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The Stack Overflow Podcast

The Stack Overflow Podcast

942 episodes — Page 14 of 19

Ep 292Big Tech is getting cozy with computer science departments

You can read more about the operating systems and business principles schools are adopting from their corporate sponsors here.You can read about the latest version of Tailwind and what it has to offer here. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Nov 27, 202025 min

Ep 291React, Vue, jQuery: what flavor do you like your Vanilla JS?

You can find Ferdinandi's post and video here.12 years ago, back when Stack Overflow was a brand new site with just a few thousand users, someone asked a basic question: What is the difference between a framework and a library?FreeCodeCamp has its own take on this question with a pretty interesting answer. "When you use a library, you are in charge of the flow of the application. You are choosing when and where to call the library. When you use a framework, the framework is in charge of the flow. It provides some places for you to plug in your code, but it calls the code you plugged in as needed."There was no Lifeboat badge to call out this week, so we honored a Lifejacket winner instead. Shout out to Andreas for answering the queston: Are byte arrays initialised to zero in Java?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Nov 24, 202016 min

Ep 290Tim Berners Lee wants to put you in a pod, a web pod.

You can find out more about Sir Berners-Lee's work on Solid here.Other topics discussed in this episode: Docker puts a limit on free containers. That has to be good for the environment. But is it also good for Docker and the future of its products? Sometimes, forcing yourself to make something worth purchasing helps drive innovation. The Tao of Programming isn't new, and some of its technical references are a bit out of date. But it's still good for a laugh and little bit of enlightenment-lite.Are you interested in putting on your own drone light show? Intel offers options to fit a range of budgets. This week's lifeboat badge goes to JCL for answering the question: C# compiler: CS0121: The call is ambiguous between the following methods or properties.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Nov 20, 202020 min

Ep 289How do you make software reliable enough for space travel?

You can learn more about the Power of 10 here. TIOBE's latest index can be found here.Our lifeboat of the week goes to lealceldeiro for answering the question: What does the multi: true attribute of HTTP_INTERCEPTORS mean?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Nov 17, 202021 min

Ep 288If you could fix any software or technology, what would you change?

Paul spent the weekend building a parser, cause who doesn't? He needed a Regex, found one on Stack Overflow, looked over the characters, and realized this is not the way to get folks interested or excited about code. "You come across a problem and you think to yourself, I know I'll use a regular expression. Now you have two problems." This sets Sara off on a tangent about CSS. What's wrong with CSS in her opinion. Well, all of it. She shares a few thoughts on how it could have been built right. Ben dives into the endless annoyances Bluetooth has been bringing to his life recently. When you have four people in a family sharing six mobile devices and five sets of headphones, audio signals are constantly getting piped to the wrong ears. Now his car wants to connect. When Bluetooth tells you it's forgetting a device, how come it never keeps it promise?Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Zero Piraeus for answering the question: Why must dictionary keys be immutable? He provided his answer in the form an elegant short essay, and it's definitely worth checking out.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Nov 13, 202016 min

Ep 287Turning your coding career into an RPG with Sai Vennam

You can find Sai's videos here. Come for the deep dives on Docker, stay for the live lightboard magic. Yes, I know what the comments say, but no, he isn't writing backwards. Sai also does a lot of work around OpenShift, the containerization software products created by Red Hat. He talks about what the tie up between IBM and Red Hat has been like and how the enterprise is increasingly learning to work with open source. Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Alex for explaining why you're Getting this as undefined when using arrow function.If you want to find more from Sai, you can follow him 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.

Nov 10, 202025 min

Ep 286The pros and cons of the SPA

Pawel Skolski wrote this definition of the SPA in 2016. "A single-page application is an app that works inside a browser and does not require page reloading during use. You are using these type of applications every day. These are, for instance: Gmail, Google Maps, Facebook or GitHub.SPAs are all about serving an outstanding UX by trying to imitate a “natural” environment in the browser — no page reloads, no extra wait time. It is just one web page that you visit which then loads all other content using JavaScript — which they heavily depend on."Tom McWright recently sparked some good discussion in the developer world with his article, If Not SPAs, What? He had written before about his belief that SPAs had done little to reduce the complexity of web development, but hadn't really given readers other options. In his latest post, he tried to offer some possible alternatives. Our lifeboat of the week of the week goes to Glortho for explaining how to add http:// to url if no protocol is defined in javascript? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Nov 6, 202015 min

