The Data Provenance Initiative is a collective of volunteer AI researchers from around the world. They conduct large-scale audits of the massive datasets that power state-of-the-art AI models with a goal of mapping the landscape of AI training data to improve transparency, documentation, and informed use of data. Their Explorer tool allows users to filter and analyze the training datasets typically used by large language models.Shayne and Robert are the authors of a new study called Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons: the first large-scale, longitudinal audit of the consent protocols for the web domains underlying AI training sets.Connect with Shayne via his website.Connect with Robert via his website or on LinkedIn. Stack Overflow user George Hawkins earned a Populist badge by explaining How to get base url in angular 5?.

Tariq Shaukat, the former president of Google Cloud and Bumble, is the CEO of Sonar. Follow him on LinkedIn.Sonar offers code quality and security solutions that help developers write clean code and remediate existing code organically. Their product SonarQube helps devs ensure the quality and security of AI-generated code.Watch Olivier Gaudin, founder of Sonar, explain why clean code is the foundation for well-functioning dev teams.Stack Overflow user Ogglas earned a Populist badge by explaining How to access the appsettings in Blazor WebAssembly.

Solo.io provides API gateway, service mesh, and internal developer portal solutions. Follow Solo.io on X or LinkedIn or dig into the docs.Want to brush up on RAG? Our Guide to AI walks you through the concept and includes a practical example. Or check out one expert’s practical tips for RAG on our blog.Connect with Keith on LinkedIn.Shoutout to Stack Overflow user MrSimpleMind: their helpful answer to the question – How to run jq from gitbash in windows? – has been viewed by more than 213,000 people and won a Populist badge.

Ryan is a VP of Product focused on the Unity Engine and AI services. You can find him on LinkedIn and X.Martin Best is a Principal Product Architect working on the Unity Engine. You can find him on LinkedIn.To learn more about Unity 6, please visit their website. Show some love to this question and Stack Overflow user NPatch, who provided an accepted answer to the question: Why is my character floating in the air when death animation is played in Unity?

Sift is an end-to-end observability stack for safety-critical hardware development. See what they’re up to on their blog.We talked to SpaceX about their testing processes way back in 2021. Connect with Austin on LinkedIn. Stack Overflow user TheScholar earned a Great Question badge by wondering How to create a new deep copy (clone) of a List?, a question that’s helped more than 200,000 people.

Helm.ai licenses AI software throughout the L2-L4 autonomous driving stack, which includes perception, intent modeling, path planning, and vehicle control. They’re hiring!Connect with Vlad on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user user3330840 won a Lifeboat badge for their answer to My commits appear as another user in GitHub?.

Memento is a real-time data platform designed to help developers ship better products faster. Explore the platform here or get started in the docs. Connect with Daniela on LinkedIn and follow Momento on X.Stack Overflow user Simon Juhl won a Lifeboat badge for dropping some knowledge on HTMLCSS change Date input highlight color.

You can find Crystal on LinkedIn.You can learn more about FSH Tech here.Congrats to Stack OVerflow user David Conrad, who earned a lifeboat badge for answering the question: How do I create a map with key and value in one line in Java?

You can find David on LinkedIn.You can learn more about Arcjet here.You can subscribe to to the console.dev newsletter and podcast here.Congrats to Stack Overflow user Greg Hewgill who earned a Populist badge for his answer to the question: What’s a good tool to determine the lowest version of Python required? Greg is getting close to the magic one million rep mark!

You can find Deedy on Twitter and LinkedIn.You can learn more about the Anthology Fund here.You can learn more about Menlo Ventures here.Congrats to Stack Overflow users Bobince for earning a Populist badge with their answer to the question: What does sorting mean in non-alphabetic languages?

Jyoti is a cofounder and CEO of Harness, a software delivery platform meant to modernize your DevOps tooling and take the friction out of CI/CD. Devs can get started with the developer portal. In addition to Harness, Jyoti is a cofounder and entrepreneur partner at Unusual Ventures, which specializes in working with early-stage startups (pre-seed to Series A).Connect with Jyoti on LinkedIn. Shoutout to Stack Overflow user kukuh, who won a Lifeboat badge for dishing out some wisdom on Android productFlavors in gradle-kotlin-dsl.

Read the paper Gias coauthored about incorrectness in AI-generated code or explore more of his research. You can connect with Gias via his website.We previously covered research on Stack Overflow code snippets that Gias was involved in and spoke to his team about deriving sentiment from SO comments.  Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Adhi Ardiansyah for an excellent explanation of How to update a GitHub access token via command line.

Multimodal AI combines different modalities—audio, video, text, etc.—to enable more humanlike engagement and higher-quality responses from the AI model. WebRTC is a free, open-source project that allows developers to add real-time communication capabilities that work on top of an open standard to their applications. It supports video, voice, and generic data.LiveKit is an open-source project that provides scalable, multi-user conferencing based on WebRTC. It’s designed to provide everything developers need to build real-time voice and video applications. Check them out on GitHub.Connect with Russ on LinkedIn or X and explore his posts on the LiveKit blog.Stack Overflow user Kristi Jorgji threw inquiring minds a lifejacket (badge) by answering their own question: Error trying to import dump from mysql 5.7 into 8.0.23.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux may be the world’s largest open-source software business. You can dive into the docs here.Created by IBM and Red Hat, InstructLab is an open-source project for enhancing LLMs. Learn more here or join the community on GitHub.Connect with Scott on LinkedIn.  User AffluentOwl earned a Great Question badge by wondering How to force JavaScript to deep copy a string?. 

From her early days coding on a TI-84 calculator, to working as an engineer at IBM, to pivoting over to her new role in DevRel, speaking, and community, Mrina has seen the world of coding from many angles. You can follow her on Twitter here and on LinkedIn here.You can learn more about CK editor here and TinyMCE here.Congrats to Stack Overflow user NYI for earning a great question badge by asking: How do I convert a bare git repository into a normal one (in-place)?

You can learn more about Kohsuke on his website.You can read more about Jenkins here.You can read more about Cloudbees here.Shout to Mossmyr for contributing a question that's now part of our CI/CD Collective:  Is there a way to call a Jenkins Shared Library method from another Jenkins Shared Library?

Pradeep talks about building at global scale and preparing for inevitable system failures. He talks about extra layers of security, including viewing your own VMs as untrustworthy. And he lays out where he thinks the world of cloud computing is headed as GenAI becomes a bigger piece of many company’s tech stack. You can find Pradeep on LinkedIn. He also writes a blog and hosts a podcast over at Oracle First Principles. Congrats to Stack Overflow user shantanu, who earned a Great Question badge for asking: Which shell I am using in mac? Over 100,000 people have benefited from your curiosity.

You can learn more about Austin on LinkedIn and check out a blog he wrote on building the SDK for Open Telemetry here.You can find Austin at the CNCF Slack community, in the OTel SIG channel, or the client-side SIG channels. The calendar is public on opentelemetry.io. Embrace has its own Slack community to talk all things Embrace or all things mobile observability. You can join that by going to embrace.io as well.Congrats to Stack Overflow user Cottentail for earning an Illuminator badge, awarded when a user edits and answers 500 questions, both actions within 12 hours.

For the last two years, Postgres has been the most popular database among respondents to our Annual Developer Survey. Timescale is a startup working on an open-source PostgreSQEL stack for AI applications. You can follow the company on X and check out their work on GitHub. You can learn more about Avthar on his website and on LinkedIn. Congrats to Stack Overflow user Haymaker for earning a Great Question badge. They asked: How Can I Override the Default SQLConnection Timeout? Nearly 250,000 other people have been curious about this same question.

You can learn more about Geshan on his website or check him out on LinkedIn.Geshan also shared the slide decks for a few of his talks on serverless and containers.Congrats to Stack Overflow user Matthew Reed for earning a populist badge with his answer to the question: GitHub: How to do case sensitive search for the code in repository?

If you’ve never seen it, check out Ryan’s classic talk, 10 Things I Regret About Node.JS, which gives a great overview of the reasons he felt compelled to create Deno.You can learn more about Ryan on Wikipedia, his website, and his Github page.To learn more about Deno 2.0, listen to Ryan talk about it here and check out the project’s Github page here.Congrats to Hugo G, who earned a Great Answer Badge for his input on the following question: How can I declare and use Boolean variables in a shell script?

You can find Ilya on LinkedIn here.You can listen to Ilya talk about Commerce Components here, a system he describes as a "modern way to approach your commerce architecture without reducing it to a (false) binary choice between microservices and monoliths."As Ilya notes, “there are a lot of interesting implications for runtime and how we're solving it at Shopify. There is a direct bridge there to a performance conversation as well: moving untrusted scripts off the main thread, sandboxing UI extensions, and more.” No badge winner today. Instead, user Kaizen has a question about Shopify that still needs an answer. Maybe you can help! How to Activate Shopify Web Pixel Extension on Production Store?

Coalesce is a solution to transform data at scale. You can find Satish on LinkedIn. We previously spoke to Satish for a Q&A on the blog: AI is only as good as the data: Q&A with Satish Jayanthi of CoalesceWe previously covered metadata on the blog: Metadata, not data, is what drags your database downCongrats to Lifeboat winner nwinkler for saving this question with a great answer: Docker run hello-world not working 

Read Dan’s blog post about the process of making Stack Overflow more accessible.We followed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), with a few exceptions. For example, we chose to measure color contrast using the Accessible Perceptual Contrast Algorithm (APCA). We quantified the accessibility of our products using the Axe accessibility testing engine.Our accessibility dashboard helps our internal teams and the community track the accessibility of our products: Stacks (our design system), the public platform (Stack Overflow and all Stack Exchange sites), and Stack Overflow for Teams (including Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise products). We also implemented robust accessibility testing and made those rules open-source in a comprehensive package you can find here.Shoutout to user Beejor for an excellent answer to the question What is the largest safe UDP packet size on the internet?.

Read the blog post or dive into the results of our 2024 Developer Survey.A few highlights to get you started: most popular technologies,most admired and desired programming languages,feelings about/use of AI coding tools, andwhat we know about the global developer community.Speaking of our developer community, Stack Overflow user Frank earned a Stellar Question badge by wondering How to use C++ in Go.

Cortex is an internal developer portal that cuts noise and helps devs build and continuously improve software. Explore their docs or see what’s happening on their blog.Cortex is also hiring, so if you’re an engineer who wants to work on these kinds of problems, check out their careers page.Connect with Anish on LinkedIn or X.Ganesh is also on LinkedIn and X.Shoutout to Alex Chesters, who earned a Great Question badge with How to count occurrences of an element in a Swift array?. 

As Josh explains, DDoS attacks aim to take down a website, while bot scrapers try to gather as much data as possible without getting caught.Josh Zhang is a staff site reliability engineer (SRE) at Stack Overflow. Connect with him on LinkedIn.ICYMI: In 2022, Josh wrote an article for our blog about how Stack defends itself against DDoS attacks.Stack Overflow user Serge Ballesta won a Lifeboat badge for answering What does |= mean in c++.

Jannis Kallinikos is a coauthor of Data Rules: Reinventing the Market Economy (MIT Press, 2024) with Cristina Alaimo, which lays out a framework for a new social science focused on the socioeconomic changes driven by data. You can read an excerpt from Data Rules on our blog here.Explore more of Dr. Kallinikos’s work.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Ebrahim Ghasemi for answering What is the structure of an application protocol data unit (APDU) command and response?

Chelsea Troy defines technical debt and maintenance load in her blog post, “Stop saying ‘technical debt.’”Learn more about technical bankruptcy in this blog post, “Monitoring debt builds up faster than software teams can pay it off.”Joel Spolsky’s classic blog post on avoiding rewriting code from scratch – Things you should never do, part I.Technical debt as explained by Ward Cunningham, who coined the term.Code as an asset, a conversation from Hacker News.Middleware is the “software glue” that provides services to applications beyond those available from the operating system. Ratpack framework is a toolkit for creating high performance web applications.React is a front end javascript library.jQuery is a JavaScript library designed to simplify HTML.Questions about functional programming.User shout out! Nikoksr received the lifeboat badge after answering a question related to math.pow.

You can connect with Lenny Primak at Flow Logix, X, LinkedIn, Github, or Mastodon. Got questions about Java? Check out the site.Apache Groovy is a Java programming language. Virtual Threads reduce the effort put into writing and maintaining code as well as observing high-throughput concurrent applications.Apache Shiro is an open-source security framework that can do authentication, authorization, cryptography, and session management. Jakarta EE, or Jakarta Enterprise Edition, is a suite of services that helps developers write enterprise applications for the Java platform. 

LlamaIndex is a data framework for building LLM applications. Check out the open-source framework or get started with the developer community, LlamaHub.Looking for a deeper understanding of RAG? Start with our guide.Wondering how to import `SimpleDirectoryReader` from LlamaIndex? This question has you covered.Jerry Chen is a partner at Greylock. Connect with him on LinkedIn.Read Jerry Lu’s posts on the LlamaIndex blog or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Learn more about Staging Ground on our blog or in the help center.Find Kyle on Linked, GitHub, and Twitter.Spevacus is a full stack developer and Stack Overflow moderator. They’re a participant in Charcoal, a user-run group that fights spam and rude/abusive content across the Stack Exchange network.

Stack Overflow and Elastic are collaborating to improve the search experience using vector search and generative AI. Learn more about the new AI features for Stack Overflow for Teams, including Enhanced Search.Learn more about the Elastic platform, including vector search. Developers can start building here.Connect with Paul, Steffi, and Gregor on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user chepner won a Lifeboat badge for answering How do I use __repr__ with multiple arguments?.

Carol is an applied clinical and intervention scientist: she develops and tests cognitive, behavioral, and social interventions that activate key mechanisms to elicit change. Learn more about understanding and mitigating code review anxiety (the full version of her article is here).You can also check out the code review anxiety workbook.Pluralsight’s Developer Success Lab is a team of scientists studying how developers work, learn, and innovate. Explore more of Carol’s work on code review anxiety, her bio, or her other work, from developer productivity and stress management to coding with GenAI. Connect with Carol on LinkedIn or Mastodon.

Still thinking about developer happiness and productivity? Read Eira’s article about the real 10x developers among us.Connect with Ben Borra through his website or LinkedIn.Asked and answered: Stack Overflow user Jian earned a Great Question badge with How do I close a frozen SSH session?. 

Before Medplum, Reshma founded and exited two startups in the healthcare space – MedXT (managing medical images online acquired by Box) and Droplet (at-home diagnostics company acquired by Ro). Reshma has a B.S. in computer science and a Masters of Engineering from MIT.You can learn more about Medplum here and check out their Github, which has over 1,200 stars, here.You can learn more about Khilnani on her website, GitHub, and on LinkedIn.Congrats to Stack Overflow user Kvam for earning a Lifeboat Badge with an answer to the question: What is the advantage of using a Bitarray when you can store your bool values in a bool[]?

