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The Stack Overflow Podcast

The Stack Overflow Podcast

976 episodes — Page 13 of 20

Ep 376How valuable is your screen name?

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.Cassidy's piece on GraphQL, the first item she ever wrote for Stack Overflow, is here. Want to learn more about AVIF and how it compresses images so well? Check out good read from Netflix's tech blog here.Instead of a lifeboat badge we're highlighting an amazing question: Can celestial objects be used in cryptography?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sep 10, 202129 min

Ep 375Authorization is complex. Oso is a library designed to help you structure it.

You can learn more about Sam on his LinkedIn here. You can find him on Twitter here.Learn more about Oso, check out the code, and join their Slack community here.Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Evgeny Lisin, who answered the question: How to find UIWebView in Project and replace it with WKWebView?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sep 8, 202122 min

Ep 374Why yes, I do have a patent on a time machine

You can find Angie's blog here, catch her on Twitter here, and connect with her on LinkedIn here.You can check out Applitools and learn about the visual AI system it uses for testing here.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Alex Klyubin for explaining: What is the difference between Jar signer and Apk signer?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sep 3, 202122 min

Ep 373Exploring the magic of instant python refactoring with Sourcery

Nick is now Sourcery's CTO. You can find him on Twitter here.Brendan serves as Sourcery's CEO. You can find him on Twitter here.You can try out Sourcery for free here and check out the company's open positions here.Our lifeboat badge of the week, fittingly, goes to Martin Evans, for explaining how to parse an integer from a string in Python.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aug 31, 202127 min

Ep 372Changing of the guards: one co-host departs, and a new one enters

Paul is stepping away down as CEO of Postlight to focus more on understanding climate change and how we can address it. The science hurts his brain. Cassidy Williams, currently at Netlify, has published articles on our blog and provides links in our newsletter.We dig into some of the results of the dev survey, including how kids today are learning to code on the internet. There's so much to learn from now!Did everyone step back from working full time? Our survey data shows a decrease in full time employed respondents. Was there an existential moment for everyone during the pandemic where they thought that there must be something else?Our surveyed devs love Svelte but get paid the most for Ruby on Rails. This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Suren Raj for his answer to Java convert bytes[] to File.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aug 27, 202119 min

Ep 371Passwords are dead! Long live the new authentication flows.

Every password can be compromised. Stych helps companies build authentication flows that don't need user passwords. Julianna grew up in Idaho, where she didn't even know what computer science was. After stints as a software engineer and product manager, she found a role where could figure out what the organization should be building: CTO and founder. Their first product was email magic links, which is more complicated than you think. Most importantly, how do you always avoid the spam folder? Copy changes in an email can make all the difference. Developer tooling is undergoing a renaissance now that smaller companies are getting into the game with API offerings. The big thing that differentiates good tools from bad is easy to understand documentation. The right metaphor for API services isn't SaaS, it's eCommerce. Plug it in into your app without giving up design and user experience. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aug 24, 202118 min

Ep 370Extending the legacy of Admiral Grace Hopper

In 1987, Anita Borg, AnitaB.org's namesake, saw how few women were at a "systems" conference. A few casual chats turned into the listserv, Systers, which continues to offer a place for women in engineering to meet and discuss. Grace Hopper—that's Navy Rear Admiral Hopper to you, civilian—was the first to devise a theory of programming languages that were machine-independent. She created the FLOW-MATIC programming language, which served as the basis for COBOL. Quincy started in electrical engineering and learned FORTRAN. That experience with how computers operate on hardware helped her teach C++. The difference is like listening to vinyl vs. mp3s. Should UX designers create technology that you need to adapt to or adapts to you? And will different generations create different interaction paradigms?We're out of lifeboat badges, so we summoned a Necromancer winner! Congrats to stealth who was awarded the badge for their answer to the question, Adding multiple columns in MySQL with one statement.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aug 20, 202114 min