Ep 285Cleaning up the cloud to help fight climate change

You can find some more of Holly's work and bio here. She gave a great talk at KubeCon 2020, How to Love K8s and Not Wreck the Planet, which you can watch on YouTube here.And here's a lovely presentation, Containers Will Not Fix Your Broken DevOps Cultures, drawing on her long history of programming and consulting. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Nov 3, 202029 min

Ep 284Stack Overflow's CEO reflects on his first year

You can find a more in depth discussion of these topics on our blog. Prashanth shares his ideas about the importance of community and what it means to be a product led company.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Oct 30, 202022 min

Ep 283The story behind Stack Overflow in Russian with Nicolas Chabanovsky

Nicolas will be the first to tell you that the version of Stack Overflow he helped to create began as a clone. It developed into a very popular site on RuNet and through persistent emails, Nic was able to find a way to make it an official part of the Stack family. Nic talks a bit about the unique culture of SO's Russian community and how each regional version of SO, from English to Spanish to Japanese, has developed its own etiquette and approach to moderation and Q&A. Nic and Sara also share some updates on their love of Jupyter Notebooks and how they make it easy to combine blogging with data analysis and presentation. Shout out to our life boat badge of the week, Aliaksandr Kavalenka , for answering the question: How to use DatePickerDialog in Kotlin? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Oct 27, 202022 min

Ep 282How should tech titans act when productizing tiny open source projects?

We break down some thoughts on this issue, which came to light after a tweet from Tim Nolet.Later in the episode we talk about the debate raging right now around elections and technology. What role should software play and where is regulation appropriate? Last but not least, we consider what the next US administration might do with regards to regulating big tech. Will they lean towards a European model or continue to be more hands off? Shout out to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Kin3Tix, for helping to identify good tutorials for SDL 2.0 for C (Not C++) programming.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Oct 23, 202026 min

Ep 281Making Kubernetes work like it's 1999 with Kelsey Hightower

You can find Kelsey on Twitter here. His Github is here. His personal journey with Kubernetes is detailed in a nice piece here.Kelsey has an interesting role at Google. He sits at the director level but is an independent contributor with no direct reports. Instead he works to help galvanize interest in particular tools and topics, driving adoption at a broad scale. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Oct 20, 202029 min

Ep 280The downside of going viral with your programming joke

That skit made it to the front page of Reddit, and was soon seen across the internet. It's nice to make people laugh, but following the surge of interest, Emily also had to deal with severe harassment and cyber stalking. She wrote a piece about the experience which you can find here.In this episode, we discuss how moderation can be improved and the work that remains to be done to make the software industry feel safe and inclusive for everyone. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Oct 16, 202032 min

Ep 279Where do game developers fit in the world of software?

Has there ever been a gaming company that brought more joy to the world than Nintendo? They were making playing cards back in 1889 and continue to find ways to be different but fun with inventions like the Switch and Labo.Sara gives us some the scoop on Rimworld. Check out the trailer here and feel free to lend your skill to a new mod if you have ideas for how to improve it.A Excel sheet meltdown led to critical health data about the pandemic being lost in the UK. Rows can go to millions, but they used columns.For those of us who need our reading glasses to see the tiny emoji people post in Slack, Paul has come to your rescue. He asked for the ability to zoom In on Twitter, the CEO of Slack co-signed, and boom, we got a new feature.We discuss what other new Slack features might take off: stories, push-to-talk, and sneakers.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Oct 13, 202021 min

Ep 278Ben answers his first question on Stack Overflow

You can find some of Jack's art and other projects here.Ben breaks through and answers his first SO question—by copy/pasting from the comments, of course. Sara finds the relevant XKCD.Later, we check out Darling.hq, a MacOS translation layer for Linux If you are in the mood to learn programming with colors and shapes, check out the website that Jack built: Maria.cloud See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Oct 9, 202018 min

Ep 277Talking Arduino, bits, and boards with Dr. Duino

Sara shares the story of a developer conference that was smoke bombed by an Arduino bot gone haywire. It was this chaos that inspired her to dig deeper into Arduino, which would eventually play a big role in helping her to found her company, Jewelbots. Paul unravels the mystery of what's really inside the Goonie Box: a timepiece, puzzle, and mechanical wonder that Guido uses to test his house guests. This week's lifeboat goes to Terminator17, who helped solve a problem around object detection using a Tensorflow-gpu. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Oct 6, 202023 min

Ep 276Who's afraid of a little merge conflict?

