The Stack Overflow Podcast

Flourish is a fintech platform for registered investment advisers (RIAs) that was recently acquired by MassMutual.After studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon, Christine spent almost 12 years at Goldman Sachs, where she was VP of fixed systematic marketing making, responsible for automating electronic trades of interest-rate products like US Treasury bonds and interest rate swaps.Christine’s time at the world’s second-largest investment bank gave her a healthy wariness of Frankencode, the scourge of legacy stacks everywhere.Find Christine on LinkedIn.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner amirali for their answer to I can't set up JDK on Visual Studio Code.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

A chemist by training, Jamie serves as Senior Research Manager of Quantum Applications and Software at IBM Quantum, which offers cloud access to advanced quantum computers capable of solving highly complex, highly interconnective, and dynamic problems.Learn about the superconducting qubits IBM Quantum uses to program quantum computers. (Need to back up a bit? Learn what a qubit is.)Jamie explains how a heavy hex architecture allows IBM to limit crosstalk between qubits to ensure coherence times long enough to complete practical calculations within hours, not years.IBM Quantum’s Qiskit Runtime allows users to optimize workloads and efficiently execute them on quantum systems at scale. As you might expect, Jamie and her colleagues are already thinking hard about the intersection of quantum and AI. Learn about System Two, IBM’s next-generation quantum system.Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn or Twitter.Congrats are in order for Stellar Question badge winner Dmitry z for asking How can I use environment variables in docker-compose?.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

W4 Games is dedicated to strengthening the open-source Godot Engine, a cross-platform game engine for 2D and 3D games. Their mission is “to help the video game industry reclaim their control of the technology powering their games and reverse a dramatic trend where they have to rely on proprietary solutions from an ever-shrinking number of vendors.”To start learning more about Godot, explore some of the best games made with Godot or join the community.Connect with Juan on Twitter, GitHub, or LinkedIn.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is Martijn Pieters for their answer to 'While' loop one-liner.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Tribe is a distributed community of AI industry leaders, including ML engineers and data scientists, dedicated to helping companies apply machine learning to their business operations. Explore their case studies to see Tribe’s expertise in action.Founder and CEO Jaclyn Rice Nelson formerly worked at Google, partnering with enterprise companies and incubating new ventures. As an early employee at CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth equity firm, she advised companies including Airbnb on scaling technical infrastructure, ensuring data security, and boosting growth with machine learning.As we explored on our blog last year, the generative AI space has been expanding rapidly. Many of Tribe’s specialists have opted out of full-time employment, but are willing to provide companies without internal AI expertise with the skills they need to leverage this rapidly evolving technology inside their business. Connect with Jackie on LinkedIn or Twitter.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is PM 2Ring for their answer to Sort a list to form the largest possible number.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Modern networked applications generate a lot of data, and every business wants to make the most of that data. Most of the time, that means moving production data through some transformation process to get it ready for the analytics process. But what if you could have in-app analytics? What if you could generate insights directly from production data?On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Stanimira Vlaeva, Developer Advocate at MongoDB, and Fredric Favelin, Technical Director, Partner Presales at MongoDB, about how a serverless database can minimize the distance between producing data and understanding it.Episode notes:Stanimira talked a lot about using BigQuery with MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud Run. If you need to skill up on these three tools, check out this tutorial. Once you’ve got the hang of it, get your data connected with Confluent Connetors. With Atlas, you can transform your data in JavaScript. Connect with Stanimira on LinkedIn and Twitter. Connect with Fredric on LinkedIn. Congrats to Stellar Question winner SubniC for Get name of current script in Python. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Oso is authorization as a service. Check out the docs or explore use cases.Sam’s post “Why Authorization is Hard” covered what makes authorization challenging, some approaches to solving it, and their associated tradeoffs. You can also watch Sam’s talk at PyCon US 2022. Since it’s impossible to address everything that makes authorization hard in just 5,000 words, Sam is currently at work on a follow-up article called “Why Authorization is Hard Part II.”Sam first learned web development via Rails for Zombies, a beginner-level Rails course. In creating Oso, he tasked himself with “putting rails on authorization.”ICYMI: Read Sam’s post about best practices for securing REST APIs or listen to his previous podcast appearance, where we talked about how Oso makes security easier for developers.Find Sam on LinkedIn or GitHub.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is OscarRyz for their answer to I am trying to solve '15 puzzle', but I get 'OutOfMemoryError'.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Retool is a development platform that lets users—95% of whom are engineers—build internal tools quickly with a drag-and-drop interface.Read David’s account of how Retool won early sales deals in the company’s Operator Playbook series.Connect with David on LinkedIn.Today we’re shouting out Stellar Question badge winner ahajib for asking How to convert a list to a dictionary with indexes as values?.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We talk about how Next is bringing image components, server components, and in-house analytics via split bee—and bundling them all together with Turbopack, powered by Rust, our Developer Survey most loved language of 2022.Guillermo Rauch is the CEO and cofounder of Vercel and cocreator of Next.js, an open-source React framework that helps developers build fast, lightweight web applications. The most recent version is Next.js 13. You can find Guillermo on LinkedIn.We previously talked with Guillermo about the security risks of laziness, how Next.js mixes static site and SPA functions, and the front-end trends that get him excited. Kelsey Hightower is the Principal Developer Advocate at Google Cloud. Find him on Twitter or GitHub, or read about his very personal history with Kubernetes.Kelsey has also distinguished himself on our podcast before. Kyle Mitofsky is a Senior Software Engineer at Stack Overflow. Find him on Twitter or GitHub.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Emery Berger, Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, joins Ben for a conversation about the impact of AI on academia. As a young sci-fi fan, he was fascinated by computers that could spit out solutions (a fascination that survived exposure to BASIC and COBOL). Now his CS students are using Copilot to do the same thing. How can educators (and students) adapt?Episode notes:Professor Emery Berger is a systems builder who studies “programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that transparently improve reliability, security, and performance.”AI giveth and AI taketh away: an incredible tool for developers is creating new challenges for CS educators and students. Read Emery’s 2022 essay “Coping with Copilot.”You can also find Emery on GitHub or Twitter.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is mbcrump for their answer to How do I generate a random integer in C#?.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