Cassidy reflect on her time as a CTO of a startup and how the shifting environment for funding has created new pressures and incentives for founders, developers, and venture capitalists.Ben tries to get a bead on a new Moore’s law for the GenAI era: when will we start to see diminishing returns and fewer step factor jumps? Ben and Cassidy remember the time they made a viral joke of a keyboard!Ryan sees how things goes in cycles. A Stack Overflow job board is back! And what do we make of the trend of AI assisted job interviews where cover letters and even technical interviews have a bot in the background helping out.Congrats to Erwin Brandstetter for winning a lifeboat badge with an answer to this question:  How do I convert a simple select query like select * from customers into a stored procedure / function in pg?

How would all this work in practice? Of course, any metric you set out can easily become a target that developers look to game. With Snapshot Reviews, the goal is to get a high level overview of a software team’s total activity and then use AI to measure the complexity of the tasks and output.If a pull request attached to a Jira ticket is evaluated as simple by the system, for example, and a programmer takes weeks to finish it, then their productivity would be scored poorly. If a coder pushes code changes only once or twice a week, but the system rates them as complex and useful, then a high score would be awarded. You can learn more about Snapshot Reviews here.You can learn more about Flatiron Software here.Connect with Kirim on LinkedIn here.Congrats to Stack Overflow user Cherry who earned a great question badge for asking: Is it safe to use ALGORITHM=INPLACE for MySQL?

RelationalAI’s first big partner is Snowflake, meaning customers can now start using their data with GenAI without worrying about the privacy, security, and governance hassle that would come with porting their data to a new cloud provider. The company promises it can also add metadata and a knowledge graph to existing data without pushing it through an ETL pipeline.You can learn more about the company’s services here.You can catch up with Cassie on LinkedIn.Congrats to Stack Overflow user antimirov for earning a lifeboat badge by providing a great answer to the question: How do you efficiently compare two sets in Python?

Palmer says that a huge percentage of today’s top websites, including apps like ChartGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, were built with Vercel’s Next.JS. For the second goal, you can see what Vercel is up to with its v0 project, which lets developers use text prompts and images to generate code. Third, the Vercel AI SDK, which aims to to help developers build conversational, streaming, and chat user interfaces in JavaScript and TypeScript. You can learn more here.If you want to catch Jared posting memes, check him out on Twitter. If you want to learn more abiout the AI SDK, check it out here.A big thanks to Pierce Darragh for providing a great answer and earning a lifeboat badge by saving a question from the dustinbin of history. Pierce explained: How you can split documents into training set and test set

You can learn more about these three features on our Overflow AI site.If you want to connect with Tiago, you can find him on LinkedIn. The same goes for Alexa.A shoutout to Stack Overflow user Mahozad for earning a LifeBoat badge with their answer to the question: How can I add Jetpack Compose & xml in the same activity?

You can learn more about Squire AI hereConnect with Patel on his LinkedInCongrats to Bharath Pabba for earning a Great Question badge and helping 129,000 people with a similar question by asking: How to disable source maps for React JS Application?

You can find Narayan on LinkedIn.Learn more about SnapLogic here.Congrats to our user of the week, Ethan Heilman, for earning a Great Question badge by showing some curiosity and asking: How do I deal with garbage collection logs in Java?This question has been viewed over 175,000 times and helped lots of folks gain some new knowledge :)

You can find Shestakofsky on his website or check him out on X.Grab a copy of his new book: Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality. As he writes on his website, the book:Draws on 19 months of participant-observation research to examine how investors’ demand for rapid growth created organizational problems that managers solved by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. The book shows how the burdens imposed on startups by venture capital—as well as the benefits and costs of “moving fast and breaking things”—are unevenly distributed across a company’s workforce and customers. With its focus on the financialization of innovation, Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by tech startups are funneled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. To promote innovation that benefits the many rather than the few, Shestakofsky argues that we should focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it.A big thanks to our user of the week, Parusnik, who was awarded a Great Question badge for asking: How to run a .NET Core console application on Linux?

Temporal is an open-source implementation of durable execution, a development paradigm that preserves complete application state so that upon host or software failure it can seamlessly migrate execution to another machine. Learn how it works or dive into the docs. Temporal’s SaaS offering is Temporal Cloud.Replay is a three-day conference focused on durable execution. Replay 2024 is September 18-20 in Seattle, Washington, USA. Get your early bird tickets or submit a talk proposal!Connect with Maxim on LinkedIn.User Honda hoda earned a Famous Question badge for SQLSTATE[01000]: Warning: 1265 Data truncated for column.

Robin is the author of a practical handbook for Selenium test automation.Connect with Robin on LinkedIn, Twitter, or via his website. Shoutout to user2651084, who earned a Great Question badge by asking How do I reset the Jupyter/IPython input prompt numbering?. 

Galileo is an end-to-end platform for GenAI evaluation, experimentation, and observability. Learn more by exploring their docs.Galileo’s Hallucination Index is a ranking and evaluation framework for LLM hallucinations (it includes a blooper reel).Connect with Vikram on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user Petr Janeček won a Lifeboat badge for answering Null array to empty list, a question that’s helped more than 47,000 other curious folks.Are you a software developer? Take Stack Overflow’s annual survey about how you learn and level up, which tools you’re using, and which ones you want most. You can check out the results of previous surveys here.

OverflowAI is a GenAI-powered add-on for Stack Overflow for Teams that does the heavy lifting of discovering and distilling information into a coherent answer. It encompasses three modules: Enhanced Search, an upgraded search experience; Stack Overflow for Visual Studio Code, an IDE extension; and Auto-Answer App for Slack, which automates access to essential team knowledge. Read about why OverflowAI is a big step toward integrating GenAI offerings into knowledge communities and dig into what’s launching and why it’s valuable.Connect with Ash on LinkedIn.Big props to Stack Overflow user Jennifer M., who earned both a Great Question badge and a Famous Question badge by wondering How to combine the sequence of objects in jq into one object?.

Al Sweigert is the author of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python and many other books about programming. You can read them all for free here.His scroll art project introduces beginners to programming by letting them turn loops and print() into animated ASCII art.Al joined us from a retreat at the Brooklyn, NY-based Recurse Center, which offers free, self-directed retreats for programmers. Learn how to apply here.PyCon US 2024 is May 15-23, 2024, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.Connect with Al through his website.Shoutout to user Alex. S., who asked Stack Overflow’s most popular Python question ever: What does the "yield" keyword do in Python?. It’s helped 3.3 million people and counting.

Read Eira’s two-part series about developers with ADHD here and here.Chris recommends that devs with ADHD employ a “second brain” to help them track and remember information. Read Eira’s article on what second brains reveal about how we work.A few years back Chris joined us to talk about the most lightweight web “framework” around: VanillaJS. Listen to the episode.Chris offers classes and workshops for front-end developers, plus daily advice for developers with ADHD.Connect with Chris through his website or social media.

Kong is a cloud-native API gateway. Find them on GitHub.We last spoke with Marco in 2023. infConnect with Marco on LinkedIn.Congrats to Famous Question badge winner mjbradford7 on How to re-render one component from another in React.

If you’ve been laid off or you’re just sweating the possibility, here’s what to do. Check out the results of our last job market survey. Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn.Shoutout to stevenkucera, who earned a Stellar Question badge with How do I create a global, mutable singleton?.

In a narrow vote, the US Federal Trade Commission banned almost all noncompete agreements, a staple of the tech industry for years.Learn how a 2017 tax law is haunting startups in 2024.Finnish hacker Aleksanteri Kivimäki exposed tens of thousands of confidential psychiatric records and tried to extort payment directly from the affected patients. Read more about it here or here. It happened: President Biden signed the TikTok “ban,” setting a deadline for the platform’s parent company, China-based ByteDance, to divest the app within a year. And TikTok faces yet more hurdles ahead.Net neutrality is back, baby. Here’s what that means.

SQLite is the most used database engine in the world. Stop by the forum or explore the docs.Devs have pledged to support SQLite through the year 2050. The developer with a team of three, all of them himself at different points in time, was Tarn Adams of Dwarf Fortress fame. On Stack Overflow, 1.2 million people have found the answer to How can I list the tables in a SQLite database file that was opened with ATTACH?. 

Meta’s open-source Llama 3 model puts Meta’s AI assistant head-to-head with ChatGPT.Stability AI laid off 10% of its workforce, the first major AI foundation model to reduce its workforce since the advent of generative AI.Is the dot-com bubble a cautionary tale for AI enthusiasts? Listen to the episode of Marketplace from NPR.Do LLMs support Wittgenstein’s position that “meaning is use”? That depends whether you’re talking pre or post Tractatus, of course.TikTok wouldn’t lie to you: you really can make friends with your local crows. Eira’s proven method for befriending crows: Feed them dry cat food on a consistent schedule, so they learn you’re reliable, and watch them eat, so they grok that you are feeding them intentionally.Stack Overflow user Arman Ordookhani received a well-deserved Lifeboat badge for telling nearly 30,000 people How to free memory in go.

Why can’t configuration be made simple? Apple is making it easier for users to repair their iPhones with used parts.Texas is swapping human graders for AI.Automattic (owner of WordPress) is acquiring Beeper for $125M.Silicon Valley or not, San Francisco’s train system still uses floppy disks. But don’t worry, an upgrade is coming—in 2030.Shoutout to Bite code, who earned a Stellar Question badge with How do I change the URI (URL) for a remote Git repository?.

Get started with MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud today. Read more from the MongoDB DevRel team at the MongoDB Developer Center.Learn more about Google’s Gemini models. Shout out to thitemple for their Lifeboat-worthy answer to In TypeScript, how do I declare a function that returns a string type array?.

Connect with Michael on LinkedIn. Shoutout to user1083266, who earned a Stellar Question badge with How to store image in SQLite database.

ICYMI: A backdoor in XZ, a popular open-source compression utility, highlights the risks of relying on open-source software maintained by small teams. Read more about the cyberattack here.Apple’s new LLM, Ferret, could help Siri understand the user interfaces of mobile displays, potentially expanding the capabilities of Apple’s digital assistant. Shoutout to Stack Overflow user cheese1756, who earned a Great Question badge by asking How do I ensure that whitespace is preserved in Markdown?.

Learn more about the potential of AI inference with OpenVINO Notebooks.Check out the previous podcast with Intel, where we talk with Raymond Lo about how hardware and software work together with AI.Connect with Ria on LinkedIn or GitHub. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Kevin, who showed what they know about TypeError; Must use key word argument or key function in Python 3.x.

A developer discovered a backdoor in XZ, a popular open-source compression utility. Read more about the cyberattack here.A Microsoft technical report pinpoints 54 attributes of great software engineers.A new report from The Economist lays out how AI is changing drug development.Are you sick of hearing about AI? What topics or technologies would you rather hear us talk about? Email us at [email protected] or DM Ben here.

You can find Jessica on LinkedIn.We've published several posts, including this most recent one, about our attempt to shape an ethical approach to combining our community of knowledge and today's AI systems.Check out this blog post that details some of the work we did to build our data platform. Congrats to macfij on your lifeboat badge for answering the question: How can I do a CTRL + A and a CTRL + C?

DBRX, an open, general-purpose LLM created by Databricks, reportedly outperforms GPT-3.5 and is competitive with Gemini 1.0 Pro.Recent research found that large, complex LLMs use a simple mechanism to retrieve stored knowledge in response to a user prompt. These mechanisms can help researchers reveal what the model knows and potentially even correct false information it has stored.FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, whose downfall began in late 2022, was sentenced last week to 25 years in prison for conspiracy and fraud. Find Michael on LinkedIn.Find Cassidy on her website.Stack Overflow user Bucket received a well-deserved Lifeboat badge for rescuing How to calculate decimal(x, y) max value in SQL Server from an ocean of ignorance.Chapters (please note that these timestamps may not be exact): 00:00 Introduction and White Paper Discussion02:01 Long Context Windows and Retrieval Augmented Generation05:56 Models' Ability to Recall Relevant Information07:18 Models' Creativity and Thinking Outside the Box09:41 Advantages and Limitations of Models' Knowledge15:09 Databricks' Open Language Model22:25 Sam Bankman-Fried’s Sentence and the Effects on Crypto/Blockchain31:28 Closing Remarks and Lifeboat Badge

Small nations like Anguilla (.ai) and Tuvalu (.tv) are benefiting from their coveted domain names.The US government is suing Apple for violation of antitrust laws, which could have a huge impact on devs, end users, and the whole ecosystem. Reddit went public last week despite not being profitable since its launch in 2005.How can you give feedback on a poorly reviewed PR? The Software Engineering Stack Exchange has ideas.The four day work week is probably not the solution to our work-life balance problems.AI-powered software development tools like Devon show promise, but their impact on code quality and maintainability remains an open question.Shoutout to Robert, who earned a Lifeboat badge by explaining Square brackets in CSS.Chapters00:00 Introduction00:31 The Impact of Dot AI Domain Space01:07 Antitrust Cases Against Apple04:01 Vendor Lock-in and Apple's Ecosystem05:08 Issues with Infotainment Systems and Apple Play06:29 The Benefits and Challenges of a Four-Day Work Week08:03 Providing Feedback on a Badly Reviewed PR10:00 The Importance of Clear Expectations in Code Reviews11:40 The Potential of AI Tools in Development14:01 Reddit Going Public and the Future of Tech Companies15:29 AI Tool Devon and the Challenges of Operationalizing AI Projects21:22 Shoutout and Closing Remarks

To learn more about the signs that indicate you may be paying more for your cloud computing that you should, check out DoIT’s seven red flags guide. We’ve spoken with DoiT on the podcast before about LLM hallucinations and the security threats that LLMs open.DoiT’s sales pitch is simple: they provide technology and expertise to clients who want to use the cloud, free of charge, with the big cloud providers paying the bills.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner  Sravan K Ghantasala for their answer to How to sort file lines in Bash?Find Joshua at joshuafox com.Chapters00:00 Introduction and Cloud Cost Control01:08 Joshua Fox's Background04:20 Understanding FinOps06:17 The Importance of Good Architecture08:18 Balancing Flexibility in Architecture10:04 Surprise Costs and Dealing with Them13:19 Bracing for Unexpected Cloud Costs25:41 The Future of Cloud Cost Optimization27:09 Closing Remarks

Cribl is a data management platform. Check out their sandbox or explore their products.Cribl Stream is their vendor-agnostic observability pipeline.If you’re new to the term, the observability pipeline is a crucial component of the cloud-native world.Connect with Nick on LinkedIn.Chapters00:00 Introduction and Background03:23 The Data Landscape and Generative AI06:08 Incumbents vs. Startups in the Data Space07:46 Challenges of Data Storage and Exfiltration09:38 Securing Large Warehouses of Data12:21 Data Quality and ETL Pipelines16:05 Measures of Data Quality for Gen AI22:04 Cribl’s Role in the Data and Observability Space26:20 The Pros and Cons of Richer Observability Monitoring28:11 Closing Remarks and Shoutout

GitClear is a developer-friendly code review tool that aims to deliver higher developer satisfaction and faster releases. Check out their blog or find them on GitHub.GitClear’s research focuses on how AI code-gen tools have impacted code quality (and not in a good way).Find Bill on LinkedIn.Chapters00:00 Introduction 00:30 Background of the Research06:09 Business Model of GitClear09:46 Copy Pasted Code10:26 Churn Code12:21 Code Readability14:12 Code Suggestions and Auto-Completion16:34 Drop in Moved Code23:18 Larger Token Windows26:31 Improving Gen AI28:46 Conclusion

Node.js® is an open-source JavaScript runtime environment.Deno is an open-source JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly runtime. Explore the quick start or check out Deno by example, a collection of annotated examples of how to use Deno.JSR is an open-source package registry for JavaScript and TypeScript.Keep up to date with Ryan on GitHub or his blog.Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Squadrons, who earned a Great Question badge by asking for a Pure javascript method to wrap content in a div.Chapters:00:00: Introduction and Background01:08: Creating Node.js05:00: JavaScript on the Server Side07:23: Impact of Node.js09:18: Edge Function System12:13: Protecting Against Malicious Use16:02: JSR: Alternative to NPM31:01: JSR and its Stage34:20: Future of JavaScript36:19: Closing and Shoutouts

AI shops are now releasing LLMs optimized for RAG. Turn a repo into a prompt for a long-context LLM.Perplexity AI is an AI-powered search and discovery tool.Good news for developers: Apple will not remove progressive web app support on iOS in the EU.Basil Bourque earned a Lifeboat badge by explaining How to get full name of month from date in Java 8 while formatting.