Today's episode was inspired by a question on folks who postpone a merge for fear of being the one to resolve a conflict. Shout out to Candied Orange for the thoughtful answer.Paul and Sara reminisce about the days before Git, when version control was very different from what it is today, and Paul accidentally left many a project in shambles. Do you remember the days of Subversion and CVS? Later, we dig into Sara's new adventure with Jupyter Notebooks. They are extremely useful for developers, but what would it take to make them a tool for any kind of knowledge worker? Default to a PowerPoint style, obviously.Last but not least, we dig into the endless argument over the 10X developer, Reed Hastings' love for the 100X developer, and the true formula for attracting employees that will contribute their genius without wrecking the team. Clive Thompson has a great piece on the myth, meritocracy, and messy reality of rockstar coders.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Oct 2, 202020 min

Ep 275Chris Anderson on drones, driverless cars, and creating communities around code

Chris is the author of the New York Times bestselling books The Long Tail and Free as well as Makers: The New Industrial Revolution.He is lso the CEO of 3DR, founder of the Linux Foundation's Dronecode Project, and founder of the DIY Drones and DIY Robocars communities, including the ArduPilot autopilot project.Not surprisingly, he also created something called GeekDad.If you want to get involved, you can learn how to build your own Donkey Car racer here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sep 29, 202027 min

Ep 274Episode 272: Pull Requests Are Welcome

"Sorry I missed your comment of many months ago. I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood." Life is lived in stages.Most people are working remotely these days, but offices may return, and even if they don't, these skills could come in handy. Teamwork, persuasion, communication, and leadership, just a few of the things you can learn in this Technion course.Big thanks to TwilioQuest, which has gotten Ben, the worst coder in the world, practicing his Javascript skills again.What gives you that special feeling: a nice, sharp recursive function or a deep, winding ternary statement? Paul and Sara debate the finer points of feeling smugly satisfied with your own code.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sep 25, 202019 min

Ep 273Next Level Command Line

You can check out more about the Github news here.Here is the farewell to updates from Moment.js.Would you take a nice bonus today for a pay cut in the future? Stripe is offering its employees that option, spurred by an exodus of developers from dense urban areas. A big thanks to Jim Mischel, who was our lifeboat badge winner of the week. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sep 22, 202021 min

Ep 272Oracle wants to Tok, Nvidia Arms Up

Oracle is in the midst of trying to negotiate and get approved a deal that would allow it to acquire Tik Tok's US Operations, and allow Tik Tok to avoid a ban on its service in the United States. For US citizens, software being banned over geopolitical concerns is a new reality. What will happen to the code if the deal goes through? Is there a clean room where software updates are inspected before rolling out? Is data segregated to local servers, and if so, will it be siloed from the rest of Tik Tok's global user base? Tik Tok users have thoughts on what is really happening with their private data.In the second half of the episode we talk about Nvidia's purchase of Arm from Softbank. Paul and Sara speculate about what this means for our personal computers and mobile devices, as well as its implications for GPU programming, which has found new homes in burgeoning fields like machine learning and crypto mining.If you're a reader looking to spend some quality time with other book worms, check out this Kickstarter from our friend Jeffrey Zie. No lifeboats this week, but be sure to check out this amazing question on the math behind spider webs. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sep 18, 202026 min

Ep 271What tech is like in "Rest of World"