Ep 369Building a better developer platform

We're officially part of the Prosus family now that the acquisition has closed. It’s a huge milestone and a big deal for our company and community.Prosus has a global reach and will help us meet the needs of developers and technologists everywhere. Have no fear: there will not be a paywall on the community sites. We have separate free and paid products for a reason. We combined our Ads and Talent businesses into Reach & Relevance, which gives companies the opportunity to showcase their products and engineering organizations to software engineers around the world. Remote work is here to stay, and a lot of knowledge workers are starting to adapt the processes that software engineers have been using for years. Our lifeboat shoutout goes to Jordi Castilla for the answer to the question: Convert HH:MM:SS into minutes using JavaScriptSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aug 17, 202123 min

Ep 368Move fast and make sure nobody gets pager alerts at 2AM

Ethan started his career when the marquee tag was king and is bullish on its comeback. His focus as an investor is on developer tools & infrastructure, open source software, space, and emerging compute.We talk about his time as a Product Group Leader at Facebook, and his strong feelings on the state of DevOps.You can find his investor profile here, his blog here, and on Twitter here.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Denys Vuika, who answered the question: How do I configure Yarn as the default package manager for Angular CLI? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aug 13, 202126 min

Ep 367Using AI to fake your own voice, podcasting never been easier

Mason began his career as a developer, went on to be a CEO, but also found time to produce 80s alt rock album full of advice on how to run your startup.Slack began life as a video game company, eventually pivoting to make an internal chat tool it had built into its main business. Descript had a similar journey, taking the editing software Mason and his team developed at Detour, and moving it to become the center of a new business after Detour was acquired by Bose.Headquartered in Montreal, Lyrebird is the AI division of Descript . It was founded by PhD students studying under Yoshua Bengio, who won the Turing Prize in 2019 for his pioneering research into deep learning and neural networks.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes Avinash, who explained what to do with a invalid syntax error that arises while running an AWS commandSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aug 10, 202119 min

Ep 366What's the blast radius when your database goes down?

Mark started out on a 4k TRS-80. He had to program it in assembly language, as there wasn't enough memory to use the local Basic copy.Throughout his career, he's oscillated between using databases and building databases. He started at Caltech and NASA, using databases to store and organize space data and chip data. Then he built databases at Oracle, including versions, 5 6, 7, and 8.After that it was back to using databases at NewsCorp for huge student data systems. He built databases at AWS with Amazon RDS, then moved to Grab Taxi, the Uber of Southeast Asia, and finally back to MongoDB, where he is building again.You can find Mark on Twitter here.This week's lifeboat badge goes to Erik Kalkoken, who answered the question: In a Slack, is there a way to see all the members that is part of that channel? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aug 6, 202125 min

Ep 365Highlights from our 2021 Developer Survey

This year over 80,000 respondents took the time to share their feedback on the tools and trends that are shaping software development.We learned a lot about the way developers learn. For the rising cohort of coders under the age of 18, online resources like videos and blogs are more popular than books and school combined, a statistic that doesn’t hold for any of our other age cohorts. Roughly a third of respondents responded to our question on mental health. This is twice the percentage that offered feedback in 2020 and may reflect a growing awareness of the importance of mental health’s and the impact of the ongoing pandemic.Another trend that may be linked to the pandemic is work status. We see a greater percentage of respondents working part-time or in school, while those indicating full time employment decreased. This may reflect the effects of the pandemic, which saw workers from all industries stepping back and reevaluating their relationship to a five day work week and in-person employment.Check out the full results of the 2021 Dev Survey here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aug 3, 202118 min

Ep 364Exploring the cutting edge of privacy and encryption with Very Good Security

We chat discrete mathematics, differential privacy, and homomorphic encryption. But don't worry, we also break it down in laymen's terms.Interested in working in security? Mahmoud will personally extend an offer to anyone who solves this puzzle.Puzzles not your thing? You can still learn more about Very Good Security and its open positions here.Mahmoud is 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.