With companies taking a long look at developer experience, it’s time to turn that attention on the humble pull request. The folks at LinearB took a look at a million PRs — four million review cycles involving around 25,000 developers — and found that it takes about five days to get through a review and merge the code. CI/CD has done wonders getting deployments down to a day or less; maybe it’s time for continuous merge next. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with COO Dan Lines and CEO Ori Keren, co-founders of LinearB, about why PRs are the chokepoint in the software development lifecycle, uncovering and automating the hidden rules of review requests, and their free tool, gitStream, that’ll find the right reviewer for your PR right now. Episode notes: So why do reviews take so long? Context switches, team leads who review everything, and the bystander effect are top contenders.Dan and Ori hope their gitStream tool can reduce the time PRs take by automating a lot of the hidden rules for reviews. Check it out at gitstream.cm or linearb.io/dev.Dan Lines hosts his own podcast: Dev Interrupted. Check out this episode with Stack Overflow’s very own Ben Matthews. Connect with Dan Lines and Ori Keren on LinkedIn. Shoutout to Rudy Velthuis for throwing a Lifeboat to the question Why should EDX be 0 before using the DIV instruction?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 just you: We all need subtitles now.Google introduces MusicLM, a model that generates music from text. The examples are pretty-mind blowing and raise big questions about licensing and copyrights for non-AI creators.Taking the uncanny valley to a new low? Nvidia’s streaming software now includes a feature that deepfakes eye contact.Beware the potentially dangerous intersection of AI and stan Twitter.Thanks to Siavash Kayal, a fan of the show and data engineer at Cleo, who sent along a great list of open-source data engineering projects folks can work on.Today we’re shouting out Stellar Question badge winner Paragon for asking how to Open two instances of a file in a single Visual Studio session.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