Stack Overflow has teamed up with Google Cloud to develop an API—Overflow API—to give Gemini, Google’s AI model, access to Stack Overflow knowledge communities. Learn how Ryan’s team is working toward socially responsible AI.Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user verygoodsoftwarenotvirus earned a Great Question badge by asking something at least 87,000 people have also wondered: How can I get all keys from a JSON column in Postgres?.

Check out Maxime’s three-part LLM course. Part 1 “covers essential knowledge about mathematics, Python, and neural networks.Part 2 “focuses on building the best possible LLMs using the latest techniques."Part 3 “focuses on creating LLM-based applications and deploying them.” Read Maxime’s blog.Follow Maxime on GitHub or LinkedIn.Nikhil Wagh earned a Lifeboat badge by explaining how to Efficiently compare two sets in Python.

Intuit shares more about their generative AI operating system (GenOS) in this Medium blog. If you want to try out generative AI in MailChimp, sign up here. Learn more about Intuit technology here.Many thanks (and a Lifeboat badge) to Dherik for dropping an answer on cURL: how can I return 0 if status is 200?Connect with Shivang on LinkedIn.

Build GenAI applications faster and cheaper with a vector database like Pinecone.New to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and other GenAI topics? Our guide is a good place to start.Learn more about RAG and Pinecone.Connect with Roie on GitHub or LinkedIn.

Pinecone is a vector database that lets companies build GenAI applications faster for less cost.Read our primer on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or explore RAG and Pinecone.Follow Roie on GitHub or LinkedIn.If you need a handy guide to what’s what in the AI space, check out Stack Overflow’s Industry Guide to AI.

SPONSORED BY INTEL Ryan and Ben chat with Raymond Lo, AI software evangelist at Intel, about the AI PC, the software that powers AI breakthroughs, and optimizing hardware and software in unison to improve generative AI performance. Bonus: what’s the difference between a GPU optimized for graphics and a VPU or NPU optimized for AI? Episode notes If you’re interested in trying any of the demos that Raymond talked about, check out Intel’s OpenVINO notebooks. Learn more about Intel’s Edge AI resources here. Raymond previously wrote about enhancing image and video resolution using OpenVINO. You can reach out to Raymond Lo on LinkedIn. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, Andrey Korneyev, for saving the question, How can I delete specific nodes from an XElement?

Sema’s AI code monitor helps companies manage the risks and capture the benefits of AI in the software development lifecycle. Learn how it works here.Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.Erstwhile podcast cohost Cassidy Williams is the CTO of Contenda. Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Jim, who earned a Stellar Question badge with Docker cannot start on Windows, a question (well, more of a statement) that’s helped 1.1 million people and counting.

Discussions are now taking place across all tags on Stack Overflow. Check out this one about why people keep proclaiming the death of PHP or this one on whether Jenkins is still the dominant player in the CI/CD space.What would happen if you suddenly lost consciousness? The Philosophy Stack Exchange has thoughts.Did knights wear glasses? Historical records don’t really answer this question, but the History Stack Exchange does.The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has deemed AI-generated robocalls illegal.

Andrew has worked in many roles, including as Executive Manager at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, where he established and grew a platform engineering function that supported 7,000 engineers.You can find him on LinkedIn here.You can learn more about Compass, a developer experience platform, here.Shout to Amelio for earning a stellar question badge and helping over six hundred thousand people with this gem: Getting the name of a variable as a string

Mobb offers AI-powered technology that automates vulnerability remediations with a goal of helping development teams significantly reduce their security backlogs and free up more time for innovation. Check out their blog or dive into their docs.Connect with Eitan on LinkedIn.Shoutout to Konrad, who won a Stellar Question badge for What is the difference between private and protected members of C++ classes?.

Find out why others have joined Shell.If you want to experience what being a developer at one of the world’s largest energy companies looks like, they’re hiring.Great question, Alexander Myshov! This badge was awarded for Are arrow functions faster (more performant, lighter) than ordinary standalone function declaration in v8?Reach out to Maya on LinkedIn.

William is the CEO of Lightning AI and the creator of PyTorch Lightning, the lightweight PyTorch wrapper for high-performance AI research.Dive into their docs or explore the developer community.ICYMI: Across tech, layoffs are boosting share prices.Follow William on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn.Shoutout to Brian61354270, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils' in Python 3.12.

Is it possible to make a PDF bigger than Germany? Here’s one larger than the known universe. As its creator says, “it’s mostly empty space, but so is the universe.”Massachusetts is leading the way in the skills-based hiring revolution by eliminating degree requirements for state jobs.Did you miss these deeply uncanny AI-generated food images, from the conjoined chickens to the macaroni and cheese rendered in shapes formerly unknown to geometry? Never fear; you can still see some here.You may have forgotten about crypto (or at least tried), but more than 2% of the United States’s electricity generation goes to large-scale crypto mining.Stack Overflow user Jeff Allen earned a Great Question badge for Create a Vector of All Days Between Two Dates, which has helped 85,000 R users.

AI-generated code is “not equivalent to reliable and robust code, especially in the context of real-world software development,” according to a new study whose title got our attention.Tech layoffs continue in the wake of the pandemic hiring boom, sending some share prices into the sky.Take a look at how AI coding assistants are already changing the way code is made.Shoutout to Stack Overflow user nonopolarity, who earned a Great Question badge by asking Can someone explain SSH tunnel in a simple way?.

A theory explores how to play DOOM inside a human cell. Fair warning, you'll need about 600 years to complete the game.Looking for a good prompt builder to help you get the most out of your LLM? Try this one or explore this huge collection of prompts.Startup Twin Labs wants to build a product that automates repetitive tasks by letting AI take over your cursor.Harvard Medical School researchers published a study showing that the CRISPR system can encode information in living cells “as complex as a digitized image of a human hand.” Read more.Three cheers for Max Lybbert, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering Python faster than C++? How does this happen?.

Intuit shares more about their generative AI operating system (GenOS) in this Medium blog. Learn more about Intuit technology here.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Mohsin Naeem for answering the question How can I extract metadata from an MP3 file?Connect with Merrin on LinkedIn or X. Connect with Shivang on LinkedIn.

The estate of the late comedian George Carlin is suing the creators of an hour-long AI-generated comedy special that mimics Carlin’s distinctive delivery and material. [Ed. note: not actually AI, still lawsuit.]Prefer your AI more Freudo-Marxist? Here’s a never-ending, AI-generated conversation between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. You’re welcome.Google’s Bard surpassed GPT-4 to claim the second spot on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard.Agile development is faltering at big companies, and a recent report cites developer burnout as a factor. But maybe the problem lies in companies’ (mis)understanding of agile.Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Emil Laine, who earned a Lifeboat badge with their answer to How can I include all of the C++ Standard Library at once?.

Find out what’s new with ML in production.Machine learning models must learn to unlearn.Open-source game engine Godot now has a free Nintendo Switch port for game developers.We’ve previously hosted Godot cofounder and lead developer Juan Linietsky on the podcast.Stack Overflow user areller earned a Lifeboat badge with their answer to How to call a destructor.

A white-hat hacker uncovered security vulnerabilities in an AI-powered hiring system used by fast-food chains and hourly employees around the world. Read the blog post or watch this explainer.Mariposa is a programming language with time travel.Want to be an individual contributor (IC) who still amplifies the performance of everyone around you? Be a radiating programmer.Congratulations to onmyway133, winner of a Stellar Question badge for What does the suspend function mean in a Kotlin Coroutine?.

Mariposa is a toy programming language that has time travel as a primary feature. Bugs are a thing of the past (literally)!Miss having a physical keyboard when thumb-typing on your phone? Well, you’re in luck. Over at CES, LG Electronics wants your devices to have “affectionate intelligence.” Whatever it takes to make AI more human-centric and empathetic.Omar used to work on the Backstage project at Spotify, so we quoted him in our article on it. Now he works on personalization, including Discover Weekly, which drops a new mixtape on you every Monday like a hipster with a crush.

Rabbit R1 is an AI-powered assistant you can keep in your pocket (but it’s not a phone).How will AI impact scientific research? A new collaboration between Microsoft and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is focused on energy storage solutions.A US Senate hearing questions whether tech companies should be allowed to train their AI models on content produced by journalists without paying licensing fees.Learn how to build a mechanical computer from Legos.

Now you know: The human body can serve as a resonance chamber for remote car keys, effectively extending their range.A hackathon team used GenAI can create a fully playable D&D-style game in just one day.Skybox AI from Blockade Labs allows users to generate 360° skybox experiences from text prompts.A significant advancement in the brain-computer interfaces (BCI) space: a novel framework called DeWave integrates “discrete encoding sequences into open-vocabulary EEG-to-text translation tasks” without the need for “eye-tracking fixations or event markers to segment brain dynamics into word-level features.”Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Vineeth Chitteti, who earned a Favorite Question badge with Is it possible to hit multiple pods with a single request in Kubernetes cluster?.

Willis Gibson, 13, closed out 2023 by becoming the first person to officially beat the original Nintendo version of Tetris. Here’s how he did it.Want to understand the code that caused the ultimate killscreen? Watch this great explainer from HydrantDude.The 2023 film Tetris is based on the true story of the legal battle to license the game.Is the era of the robot butler upon us? Mobile ALOHA is a low-cost and whole-body teleoperation system for data collection. Check out some of what it can do.Explore the questions and answers on the Mathematics Stack Exchange.

Will AI fundamentally change software development or just add some efficiencies around the edges?  Surveys from Stack Overflow and Github find north of 70% have probably already tried using it and many incorporate it into their daily work through a helper in the IDE. It's also worth reflecting a bit on the technology sectors that didn't have as great a 2023: crypto, VR, and quantum computing still seem far from mainstream adoption. We dive a little into the half-life of skills, which seem to be shrinking, especially in IT. Got any resolutions to learn something new this year?And what about the data we use for training? We highlight a comment from Kian Katanforoosh, a lecturer who helped create Stanford's Deep Learning course with Andrew Ng, who says we'll run out of high quality data as soon as 2030.A big thanks and congrats to Stack Overflow user  Corn3lius for helping to answer a question and being awarded a life boat badge: How can I create spoiler text?

Along with his work at Stanford, Katanforoosh is a founding member of deeplearning.ai and co-created the Deep Learning Specialization on Coursera. He believes the rapidly expanding capabilities of AI will mean that humans, and especially programmers, will need to learn new skills faster than ever. This doesn't mean machines are going to take our jobs. Rather, with the assistance of AI, humans will become far more capable, learning faster and mastering more domains. Not surprisingly, Katanforoosh has built his business with the goal of addressing this issue. Workera aims to help companies identify where their employees lack skills and provide them with personalized instruction that can quickly bring them up to the next level.You can find Kian on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Stanford's website. Thanks to Stack Overflow user PaxDiablo, who was awarded a Life Boat badge for providing a great answer to the question: Given  a month in numeric form, how do you find the first month of its respective quarter?  

Biilmann says we can't ignore the impact GenAI is having on developer productivity.  One of their engineers created a  GPT that automatically generates stories for React + TypeScript components, and after seeing how successful it was internally, Netlify made it open source for the public.We also chat over the results of their recent State of Web Development survey. The key takeaway is below: The 80% of developers that have integrated AI into their workflow are quickly reaping the benefits. Seventy percent report using AI to automate manual and repetitive tasks and 42% are using it to improve internal knowledge sharing and increase productivity, freeing up more time for impactful work and enabling faster launch times. Over 50% of developers also realized new opportunities that AI created, such as generating new web projects with a single prompt or reading API documentation.However, AI experimentation is not without its own unique challenges. Developers are concerned about receiving incorrect answers and information (65%), security issues and leaking confidential information (52%), a lack of regulation (48%), and a decrease in code quality (45%).So much opportunity, but plenty of risk as well. Last but not least, Biilmann tells us what he's looking forward to in the near future, specifically apps that can reformat their UI on the fly to be more customized to each user. He calls this UI 2.0, and it sounds a bit like what Google showed off in its recent Gemini demo. Congrats to our lifeboat winner of the week, Petrus Theron, who answered the question: How can I make a public struct where all fields are public without repeating `pub` for every field?

SPONSORED BY DOITThe broken nose in jail scam is on the rise. With AI improvements, it’ll get harder to spot. OWASP, a non-profit dedicated to software security, tracks the top ten security risks for LLMs.We’ve spoken with DoiT on the podcast before about LLM hallucinations. DoiT’s sales pitch is simple: they provide technology and expertise to clients who want to use the cloud, free of charge, with the big cloud providers paying the bills.