Jul 30, 202122 min

Ep 363Why startups should use Kubernetes from day one

You can read Max's full article on Kubernetes on our blog here.You can find Max on Twitter here and his personal website here.Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Mantas, who answered the question: Determine if all the values in a PHP array are nullSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 27, 202123 min

Ep 362From AOL chat rooms to Wikipedia, Reddit, and now, Stack Overflow

Beaudette cut his teeth in the days of AOL chat rooms, then became an early Wikipedian. More recently he worked at Reddit, where his team of ten professional community managers supported 300 million monthly unique visitors. Before his recent promotion to VP, Beaudette was on the Trust and Safety team at Stack Overflow. For more detail on his experience, check out his LinkedIn here.Our lifefboat badge of the week goes to Arty-chan for answering the question:What is gitlab instance url, and how can i get it?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 23, 202121 min

Ep 361Crafting software and games for the selfie generation

You can find Tara on Twitter here. Sam is on Twitter here.You can learn more about Loveshark's latest games and the roles they are hiring for here.Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Elliott Frisch, for answering the question: Convert list of integer into comma separated string? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 20, 202121 min

Ep 360Github Copilot can write code for you. We put it to the test.

You can find some fun video of Cassidy putting Copilot to the test here.If you want to take the Jamstack survey, check it out here.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Andomar, who answered the question: Will multiple calls to `now()` in a single postgres query always give same result? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 16, 202126 min

Ep 359Leaving your job to pursue an indie project as a solo developer

We discuss how Simões learned to code and the feature set that allowed Poker Now to differentiate itself in a crowded space. Simões shares the tech stack he used to craft the first version of Poker Now, and how he rebuilt the service after it crashed under the weight of a massive wave of new users. During the peak of lockdown, his site went from an average of 100 concurrent users to more than 10,000 at a time.Lastly, we chat about the allure of leaving a regular job behind to work on a passion project, and about the challenges of maintaining a service and earning a living as a solo developer.Today we're celebrating Divakar, who was awarded a lifeboat badge for answering the question: Searching a sequence in a NumPy array.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 13, 202130 min

Ep 358So you're not getting along with your engineering team

If you want to catch up on the first half of the episode, you can find it here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 12, 202120 min

Ep 357Is everyone starting to work like a developer?

The massive shift to remote work that so many companies undertook over the last year has pushed many to adopt an asynchronous, merge driven workflow that has been pioneered and perfected by software developers. With tools like Airtable, and Coda, the boundary between programming and other forms of media and knowledge work is beginning to blur. What happened to Google Wave? Can products with passionate fans get pushed into the Commons after they are sunset?Peek under the hood, and it's spreadsheets all the way down. Some companies are now turning a simple spreadsheet into an interactive web app. Spreadsheets on steroids, what could go wrong?No Lifeboat badge this episode, but tune in tomorrow, we'll have Part 2 of our live episode from the Fishbowl. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 9, 202127 min

Ep 356Building for AR with Niantic Labs augmented reality SDK

You can learn more about Lightship, Niantic's AR SDK, here. They are hiring developers, and openings can be found here.Richard can be found on LinkedIn here. Kelly can be found on LinkedIn here.A big thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Karim, for answering the question: Check if value exists in Array object Javascript or Angular? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 6, 202129 min

Ep 355Bring your own stack: Why developer platforms are going headless

As explained in this piece, "A headless CMS is a back-end only content management system (CMS) built from the ground up as a content repository that makes content accessible via a RESTful API or GraphQL API for display on any device." Shopify has leaned hard into GraphQL and APIs in general. The goal, as Coates describes it, is to allow developers to bring their own stack to the front-end, but provide them with the benefits of Shopify's back-end, like edge data processing for improved speed at global scale. Shopify also offers a wealth of DevOps tooling and logistical support when it comes to international commerce. We also discuss Liquid, the flexible template language Shopify uses for building web apps.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to chunhunghan for answering the question: How to customize the switch button in a flutter?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 2, 202121 min

Ep 354How product development at Stack Overflow has evolved

If you're full up on technical content and just want funny retweets, follow Adam on Twitter hereIf you're interested in learning more about tag pages, check out what the community created for Rust.Thanks to Peter Cordes, our lifeboat badge winner of the week, for answering the question: How can I accurately benchmark unaligned access speed on x86_64?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jun 29, 202120 min

Ep 353Stack Overflow has a new product: Collectives™. Here's how we built it, and why.