Sophie founded Rest of World in 2019 after a decade of living and working across Asia, Africa & the Middle East, and with companies like Uber and Xiaomi. She graduated from Stanford Graduate School of Business, Harvard Kennedy School and Princeton University. Sophie is based in New York. Read why she started this publication in her founder’s note. You can subscribe to Rest of World's newsletter here.In this week's episode we talk about Okash, a peer-to-peer lending app that show what happens when you gamify public social shaming. We explore honjok, a South Korean sub-culture that emphasizes a movement away from ambitious professionalism and towards a more stoic loner lifestyle. In some ways, the apps, services, and online communities that formed around this tribe perfectly predicted what many people are experiencing in 2020. "The accidental pioneers of a lifestyle that has been forced on all of us," as Sophie explains.And finally, we explore what it takes to break into the world of digital finance in Indonesia, where a board of clerics must certify that your code halal - consistent with Islamic religion and law - before you can break into a market of more than 220 million potential customers.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sep 15, 202030 min

Ep 270How developers can become successful writers

Along with her work writing and editing, Stephanie works as a product manager at Microsoft and runs Developer Content Digest, a biweekly newsletter with content tips. She has worked for companies like Digital Ocean, Github, and General Assembly.Twitter: @radiomorilloeBooks: developersguidetocontent.comNewsletter and blog: stephaniemorillo.co/links See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sep 11, 202025 min

Ep 269The magic of metric, micro frontends, and breaking leases on Silicon Valley offices

Every experienced software engineer can tell you a story about a standardization effort that ended up causing more problems than it solved. Queen Elizabeth's decree adding 280 feet to each mile made it easy to divide up acres, but has haunted those of us stuck with Imperial units ever since. Sara dives into micro frontend services and how they can help to add agility to a modern development team. There is a nice article on the topic here, and Sara found it through the Thought Works Tech Radar.Pinterest paid just under $90 million dollars to break its lease in San Francisco. Paul and Sara are hearing about lots of developers who are fleeing major cities, and it seems clear that Pinterest won't be the last company to abandon expansion plans or ditch fancy corporate offices for at least the next few years. Our lifeboat badge of the week the week goes to Sravya Nagumalli, who explained why Angular is associated with the Single Page App and just what an SPA is anyway. Thanks for sharing some knowledge, Sravya!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sep 8, 202023 min

Ep 268Ok, who vandalized Wikipedia?

You can read the hilarious tale of how Paul was alerted to "Frenchpoop Butt" here.Enjoy an all time classic tale of a security expert being outwitted by his daughter. Her approach was not in his threat model. Want to try your hand at a little hacking? Here's a fun online game called Telehack.We asked some teens what would motivate them to participate more on Stack. The answer was obvious: loot boxes. What kind of digital swag would you want receive for helping spread knowledge across our network? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sep 4, 202021 min

Ep 267The tiny open-source pillar holding up the entire internet

It's dependencies all the way down...Remote learning is a bad joke. Who has ideas for some tech or gaming inspired solutions? What's your favorite way to refer to software of very large size? Everyone's got their favorite nickname for that big ol' pile of code. Lemon juice is recommended in lots of natural cures and remedies. But could it also be MELTING YOUR BONES? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sep 1, 202023 min

Ep 266What it's like learning to program in prison

Here is the Reddit comment that inspired us to reach out to Garry. This is the Vice news article that started the thread. As you can see, the ban has affected a lot of books that would seem to have little bearing on cybersecurity. "Rejected books that are geared towards hacking, such as Justin Seitz’s Black Hat Python, may represent a clearer threat to the Department of Corrections, which fears that prisoners could use those tools to compromise their systems. But how did books such as Windows 10 for Dummies, Microsoft Excel 2016 for Dummies, and Google Adsense for Dummies (marked as posing "clear and present danger"), fail the prison’s security test?"If you want to read about programs helping prisoners learn to code, check out this story on the Bard Prison Initiative. We also did a podcast episode back in January of this year that focused on The Code Cooperative, an organization dedicated to teaching software skills to formerly incarcerated individuals. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aug 28, 202026 min

Ep 265Try your own cooking: turning our employees into Stack users

Our guests this week were two of our employees: Yaakov Ellis and Stephanie Cantor. Yaakov is a Principal Web Developer, Community Advocate on the Public Platform team at Stack Overflow, and Former Team Lead for Internal Development at Stack. Stephanie is the Program Manager for Community Strategy at Stack. Want to learn more about how the Community-athon worked? Read up on it here. And yes, of course there was a leaderboard and internet points. Yaakov was undercover as a brand new user, but some of his answers gave him away. Can you spot the tell? Our very own CEO spent a lot of time asking extremely important and nerdy question on our SciFi Stack Exchange. We bumped our engagement from employees by more than 100%. Many questions were asked, much knowledge was spread.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aug 25, 202028 min

Ep 264Should managers of developers ever make technical decisions?