John spent 25 years at Oracle before joining Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO (OCTO), a team that’s been called the company’s “secret weapon” in collaborating with major customers to solve their tech problems and drive long-term deals.For more on his approach to tech and business, you can read this article he wrote on the seven points of driving lasting innovationLearn more about OCTO from Business Insider.Settle down for a good read: the full story of how the BBC’s microcomputer changed history.Connect with John on LinkedIn or Twitter.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is vscjones for their answer to How can I find the number of business days in the current month with JavaScript?.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Naturally, tech layoffs are top-of-mind for many of us. Despite comparisons to the dot-com bubble, what we’re seeing right now is different. Here’s what the tech and media layoffs really tell us about the economy.In praise of analog technology: why Millennials and Gen Z are springing for paper maps.Make Time, a way of “rethinking the defaults of constant busyness and distraction so you can focus on what matters every day,” was developed in response to always-on Silicon Valley culture.Wifi routers can now be used to detect the physical positions of humans and map their bodies in 3D. Terrifyingly dystopian or interestingly practical? Why not both?In recent accessibility news, a brain-computer interface (BCI) that converts speech-related neural activity into text allows a person with paralysis due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to communicate at 62 words per minute, nearly 3.5 times faster than before. From the abstract: “These results show a feasible path forward for using intracortical speech BCIs to restore rapid communication to people with paralysis who can no longer speak.” Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Holger for their answer to Sort an array containing numbers using a 'for' loop.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Astro is a site builder that lets you use the frontend tools you already love (React, Vue, Svelte, and more) to build content-rich, performant websites. Astro extracts your UI into smaller, isolated components (“islands”) and replaces unused JavaScript with lightweight HTML for faster loads and time-to-interactive (TTI).Ben and Nate explain why Astro’s compiler was written in Go (“seemed like fun”).To learn more about Astro, start with their docs or see what people are doing with the framework.Connect with Ben on LinkedIn, GitHub, or via his website.Connect with Nate on GitHub.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Aurand for their answer to How to convert list to queue to achieve FIFO.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In complex service-oriented architectures, failure can happen in individual servers and containers, then cascade through your system. Good engineering takes into account possible failures. But how do you test whether a solution actually mitigates failures without risking the ire of your customers? That’s where chaos engineering comes in, injecting failures and uncertainty into complex systems so your team can see where your architecture breaks. On this sponsored episode, our fourth in the series with Intuit, Ben and Ryan chat with Deepthi Panthula, Senior Product Manager, and Shan Anwar, Principal Software Engineer, both of Intuit about how use self-serve chaos engineering tools to control the blast radius of failures, how game day tests and drills keep their systems resilient, and how their investment in open-source software powers their program. Episode notes: Sometimes old practices work in new environments. The Intuit team uses Failure Mode Effect Analysis, (FMEA), a procedure developed by the US military in 1949, to ensure that their developers understand possible points of failure before code makes it to production. The team uses Litmus Chaos to inject failures into their Kubernetes-based system and power their chaos engineering efforts. It’s open source and maintained by Intuit and others. If you’ve been following this series, you’d know that Intuit is a big fan of open-source software. Special shout out to Argo Workflow, which makes their compute-intensive Kubernetes jobs work much smoother. Connect on LinkedIn with Deepthi Panthula and Zeeshan (Shan) Anwar.If you want to see what Stack Overflow users are saying about chaos engineering, check out Chaos engineering best practice, asked by User NingLee two years ago.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In a win for accessibility, GitHub Copilot now responds to voice commands, allowing developers to code using their voices.Speaking of accessibility, learn how Santa Monica Studio worked with disabled gamers and the community to build accessibility into God of War Ragnarök.The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has determined that lab-grown meat is safe to eat.Looking for some high-quality entertainment content? Look no further than Simone Giertz’s YouTube channel, where she builds robots to (among other things) wash her hair and wake her up with a slap in the face.Blast from the past: Listen to our episode with MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner ralf htp for their answer to How to listen for and react to Ace Editor change events.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

First, some self-administered back-patting for the Stack Overflow editorial team: great engineering blogs give tech companies an edge (The New York Times says so). Hiring aside, engineering blogs are fresh sources of knowledge, insight, and entertainment for anyone working in tech. You can learn a lot from, for instance, blog posts that break down an outage or security incident and detail how engineers got things up and running again. One classic of the genre: Amazon’s explanation of how one engineer brought the internet to its knees. And here’s an example from our own blog. When you’ve finished catching up on the Stack Overflow blog, check out those from Netflix and Uber.Good news for late-night impulse shoppers: Instagram is removing the shopping tag from the home feed, reports The Verge. Is this a response to widespread user pushback, and does this herald the end of New Instagram? We can hope.Sony announces Project Leonardo, an accessibility controller kit for PS5.Did you know? Using only Tetris, you can build a machine capable of universal computation.Developer advocate Matt Kiernander is moving on to his next adventure. If you’re looking for a developer advocate or engineer, connect with him on LinkedIn or email him.One of Matt’s favorite conversations on the podcast was our episode with Mitchell Hashimoto, cofounder and CEO of HashiCorp. It’s worth a (re)listen.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At an SaaS company like Intuit that has hundreds of services spread out across multiple products, maintaining development velocity at scale means baking some of the features that every service needs into the architecture of their systems. That’s where a service mesh comes in. It automatically adds features like observability, traffic management, and security to every service in the network without adding any code. In this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Anil Attuluri, principal software engineer, and Yasen Simeonov, senior product manager, both of Intuit, about how their engineering organization uses a service mesh to solve problems, letting their engineers stay focused on writing business logic. Along the way, we discuss how the service mesh keeps all the financial data secure, how it moves network traffic to where it needs to go, and the open source software they’ve written on top of the mesh. Episode notes:For those looking to get the same service mesh capabilities as Intuit, check out Istio, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project. In order to provide a better security posture for their products, each business case operates on a discrete network. But much of the Istio service mesh needs to discover services across all products. Enter Admiral, their open-sourced solution. When Intuit deploys a new service version, they can progressively scale the amount of traffic that hits it instead of the old version using Argo Rollouts. It’s better to find a bug in production on 1% of requests than 100%.If you want to learn more about what Intuit engineering is doing, check out their blog. Congrats to Great Question badge winner, HelpMeStackOverflowMyOnlyHope, for asking Detect whether input element is focused within ReactJSSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