You can check out all the details about Collectives in our launch post here.We detailed the user research that allowed our community to help shape this product in a Meta post here.Teresa is on Twitter here and Jascha is on LinkedIn here. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jun 25, 202120 min

Ep 352From search trees to neural nets, a deep dive into natural language processing

We chatted with three guests:Miguel Jetté: Head of AI R&DJosh Dong: AI Engineering ManagerJenny Drexler: Senior Speech ScientistWhen Jette was studying mathematics in the early 2000s, his focus was on computational biology, and more specifically, phylogenetic trees, and DNA sequences. He wanted to understand the evolution of certain traits and the forces that explain why our bones are a certain length or our brains a certain size. As it turned out, the algorithms and techniques he learned in this field mapped very well to the emerging discipline of automatic speech recognition, or ASR. During this period, Montreal was emerging as a hotbed for artificial intelligence, and Jette found himself working for Nuance, the company behind the original implementation of Siri. That experience led him to several positions in the world of speech recognition, and he eventually landed at Rev, where he founded the company’s AI department. Jette describes Rev as an “Uber for Transcription.” Anyone can sign up for the platform and earn money by listening to audio submitted by clients and transcribing the speech into text. This means the company has a tremendous dataset of raw audio that has been annotated by human beings and, in many cases, assessed a second time by the client. For someone looking to build an AI system that mastered the domain of speech to text, this was a goldmine. Jette built the earliest version of Rev’s AI, but it was up to our second guest, Josh Dong, to productize and scale that system. He helped the department transition from older technologies like Perl to more popular languages like Python. He also focused on practical concerns like modularity and reusable components. To combine machine learning and DevOps, Dong added Docker containers and a testing pipeline. If you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of keeping a system like Rev’s running at tremendous scale, you’ll want to check out this part of the show. We also explore some of the fascinating future and promise this technology holds in our time with Jenny Drexler. She explains how Rev is moving from a hybrid model—one that combines Jette’s older statistical techniques with Dong’s newer machine learning approach—to a new system that will be ML from end-to-end. This will open up the door for powerful applications, like a single system that can convert speech text across multiple languages in a single piece of audio. “One of the things that's really cool about these end to end models is that basically, whatever data you have, it can learn to handle it. So a very similar architecture can do sequence to sequence learning with different kinds of sequences. The model architecture that you might use for speech recognition can actually look very similar to what you might use for translation. And you can use that same architecture, to say, feed in audio in lots of different languages and be able to do transcription for any of them within one model. It's much harder with the hybrid models to sort of put all the right pieces together to make that happen,” explains Drexler.If you’re interested in learning more about the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence that can understand our spoken language and learn how to respond, check out the full episode. If you want to learn more about Rev or check out some of the positions they have open, you can find their careers page here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jun 23, 202134 min

Ep 350Tickets please! Exploring the joys of being a junior engineer

Bligh explains her love for front end and the simple pleasure of bringing a designer’s vision to lifeWe also talk about making the transition from journalism and digital media to the world of software development. You can find her on Twitter here.You can check out Contact here.Learn more about Makers here.Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Rami Amro Ahmed, who answered the question: What is the difference between Model Factory and a DB seeder in Laravel?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jun 18, 202118 min

Ep 349Information foraging: the tricks great developers use to find solutions

You can check out some more of Henley's work on his blog here. Recent pieces include: A theory of how developers seek information All my career rejections Navigate your code like it's 2021 Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago? An inquisitive code editor: Overcome bugs before you know you have them How much time does the average developer spend typing in their editor versus researching, exploring, and pondering? Henley believes half an hour of inputting actual code a day is realistic, despite what you've heard about the 10X developer in your area. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jun 15, 202118 min

Ep 348Forget view-source, young coders are learning by making Discord bots and hacking Roblox

You can find Jenn on Twitter here. She is the creator of the wonderful website, make8bitart.com. You can check out Glitch here and dig into some of its WebXR projects.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Ruberandinda Patience, who explained why you got a 404 Not Found, even though the route exist in Laravel.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jun 11, 202128 min

Ep 347A good software tutorial explains the How. A great one explains the Why.