To start things off, we talk about the launch of Articles, a new content type for Stack Overflow Teams that lets you write longer, subjective pieces. Sometimes it's best to share knowledge through Q&A, but other times you've got complicated, narrative, DevOps recipes or a policy paper and FAQ. Now your knowledge artifacts can all live in one place. "The FAQ is the great folk form of the internet" - quotable moments featuring Paul Ford.If you're interested in another cut at this old saw, Mailchimp.com/developer is Postlight's take on what developer docs should look like. Sara is convinced it's all about the left nav.Speaking of convictions, a conflict is tearing Sara's home apart. Ben and Paul step in to save her marriage. The question at hand: should managers of developers EVER make technical decisions?Finally, Paul talks about his experience using Google Cloud Run to build a fun little tool called Ephemeralist. It pulls in random images from public domain collections hosted by museums and archives. Use it to take a break from the negativity of social media or the news. Also, revel in the joy of Paul's neologism, the Browseulator. It recently brought me this little gem.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aug 21, 202030 min

Ep 263Maxing out our stats with Personal Development Nerds

Juvoni describes himself as someone who helps people explore ideas and strategies for improvement. He focuses on combining multiple skills, better thinking and tools for thought, inner engineering healthy habits, and discovering how systems in the world affect us.You can follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/juvoniYou can join the Personal Development Nerds Facebook group here:https://www.facebook.com/groups/pdnerds/The PDNerds discord server can be joined at www.pdn.communityFind Juvoni's book recommendations on his site: www.juvoni.com/booksHe can be contacted at [email protected] you are or know a Black software engineer, you can recommend they join /dev/color a community dedicated to helping black software engineers empower each other to become industry leaders.http://devcolor.org/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aug 18, 202030 min

Ep 262Tik Tok's Tech Troubles / Developers Flee San Francisco

Tik Tok has been accused of spying on users and siphoning up their data, although it's important to point out the same criticism has been leveled at many American tech giant's apps and web services. In working to address security flaws, it seemed that Tik Tok programming was just as often sloppy as malicious. All that hasn't stopped reports from surfacing that Microsoft might be wiling to pay as much as $30 billion to acquire Tik Tok, at which point it intends to "transfer all of TikTok’s code from China to the U.S. within one year." This code just needs a supportive home. Speaking of moving to new digs, according to a recent survey, two out of three techies in the San Francisco Bay area say they are considering moving if their employers allow it. Will we see the rise of a complex system of salaries that fluctuate not just by rank and performance, but by proximity to the home office? Will Silicon Valley's once unshakable grip on the cutting edge of startup culture and product acumen start to wane if developers flee for remote working locales in more affordable areas? Can you turn back the clock once they can acquire bigger homes or enjoy more of the great outdoors during a pandemic that doesn't yet have a firm end date. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aug 14, 202020 min

Ep 261From web comics to React core with Rachel Nabors

You can read our story on Rachel and the work she is doing with the React community here.Nabors' is the author of Animation at Work, which you can find on A Book Apart.If you want to get a feel for an animated web project Rachel worked on, check out DevToolsChallenger, an interactive site she helped create for Mozilla. Nabors has digitized a lot of her work, signal boosting members of the React community at Reactjs.org/stories. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aug 11, 202036 min