There is a ton of great research to be found on Prof. Kapfhammer's website, including: Flaky Tests: Finding and fixing unpredictable and harmful test cases Database Testing: Automatically testing relational database schemas Web Testing: Detecting and repairing poor responsive web page layout We've written a bit about how Stack Overflow is upping its unit testing game and how you can evaluate multiple assertions in a single test.Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Survivor, for answering the question: Is it possible to find out if a value exists twice in an arraylist?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Juri is currently Director of Developer Experience (Global) and Director of Engineering (Europe) at Nrwl, founded by former Googlers/Angular core team members Jeff Cross and Victor Savkin.Nrwl has compiled everything you need to know about monorepos, plus the tools to build them, here.Connect with Juri on LinkedIn or explore his website.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner penguin2718 for their answer to Storing loop output in a dataframe in R.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Any large organization with multiple products faces the challenge of keeping their brand identity unified without denying each product its own charisma. That’s where a design system can help developers avoid reinventing the wheel every time, say, a new button gets created On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Demian Borba, Principal Product Manager, and Kelvin Nguyen, Senior Engineering Manager, both of Intuit. We chat about how their design system is evolving into a platform, how AI keeps their brand consistent, and why a design system doesn’t have to solve every use case. Episode notesTreating a design system as a platform means providing a baseline of tokens—colors, typography, themes—and allowing developers to deviate so long as they use the right tokens. Alongside a company-wide push towards greater AI usage, Intuit’s design system team is beginning to leverage AI to help developers make better design decisions. As an example, they’re including typeahead functionality to suggest possible solutions to design decisions. The team is using a Figma plugin to manage a lot of the heavy lifting. Their presentation at Config 2022 built a lot of excitement for what’s possible. Congrats to RedVelvet, who won a great question badge for The most efficient way to remove first N elements in a list?Find Kelvin and Demian on Linkedin.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

LogRocket helps software teams create better experiences through a combination of session replay, error tracking, and product analytics.LogRocket’s machine-learning layer, Galileo, cuts through the noise generated by conventional error monitoring and analytics tools to identify critical issues affecting users.LogRocket is hiring, so check out their open roles or connect with Matt Arbesfeld on LinkedIn. You can also give LogRocket a free trial.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Adobe closed out 2022 and celebrated 40 years with an employee-only Katy Perry concert. Related: Ceora makes the case for virtual concerts.DeepMind is teaching AI to play soccer, which naturally makes us think of QWOP.ICYMI: Ghost calls out Substack and Substack responds.BeReal is the iPhone app of the year. But not even Resident Youth Ceora knows anyone who actually uses it.Some 2023 recommendations from the team: Ceora recommends Realworld (not to be confused with BeReal), an app that guides you through tasks and decisions big and small, from deciding on health insurance to improving your credit.Cassidy recommends Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott.Matt suggests fellow side hustlers check out The Freelance Manifesto: A Field Guide for the Modern Motion Designer by School of Motion founder Joey Korenman.Ben recommends Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a terrific novel about a love triangle between indie video game creators, especially fun if you grew up with Oregon Trail, Myst, and Super Mario. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Over the past five years, Intuit went through a total cloud transformation—they closed the data centers, built out a modern SaaS development environment, and got cloud native with foundational building blocks like containers and Kubernetes. Now they are looking to continue transforming into an AI-driven organization that leverages the data they have to make their customers’ lives easier. Along the way, they realized that their internal systems have the same requirements to leverage the data they have for AI-driven insights. Episode notesWadher notes that Intuit uses development velocity, not developer velocity. The thinking is that an engineering org should focus on shipping products and features faster, not making individual devs more productive. No, the robots aren’t coming for your jobs. Wadher says their AI strategy relies on helping experts make better insights. The goal is to arm those experts, not replace them. In terms of sheer volume, the AI/ML program at Intuit is massive. They make 58 billion ML predictions daily, enable 730 million AI-driven customer interactions every year, and maintain over two million personalized AI models. Intuit’s not here to hoard secrets. They’ve outsourced their DevOps pipeline tool, Argo. They found that a lot of companies used it for AI and data pipelines, and have recently launched Numaproj, which open sources a lot of the tools and capabilities that they use internally. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Bill Karwin for their answer to Understanding MySQL licensing. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