On today’s home team episode, Ben and Ryan discuss the implications of a lapse in section 174 of the tax code. Here’s a great explainer on how it’s affecting startups and software firms, threatening jobs and potentially bankrupting some struggling companies. Video game employees are exploring a union and Microsoft recently announced it will stay neutral in the process. What’s the difference between a bad game, a low effort developer, and shovelware? Our game development Stack Exchange has some thoughts.Today’s lifeboat badge winner is “that_other_guy”, who explained: What is the difference between kill and kill -9? Hint, you want to terminate your process, not brutally murder it, ok! 

Does ChatGPT have seasonal depression?AIs aren’t building apps on their own, at least not yet—but they are helping developers build them. Read Isaac Lyman’s article about the three types of AI-assisted programmers.ICYMI: Listen to our interview with linguist Gašper Beguš, director of the Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, about how LLMs and humans acquire language. Shoutout to Stack Overflow user nhgrif, who earned a Lifeboat badge by rescuing Store only date without time in a database from the ash heap of history.

SPONSORED BY FIREHYDRANTWhile FireHydrant is mostly known for their incident management software, they’re introducing Signals to modernize alerting and consolidate it with incident management. FireHydrant was born out of an incident where a database was dropped at 5:30pm on a Friday right before network maintenance started. It also led to Robert’s social media handle, Bobby Tables. This one time…at band camp…Robert got paged in the middle of trumpet practice…on his sabbatical.Congrats to Great Question badge winner timdim for asking How can I flush GPU memory using CUDA (physical reset is unavailable)?. 100 people thought it was worth voting for.

Gemini, Google’s new AI model, is great at competitive programming, among other things.AI Explained is a YouTube channel that covers the latest developments in AI.One problem with regulating AI is that the technology evolves (much) faster than regulators can.Wikifunctions is an open repository of code that anyone can use or contribute to.Did we need another study to tell us that longer commutes are bad for mental health? Probably not, but here’s one anyway.Are governments spying on you through push notifications? Sounds like it! In fact, push notifications are a privacy nightmare.

CommandBar is a user assistance platform (UAP). Their flagship product, Copilot, is an embedded user assistant agent that companies can configure to help their users with on-demand help, including interactive walkthroughs and personalized responses. Read James’s article about why CommandBar built Copilot, then get started with their docs.Follow James on LinkedIn and Twitter.Follow CommandBar on LinkedIn and Twitter.If you’ve ever wondered Why "Yarn 2" is Yarn 3.0.1, Lifeboat badge winner Ilias Karim has your answer.

Do LLMs herald the end of computer programming (as we know it)? A Harvard lecture weighs in on this contentious topic.An epic hardware bug story.Question from the academic trenches: How bad will it look to prospective employers if you refuse to defend your PhD? (Answer: Pretty bad.)Another intriguing question: Were postal pneumatic tubes in Berlin really cleaned with wine?The Jetsons misled us about many aspects of the future, from flying cars to the role of pneumatics, but they were onto something with the series of tubes.Before influencers and social media algorithms, there were coolhunters.Congrats to Stack Overflow user tjati, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering What does 'HTML is escaping' mean?.

As the year winds to a close, some big employers are facing lower-than-expected attrition rates—in other words, fewer people than expected are quitting. What a difference a year or two makes.People have strong opinions on the return-to-office conversation. Read Eira’s article and let us know how you feel.We are just beginning to explore the effects of prompting on the capabilities and performance of LLMs.The Humane AI pin can be described as a cross between two of humanity’s most beloved technologies: Google Glass and the pager.People are using low-cost drones, 3D printers, and private satellites to preserve irreplaceable cultural heritage sites before they are destroyed or lost to time. (Stay tuned while Eira figures out how to apply this tech as a cemetery tour guide.)Stack Overflow user FlipperPA earned a Lifeboat badge with their answer to The 'Black' formatter - Python.

Bito AI is an AI coding tool that helps developers work more productively with features like code completion within the IDE and personalized answers drawn from your codebase. Get started with their docs here.ICYMI: Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is a way of addressing LLM hallucinations and outdated training data.Listen to our recent episode about how an original architect of Jira is rethinking meaningful engineering metrics.Connect with Anand on LinkedIn or Twitter.com. Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Jan Kardaš, whose answer to Go: Retrieve a string from between two characters or other strings earned them a Lifeboat badge.

Cloudflare is a cloud provider used by almost 20% of all websites. Developers new to Cloudflare can get started here.Cloudflare recently launched Workers AI, an open, pay-as-you-go AI inference-as-a-service platform that lets developers run machine learning models on the Cloudflare network from their own code. Developers can get started here.On a related note, read Ryan’s article exploring the infrastructure and code behind edge functions or check out his conversation with Vercel CTO Malte Ubl.Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is a strategy that helps address both LLM hallucinations and out-of-date training data.Connect with Rita on LinkedIn.Connect with Cassidy through her website.Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Bamieh, whose answer to What does the function call app.use(cors()) do? earned them a Lifeboat badge.

Sana automates user enrollment, training reminders, and other manual/admin tasks associated with onboarding and learning. Sana AI, their AI assistant, is trained on a company’s data so employees can self-serve the knowledge they need.On a related note, listen to our interview with Gašper Beguš, director of the Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, about his research into how LLMs and humans acquire language.You can also read about how Stack Overflow implemented semantic search.Connect with Joel on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user Donagh Hatton received a well-earned Lifeboat badge with their answer to Why is StringBuilder much faster than String?.

SPONSORED BY CHRONOSPHEREEpisode notes:Chronosphere is introducing Lens, a cloud-native observability tool to view data flows between services. At Uber, Rob created M3, an open-source metrics engine compatible with Prometheus.  Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, ralf htp, for their answer to How to read an image in Python OpenCV. If you want to meet Rob and the Chronosphere team, they’ll be at AWS re:Invent  from Nov. 27 to Dec. 1.

ICYMI, listen to part one of this conversation.Craig is the cofounder and CEO of Stacklok, which helps developers and open-source communities build safer software, secure the supply chain, and choose safer dependencies. Stacklok’s free-to-use service, Trusty, employs a statistical analysis of author/repo activity and a package’s source of origin to assess its trustworthiness.Craig cofounded the Kubernetes project, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.Craig is on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user mprivat earned a well-deserved Lifeboat badge by answering Abstract class extending concrete classes.

Stacklok helps developers and open-source communities build safer software, secure the supply chain, and choose safer dependencies. Trusty is their free-to-use service that employs a statistical analysis of author/repo activity and a package’s source of origin to assess its trustworthiness.Craig cofounded the Kubernetes project, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.He is also the former VP of Research and Development at VMWare.Follow Craig on LinkedIn.Congrats to Stack Overflow user netcorefan, who earned a Lifeboat badge with their answer to Need a workaround to access ReadOnlySpan inside a function that returns an IEnumerable.

Sleuth helps engineering teams systematically improve efficiency by tracking speed and release quality, preventing slowdowns and bottlenecks, and removing toil and unnecessary friction. Try it for free or see how teams are using Sleuth. Interested in the automations they offer for teams, check out their public marketplace.Dylan was an original architect on JIRA, so he’s not exactly new to issue- and project-tracking software.DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) is a research program that tries to understand what drives successful software delivery and operations performance. According to Dylan, one thing the best development teams have in common is their culture of continuous learning.Connect with Dylan on LinkedIn.

Tomasz is a general partner at Theory Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage software companies.He coauthored the book Winning with Data, a deep dive into how big data has changed business best practices and organizational culture.Find Tomasz’s writing here.Follow Tomasz on LinkedIn or Twitter.com.In honor of Tomasz’s early career, we’re shouting out Johnny Hujol’s answer to What exactly is a container in J2EE and how does it help?.

Giamir is the tech lead for Stacks, Stack Overflow’s design system.Svelte is a tool for building web apps. Delve into their docs or, if you’re brand-new to Svelte, start with this interactive tutorial.More than 90,000 devs responded to our 2023 Developer Survey where Svelte was ranked the second-most admired web framework.  Connect with Giamir via his website or LinkedIn. Today we’re shouting out a topical question asked by Félix Paradis, who (like 73,000 others) wanted to know How to pass parameters to on:click in Svelte?.

Alex and cofounder/CTO Paul Querna started ConductorOne because they saw that traditional identity governance (IGA) and privileged access management (PAM) needed to be rethought for cloud-forward companies.Before he cofounded Conductor One, Alev Bovee was a senior director of product management for zero trust and security at Okta.Read Ben’s article about how Computers are learning to decode the language of our minds.Would you trade an iris scan for some crypto? Sure, what could go wrong?Connect with Alex on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user Matthew Watson earned a Lifeboat badge for helping more than 32,000 people by answering Checking if an array is null or empty.

Find out why others have joined Shell. Wondering what it’s like to be a developer at one of the world’s biggest energy companies? They’re hiring.Behavior-driven development is a conceptual approach to software development that calls for collaboration and alignment between developers, testers, and domain experts.One of the new technologies James and Tristan helped introduce at Shell is Kafka, an open-source distributed event streaming platform. Check out their docs here.Engineering teams at Shell use Stack Overflow for Teams to capture and share information. Get started for free here.Congratulations to David Snabel, winner of a Stellar Question badge for How do I see which version of Swift I’m using?.

At Netlify Compose 2023, Biilmann announced their new composable web platform. This isn’t Netlify’s first rodeo—we talked to them for episodes 588 and 456.You can find Matt Biilmann on X or LinkedIn (and perhaps elsewhere). Today’s shoutout goes to Dick Lucas who asked a topical question, How to prevent Netlify from treating warnings as errors because process.env.CI = true?, viewed by over 84,000 people.

The company says v0 is intended to author the first draft of your site or app, then help you iterate quickly. It won't mean the end of junior web developers, says Lee, as a polished final draft still requires a human touch. And it's not a low code no code approach, as the system allows you to switch easily between the GenAI approach and the actual code.You can learn more about v0 here and head over here to join the waitlist.You can find Lee on LinkedIn or his website.Congrats to Stack Overflow user Jonathon Reinhart, who earned a Lifeboat badge for answering the question: How can I import a static library in Python? 

Listen to our previous episodes with Eliot here and here.Viam is a software platform for building, monitoring, and managing data from smart machines, including industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, smart home appliances, and IoT devices. Get an overview of the Viam platform or dig into their docs.Connect with Eliot on LinkedIn.Three cheers for Stack Overflow user mattl, who won a Great Question badge with How to remove all contents of a directory using Golang?.

CodeWhisperer is an AI coding companion trained on Amazon and open-source code that gives you coding suggestions in real time. In addition to being general manager for CodeWhisperer, Doug is also the GM for Amazon CodeGuru Security, which uses machine learning to detect security policy violations and vulnerabilities. Connect with Doug on LinkedIn.Asked and answered: user Manodnya B won a Lifeboat badge for answering Cannot find the Start Button under CodeWhisperer in AWS Toolkit.

Clockwise is a time orchestration platform that optimizes schedules to create more time in your day. Clockwise AI, their new GPT-powered scheduling assistant, is launching in beta. Join the waitlist here to get early access. (They’re also hiring!)Ryan wrote a recent article about whether meetings are making developers less productive.Cal Newport’s instant classic Deep Work is about learning to tune out distractions and focus on cognitively demanding tasks.Speaking of classics, Paul Graham of Y Combinator wrote about maker’s vs. manager’s schedules back in 2009.Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.Kudos to Stack Overflow user Joe Caruso, who won a Great Question badge with Get current time in hours and minutes.

California is trying to transform how math is taught. How’s that going?Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for work that allows scientists to see how electrons move by mapping their positions in an atom. Learn more here and here.As Ben says, speaking of things that are difficult to observe and don’t make a lot of sense, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is on trial for a historically huge amount of fraud. Follow the live trial blog from Wired or check out their explainer.Starting next year, Unity is charging developer fees. We explore the back and forth as they try to find a solution that works for the company and the community.Shoutout to user vasco, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering How to test abstract class in Java with JUnit?.

If you want to hear more of her work, check out Alexandra’s Instagram. She uses Tidal Cycles and Supercollider to make algorithms that get people to dance. Interested in algoraves? You may be able to find one near you or run your own. Check out Alexandra in her ad for Logitech, then check out her favorite keyboard. 

Ben is watching AI Explained, a YouTube channel that covers the latest AI developments and their implications. Read Ryan’s article ​​Do large language models know what they are talking about?.Is language really unique to humans? New research suggests maybe not.Not for the first time, Ryan recommends the work of Noam Chomsky: Why Only Us: Language and Evolution, an evolutionary account of language acquisition in humans written with Robert C. Berwick.OverflowAI search is now available for alpha testing. Learn more here.Good news for your cable clutter: Apple is switching to USB-C charging ports. Here’s when.The WGA (Writers Guild of America) strike ended with an agreement that “allows for artificial intelligence as a tool, not a replacement,” but the arguments about creativity, copyright, and AI are far from over.If you’re interested in working with PHP, head over to the PHP Collective and check out conversations like Most useful new PHP features for version 8?.

pgnanalyze helps users deliver consistent PostgreSQL performance and availability at any scale. Get started with a free trial or explore their docs. You can also find them on YouTube, where Lukas posts a weekly show called 5mins of Postgres.Lukas was a founding engineer of Citus Data. Citus is an open-source extension to PostgreSQL that was eventually acquired by Microsoft. Find them on GitHub.If you’re new to the topic, SQL (Structured Query Language) is a language for querying databases, introduced in the 1970s. Find Lukas on LinkedIn, Twitter, or GitHub.

Check out Luyang’s work at his website or in this Youtube playlist. To make these animations, Luyang uses Processing, a 20-year-old language that started out as a visual way to teach programming but evolved into a professional development tool. Logitech selected Luyang as one of the ambassadors to show off what you can do with their MX Keys S Combo. Shout out to George Profenza for dropping a top answer on Position of a vector in coordinate system (Processing/p5.js).

If you missed the first part of our conversation with Chris, listen to it here.Modular’s new programming language, Mojo, is built for AI developers. Check out their docs or find them on GitHub.Connect with Chris on LinkedIn. Shoutout to user DanielGibbs, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering what is the difference between getType() and getClass() in java?.

Modular built a new programming language, Mojo, for AI developers. Explore their docs or find them on GitHub.Chris is on LinkedIn. Congratulations to user Shengyuan Lu, whose answer to Priority queue ordering of elements merited a Lifeboat badge.

If you missed the first part of this conversation, listen to it here.Replit is a browser-based IDE (integrated development environment). Check out their blog or start coding.ICYMI: Stack Overflow recently implemented semantic search, allowing users to search using natural language.Explore Stack Overflow Labs to learn more about OverflowAI and other projects.Amjad Masad is on LinkedIn, Twitter, and GitHub.Congratulations to Stack Overflow user macxpat, whose answer to How to install Linux packages in Replit earned a Lifeboat badge.

