerate now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Go get your copy of They Key here.Our frequent collaborator, Cassidy Williams of Netlify, helped design the key and joined this episode to share her love for all things mechanical keyboard. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We talked about obscuring DNS traffic based on this article.Cassidy and Ben are pretty excited about all the new Apple stuff announced recently. Ryan, the curmudgeon, does not. There are several theories as to where the word dongle came from. The Conductor framework makes building web apps simpler in a low-code/no-code style. Did the pandemic worsen everyone else's guilt and self-loathing over decreased productivity or was it just us?Our only point of contact during the height of the pandemic was the Internet connection. Has the loosening of quarantine made us less likely to live online? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Tarn and his brother Zach are the brains behind Dwarf Fortress and the community that rose around it.Dr. Tarn Adams received a math PhD, but left his post-doc because he was too busy making games. A bug created the statue Planepacked, a massive structure that contained the entire history of the world as well as 73 copies of the statue itself.Many people, including one of our hosts, found out about Dwarf Fortress through a Let's Play session in a fortress called Boatmurdered. If you want a more human readable version of Dwarf Fortress, you can wishlist it on Steam or use one of the Lazy Newb packs. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Former co-host Sara Chipps now manages engineering teams at LinkedIn, but her best content is still on Twitter.Cassidy's former boss, Sarah Drasner, recently wrote a book to help engineers level up to management: Engineering Management for the Rest of Us. Cassidy's new favorite software tool is Astro, a single-site generator that looks to minimize the amount of client-side JavaScript in a site. The two books Ms. Chipps mention as the old standbys for new engineering managers are Peopleware and Smart and Gets Things Done. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

While every developer loves a good story about discovering and fixing a gnarly bug, not everyone enjoys the work of finding those bugs. Most folks would prefer to be writing business logic and solving new problems. But those input validation errors and resource leaks won’t solve themselves. Or will they?AWS Bug Bust is a global competition launched with the goal of finding and fixing one million bugs in codebases around the world. It takes the traditional bug bash and turns it into a competition that anyone can enter. Got a repo or two that you’ve been meaning to clean up? Enter the Bug Bust and start squashing. This competition awards points to organizations, as well as individuals within an organization, for every bug that they fix in their own repos. A little friendly competition can motivate developers to fix more bugs in order to move up the leaderboards. How do you think we built Stack Overflow? Fake internet points are very important around here. With the Bug Bust competition, it’s not just fake internet points and personal glory; top bug squashers—overall and within top organizations—can win all expense paid trips to re:Invent 2021. In a traditional bug bust, someone has to find the bugs, file tickets on all of them, then collect them for squashing. In the Bug Bust, Amazon has managed to automate that part of the process. That’s because the Bug Bust is built on their AI-powered code review and profiling tool, CodeGuru. CodeGuru uses static analysis and machine learning with some additional automated reasoning to find bugs in code; everything from best practices to concurrency issues, resource leaks, security problems, and more. AI isn’t here to take your jobs, it’s here to automated away the tedious stuff. Developers get to harness the power of artificial intelligence in their everyday lives.Concurrency and resource leak issues tend to drain the soul out of the developers. You could spend all day trying to optimize and close those. CodeGuru includes a function profiler that looks for a codebase’s most expensive calls. It’s a lightweight agent actively running and looking for ways to reduce the cost of the running application. These bugs, along with security issues and AWS API calls, are the ones that earn the most points. But all bugs earn their bashers points; CodeGuru spots code inefficiencies, duplications, and general code quality detectors, and performs input validation. The model behind this is pretrained on years of Amazon bug hunting experience. The system does learn from you as to what is a good bug in your codebase, but it’s not training on your code. It’s your feedback that makes CodeGuru a better bug hunter.If you have Java and Python code in a GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, Bitbucket, or AWS CodeCommit repository, you can jump into the competition. Sign up with your email and you get 30 days to run as many Bug Busts as you want for free. The top ten individual bug busters get VIP treatment at the 2021 re:Invent conference (and an all-expense-paid trip there), which is being held in person this year. Top participating organizations get a ticket to give to one of their developers as well. For those bashers outside of the top ten, you can still earn some sweet swag by passing some point milestones. The contest to win the trip to re:Invent 2021 runs through September, but you can still automate your bug bashes and get swag anytime. Want to get started? Head over to the AWS Bug Bust site now.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Weaveworks helps DevOps folks manage their Kubernetes settings entirely Paul's first computer was a Sinclair ZX-80, which had a clock speed of 3.25 MHz, 1 KB of static RAM ,and 4 KB of read-only memory. Pretty good for 1980. Weaveworks based their project on Flux, an open source engine. If you're not a big corporation and you want to use it, it's free!Before there was Kubernetes, Google created Borg, an internal cluster manager. It has yet to be assimilated by Kubernetes. Ben thinks that, if it gets too easy to manage Kubernetes clusters, we'll be out of a job talking about the pain of cluster manages. Today's lifeboat badge goes to Daniel Ribeiro for the answer to How can I run Go binary files?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.