If you want to read more about Jessica, you can check out the blog we worked on together for the launch of our Overflow Offline initiative. If you've ever wondered what it's like learning to code from an XML file of raw Stack Overflow data, be sure to check this episode out.You can learn more about the Supreme Court case that led to Jessica's release here.Her company's mission is to build a better justice system from the inside, specifically by educating incarcerated individuals so they can teach the next generation and have valuable skills upon release. Read more about Unlocked Labs here.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to mx0 for answering the question: How do you extract the 'src' attribute from an 'img' tag using Beautiful Soup?Follow Ben on Twitter and if you enjoy the show, be sure to leave us a rating and review.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 Anthony here.His favorite terminal tool at the moment is Warp, which describes itself as "a blazingly fast, Rust-based terminal reimagined from the ground up to work like a modern app." His personal website features a live chat function. Sometimes it's actually Tony, sometimes it's just a bot. No lifeboat badge today. We''ll be taking a break for the holidays and will resume episodes in 2023. Until then, enjoy the holidays. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ben asks Matt to explain Mastodon to him like he’s five. Matt says the experience feels a lot like…LinkedIn?Matt explains that he took social media apps off his phone for a while…just to chill out. (Ed. note, they're already back on.)We cover the latest AI to emerge that can write essays, jokes, and yes, some code.While everyone’s confused about the state of social media and AI chat, physicists have created a wormhole using a quantum computer. (Though it may have been a publicity stunt.)Follow Ben and Matt.Shout out to Lifeboat Badge winner ralf htp for their answer to the question ‘how to listen for and react to Ace Editor change events.’ Your answer has helped more than 20,000+ people, so rock on.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Steve was working as an engineering manager at ShopStyle and found that an increasing amount of his team's time was spent working on custom requests from departments like marketing and sales. They tried moving to a headless CMS but the data and components couldn't keep up with ever evolving needs. They wanted a drag and drop system connected to their code, data, and components.This pain point inspired him strike out on his own to create a new product. The vision was a tool that would allow colleagues from across a company to make changes to web pages without requesting dev time, but would also ensure that any changes made would be up to the standards of the design department and not introduce errors that engineering would then have to fix. Hence, the company's pitch for a plug & play system that integrates with your existing sites & apps. It relies on a few key ideas: API-based infrastructure that is native to your tech stack Works with any frontend or backend Build with your own data, like product catalogs or customer data platforms, to create rich, dynamic experiences You can check it out for yourself over at Builder.io.Follow Steve on Twitter and TikTok where he breaks down websites and effects he finds interesting.Congrats to phoenisx for being awarded the Necromaner badge after answering the question: Property 'share' does not exist on type 'Navigator"? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

SPONSORED BY COMMERCE LAYERAround the world, billions of people can sell their wares online, in part thanks to solutions that handle the complexities of securely and reliably managing transactions. Businesses, large and small, can sell directly to customers. But a lot of these ecommerce services provide a heavier surface than many need by managing product catalogs and requiring inflexible interfaces. On this sponsored podcast episode, Ben and Ryan talk with Filippo Conforti, co-founder of Commerce Layer, an API-only ecommerce platform that focuses on the transaction engine. We talk about his early years building ecommerce at Italian luxury brands, the importance of front-ends (and micro-frontends) to ecom, and how milliseconds of page load speed can cost millions. Episode notesConforti was the first Gucci employee building out their ecommerce, so he got to experience life in a fast-moving startup within a big brand. When he left five years later, the team had grown to around 100 people. The ecommerce space is crowded—one of Commerce Layer’s recent clients evaluated around 40 other platforms—but Conforti thinks Commerce Layer stands out by making any web page a shoppable experience. Conforti thinks composable commerce back ends that neglect the front end neutralize the benefits. Commerce Layer provides micro-frontends—standard web components that you can inject into any web page to create shoppable experiences. Getting your ecommerce platform as close to your customer makes real monetary difference. A report from Deloitte finds that a 100ms response time increase on mobile translates to an 8% increase in the conversion rate. Thanks to Mitch, today’s Lifeboat badge winner, for their answer to the question, How to get all weekends within a date range in C#? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Webpack has been king for several years. Vercel wants folks to embrace Turbopack, but their claims about speed raised a lot of backlash after it was first announced. Lee explains why he thinks the Rust-based approach will ultimately be a big benefit to developers and how organizations who are deeply ingrained with existing tools can safely and incrementally migrate to what is, for now, a very Alpha and experimental release. We go over the routing and rendering updates in Next.JS 13, exploring where it might offer developers more flexibility and the ability to use React server components to ship less, maybe a lot less, JavaScript. As Lee says in the episode: “So to your point about wanting to ship less JavaScript, that was a kinda fundamental architectural decision of where we headed with the app directory. And the core of this is because it's built on React server components. The key thing with React server components is that as your application grows in size from one component to a hundred thousand components, the amount of client-side JavaScript you send can be exactly the same. It can be constant because you can render every single component on the server. And that's a lot different from the world of React applications today, where every new component you add for data fetching or just putting some HTML on the screen also adds additional client-side JavaScript.So this is kind of inverting the default, back from the client to be server first. Now, of course, we still love client-side interactivity that React provides making really interactive and rich UI experiences, but the default for data fetching or just getting HTML to the browser happens from the server, and that's gonna help us reduce the amount of JavaScript.”You can learn more about Lee on his website, LinkedIn, and Twitter. To diver deeper into his take on how Rust will impact the future of Javascript, check out a post he wrote 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 Andrew, from building out a telco in Canada to cyber security at Deloitte, on his LinkedIn.Validation Cloud bills itself as the world’s fastest node infrastructure and cites networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Binance as clients it supports. Learn more at the company’s website here.The company announced the launch of it's latest product, Javelin, earlier today.Shout out to this week’s lifeboat badge winner, Derek, for helping answer the question: How do you open the file chooser in an Android app using Kotlin?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Data show's Silicon Valley's share of new startup funding deals dropped below 20% for the first time.What does it mean to experiment with big changes to an engineering org, in public and in real time?SBF would like the chance to explain himself.Today's lifeboat badge goes to CodeCaster for explaining: What is E in floating point?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Srivastava reflects on his upbringing in India, learning to write Assembly, and going to Stanford University to complete his Ph.D in computer science.He shares his early career experiences at big tech names like Yahoo!, Google, Twitter, and Google.The group reflects on some of the engineering challenges at Patreon including technical debt, migrations to open source services, and troubleshooting bugs.Srivastava walks us all through upcoming product features that his engineering team is working to implement.Andy wins a Lifeboat Badge for answering this question about a list of all tags on Stack Overflow.Follow Ben, Matt, Cassidy, and Utkarsh.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Cami and Cassidy take us down memory lane, sharing how they got into computer science together, hosted a web series (and still podcast together sometimes), and overlapped at two jobs together.We discuss the technologies being used to build in/for the Metaverse like Horizon Workroom, Presence Platform, Insights SDK, and of course, React. Cami shares how object and scene recognition work in VR.Cami reveals a family secret — so listen up if you want to know how to beat Cassidy at board games.Blackbishop wins the Illuminator Badge for answering and editing 500 different questions on Stack Overflow.Follow Ben, Matt, Cassidy, and Cami.We’re taking a break for the Thanksgiving holiday so no podcast this Friday…have a good one, and see you next week.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