Replit is a browser-based IDE (integrated development environment). See what they’re up to on their blog or just start coding.RIP Google Wave, one of the greats.Find Amjad on LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, or via his website.

After founding two companies, including StrongDM, a dynamic management access platform (explore their docs here), Elizabeth took a “break” by co-authoring a book. Founder vs Investor: The Honest Truth About Venture Capital from Startup to IPO is about what she learned as a founder and executive about the founder-investor relationship. Order it on Bookshop or Amazon.Elizabeth’s co-author is investor and advisor Jerry Neumann, managing director of Neu Venture Capital.One option for your next weekend outing: a ride and tie.Connect with Elizabeth on LinkedIn.Connect with Jerry Neumann on LinkedIn.Nice work: User Reap’s answer to Get String Name from Enum in C# earned them a Lifeboat badge.

Gašper’s work combines machine learning, statistical modeling, neuroimaging, and behavioral experiments “to better understand how neural networks learn internal representations in speech and how humans learn to speak.”One thing that surprised him about generative adversarial networks (GANs)? How innovative they are, capable of generating English words they’ve never heard before based on words they have.Read about how AI is restoring a stroke survivor’s ability to speak.Universal grammar proposes a hypothetical structure in the brain responsible for humans’ innate language abilities. The concept is credited to the famous linguist Noam Chomsky; read his take on GenAI.AI expert Yoshua Bengio recently signed an open letter asking AI labs to pause the training of AI systems powerful enough to pass the Turing test. Read about his reasoning.Find the Berkeley Speech and Communication Network here.Find Gašper on his website, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Or dive into his research.Congratulations to Lifeboat badge winner and self-proclaimed data nerd John Rotenstein, who saved How can I delete files older than seven days in Amazon S3? from the ignominy of ignorance.

Zapier is a no-code automation platform that allows users to create custom workflows for their critical work apps. Learn how it works, peruse the blog, or sign up to try beta AI features.Check out Reid’s article about how to write more effective AI prompts.Zapier built a natural language actions (NLA) API to enable AI models to independently use natural language to complete Zapier actions.You know the doge, but do you know the dog? RIP Balltze.Find Reid on LinkedIn and the social network formerly known as Twitter.Find Kyle on LinkedIn, GitHub, and text-based social media.

Stack Overflow’s Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) focus on aspects of employees’ personhood, “who you are outside of your role, who you bring to every single room that you enter,” Joey explains. Among our ERGs are Black and Brown, LGBTQ+, MIND (mental illness and neurodiversity), and a group for caregivers and parents. Interested in learning more about our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, plus more about what it’s like to work at Stack Overflow? Start here.Members of Stack’s MIND ERG contributed invaluable perspective, insights, and feedback that helped us write our two-parter on ADHD and neurodiversity: Developer with ADHD? You’re not alone and What developers with ADHD want you to know.Joey is on LinkedIn.Natasha is also on LinkedIn.Kyle is on Linked, GitHub, and text-based social media.Stack Overflow user apostofes earned a Great Question badge for their query How do I get the value of a tensor in PyTorch?, which has helped 175,000 people and counting.

Rockset is a real-time search and analytics database. Explore their docs and developer tools here.We here at Stack Overflow recently implemented our own vector search. Here’s a technical deep dive into how we did it. Louis is on LinkedIn.Three cheers for Lifeboat badge winner user7610, who rescued C++ application terminates with 143 exit code. What does it mean? with a solid answer.

Sorcero uses a mix of natural language processing, generative AI, and even more old school symbolic AI, where they craft their own ontologies, to try and ingest that river of new medical data and make it easier to search and comprehend. Less than 0.2% of the global population can read a medical paper! AI can help make these dense works up to 700x more readable. Medical Affairs Teams are the groups inside big pharmaceutical companies that helps surface the right information to health providers. It’s hard for them to keep up with the thousands of new articles and research papers being published each month, much less unpack that information. Connect with Dipanwita Das and Hellmut Adolphs on LinkedIn. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner John Carrell for saving the question Self join vs. inner join with an excellent answer. 

Last month, we announced the launch of OverflowAI from the stage of WeAreDevelopers. To learn more about AI-driven products and features in the works, check out Stack Overflow Labs. Among the projects Alex works on is a semantic search API and the new search experience on Stack Overflow for Teams.LLMs can be vulnerable to jailbreak attacks like the napalm grandma exploit.Kyle is on GitHub, Linked, and text-based social media.Michael is on LinkedIn.Alex is on LinkedIn.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Pushpendra, who scooped Error: Invalid postback or callback argument from a churning ocean of ignorance. 

SPONSORED BY DISCOVER FINANCIAL SERVICESGo deeper into Technology at Discover. If your interested in working on an event-driven architecture that uses domain-driven design within a financial organization, check out jobs.discover.com.Connect with Paul on LinkedIn.. 

The mission of Night Shift Development is to democratize data analytics to help organizations and users of all skill levels understand their data. Their flagship product, ClearQuery, is a data intelligence and analytics platform designed for nontechnical users. ClearQuery has a free version that lets you try out the full array of features. Learn how it works and register here to get started, gratis.Learn how Stack Overflow implemented semantic search to allow users to search using natural language.Read about why self-healing code is the future of software development.Tim is on LinkedIn. Thanks and congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Boann, whose answer to Sort four numbers without an array has been viewed 23,000 times and counting.

Vlad is Head of Research and Development at Siemens Healthineers, the healthcare arm of tech conglomerate Siemens. He wrote about SRE on our blog here.His book, Establishing SRE Foundations: A Step-by-Step Guide to Introducing Site Reliability Engineering in Software Delivery Organizations, is available now. Site reliability engineering (SRE) applies a software engineering approach to IT operations and infrastructure, with the goal of building scalable, reliable systems capable of handling constant updates from dev teams. SRE is closely related to DevOps.ICYMI, we talked with Chef cofounder Adam Jacob about how he’s creating a new-and-improved approach to infrastructure automation. Listen to that conversation here.Connect with Vlad on LinkedIn, where you can also read snippets of his book on SRE.Lifeboat badge winner Abbas Galiyakotwala’s answer to How do I split a comma-separated string? filled a void of ignorance with a little extra knowledge.

Twilio is a customer engagement platform whose communication APIs for voice, text, chat, email, and video are used by millions of developers. See what’s happening on their blog, dig into their docs, or check out their Stack Overflow Collective.This summer, Twilio announced CustomerAI, which applies the power of LLMs to the rich troves of customer data that flows through Twilio’s platform. Learn more here.ICYMI: From the stage of WeAreDevelopers, Stack Overflow announced a roadmap for integrating GenAI into our public platform and paid offerings. Check out Stack Overflow Labs to see what we’re working on.Also ICYMI: Listen to our conversation with Jody about his path from physics to sales to programming and what drew him to working at Stack Overflow.Register for SIGNAL 2023, Twilio’s customer and developer conference, happening virtually and for free on August 23, 2023. Attendees can expect a deep dive into AI and how it’s revolutionizing customer experience technology.Connect with Kathryn on LinkedIn or the social network formerly known as Twitter.Connect with Jody on LinkedIn. Three cheers for Lifeboat badge winner blackgreen, who swooped in to save How can I write a generic function that accepts any numerical type? from the howling void of ignorance.

Find out why others have joined Shell. If you want to experience being a developer at one of the world’s largest energy companies, they’re hiring.Amber Webb is on LinkedIn.Naresh Kumar is on LinkedIn.Congrats to Tomasz Kula, today’s Lifeboat badge winner, for dropping some knowledge on Multiple components binding with the same reactive form control update issue and saving it from ruin. 

Sean hosts Partially Redacted, a podcast about data privacy, security, and compliance.He also hosts the podcast Software Engineering Daily, which features technical interviews on everything from the ethics of GPTs to cloud-native search and WebAssembly. Start with the recent episode Surviving ChatGPT with Christian Hubicki (of Survivor fame).You can also read about how he crowdsourced a behavioral model for Survivor.Sean spent four years working in developer relations (DevRel) at Google. Here’s a Software Engineering Daily episode about the role DevRel plays at Google.Connect with Sean on LinkedIn or Twitter (I mean, X), or check out his website.Kudos to Great Question badge winner Kai Sellgren for asking How to remove an element from a vector given the element?.

You can learn more about OverflowAI and sign up to be an alpha tester here.You can check out Ellen and Jody on Linkedin. Congrats to Ben Lindsay, who was awarded a Lifeboat badge for his answer to: How can I divide each element in a tuple by a single integer?

Pablo is a Python core developer, Steering Council member, and release manager of Python 3.10 and 3.11. He’s currently a senior software engineer at Bloomberg.Looking for a comprehensive guide to contributing to Python? The Python Developer’s Guide is the place to start.The Zen of Python is a list of the language’s guiding principles, including, “There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it.”Find Pablo on LinkedIn, Twitter, and GitHub.Find Kyle, a senior software engineer on Stack Overflow’s public platform, on Linked, Twitter, and GitHub.

Pablo is a Python core developer, Steering Council member, and release manager of Python 3.10 and 3.11. He splits this work 50/50 with his day job as a senior software engineer at Bloomberg.An astrophysicist by training, he did his PhD on rotating black holes.Whether you’re a new contributor or a seasoned veteran, the Python Developer’s Guide is a comprehensive guide to contributing to Python.Pablo is on LinkedIn, Twitter, and GitHub.Kyle is also on Linked, Twitter, and GitHub.Shoutout to Inquisitive Badge winner trever for asking well-received questions on 30 separate days.

DoIT’s sales pitch is simple: they provide technology and expertise to clients who want to use the cloud, free of charge, with the big cloud providers paying the bills.You can check out Sascha’s writing on machine learning on his Medium blog.  Connect with him on LinkedIn or subscribe to his YouTube channel.

Cat’s research centers on the socio-cognitive factors and processes that help people learn and succeed. In her role as director of Pluralsight Flow’s Developer Success Lab, she studies what makes software teams thrive and shares that research with the community so teams can learn from her findings.In a recent report, the Dev Success Lab explored how visibility can encourage higher-performing teams and better business outcomes.Pluralsight is an education platform for software developers. Pluralsight Flow, their software delivery intelligence platform, is designed to eliminate developer friction and wasted time.Cat is on LinkedIn and Twitter.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is Kent Kostelac, who gave a terrific answer to One-line if-else in C#.

ICYMI, listen to our episode with Agile pioneer Jim Highsmith: The meeting that changed how we build software (Ep. 579).Explore Connell’s website or his talks.Connell will be speaking at DDD East Midlands again this year: October 7, 2023 (with apologies to our British listeners for the date format). He’s also on GitHub, Twitter, and Stack Overflow (naturally).A very special Lifeboat badge is awarded to Connell for answering his own question: Why does this SelectMany perform several SQL queries instead of a single join?.

Netlify’s all-in-one development platform gives devs access to build, deploy, and backend services for websites and web apps. Get started with their docs.Jamstack is a web development architecture based on JavaScript, APIs, and Markup (the JAM in Jamstack). Learn what Jamstack is and what benefits it offers.Composable architecture has been called “the next big thing” in web development. Netlify defines it as “a development approach [that] provides the ability to more rapidly build technology stacks by making use of logically separated reusable and customizable components.”Dana is on LinkedIn.Warm congrats to Lifeboat badge winner hasectic saif, who rescued the question How can I print to standard error in C with 'printf'? from an answerless void.

VerseProp is a digital real estate platform where users can buy, sell, and rent virtual properties.New to the concept of digital real estate? The Motley Fool has a useful primer for you.If you need to brush up on your investment terms, a supercycle is “a sustained period of expansion, usually driven by robust growth in demand for products and services.”Joel is on LinkedIn.Will is on LinkedIn.Follow VerseProp on Twitter, where the team welcomes questions.Today’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to Omar, for helping 44,000 people and counting with their answer to Event handlers on Message box buttons.

Our 2023 Developer Survey explored AI’s benefits for developers. Read about the results here.For more WWDC talk, listen to our episode from last month: Chatting with Apple at WWDC: Macros in Swift and the new visionOS (Ep. 578).Squarespace is acquiring Google Domains.Congratulations to Bruno Brant, who won a Lifeboat badge for answering Where can I view LINQ source code?.

While he’s been the dean of the School of Computer Science since 2019, Martial started his career at Carnegie Mellon University way back in 1984. Ben covered LIDAR inventor Velodyne while at the Verge, while Martial has LIDAR’s ancestor, the laser rangefinder, which was state of the art in 1986. Martial’s area of research is in computer vision and perception for autonomous systems. Since 1985, he’s been a part of 388 publications. Congrats to Lifeboat winner mx0 for their answer to the question “How to use a reserved keyword in pydantic model?”

Software might not be top of mind when you think of an energy company like Shell, but software engineering powers a lot of what they do. The tech stack includes React, Golang, Python, GraphQL, MongoDB, Kafka, and the list goes on. The experience their developers have at work is a priority for the organization and its leaders. Episode notes:Find out why others have joined Shell. If you want to experience what being a developer at one of the world’s largest energy companies looks like, they’re hiring.You can connect with Abhai on LinkedIn. Congrats to this episode’s lifeboat badge winner, CertainPerformance, for their answer to Convert different strings to snake_case in JavaScript. You saved the question and got some shinies for your profile. 

Adam is the cofounder and former CTO of Chef, which provides DevOps automation tools that help configure, deploy, and manage application infrastructure, including security and compliance.Adam’s new venture, System Initiative, reimagines infrastructure-as-code as collaborative, open-source software. See what they’re up to on their blog, starting with Adam’s article DevOps without papercuts.If you’re interested in playing with a developer build of System Initiative, submit your information here. You can also join System Initiative on Discord (and keep an eye on their open positions).Connect with Adam on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Sofy is a no-code test automation platform for mobile apps. SofySense is their OpenAI-powered AI assistant. See what they’re up to on their blog or check out their open roles.One of the biggest challenges in testing is deciding whether to use mock or live data. Interested in reading about how Stack Overflow is building up our test coverage?Syed is on LinkedIn.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Todd A. Jacobs for interceding between the question How can I check whether a string is an integer in Ruby? and the relentless march of time.

CodiumAI plugs into your IDE and suggests meaningful test suites as you code. See what they’re up to on their blog or scope out their open roles. You can also follow them on Twitter.Connect with Kyle on Linked, Twitter, or GitHub.Connect with Itamar on LinkedIn.Today’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to Héctor M. for answering Convert a string to a Boolean in C#. Thanks for spreading some knowledge.

Interested in trying Duet? You can get on the waitlist here.You can learn more about tuning and deploying your own version of Google’s foundation models in their Generative AI studio.If tuning your own model sounds overwhelming, you can head to Model Garden, where a wide selection of open-source and third-party models are available to try.Marcos is on LinkedIn.