Ep 260Never program in bed

Is there any more fitting end to a day of working from home, deep into months of a fully remote world, than using your smartphone to finish up a little Python code with your head resting on your pillow? Paul has no regrets. If you look at that big, bright, shiny computer monitor late at night, you'll never fall asleep. Sara helps us trace the origin of the word software. It was originally meant as a joke, a clever play on computer "hardware" used in casual conversation, not as an iron clad piece of marketing. Over time, as it was used in correspondence - at public talks, and eventually in academic papers - it began to take on serious weight as a term of art for the product you produce with computers and code.Ben would prefer to be Less Wrong, and is starting to use the podcast to put his deference to a supreme AI into the historical record, just in case Roko's basilisk rears its ugly head. Our lifeboat this week is about an error in some non-standard syntax. Who among has not missed a paren, but hey, sometimes you just need another pair of eyes. Two kind members of our community answered this question, elaborated on how to improve the code, and earned a lifeboat. Congrats! And finally, a bit of recommended reading on just how much power is consumed by the data centers that make cloud computing run 24/7, and what that means for our planet.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aug 7, 202025 min

Ep 259A few of our favorite haxx

No list of great hacks would be complete without the Samy worm that ran amok on Myspace back in 2005. As Rachel points out, lots of hackers start out as experimenters, naturally curious coders who enjoy learning the rules and seeing how far they will bend before they break. If any hack made it's way into the mainstream consciousness over the last decade, it was WannaCry. It introduced a mainstream audience to the concept of ransomware and, because of the impact it had on critical hospital equipment, showed just how far software has embedded itself into our society.If you want to learn more about the Fullstack Cyber Bootocamp, you can check it out here. You can find Rachel here or email her- rachel dot troy at fullstackacademy dot com.This week, as part of our security theme, we skipped the lifeboat, and picked this gem from our Information Security Stack Exchange. Remember, when in doubt, if you absolutely need to erase all data off a drive, a plasma cutter will always come in handy.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Aug 4, 202025 min

Ep 25825 Years of Java - the present to the future

For this episode we spoke again with Georges Saab, Vice President of Software Development at the Java Platform Group and Manish Gupta, Vice President of Global Marketing for Java and GraalVM. The very first feature that made a massive impact wasn’t a change in the Java language at all. It was the vastly improved library support that happened in the early releases. Between 1.0 and 1.3, these libraries included the Swing window toolkit, the Collections framework, a RPC-like API for remote calls, JDBC for interacting with databases, and more. The standard libraries grew richer, more sophisticated, and allowed Java to become a real enterprise language. In 2004, Java added generics, which allowed types, methods, and interfaces to be specified with the associated data types to be specified when that item was instantiated without sacrificing type safety. “At the time, generics were a challenge and people had strong opinions about them,” said Saab. Today, generics are one of the enduring features of the language. Java may have been designed as a completely object oriented language, but when Java SE 8 was released in 2014, it added Lamda expressions (aka closures), which added some functional programming elements. Not every problem is best served by OOP, and by adding Lambdas, Java became more flexible. Despite its prominence across numerous industries, Java isn’t sitting still. Saab mentioned four big projects coming to Java that had him excited, all designated by codenames: Loom, Valhalla, Leyden, and ZGC. You can read all about them on our blog.If you want to learn more, Oracle has put together a wealth of resources to celebrate Java's 25th anniversary.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 30, 202019 min

Ep 25725 Years of Java - the past to the present

For this episode we chatted with Georges Saab, Vice President of Software Development at the Java Platform Group and Manish Gupta, Vice President of Global Marketing for Java and GraalVM. In the beginning, the nascent Java language project, codenamed Project Green and later Oak, was designed to create interactive televisions. Think of the kind of overlays and interactivity that you see with most flat screen TVs today. Back in 1995, this was brand new territory. There was no hardware or operating system standard for a computing platform within a TV, so the team had to figure out how to create a programming language that could run on virtually anything. Code it once and run it everywhere through a virtual machine. Interactive TV was ahead of its time in the early 90s, but Java found a strong foothold for its cross-platform ideas in web applets and WebStart programs that downloaded and ran an application entirely from a web address. This evolved over time, and today it provides a lot of the processing muscle for server-side web apps and cloud-based SaaS applications. Here at Stack Overflow, the Java tag has remained one of the most popular over the years, with 1.7 million total questions on the site. When Sun announced Java in 1995, they did so with Marc Andreessen—then cofounder and “rockstar” at Netscape—on stage with them. Andreessen had agreed to integrate Java into the Navigator browser, a major coup for a brand new language. At the time, Navigator was the clear leader in the browser market, taking over 75% of the share. Even before this announcement at the SunWorld conference, the volume of downloads of the language became so great that it overwhelmed the T1 line attached to the java.sun.com web server. Today's episode covers the past and present of Java. Tomorrow, we'll air episode two, which takes us from the present and looks towards the future. If you want to learn more, Oracle has put together a wealth of resources to celebrate Java's 25th anniversary.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 29, 202020 min

Ep 256You down with GPT-3? Yeah you know me!