SPONSORED BY PLURALSIGHTEarly in the days of high-traffic web pages and apps, any engineer operating the infrastructure would have a server room where one or more machines served that app to the world. They named their servers lovingly, took pictures, and watched them grow. The servers were pets. But since the rise of public cloud and infrastructure as code, servers have become cattle—you have as many as you need at any given time and don’t feel personally attached to any given one. And as more and more organizations find their way to the cloud, more and more engineers need to figure out how to herd cattle instead of feed pets. Show notesGartner forecasts that around $500 billion will be spent worldwide on end user cloud computing during 2022. Firment says that’s only 25% of IT budgets today, but he expects it to grow to 65% by 2025.Don’t doubt the power of your people. Gartner estimates that 50% of all cloud IT migration projects are delayed up to two years simply because of the lack of skills.Pluralsight just published its State of the Cloud report. 75% of of all leaders want to build new products and services in the cloud, but only 8% of the technologists have the experience to actually work with cloud related tools. Today we’re highlighting a Great Question badge winner—a question with a score of 100 or more—awarded to Logan Besecker for their question: How do you cache an image in JavaScript?Want to start earning your cloud certificates? Head over to Pluralsight.Connect with Ben or Ryan on Twitter. Find Drew on LinkedIn.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Over the years Homebrew, an open source package manager, has emerged as the project with the greatest number of individual contributors. Despite all that, it’s creator Max Howell, couldn’t make a living off the occasional charity of the millions of people who used the software he built. This XKCD cartoon is probably the most frequently repeated joke on the podcast over the last three years.While he is not a crypto bull, Max was inspired with a solution for the open source funding dilemma by his efforts to buy and sell an NFT. A contract written in code and shared in public enforced a rule sending a portion of his proceeds to the digital objects original creator. What if the same funding mechanism could be applied to open source projects? In March of 2022, Max and his co-founder launched Tea, a sort of spirtual successor to Homebrew. It has a lot of new features Max wanted in a package manager, plus a blockchain based approach to ensuring that creators, maintainers, and contributors of open source software can all get paid for their efforts. You can read Max’s launch post on Tea here and yes, of course there is a white paper. 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.