Jim is a pioneering software developer who was one of 17 original signatories to the Agile Manifesto. His first engineering job was on a little NASA program you may have heard of: Project Apollo.His latest book is Wild West to Agile: Adventures in software development evolution and revolution; get your copy here.Find Jim on LinkedIn or his website.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is nCod3d for answering How can I find how many useful digits are in any given a number N?. Thanks for spreading some knowledge.

Our guests today are Christopher Thielen, product manager for languages and frameworks at Apple, and Josh Shaffer, a Senior Director of Software at Apple with a focus on Swift frameworks. We discuss the introduction of Swift Macros, improving widgets with App Intents, and some of the new paradigms for crafting apps in visionOS.If you want to get the full picture of all the updates Apple announced for software developers, you can watch this year’s State of the Union or dive into particulars with 175 different videos focused on key elements of the announcements.

MosaicML is a platform for training and deploying large AI models at scale. Explore their docs, check out their blog, and keep an eye on their open roles.Jonathan Frankle is the Chief Scientist at MosaicML and an incoming Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvard.Abhinav Venigalla is the NLP Architect at MosaicML.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is singmotor for rescuing How to remove columns with too many missing values in Python from the dustbin of history.

Rebuy is an AI-powered personalization platform. Check out their developer hub, explore case studies, or keep up with their blog.Cameron is a PhD student in computer science and member of the OptimaLab at Rice University. Autonomous agents are AI-powered programs that can create tasks for themselves in response to a given objective. They “can create tasks for themselves, complete tasks, create new tasks, reprioritize their task list, complete the new top task, and loop until their objective is reached,” according to one beginner’s guide to autonomous agents.Follow Cameron’s work on Twitter or Substack, or his website. Read his publications here.This week’s Lifeboat badge honoree is Mark Setchell for sharing their knowledge with the world: I need to convert a fixed-width file to 'comma-delimited' in Unix.

Joonko is an automated diversity recruiting layer named for Japanese mountain climber ​​Junko Tabei, the first woman to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. You can learn about their talent pool, keep up with their blog, or check out their open positions.ICYMI, read our blog post about how the recent tech layoffs have had a disproportionate impact on women, people of color, and immigrants.Connect with Ilit on LinkedIn.This week’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to pppery for their answer to Why use positional-only parameters in Python 3.8+?.

Angular is an open-source web framework used by millions of developers. Explore the Angular community. Miško is currently CTO at Builder, an API-driven, drag-and-drop headless CMS with a visual editor. Explore their docs or see what they’re up to on their blog.Builder’s full-stack web framework is Qwik, which just reached 1.0.Let Miško walk you through why Hydration is Pure Overhead.ICYMI, listen to our episode with Builder CEO Steve Stewell.Connect with Miško on LinkedIn, Twitter, or GitHub. You can also check out his website.This week’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to ORION for their answer to Unicode symbol that represents "download".

Pierre-Étienne’s interest in computing began with the functional programming language OCaml, created by Xavier Leroy. Before OCaml, Pierre-Étienne explains, “everyone thought functional programming was doomed to be extremely slow.”Pijul is a free, open-source distributed version control system. You can get started here. Want a GitHub-like interface? Find it here.Read the article that led to this conversation: Beyond Git: The other version control systems developers use. Pierre-Étienne is currently working on a new project with the creators of the open-source game engine Godot. We hosted Godot cofounder and lead developer Juan Linietsky on the podcast a few months back; listen here.Nix is a package management and system configuration tool. Learn how it works or explore the NixOS community. Connect with Pierre-Étienne on LinkedIn.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Rachit for answering Passing objects between fragments.

While Mauricio and team had to get back to bare metal, most programmers are headed in the opposite direction. It’s why MIT switched from Scheme to Python. At Stack Overflow, we’re familiar with what happens to websites during physical failures, like hurricanes. Connect with Mauricio on LinkedIn. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner The Nail, who pinned a solid answer on the question, if->return vs. if->else efficiency.

Visit Dagna’s website, theMindfulDev.com, to learn more about her coaching process, which is built around understanding what fulfillment looks like for each client. Dagna is on LinkedIn.You can also connect with Ceora on Twitter or her website.Ryan is also on Twitter, especially when there’s a good AI joke to be shared.Gold star for Lifeboat badge winner JasonHorsleyTech for rescuing the question Installing PHP 7.3 on a new MacBook Pro with the new A1 chip (Apple silicon).

Simon is the founder and longtime project lead of OWASP ZAP, an integrated penetration testing tool that helps uncover vulnerabilities in web apps, including compromised authentication, sensitive data exposure, and SQL injection. ZAP is OWASP’s most active project and the world’s most popular web app scanner. Check out other OWASP projects here or explore ZAP’s docs.Check out our blog post on how you can mitigate the ten most-found OWASP vulnerabilities in Stack Overflow C++ snippets.Jit, where Simon is a distinguished engineer, is a DevSecOps platform that allows high-velocity engineering teams to embed security requirements throughout the DevOps workflow. You can explore Jit’s docs here.Today we’re shouting out the question CSP Alerts by OWASP even though CSP header is added, definitively answered by one Simon Bennetts.Simon is on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Learn more about Forrest on his website and check out his newsletter. You can follow Paige on Twitter or her LinkedIn.Get on the list to try out some of the new stuff released today here.

Cloudflare offers zero-trust security and performance tools for web and SaaS apps.Cloudflare Workers allows devs to deploy serverless code globally to over 285 data centers around the world.Astro is an open-source web framework built for speed. Houston is a bot that lets you chat with their docs.Check out Confbrew, a conference session Q&A bot from Markprompt and Contenda (where Cassidy is CTO). Connect with Brendan on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.Connect with Michael on Twitter.Connect with Fred on LinkedIn.While you’re at it, follow Ceora and Cassidy on Twitter. Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner The Nail for saving if->return vs. if->else efficiency from oblivion.

Luca currently heads up product at Humanitec, a platform orchestrator that provides self-service “golden paths” for developers.Get up to speed (or refresh your memory) on what platform engineering involves and what an internal developer platform is.Dynamic configuration management (DCM) is a methodology for configuring compute workloads.Stop by the Platform Engineering Slack channel.Hear from top DevOps and platform engineering leaders at PlatformCon 2023, a virtual event held June 8-9.Find Luca on LinkedIn and Twitter.Cheers to Lifeboat badge winner Devart for rescuing How can I show the table structure in SQL Server query? from the dustbin of history.

Ben and Ceora talk through some thorny issues around AI-generated music and art, explain why creators are suing AI companies for copyright infringement, and compare notes on the most amusing/alarming AI-generated content making the rounds (Pope coat, anyone?).Episode notes:Getty Images is suing the company behind AI art generator Stable Diffusion for copyright infringement, accusing the company of copying 12 million images without permission or compensation to train its AI model.Meanwhile, a group of artists is suing the companies behind Midjourney, DreamUp, and Stable Diffusion for “scraping and collaging” their work to train AI models. One of those artists, Sarah Anderson, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about seeing her comics gobbled up by AI models and regurgitated as far-right memes.Speaking of copyright violations, did Vanilla Ice really steal that hook from David Bowie and Freddie Mercury? (Yes.)Check out the AI model trained on Kanye’s voice that sounds almost indistinguishable from Ye himself.Read The Verge’s deep dive into the intersection of AI-generated music and IP/copyright laws.Watch the AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti that’s been called “the natural end point for AI development.”ICYMI: The Pope coat was real in our hearts.Columbia University’s Data Science Institute recently wrote about how blockchain can give creators more control over their IP, now that AI-generated art is clearly here to stay.Congrats to today’s Lifeboat badge winner, herohuyongtao, for answering How can I add a prebuilt static library in a project using CMake?.

Olin College of Engineering has one of the top-ranked undergrad engineering programs in the US. Its computing curriculum is a concentration within the engineering major, not a standalone major. The upshot is a liberal arts-informed course of study with fewer math and theory requirements than a typical CS degree and a greater emphasis on practical, job-ready skills like code quality, testing, and documentation. To learn more about how software design is taught at Olin, explore the course.Andrew Mascillaro is a senior at Olin majoring in electrical and computer engineering. He’s currently a software engineering intern at Tableau. You can find him on LinkedIn.Steve Matsumoto is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Olin; his academic interests include crypto and cybersecurity. You can find him on GitHub or through his website.

Prosus, one of the world’s largest tech investors, acquired Stack Overflow in 2021.Check out the annual State of AI Report from Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth.Read our CEO’s recent post on Stack Overflow’s approach to Generative AI.Connect with Paul on LinkedIn. Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is suvayu for their answer to How to put a big centered "Thank You" in a LaTeX slide.

Akita is a monitoring and observability platform that watches API traffic live and automatically infers endpoint structure.Jean, who comes from a family of computer scientists, earned a PhD from MIT and taught in the CS department at Carnegie Mellon University before founding Akita.Read Jean’s post on the Stack Overflow blog: Monitoring debt builds up faster than software teams can pay it off.Jean is on LinkedIn and Twitter.Congrats are in order for Stellar Question badge winner legendary_rob for asking Adding a favicon to a static HTML page.

A common refrain you’ll hear these days is that servers should be scaled out, easy to replace, and interchangeable—cattle, not pets. But for the ops folks who run those servers the opposite is true. You can’t just throw any of them into an incident where they may not know the stack or system and expect everything to work out. Every operator has a set of skills that they’ve built up through research or experience, and teams should value them as such. They’re people, not pets, and certainly not cattle—you can’t just get a new one when you burn out your existing ones. On this episode of the podcast—sponsored by Chronosphere—we talk with Paige Cruz, Senior Developer Advocate at Chronosphere, about how teams can reduce the cognitive load on ops, the best ways to prepare for inevitable failures, and where the worst place to page Paige is. Episode notes:Chronosphere provides an observability platform for ops people, so naturally, the company has an interest in the happiness of those people. If you’re interested in the history of the pets vs. cattle concept , this covers it pretty well. Previously, we spoke with the CEO of Chronosphere about making incidents easier to manage. We’ve covered this topic on the blog before, and two articles came up during our conversation with Paige. You can connect with Paige on Twitter, where she has a pretty apropos handle. Congrats to Stellar Question badge winner Bruno Rocha for asking How can I read large text files line by line, without loading them into memory?, which at least 100 users liked enough to bookmark.  

Alura is a Portuguese-language edtech platform where users can learn programming, backend and mobile development, data science, design and UX, DevOps, and more.They started small, grew into a bustling online program, then purchased a majority stake in FIAP, a private university in São Paulo, Brazil.  Paulo and Stack Overflow Director of Engineering Roberta Arcoverde cohost a popular Portuguese-language podcast about programming, design, startups, and technology.Paulo’s new open-source project is full of career resources for T-shaped developers.Connect with Alura CEO Paulo Silveira on LinkedIn.Connect with Alura Chief Education Officer Guilherme Silveira on LinkedIn.Connect with Roberta Arcoverde on LinkedIn.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is netblognet for their answer to Get JSON object from URL.

Fermyon offers serverless cloud computing. Spin is their developer tool for building WebAssembly microservices and web applications; check it out on GitHub.Like past podcast guest David Hsu of Retool (and yours truly), Matt earned a degree in the humanities before deciding to prioritize his “side gig” in tech.Follow Fermyon on GitHub. Matt is on LinkedIn.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner keineahnung2345 for saving Hamming distance between two strings in Python from the dustbin of time.

Cerbos is an open-source, scalable authorization-as-a-service that aims to make implementing roles and permissions a cinch. Explore their docs or see how their customers are using Cerbos. Stateless applications like Cerbos don’t retain data from previous activities, giving devs predictable plug-and-play functionality across cloud, hybrid, on-prem, and edge instances.Connect with Alex on LinkedIn and Twitter.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Hoopje for rescuing Print in bold on a terminal from the dustbin of history.

If you prefer, you can read this as a Q&A article or watch the video.Kong is a cloud-native API platform. The first iteration of an API marketplace Marco and his colleagues built was Mashape.Developments like GraphQL and gRPC have become critical as the number of APIs increases over time.Find Marco on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Right now, plenty of people are building businesses on social media platforms, on streaming platforms, and on market platforms that they don’t control. That platform can make the rules in any way they want and remove access at any time. That means founders are potentially one step away from losing their livelihood. The same goes for consumers buying from these platforms: if you lose access to your account, there goes all your purchases. As it turns out, you were licensing everything, not buying it. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Ripple CTO David Schwartz about the promise that decentralized trust and distributed consensus has for software development — and for more transparency in ownership. Episode notes:Cross-border payments, while they might not be the sexiest app, are one of the best product-market fits for blockchains. Learn more about Ripple at their home page. Check out the documentation to learn more about building on the XRP Ledger. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, asmeurer, for their answer to What does `S` signify in SymPy? 

Smart contracts aren’t actually new. Computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer Nick Szabo coined the term in 1994 (possibly earlier, depending on who you ask). Old problems seem to keep coming back. Bret Victor gave a talk in 2013 called “The Future of Programming,” where he talked about problems from 1973 that were still relevant. To learn more about the Agoric blockchain, check out their homepage. If you’d rather shape how the blockchain itself operates, much of Agoric’s code is open source. Connect with Dean on Twitter or Telegram

A Principal Engineer at GitHib, Kris is president of the Nivenly Foundation and an admin at Hachyderm, an instance of the decentralized social network powered by Mastodon. The ongoing changes at Twitter have fueled interest in alternative, decentralized platforms like Mastodon and Discord.Read Leaving the Basement, Kris’s post about scaling and migrating Hachyderm out of her basement.Watch Kris’s conversation with DigitalOcean Chief Product Officer Gabe Monroy about building decentralized IT platforms.Find Kris on Twitter, GitHub, Twitch, or YouTube.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner metakeule for answering How can I get an error message in a string in Go?

Today’s guests from Browser Co. are software engineer Victoria Kirst and design lead Dustin Senos of The Browser CompanyThe Browser Company is building a new kind of browser designed to keep users “focused, organized and in control.” Arc, their browser, is “full of big new ideas about how we should interact with the web” and has been called “the best web browser to come out in the last decade.” For an introduction to and first look at Arc, start with this video. You can also join the waiting list or subscribe to the Substack.Follow The Browser Company on Twitter.Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn or Twitter.Connect with Dustin on LinkedIn or Twitter.Special thanks to Ellis Hamburger, owner of the best username, for facilitating this terrific conversation with Victoria and Dustin.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Todd for answering How can I name a @Service with multiple names in Spring?.