Karl is interested in the use of low code tools to extend development work beyond the engineering department. He also believes this approach, when done properly, allows teams to release new iterations more rapidly.Check out his company, draft.dev.Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.This week's lifefboat badge goes to Günter Zöchbauer, who explained: How to use 2 mixins in State in Flutter? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jun 8, 202121 min

Ep 346Don't build it: advice on civic tech from MIT's GOV/LAB

Innocent is a research associate at the MIT Gov /Lab. You can find him on Twitter here.Luke is the Founder and Executive Director of the civic technology organization Grassroot, as a practitioner-in-residence in 2021. You can follow him on Twitter here.Our lifeboat of the week goes to John Rotenstein, who explained: Why some services are called “AWS XXX” and the others “Amazon XXX”. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jun 4, 202118 min

Ep 345Unpacking observability and OpenTelemetry with Spiros Xanthos of Splunk

You can read more about Spiros on his LinkedIn or Twitter.There is some good backstory on his first company, Log Insight, here. A rundown of the acquisition that led to Spiros joining Splunk is here. There are also some interesting details in Splunk's blog on the deal, which calls out Omnition as a "a stealth-mode SaaS company that is innovating in distributed tracing, improving monitoring across microservices applications."If you enjoy the conversation and want to hear more, Spiros has done some interesting talks that are up on Youtube here.Our lifeboat of the week goes to Willie Mentzel, who explains how to: Round Double to 1 decimal place in kotlin: from 0.044999 to 0.1. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jun 1, 202134 min

Ep 344WFH? Developers learn to be their own operations department

You can check out our piece how developers can be their own operations department here.Our piece on preventing scope creep while working from home is here.You can follow Mike on Twitter here and learn more about building apps for Slack here.This week's lifeboat badge goes to averroes for helping us to : Check if integer == null See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

May 28, 202131 min

Ep 343Blocking the haters as a service

Chou, a Stanford educated computer scientist and electrical engineer, cut her teeth in Silicon Valley with stints at Facebook, Quora, and Pinterest, where she advocated for a stronger focus on diversity. Block Party describes its mission as building "anti-harassment tools against online abuse, but more fundamentally we are building solutions for user control, protection, and safety."As CEO and lead engineer, Chou gets to choose the company's tools. Block Party is built with technologies like Render, Flask, and Jinja. Paul is very jealous of this stack.Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Bryan Oakley, who answered the question: How to redirect print statements to Tkinter text widget? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

May 25, 202136 min

Ep 342Build engineering at Apple and the future of deploy previews

Eric was a build engineer at Apple for many years, then started a FeaturePeek which went through Y-combinator. He talks about what he learned from those experiences and how he'll be applying that knowledge to his new job at Netlify.The teams combined forces to make the process of submitting and gathering feedback on deploy previews easier and more broadly accessible outside technical teams. As Cassidy explained:“Based on technology from FeaturePeek, Deploy Previews enables reviewers to comment, screen record, and annotate right from the actual preview link. No new tabs. No new tools. Everyone’s feedback is recorded back in the GitHub pull request and can even extend to popular productivity tools such as Clubhouse.io, Linear, and Trello.”This feature set is near and dear to Ben’s heart. Now folks from marketing and design can offer feedback and be more tightly involved in the development process for new features, products, and websites. All without really learning Git! Also discussed this episode: weirdware, workflow automation, Jerry Garcia, compound bows, and the spread of Git and branch methodology to areas well outside software development.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

May 21, 202124 min

Ep 341Where design meets development inside Stack Overflow

David helps us understand where great designers fit on web companies these days, somewhere between front-of-the-front-end and back-of-the-front-end.Right now a lot of projects have to be maintained in multiple places - one for marketing, one for design, one for development. David shares thoughts on how to combine workspaces and where design systems can be integrated with tools.Congrats to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Jon, for helping unpack this riddle: Execution failed for task ':fluttertoast:compileDebugKotlin'See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

May 18, 202132 min

Ep 340Why are good Ruby developers so hard to find?