Eric explains that great jobs are available for developers in Japan, but it can be tough to find these opportunities.We talk about interesting startups that are gaining traction in the Japanese tech sector (like Visual Alpha, Treasure Data, and Exawizards, to name a few examples of companies on the Japan Dev platform).Matt is impressed to learn Japan Dev generates an average of $60,000/month in revenue.Eric reflects on starting Japan Dev as a side project while he was employed full-time as an engineer.Eric elaborates on why he doesn’t think venture capital is a good fit for Japan Dev.Night owls unite! Eric says that his most productive hours are between midnight to 4AM.Follow Matt and Eric.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Episode notes:The team questions whether a print out of 60-90 days worth of code is the right benchmark for whether to lay someone off. Ben gives our podcast listeners a heads up to reports of repo jacking on GitHub (who got ahead of the issue quickly).We reflect on whether or not we’re okay with generative AI—and question tradeoffs between copyright and the ability for more people to create stuff.Ben discusses how his internet browser might be becoming his second brain.Matt and Cassidy get props from Ben for their rising popularity on Stack Overflow’s YouTube channel.Follow Ben, Matt, and Cassidy.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

When most people talk about Web3 or cryptocurrencies and related technologies, they usually mean blockchains. But blockchain is only the first generation of distributed ledger technology (DLT). As with any new technology, once people see how it works, new generations come along rapidly to address the faults in the previous ones. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan chat with Matt Woodward, head of developer relations at Swirlds Labs. Swirlds Labs created the Hedera ecosystem, a DLT built on a hashgraph, not a blockchain. We chat about what the difference is between a blockchain and a hashgraph, Hedera’s focus on environmental sustainability, and why the Web3 version of “Hello, World!” takes a little more effort. Show notesHedera’s hashgraph is a third-generation DLT: it’s an open-source consensus algorithm and a data structure that uses a direct acyclic graph and two novel inventions, the gossip about gossip protocol and virtual voting. Where Bitcoin can only handle between three and seven transactions per second, a hashgraph can support upwards of 10,000. There’s been a lot of talk about the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies. Woodward says that a single Bitcoin transaction uses 1000kW-hours—the equivalent of driving a Tesla Model S 5,500 km—while Hedera uses 160 MW-hours of energy per year, about 2.5 million times less.Congrats to the winner of a Stellar Question badge, g.revolution, for their question What is an anti-pattern? 100 users saved it for later. Find out more about Hedera and hit the start button. Connect with Matt, Ben, or Ryan on Twitter.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Shoemaker spent his childhood in Silicon Valley and learned Assembly when he was just 16 years old.In his early 20s, he applied to work at Apple and was continually rejected. So he went to work for seven startups instead.Finally, in 2009, Shoemaker ended up at Apple overseeing the review process for the App Store.After seven years at Apple, Phillip became interested in cryptocurrency after discovering his personal information on the dark web.His interest grew in the topic of self sovereign identities, which led him to become CEO and co-founder of Identity.com.Phillip and Ben reflect on the utility of Web3 in gaming.Follow Ben and Phillip.Thank you to lifeboat badge winner Marchingband for their answer to the question about running C or C++ code from Node.js in an efficient way.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In today’s podcast, Matt, Ceora, and Cassidy reflect on Cara’s founder journey.Cara shares her experiences living in New York and San Francisco— and why she and her co-founder ultimately located Stashpad in North Carolina.She elaborates on the exact steps that she took to pivot her startup following limited initial interest in V1 of the product.Despite being in the Bay Area and working at Twilio, she was struggling to meet people because her full brain power was going to her products.She shares what it was like for her and her co-founder to hire Stashpad’s first employees.The group discusses Stashpad’s pathway to monetization in the context of developers wanting free tools.Follow, Ceora, Matt, Cassidy, and Cara.Marchingband gets today’s lifeboat badge for their answer to the question about running C or C++ code from Node.js in an efficient way. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

When Foursquare launched in 2009, the app was consumer facing, letting you know where friends had checked in and what spots might appeal to you. People competed to be the “mayor” of certain locations and built guides to their favorite neighborhoods., The service expanded to allow merchants to offer discounts to frequent guests and track foot traffic in and out of the stores. While you can still use the Swarm app to find the best Manhattan in Manhattan, the company realized that real estate and data share the same three key rules: location, location, location. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with Vin Sharma, VP of Engineering at Foursquare, about how they’re finding the atomic data that makes up their location data—their location data—and going from giving insight to individual app users about the locations around them to APIs that serve these location-based insights to developers at organizations like Uber, Nextdoor, and Redfin, who want to build location based insights and features into their own apps. Show notesIf you still want to check in at your local bakery and remember all the place you’ll go, the original Foursquare app is now Swarm. If you’re looking to build on their data instead, you can start with their developer documentation. They have almost 70 location attributes that they are starting to deconstruct and decompose into fundamental building blocks of their location data. Like data primitives—integers, booleans, etc.—these small bites of data can be remade with agility and at scale. Through the recent acquisition of Unfolded, Foursquare allows you to visualize and map location data at any scale. Want to see patterns across the country? Zoom out. Want to focus on a square kilometer? Zoom in and watch the data move. Today’s lifeboat shoutout goes to Rohith Nambiar for their answer to Visual Studio not installed; this is necessary for Windows development. You can find Vin Sharma on Twitter. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The group laughs about setting up JIRA workflows and Trello boards for our family lives—Matt says heck no.Ceora speaks to the power of homelabbing as a way to gain profitable skills. JJ talks about the VPN system he has running on his phone to access his home network using tools like WireGuard and ZeroTier.Cassidy suggests setting up a personal knowledge base as a second brain (and recommends Obsidian). JJ shares how homelabbing is popular among kids under 18 as a pathway for them to get into the tech industry.Follow, Ceora, Matt, Cassidy, and JJ.High fives to Lifeboat Badge winner Manquer for the answer to his question How can I upgrade the Yii 1.x version to the Yii 2.0 latest release version?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Katzgraber reflects on his time as a university professor up until 2020 and why he switched to working at Amazon.He walks us through a quantum computing challenge that he hosted with BMW, through his role at Amazon (and what real world applications he sees emerging from these types of collaboration experiments).We discuss what inspires him to stay curious — raising the bar for scientific research, crowdsourcing breakthroughs, and opening up the playing field for more people to jump in.Follow Ben, Ryan, Matt, and Helmut.‘Til next time, all.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