In his role at SwissOne Capital, Kenny champions investments in Web3 and the metaverse. A writer on all things crypto since 2013, he’s a regular contributor to the US Chamber of Commerce.The collapse of Three Arrows Capital and FTX eroded investor trust in crypto, but Kenny remains “cautiously optimistic” about the market’s future.Connect with Kenny on LinkedIn or Twitter.Congratulations are in order for Lifeboat badge winner xray1986 for their answer to Unicode symbol that represents "download".

The history of computing has been a story of moving up levels of abstraction: from hard-coding algorithms and directly manipulating memory addresses with assembly languages to using more natural language constructs in high-level general purpose languages to abstracting the hardware of the computer in cloud compute. Now serverless functions take that abstraction even further. We’ve made the algorithms that process data simple and natural; MongoDB wants to do the same for how we persist data. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Andrew Davidson, SVP Products at MongoDB, about how they’re turning a database into a fully-managed service that developers can use in a more natural way. Along the way, we discuss how the cost bottleneck has moved from the storage media to developers’ minds, how greater abstractions can enable developers, and how to get insights from production data faster. Episode notesTry MongoDB Atlas on AWS for free.You can get started with MongoDB Atlas directly from the AWS Marketplace. If you’re at a startup, you can take advantage of their special offer for startups. The community edition of their classic database is available to download as well. If you’re looking to learn a thing or two before diving in, check out MongoDB University. Our thanks to Great Question badge winner Derek 朕會功夫 for asking How can I reverse an array in JavaScript without using libraries? You know the rarest kung fu of all: asking great questions.

The inbox improvements were Radek’s graduation project. Not bad for a newbie. Not everyone likes change, and the inbox change was no exception. So we looked into fixing that.Read about what our engineering team learned building and scaling Stack Overflow to support millions of users.Connect with Radek on LinkedIn. Find Cobih on LinkedIn and Twitter.Longtime Stacker Yaakov Ellis is also on LinkedIn.Congrats to user HelloCW on receiving a Socratic Badge for asking a well-received question on 100 separate days and maintaining a positive question record.

Our recent Pulse Survey showed how technologists visiting Stack Overflow feel about emergent technologies. The consensus is clear: AI assistants will soon be everywhere, and developers aren’t sure how they feel about that. Check out the podcast here or dive into the blog.Learn more about the emergent abilities of large language models (LLMs). For more on the intersection of AI and academia, listen to our episode with computer science professor Emery Berger or read his essay on how academics are coping with AI that can ace exams and do everyone’s homework.Catch up on the adventures of the worst coder in the world.Congrats to user d1337, whose question How to assign a name to the size() column? won a Stellar Question badge.

With so many companies offering API products, it can be hard to get your particular APIs discovered and used by the developers who need them most. You might have the best, most useful solutions out there, but if you’re relying on the digital equivalent of foot traffic for discoverability, it might as well not exist. And if an API solution can’t be found, then someone else is going to reinvent it. On this sponsored episode, we chat with SmartBear API Technical Evangelist Frank Kilcommins about the growing challenges of API visibility and how to outsmart the invisibility trap with the right development strategies and tools. Episode notes:Kilcommins suggests you can get better visibility for your APIs with SmartBear's new free API exploration tool. Open specifications like the Open API Initiative help make your endpoints easier to understand—both by humans and computers. Connect with Frank Kilcommins on Twitter and LinkedIn. Congrats to Stack Overflow user WorstCase, who asked five well-received questions on five separate days and earned themselves a shiny new Curious badge.

You can dive deeper into the research, including some lovely matrix charts, on our blog.Erin has also explored tag trends among our most loved languages and job insights from our community.Learn more about Joy on her LinkedIn.Thanks to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, russbishop, for helping to answer the question: Where is the app content folder in the simulator of Xcode? 

Per one count, more than 280,000 people were laid off from tech jobs in 2022 and the first two months of 2023.What do layoffs have in common with farting at a party? Both are a bad look if you’re the only one doing it.ICYMI: On a recent episode, we talked about how these layoffs are reshaping the job market and where to find software engineering roles outside of tech.Just laid off, or worried you might be? Cohost Ryan Donovan has some advice.Connect with Wesley on LinkedIn.

Writing code that runs without errors—and without all the bugs that only show up when the program runs—is hard enough. But teaching others to write code and understand the underlying concepts takes a deeper understanding. Now imagine doing that for 37 courses. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with Bharath Thippireddy, a VIP instructor at Udemy who has taught more than half a million students. We talk about how he went from a humble Java developer to one of Udemy’s top instructors (and a budding movie star!). Along the way, we discuss whether Java or Python is better for beginners and how to balance theory with syntax. Episode notes:Like a lot of today’s content creators, Bharath got his start posting videos on his Youtube channel in 2012.Today, you can find all of Bharath’s courses on his Udemy page.You can find out more about Bharath from his website or connect with him on LinkedIn. Udemy is one of our launch partners for our online course recommendations. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner desertnaut for their answer to What is the meaning of exclamation and question marks in Jupyter Notebook?.

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.

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?.

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.

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.

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. 

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'.

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?.

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.

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#?.

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?

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.

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?.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ReactJS

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 casesDatabase Testing: Automatically testing relational database schemasWeb Testing: Detecting and repairing poor responsive web page layoutWe'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?

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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 stackWorks with any frontend or backendBuild with your own data, like product catalogs or customer data platforms, to create rich, dynamic experiencesYou 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"? 

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#? 

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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?

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.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ceora and Cassidy talk about why engineers are so good at job hopping — and why it can pay to upgrade roles every year or two.Ceora speaks openly about the privileges of working in tech compared to other industries.Apparently, in some places, it’s a thing for engineers to leave their teams and then rejoin the organization with a promotion to get ahead. Do you boomerang?Cassidy’s husband’s favorite interview question to ask is, “If you had a magic wand and could change one thing about this company, what would you change?”Ben poses a question about whether LinkedIn AB tests are disadvantageous to some career seekers over others.Matt introduces us to the world of AI generated Pokémon.Ceora, our resident voice of Gen Z, tells us why she thinks millennials are the only true generation to understand tech.High fives to Unique Username for answering the question “how can I print to the console using JavaScript?” You get a Lifeboat Badge for helping 140,000 people.Follow Ben, Ceora, Matt, and Cassidy.

Matt takes us back to the origins of his open source days and the spark that inspired his love for engineering — including the point at which he discovered Linux.He shares how he began learning from the code itself, which was ultimately a different style of learning than what was available to him at university. Then, it was to the stacks, but not Stack Overflow. Think Barnes and Noble, not YouTube videos.Imagine trying to  navigate getting your first engineering job during the dot-com crash of the late 90s and early 2000s.We reflect on Matt's experience building projects with his daughter, including an AI-powered doorbell he built himself.Speaking of insatiable curiousity, we’d like to give a big high five to Wonton, who received the Inquisitive Badge. Thanks for coming on 30 separate days to maintain a positive question track record.Follow Matt, Ben, and Cassidy.

Our guests have done most of their ML work on AWS offerings, from AWS Personalize for their initial recommendation engine to SageMaker for model training and deployment pipeline. Now they’re building models from scratch in TensorFlow. Want to see these recommendations in action? Check out the offerings at Discovery+ and HBOMax. If you’re a ML/AL data scientist looking to shape the future of automated curation, check out their open roles. Follow our guests on LinkedIn:Shrikant DesaiSowmya Subramanian

Mariann shares how she and her UX research team at Stack Overflow are taking steps to create a more inclusive product experience, while reflecting on her experiences as a mother to a neurodiverse daughter.Wesley talks about what it’s like to be a developer with dyslexia and why self-empathy and self-compassion have been important to his evolution as a senior leader.Ceora explains why it’s important to be on a psychologically safe team from her perspective as a Black woman who is also neurodivergent.We talk about giving people the space necessary to do their best work, implementing more inclusive hiring practices, and everyday routines that help us stay our happiest and most productive.We conclude with a note about why supporting neurodiversity is good for everyone of all walks of life.Follow Ceora, Wesley, and Marianne.

Ceora shares her experience representing Auth0 at REFACTR TECH, reflecting on what it was like being back in-person after years of virtual events.Cassidy announces her move to CTO and how her current leadership role at Contenda fits into her career journey and future aspirations as a technologist.Ben talks about Stack Overflow’s Flow State, the first IRL event he’s attended since 2019 and Stack’s first ever customer conference. In case Cassidy pulled you down a rabbit hole of wondering how eels reproduce, check out this piece in the New Yorker from 2020.Be sure to follow Ceora and Cassidy on Twitter. Speaking of the power of curiosity, today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user448810 for answering the question, Feasible implementation of a prime-counting function. Thanks for helping 6,000 people gain valuable knowledge.

Guilo gives building UI components as an example of where software innovation has given him time back: he started building them as static images in Photoshop, then Sketch brought connected, interactive components, and Finally, Figma let you collaborate and build an entire system together.  If you missed any of the previous episodes, you can find them waiting for you here. Connect with Paolo Passeri on LinkedIn. Connect with Giulio Barresi on LinkedIn. Check out more mechanical keyboard products from Logitech. Congrats to KnutKnutsen for their answer to How can I specify a one-argument constructor using Lombok?, saving the question and picking up a Lifeboat badge. 

It finally happened. In the words of the Ethereum Foundation, ETH is now “ready for its interstellar voyage,” having transitioned from proof of work to proof of stake. With no centralized authority insisting on a ship date, we’re witnessing a feat. We’re all wondering what comes next. The Great Debate about hybrid and remote work continues. Is the decentralized talent movement winning? What can we do to prevent cabin fever? What do government workers do with their laptops if they need to cross the border?The semiconductor chip shortage hasn’t ended yet, but some companies seem to be hurting more than others. What gives?We conclude with a reflection on the new Apple Watch—and whether it can actually save our lives.Be sure to follow @mattkander and @benpopper on Twitter to keep the convo going.Big thanks to Androidian who is our latest Inquisitive badge recipient for coming to Stack Overflow for 30 separate days, maintaining a positive question record.Catch you all later.

About three years ago, when our public platform engineering team at Stack started growing, we realized that we needed a more robust formal project management system that could scale with all the creativity coming on board. That’s when we started looking at formal, by-the-book frameworks to empower and coach our teams to their fullest potential. We landed on Agile and Scrum. Admittedly, our development team was nervous about implementing Scrum and Agile at first. So we focused on the goals of introspection and accountability rather than the rigidness of enforcement.Agile and Scrum get a lot of hate. But is that their fault or are you doing it wrong?We talked about this on the podcast a few years ago, when Ben, Paul, and Sara wondered, “Is Scrum making you a worse engineer?” It’s about providing support—not punishing people. Done right, Agile and Scrum can be a force of freedom and autonomy when they start with trust.Connect with Shanda and Jon on LinkedIn.We conclude with a big high five to Lifeboat badge winner jminkler for their answer to how to create an Instagram share link in PHP (thank you).‘Til next time.

Like other folks we’ve talked to on the podcast, Chronosphere was born out of work pioneered at Uber. When you can’t find solutions to help you scale, sometimes you have to build them. Everything in Chronosphere was built from scratch, from the ingestion tier to the query layer. If you’re going to build something cloud native from the ground up, the clear choice for the team was Go. Cloud native observability changes the way developers interact with their code in production. Infrastructure is more complex, dev and test environments are gone, and data increases massively while data sources are more ephemeral. Congrats to david, who won a lifeboat badge for their answer to Can we convert a byte array into an InputStream in Java?

We dive into some of the ways developers can customize their keyboard with shortcuts, macros, and apps to eliminate repetitive tasks and automate the busywork that stands in the way of bigger, breakthrough innovations. Flow state can be affected by things as simple as the right lighting, so Logitech created keyboards that automatically adjust their keyboard backlighting. For those not familiar with the MX series, you can read more about the different versions, including the mechanical one, here.If you don’t know about Cassidy’s passion for keyboards, you can check out her website here or listen to a previous episode diving deep into the details of mechanical keyboards here.If you missed episode two, you can check it out below. In it, we chat with Marcel Twohig, Head of Design for the MX Series at Logitech, and Thomas Fritz, Associate Professor of Human Aspects of Software Engineering at the University of Zurich. We cover the research that Professor Fritz has done on flow states, the design work that Marcel and team have done to incorporate that research, and the tools that you can use to maximize your daily flow.

Appsmith is an open-source, low-code platform for building and maintaining internal tools like custom dashboards, admin panels, and, of course, CRUD apps.Watch Arpin’s talk on how a low-cost, low-tech solution can simplify online payments.Arpit isn’t the first engineer we’ve talked to whose career was sparked by the digital pets of the 90s. Listen to Episode #431: Words of wisdom for self-taught developers.It’s time to get excited about Hacktoberfest, an annual DigitalOcean event that encourages people to contribute to open-source projects throughout the month of October.Connect with Arpit on LinkedIn or Twitter.Last but not least, today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Belzebub for their answer to the question Custom alert dialog with rounded corners and a transparent background.

Like a lot of good tools, Backstage started as a way to stop using a spreadsheet. They knew it was something worth open-sourcing when conference attendees paid more attention to the tool than the topics of the talks. Backstage treats docs-like-code, keeping markdown files in the same repo as the code. Down with wikis, up with pull requests!If you want to learn more about Backstage, check out our recent webinar with Emma Indal, a web engineer at Spotify.

Show notesIf you’re interested in diving deeper into Professor Fritz’s research on developer flow states, check out his list of publications. Flow states can be affected by things as simple as the right lighting, so Logitech created keyboards that automatically adjust their keyboard backlighting. Lights can be used to indicate your interruptibility.; Prof. Fritz did some research on FlowLight, which indicates your willingness to be interrupted with a simple red light/green light protocol. These days, you can use your Slack status to the same effect. If you’re looking for apps to improve your daily flow, Cassidy recommends Centered.

As part of an effort to work with students at college and universities, Stack Overflow is partnering with Major League Hacking (MLH) to recruit our first cohort of Student Ambassadors. These folks will represent us on campus and lead the way in tackling challenges, earning rewards, and planning out the future of the program. Our pizza fund events are open to students in the US and Canada, and Global Hack Weeks are open to all. You can learn more about how to apply here.ICYMI: Major League Hacking cofounder Jon Gottfried and Hackathon Community Manager Mary Siebert previously came on the podcast to describe what a Major League Hackathon looks like (the succulents were a surprise).Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Manquer for their answer to the question How can I upgrade Yii 1.x to Yii 2.0?.