Ilya brought a host of good topics to the table. Bold Penguin went from one offshore developer, to one key dev, to one team, to multiple teams, multiple leaders, multiple external teams, to having a complete reboot only to go through it again. Ilya explains the lessons learned along the way.If you’re trying to grow a software startup, you have to understand and adapt your business. Bold Penguin had to figure out if its focus was being a platform, a product, a SaaS company, an enterprise technology solution company, or all of the above. You can check out Bold Penguin here and find Ilya on LinkedIn here.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Gibin Ealias, who helped to solve the enternal conundrum: Flex align-items: center not centering.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

May 14, 202123 min

Ep 339Saying goodbye to our co-host, Sara Chipps

Sara has been part of the open source community since 2001 and was formerly on the board of the .NET foundation. Recently she was elected to the board of the OpenJS foundation and was eager to get back in the trenches, helping people solve computer problems.In this episode we talk about coding interviews and brushing up on your puzzle solving chops.Later we dive into Ember.js, the framework Sara will be using with her new colleagues at LinkedIn.We explore what it’s like to join a team when everyone is still remote and you never get the chance to onboard with your team in person.This week’s lifeboat badge winner is Perfect28, who answered the question: Linq OrderBy custom order. Spoiler alert, there are char arrays involved. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

May 11, 202122 min

Ep 338NFT art, Ethereum gas, and a dive into Gemini's data lake

You can find Tommy on Twitter here and check out his NFT collection here.Evan tweets his undying love for The Mets here.Before you lay out your critique of NFTs, here's a great documentary on fraud and forgery in the fine art world. Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Oriol, who answered the question: What is the difference between 'remove' and 'removeChild' method in javascript?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

May 7, 202130 min

Ep 337Open source contributors helped a helicopter fly on Mars

You can check out the badge Github gave to folks for helping with the Mars flight here. You can learn more about F´, NASA’s open source flight software and embedded system framework, here.Paul tells the story of a shady financial operator who offered to take his blog public during the dot com boom. Yes, Ftrain.com was once an IPO candidate.Who copies and pastes from Stack Overflow? We dig into some of the data from our April Fools joke to get a sense of the scale and collaboration happening across our community.Paul takes a tutorial on coding with Ethereum but decides decarbonizing is the real future for software.Today's lifeboat badge winner is Scott M., who answered the question: How to remove one line from a txt file? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

May 4, 202124 min

Ep 336One founder's journey from personal trainer to "frontend mentor"

You can check out Frontend Mentor here. Try a few challenges or join their Slack, where thousands of students are chatting about how they are approaching the projects.You can follow Matt on Twitter here. If you want to read about how he made the jump from personal trainer to web developer, he did a nice interview with Indie London.Our lifeboat of the week goes to Banex for answering the question: why do we use NULL in strtok()?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Apr 30, 202121 min

Ep 335From music to trading cards, software is transforming curation and collecting

You can follow David on Twitter here and read his blog here.Check out more about Dapper Labs and it's work with the NBA and NFTs here.David has written some influential pieces on the world of digital music and the role of software platforms. Check out a few of his pieces here.Read about David's adventure's setting up a Minecraft server for his kids and using software for griefer detection. Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Keith Thompson, for answering the question: Go lang differentiate “\n” and line breakAs Keith eloquently explains, "There is no distinction between a 'real' and an 'unreal' line break." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Apr 27, 202131 min

Ep 334Non-fungible Talking

Want to try developing with Ethereum? Free Code Camp has you covered.On the other hand, here are some thoughts on why it's not the greatest language for developers.Interested in minting your own NFT? There are lots of options. Ethereum can be more expensive to use (those gas fees, ouch) but it also has the most active network of artists and collectors.Thanks to Phlume, our lifeboat badge winner of the week, for answering the question: How do I remove the double border on this table?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Apr 23, 202124 min