If you're wondering why GPT-3 matters and how it compares to prior efforts in this area, here is a good summary.If you want to dive deeper into the effect anxiety has on the interview process and hiring in tech, you can read up on the research here.This week's lifeboat badge goes to PerformanceDBA, who left an incredbily long and detailed answer, complete with charts and code snippets, on the following question: how to organize a relational data model for double entry accounting? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 28, 202027 min

Ep 255Forming new habits with 100 Days of Code

You can learn all about 100 Days of Code on their website.Alex also published a newsletter about habit forming and self-improvement. You can learn more about that and subscribe here.If you want to follow Alex on Twitter, you can find him here.This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Chris, who helped a user understand why ComponentDidCatch was not working in their react-native app.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 24, 202017 min

Ep 254Code Newbie's approach to education and community

Saron explains how she went from working in the marketing department of a startup to learning code, creating a supportive community for novice developers, and founding two podcasts about the art and science of learning to program. You can read more about the Dev acquisition and what the dynamic duo have planned here.Sara and Paul spend some time bantering with Saron on that classic developer debate: why learn computer science? Besides the ego boost and the desire to avoid imposter syndrome, how much of a four-year-degree is actually useful when you're a new graduate trying to land your first job? Later on, we dig into the debate over toxic positivity. During these challenging times, it can be addictive to watch others flaunt their hustle and hard work on social media. But there is a downside to tuning out the failures and negative emotions we all live with. You can read more about it here.Ever wondered about the difference between a subview and a superview? Find out more with this week's lifeboat badge. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 21, 202032 min

Ep 253Is Scrum making you a worse engineer?

What began as a question on our Software Engineering Stack Exchange graduated into a blog post for further discussion. Paul points out that modern tooling has internalized so much of agile methodology that developers tend to work this way without having to explicitly create a culture or process around Scrum. And as Sara points out, if it turns out you're being driven to optimize for finished work over quality work, the problem may not be Scrum, but the pressures of your particular manager or company. Our lifeboat of the week goes to an old school Excel question with over half a million views. Thanks to Michelle for earning a badge while answering this query: How do I append the same text to every cell in a column in Excel? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 17, 202014 min

Ep 252A conversation on diversity and representation

Syeeda and Ian talk with Sara and Paul about how affinity groups came to exist within Stack Overflow, and how the BNB group helped to lead the design of the company's short and long response to issues of systemic racism. You can find more about Stack's plans here.More generally, the group discusses how people at all levels of their organizations are putting a renewed emphasis on diversity and inclusion, and how individual contributors, managers, and executives can come together to find new ways to listen and learn.You can find Ian on Twitter and Github. He has also written for the Stack Overflow blog. You can find Syeeda's images and writing on Instagram and more about her education and career on LinkedIn. Our lifeboat badge for this episode goes out to IsVForAll, who answered the following question: How to check if a value exists in an object using JavaScript? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 14, 202029 min

Ep 251How to interpret the compiler

This is a great crash course on just-in-time compilers written by Lin Clark, who works in advanced development at Mozilla on Rust and Web Assembly. It references the film Arrival and kicked off our discussion on the podcast. Paul talks about his first love, XSLT, and how that language actually foreshadowed a lot of what would become popular staples of modern programming languages. Sara and Paul share their thoughts on what it takes to craft a new language as a programmer and why they have never embarked on this arduous intellectual adventure. This brought to mind a well written essay from one of the creators of Redis, who is stepping back from managing the project to work on something new. Here is, in my opinion, a profound quote from that piece: "I write code in order to express myself, and I consider what I code an artifact, rather than just something useful to get things done. I would say that what I write is useful just as a side effect, but my first goal is to make something that is, in some way, beautiful. In essence, I would rather be remembered as a bad artist than a good programmer."Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Farhan Amjad, who answered the question - How can I implement PageView in SwiftUI? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 10, 202017 min