We got the chance to sit down with Guillermo Ruach, Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel and co-creator of Next.JS, about the news coming out of today's conference. The most interesting was a new product called Turbopack. You can read more about it here. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Freund reflects on his early days at Applied Materials, where he worked on a machine that inspected silicon wafers.It was in this early role that Freund gained an appreciation for rigorous software testing protocols in the manufacturing process.At WeWork, Freund was fascinated by the idea of a full stack business, which is a business building itself.While Freund officially launched Wilco in 2021, the origin story for the company dates back to 2013 when he was hiring and managing a team of engineers—he saw a need in the market to help developers build critical skills to problems-solve in real-time.You can think of Wilco as the equivalent of a flight simulator for engineers.Shoutout to Lifeboat Badge winner Zico for their awesome answer to the question, “Hiding sensitive information in response”Follow On and Ben.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

John explains that Web3 is about the convergence of technology, economics, and social trends.He elaborates that foundations begin with service-based architecture (SOA), the notion of how to design loosely coupled systems that consist of economic services and components.He goes on to explain how DeFi represents this thinking of a loose composition of services.With all of this, blockchain brings together technology and economic incentives into a holistic equation—people contribute because they want to contribute.Nonsense it is not, says baby Yoda.Crypto isn’t the end game. It’s a segue along the way.Follow Ben, Matt, and John.Learn more about the Global Blockchain Business Council and John’s company, ngEnterprise.Speaking of awesomeness, we’d like to give a shout out to Stellar Question Badge winner GateKiller for asking a question “How can I get the DateTime for the start of the week?” that has been bookmarked by a hundred people.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Having trouble with understanding your team’s productivity outside of frameworks and tooling? Create a backlog and work through it: Instant Agile! How much of that backlog you work through is a good baseline measure. The Stack Overflow blog recently featured an article from Stack Overflow’s Director of Engineering, Ben Matthews: Does high velocity lead to burnout? That may be the wrong question to askIf you're interested in seeing how Couchbase’s SQL database solutions can help improve your team’s velocity, check out Capella. Cory House helps teams deliver successful React projects through his consulting business, ReactJS Consulting. If you want to learn more about Matt, check out his LinkedIn.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, Alohci, who threw a great answer to rescue the question, Display button with inline CSS.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before jumping into driverless car talk, Ben shares a heads up about fake jobs at credible companies that are actually phishing scams meant to steal your identity and hijack your bank accounts. Beware the job offer that seems too good to be true!Jon, Cassidy, Ceora, Matt, and Ben reflect on whether they trust software to operate a vehicle.Cassidy tells us that she once sat in a car that parked itself and screamed the entire time.Matt brings us back to reality, reminding us that airplane flights have been automated for a while now.Matt and Ben point out that in the medical technology space, robotic surgeons are so advanced that they have become more precise than human hands.Shoutout to lifeboat badge winner GKG4 for a great answer to the question “how can I check if an array index is out of range?” which has been viewed 67,000 times.Follow Jon, Ben, Ceora, Matt, and Cassidy.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Despite our hope for the power of robotics, the technology is still far from mainstream. That’s because the amount of effort needed to get hardware to do useful things at scale is…well…hard.When Eliot started Viam, his goal was to address this challenge by creating software that supports a range of hardware builds right out of the box. As the company explains - “we’re addressing these issues by building a novel robotics platform that relies on standardized building blocks rather than custom code to create, configure and control robots intuitively and quickly. We’re empowering engineers – aspiring and experienced – across industries to solve complicated automation problems with our innovative software tools.” The company announced the opening of its public beta earlier this week.While Eliot elaborates on his vision for Viam, Ben reflects on his time covering drones for The Verge and working on robotics at DJI.Inquisitive badge winner, Neeta, gets props for asking well-received questions on 30 separate days.Follow Ben and Eliot on Twitter.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.