Ep 333One in four visitors to Stack Overflow copies code

You can check out our deep dive into the copy paste data here. We saw over 40 million copies in the two weeks worth of activity we analyzed.Kyle Pollard graduated from the University of Northern British Columbia and worked as a computer technician and programmer for the City of Prince George in Canada. You can find him on Github, Twitter, and his website.There’s lots of info about Cassidy’s various projects at cassidoo.co. You can catch her coding live at @cassidoo, Thursdays at 12:30 PT/2:30 Central/3:30 Eastern.Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is TJ Crowder, who answered the question: How can I see the source of built-in JavaScript functions?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Apr 20, 202114 min

Ep 332How to build and maintain online communities, from gaming to open source

You can follow David on Twitter here. If you want to check out his new book, The Business of Belonging, the first chapter is available here.You can find out more about CMX here and learn more about Bevy here.Cesar prefers to remain off social media, but you can find him on LinkedIn.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Apr 16, 202137 min

Ep 331Two words for ya: networked spreadsheets

Dave Winer wrote a fun piece on the lost apps of the 80s. We explore the paradox of software that is "too good" to become popular among mainstream consumers. Microsoft has been releasing new versions of its flagship flight simulator each year for a whopping 38 years now. Now we know what makes it seem so very, very real. But just how big can that next patch be? Another day, another data breach. At this point, we've become numb to the notion that our identity is compromised. Is acceptance better for your health than constantly being on guard? See for yourself.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Apr 13, 202124 min

Ep 330For Twilio's CIO, every internal developer is a customer

You can find Michelle on Twitter here.You can learn more about building apps with Twilio here.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to TryingToLearn for explaining the error that pops up in Python when: you can't assign to literal.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Apr 9, 202121 min

Ep 329Web programming with nothing but Python

Lots of people who work outside of programming learn Python as part of their job. When folks from telecom, academia, or medical science want to build a web app to help with their job or share their findings with the world, they may feel they need to learn Javascript, CSS, HTML, and half a dozen frameworks to get started. Anvil is a platform that hopes to enable the creation of great web apps with nothing but Python code. You can drag and drop your user elements and rely on Anvil to handle your server and database. He also created Skulpt, which you can check out here. It's decscribed as follows, "Python. Client Side. Skulpt is an entirely in-browser implementation of Python. No preprocessing, plugins, or server-side support required, just write Python and reload. Want to go deeper? Check out his talk on Full Stack Web Development with nothing but Python here. You can follow him on Twitter here and Github here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Apr 6, 202132 min

Ep 328What does being a "nerd" even mean these days?

Despite its reputation, there is a Go To for every language. You can dive deeper with the Summer of Go To.There is a lot you can learn from it as a beginner, even if it is worth avoiding as a professional.Paul's children have learned to inspect the element and the document object model. Being deep into computers seems normal in an era of remote school and omnipresent devices. Who doesn't like making tree maps of memory usage or cropping and splicing footage on TikTok? If all kids are into computer hacking and AV Club activities like film editing and music producing...what does being a nerd mean anymore? Google has a whole slew of online certificates that allow you to find entry points into a career in data analysis, UX design, or project management. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Apr 2, 202125 min

Ep 327How we keep Stack Overflow's codebase clean and modern

You can find Roberta on Twitter. For anyone who understands Portuguese, you can also check out her podcast. Check out Roberta's recent blog post on best practices, and when to ignore them.If you're interested in Dapper, an open source project built by Stack Overflow folks that works as a simple object mapper .Net, you can check it out here.Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Colonel Panic, for explaining: What the boolean literals in PowerShell are See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Mar 30, 202122 min

Ep 326We chat with Slack developers about building apps, APIs, and open source communities

Shay is a developer advocate building open source tools and writing education content. Outside of work she writes poetry, indulges fad hobbies, and reads whatever’s left out on the coffee table. Steve Gill a Developer Relations Manager, currently managing the SDK tools team at Slack. The tools teams develops all of our open sourced SDK, such as Bolt for JavaScript, Python, and Java. In his spare time, he enjoys playing ice hockey, woodworking and gaming.You can find Shay on LinkedIn and TwitterLearn more about Steve on LinkedIn and Twitter If you're interested in Bolt, there is lots to learn here.No lifeboat this week, but thanks to Alex for emailing us to ask: "alternatives to more better element usage?" If you have ideas, we're all ears.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Mar 26, 202124 min