Ep 250How We Hire Developers at Stack

When it comes to hardware that cranks, Paul is a fan of Micro Center's in-house brand - PowerSpec.This week we chew through a great post from Jon Chan about how Stack Overflow hires developers. Sara recalls flunking her first few code screenings while applying for jobs. The hard lesson she learned? Sometimes, it pays to skip the collaboration and just show off. Ben wishes that he had known about real-time tests back when he was hiring bloggers.Last but not least, this week's lifeboat goes to Yigit, who answered the following question: "In Android Rooms persistence library, how would I write the following SQL statement: SELECT * FROM table WHERE field LIKE %:value% As a @Query? This syntax is invalid, and I can't find anything about it in the docs."Thanks Yigit for sharing your knowledge and helping the Stack Overflow community to grow and thrive. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 7, 202019 min

Ep 249Java goes to outer space

From Mars rovers to Minecraft to the makeup of our DNA - these are some of the Java apps that may leave a mark on the world of software for decades to come.Thanks to Hizbul25, our winner of the week, for answering a question and earning a lifeboat badge: query to order by the last three characters of a column. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jul 3, 202019 min

Ep 248Can't Pay Your Taxes if The Website Won't Load

You can read about the IRS and its Sisyphean efforts to modernize its computer systems here.Ben's Twitter thread on amazing and obscure trade periodicals you can find online is here.You can read more about what Apple is doing with biometric identity on the web here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jun 30, 202022 min

Ep 247Paul Explains It All

This week, Ben and Paul are flying as a duo, a true dad-cast. We walk through the slow build of increasingly complex keyboard macros, followed by the inevitable cleansing and renewal of an empty slate. Pus, type systems and type safety, the galaxy brain edition. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jun 26, 202023 min

Ep 246Chatting with Robin Ginn, executive director of the OpenJS Foundation

You can learn more about today's event and all the livestream broadcasts here.If you want to learn more about Robin, you can get in touch 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, 202021 min

Ep 245It Ain't Real Till You Break Prod

Cassidy helps to write The Overflow newsletter and is two months into a new gig as a Principal Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify. That's where she broke Prod, but it turned out ok.We chat about Hey what it means for software engineers when prominent coders are arguing with big mobile platforms about the fees that the owners of the OS collect. What's old is new again. Bot armies are farming gold in World of Warcraft, which takes us down a wandering path of wondering how often people have access to powerful computers, but limited access to money they can spend on essentials.Last but not least, we try to dissect a great question from our Software Engineering Stack Exchange: ways to explain code when told it doesn't make sense.Shout out to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, "wizard", who answered the following question: is there an equivalent method to C's scanf in Java.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jun 19, 202025 min

Ep 244Dropping knowledge with Drupal's creator, Dries

Dries explains how Drupal began: as a intranet, not internet, message board for his college community. It's now the technology underpinning tens of millions of websites, including some of the biggest in the world. We get the story behind the name, an accident overlap of language that became the software's iconic mascot. And we talk about the process that allowed this to scale from an open source project shared across a few dorm rooms to something used by massive public companies. Stay tuned Friday, when we'll publish part two of our chat with Dries.As always, shout out to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, for helping to answer the question: Can you use React Native to create a desktop app? As to whether or not you should, well, that's another question for another time. You can find more about Dries at his website. You can read more about his experience with Acquia here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jun 16, 202016 min

Ep 243Turn on, tune in, drop out, log off

This week on the pod, we chat about Cloudflare.tv, a 24/7 streaming channel dedicated to discussions of software, startups, and technology. We also dig into a new offering called Github Classroom. Do pedagogy and programming mix well? Can this approach to collaborative work be useful beyond the computer science classroom?So, you want to delete half your database? Well, I can guarantee this method will delete about half your database...most of the time. Thanks, as always, to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jun 12, 202016 min