AssemblyAI is an AI-as-a-service provider focused on speech-to-text and text analysis. Their mission is to make it easy for developers and product teams to incorporate state-of-the-art AI technology into the solutions they’re building. Their customers include Spotify, the Dow Jones, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. Need AI to run semantic analysis on your forum comments or automatically produce summaries of blog post submissions? Rent an ML model on-demand from the cloud instead of building a solution from scratch.Just three months after its $28M Series A, AssemblyAI raised another $30M in a Series B round led by Insight Partners, Y Combinator, and Accel. In this economy?When it comes to new and cutting-edge AI developments, what’s Dylan excited about right now? This open-source implementation of AlphaFold from GitHub user lucidrains.Connect with Dylan on LinkedIn.Today we’re shouting out the winner of an Inquisitive Badge: User Edson Horacio Junior asked a well-received question on 30 separate days and maintained a positive question record.

For those not familiar with the MX series, you can read more about the different versions, including the mechanical one, here.If you don't know about Cassidy's passion for keyboards, you can check out her website here or listen to a previous episode diving deep into the details of mechanical keyboards here.Stayed tuned for episode #2, airing next week, when we'll be digging deeper into the science behind keyboards and coders with Prof. Thomas Fritz and Marcel Twohig Head of Design for the MX series.

You can find a great essay on AI helping students, and what that means for their teachers, here.Here's a piece on W4 Games plans to monetize the Godot engine.Snap says it now has one million subscribers for its Snapchat+ offering.There were no fresh lifeboats badges this week, so shoutout to Jemo for being awarded the Great Question badge. They asked: What's the difference between thread and coroutine in Kotlin

ReleaseHub provides on-demand environments for development, staging, and production. Every developer knows that environments can be a bottleneck, so ReleaseHub’s mission is to empower developers to share their ideas with the world more quickly and easily, sidestepping what Tommy calls “the big bottlenecks in development.”As CTO of TrueCar, Tommy was leading an effort to rebuild that company’s tech stack, but he needed an environment management platform, and nothing on the market fit his needs. The homegrown environment management system he developed with his cofounders would become ReleaseHub.Tommy joined Y Combinator in 2009.Connect with Tommy on LinkedIn.Today we’re shouting out the winner of an Inquisitive Badge: L-Samuels asked a well-received question on 30 separate days and maintained a positive question record.

What do companies want to gain through monitoring software—and what do they, and their employees, stand to lose? Read more.In Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport makes the point that our world isn’t geared toward deep, focused, flow-state work; instead, it rewards the appearance of busyness. Workers who see their keystrokes or mouse movements tracked are likely to focus on those behaviors instead of their projects.More than 50 countries are establishing rules to control their digital information and achieve data sovereignty. Read more.Gather round for the latest in cautionary crypto tales: The Crypto Geniuses Who Vaporized a Trillion Dollars. If you’re in the market, you can buy their yacht, the Much Wow (we kid you not).Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Tonyyyy for their answer to the question In what way does wait(NULL) work exactly in C?.

Varun is the cofounder and CTO of AKASA, which develops purpose-built AI and automation solutions for the healthcare industry.Building a physics simulator for a robot helicopter as a student at Stanford helped Varun connect his interests in physics, machine learning, and AI. Check out that project here. His instructor? Andrew Ng.Along with Ng, Varun was lucky to connect with some brilliant AI folks during his time at Stanford, like Jeffrey Dean, Head of Google AI; Daphne Koller, cofounder of Coursera; and Sebastian Thrun, cofounder of Udacity.When Varun earned his PhD in computer science and AI, Koller and Thrun served as his advisors. You can read their work here.In 2017, Udacity acquired Varun’s startup, CloudLabs, the company behind Terminal.  Connect with Varun on LinkedIn.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user John Woo for their answer to the question Update the row that has the current highest (maximum) value of one field.

Learn why some companies are moving AI and ML data and models off the cloud and back on premises.Oxide is a rack-scale server with tightly integrated hardware and software. Cofounder and Chief Product Officer Jessie Frazelle was an early core maintainer of Docker. You can find her on GitHub or LinkedIn.Check out FauxPilot, a locally hosted version of GitHub Copilot.It’s no secret that Instagram has made changes to its feed, emphasizing video content in an effort to compete with TikTok. Nor is it a secret that these changes have proved unpopular with creators, from Kylie Jenner to independent photographers and other artists. Just another reminder that these platforms are rarely for creators; they’re built to generate revenue. What Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot (of Roomba fame) might mean.Earthships are sustainable dwellings constructed from recycled and natural materials. Built for off-the-grid living, they use thermal and solar power, harvest rainwater, and often incorporate gardens to supplement food supply.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user SILENT for their answer to the question In React and Next.js constructor, I am getting “Reference Error: localstorage is not defined”.

Born and raised in China, Liam arrived in the US to attend the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied human-computer interaction. After some initial “culture shock” at the differences between his education in China and the “open and innovative” Berkeley environment, Liam thrived. After graduating, he worked at LinkedIn before returning to China to found a startup called Zaihui, offering ecommerce SaaS solutions for retailers.Liam describes the still-commonplace 9-9-6 schedule (working from nine in the morning until nine at night, six days a week) and the approach of assigning multiple teams to compete on different visions for the same product.In Liam’s view, US and Chinese engineering teams take different approaches to work, work-life balance, innovation, and risk. US teams pursue “breakthrough innovations” that impress customers, while “hustling and hardworking” Chinese teams “want to move fast and break things” to copy what works and make it incrementally better. What would a hybrid of these approaches look like? Liam’s new startup, Immersive, is combining teams from the US and China to find out.Follow Liam on LinkedIn.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Abhijit for their answer to the question Set difference versus set subtraction.

Since the day a hiring manager first wheeled a whiteboard into a conference room, software engineers have dreaded the technical interview, which can be an all-day process (or multi-day homework assignment). If you’re interviewing for multiple roles, you can expect to write out a bubble sort in pseudocode for each one. These technical interviews do no favors for hiring companies, either, because the investment needed from both parties limits the number of candidates a company can consider. In this age of data-driven decisions, perhaps there’s a way that AI and ML can help candidates and companies find each other.  On this episode of the podcast, sponsored by Turing AI, we chat with Chief Revenue Officer Prakash Gupta about building a better hiring process with AI. Turing helps companies scale their engineering programs quickly with remote developers from around the world. We talk about how to vet a profession without standard markers, the benefits of soft skills, and how AI-assisted hiring helps everyone involved. While companies have been outsourcing development for years, COVID made the software industry almost entirely remote. Suddenly, every company has the ability to hire the best developers regardless of location. And good developers can find work at companies of all sizes without packing up and settling in Silicon Valley. But when any company could conceivably interview any candidate, how do you vet candidates at scale? There is no standardized board certification for software engineers, after all. Every interviewer has to vet the candidates themselves, and that’s where human biases come in. On one side, you have Fortune 500 companies developing complex systems and undergoing digital transformation projects, plus startups looking to scale their engineering organizations as their product finds market fit. On the other, you have a new generation of engineers trained on bootcamps and online resources who may not have opportunities where they live. That’s where Turing comes in, matching 1.7 million engineers from over 140 countries with jobs at hundreds of companies. Turing strives to mitigate bias by collecting hundreds of signals about candidates over a four- to six-hour process. This process covers projects candidates have worked on, technology aptitude, and soft skills through 30-minute tests, candidates’ online presence in places like GitHub and Stack Overflow, and qualitative assessments refined over two years of feedback loops. A process that once consisted of ten interviews can now drop to two or three at the most. Some Turing customers have eliminated interviews altogether, relying on Turing’s AI-powered solutions to surface and evaluate the best candidates. To see how Turing can streamline your interview process, either as a candidate or a company, check out turing.com today.

Heather is a General Partner at OSS Capital, which provides VC backing to seed-stage COSS (commercial open source) startups. Her law practice focuses on intellectual property and open-source licensing, and she serves on the IEEE-ISTO Board of Directors.Connect with Heather on LinkedIn or explore her work on her website.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user keshlam for their answer to the question Why do we need abstract classes in Java?.

Spencer was one of the original creators of open-source, cross-platform image editing software GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), authored while he was still in college. He went on to spend a decade at Google, plus two years as CTO of Viewfinder, later acquired by Square.In 2014, he cofounded Cockroach Labs to back his creation CockroachDB, a cloud-native distributed SQL database.Database sharding is essential for CockroachDB: “a critical part of how Cockroach achieves virtually everything,” says Spencer. Read up on how sharding a database can make it faster.Like many engineers who find themselves in the C-suite, Spencer went from full-time programmer to full-time CEO. He says it’s been a “relatively gentle” evolution, but he can always go back.Like lots of you out there, Spencer started programming on a TI-99/4, the world’s first 16-bit home computer.Connect with Spencer on LinkedIn or learn more about him.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Hughes M. for their answer to the question Multiple keys pointing to a single value in Redis (Cache) with Java.

DoNotPay offers more than 250 “automated justice” services in every US state, from suing robo-callers to annulling marriages to fighting eviction. It earned Joshua the title “Robin Hood of the internet.”DoNotPay leverages AI and ML solutions, including GPT-3, to shape and refine its decision trees.Read about how DoNotPay is helping crypto traders who’ve lost money file suit against fallen leaders.Why PDFs are unfit for human (or computer) consumption.Follow Joshua on Twitter.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user EM-Creations for their answer to the question The PHP header() function is not redirecting.

A coding error reportedly caused the massive outage at Canadian telecom company Rogers that affected more than 10 million customers—a quarter of Canada’s population.In a rut? Hacker News has some advice for climbing out. (Hint: More screen time won’t help.)The Verge reports on how Starlink and other companies that provide internet connectivity through low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites are shaping an “orbital internet.”Michael Pollan’s 2019 book How to Change Your Mind—an exploration of psychedelic therapy’s history, current status, and future potential—is now a four-part Netflix documentary. We at Stack Overflow DO NOT recommend illegal drug use, but we can recommend the documentary.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Satpal for their answer to the question 'setinterval' with random time in JavaScript.

Bigeye is a data observability platform that helps teams measure, improve, and communicate data quality clearly at any scale. Explore more on their YouTube channel.Bigeye cofounders Kyle Kirwan and Egor Gryaznov met at Uber, where Kyle worked on data and Egor was a staff engineer.Kyle and Egor made a clean break with Uber before founding Bigeye, eager to avoid even the appearance of an Anthony Levandowski-like situation. If you’re not familiar with the ex-Google engineer sentenced to prison for stealing trade secrets (and later pardoned by Trump), catch up here.Learn how to save your energy for innovation by choosing boring technology.Connect with Kyle on LinkedIn.Connect with Egor on LinkedIn.Compiler is an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small and strange like, What are tech hiring managers actually looking for? And, do you have to know how to code to get started in open source? Listen to Compiler anywhere you find your podcasts or visit https://link.chtbl.com/compiler?sid=podcast.stack.overflow

San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed says a seismic shift (definitely not an exodus) is underway as tech workers continue working from home and companies like Salesforce (the city’s largest private employer) reduce office space. Breed says San Francisco lost $400 million in tax revenue in 2021, as companies shuttered offices or moved to other cities. San Francisco offices haven’t been this empty since 2009.The Wall Street Journal reports that 71 cities (and counting) are offering cash grants and other incentives to lure remote workers from Silicon Valley to, say, Tulsa, Oklahoma.If you’re a member in good standing of the Hellfire Club (or any D&D group), check out the free AI image generator from AI Dungeon.Customizable open search platform You.com debuts YouCode, a specialized search engine intended to increase developer efficiency. You.com allows users to deploy AI to customize the sources they want to see, the order in which results appear, and how private results are, reports VentureBeat.Matt is the proud owner of a new tongue scraper (TMI?), and Ben is 3D-printing him a customized holder. What are friends for?Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user LuLuGaGa for their answer to the question Is there a way to create BottomBar using SwiftUI?

Multitudes helps managers and CTOs create happier, higher-performing teams, using data they already have. Multitudes is focused on software development teams to start, but their bigger vision is to make it easier for any manager to understand and improve their teams’ culture and performance.“Developers in our audience have expressed skepticism or dismay in the past about software that tracks performance or output,” Lauren explains. Multitudes’ approach is to break down an organization’s approach to ethical team analytics in order to balance delivering value to management with respect and support for the individual developers whose work is being measured. How does that work? Read Lauren’s blog post about data ethics.Lauren founded Multitudes based on insights she acquired running Ally Skills NZ, which supports organizations in building equitable, inclusive teams. Before that, she worked with high-performance, fast-growth companies in Silicon Valley, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and New Zealand. A Stanford grad, Lauren is passionate about making equity the default both at work and in the wider world.Check out Multitudes’ success stories or explore their blog.Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Pokémon GO is six years old (it makes us feel old, too). Check out NoobBoy, the Game Boy emulator. Need more nineties nostalgia? You can still play DOOM on almost anything.What kind of game could you build with PowerPoint? Two game developers go head-to-head over 24 hours to show you: Watch the video.Did you know a moose can dive 20 feet deep and swim faster than Michael Phelps? It’s true.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user zvone for their answer to Error message "TypeError: descriptor 'append' requires a 'list' object but received a 'dict'".

Today's episode is sponsored by Opentext. You can learn more about their information management solutions here.You can find out more about Claire and here career on her LinkedIn.Opentext has a fascinating history. It began as an academic project at the University of Waterloo. The researchers were looking to digitize the Oxford English Dictionary, and created an early search engine, similar to Project Gutenberg. The private company spun out of that work.No lifeboat badge today, so we'll shout out SDK, who claimed the benefactor badge for placing a bounty on his question: How to make a dynamic slide up transition? Seems like it worked, as the question now has an accepted answer :)

Anvil is an open-source web framework for building full-stack applications entirely in Python.Ready to dig deeper into code completion? Check out Meredydd’s talk at PyCon 2022 (he even built a code completion engine live on stage). ICYMI: Listen to our previous episode with Meredydd about countering the complexity of web programming: Full-stack web programming with nothing but Python. Connect with Meredydd on LinkedIn or Twitter.The Lifeboat badge shoutout is back. Today’s badge goes to user Tomasz Nurkiewicz for their answer to Best performance for string-to-Boolean conversion.

The GPU shortage is (allegedly) over! Read about it at The Verge.Learn how low code demands more creativity from developers.On the job market? Don’t be afraid to turn the tables on your interviewer.This week’s tech recs: Help foster more equitable compensation conversations by taking Devocate’s Developer Relations Compensation Survey.Cal.com offers scheduling infrastructure for anyone and everyone—and it’s open-source.Appsmith is an open-source, low-code platform for building, shipping, and maintaining CRUD apps.Finally, if you’re wondering how to get that startup idea from back-of-napkin to exit, start with Kernal.

Devraj Varadhan is the SVP of Engineering at Ripple, which provides crypto and blockchain solutions for businesses. Ripple’s mission is to provide practical access to investment tools that can deliver economic freedom for unbanked and underbanked people around the world. Plenty of companies have pressed pause on recruitment efforts, but Ripple is hiring. Before working at Ripple, Dev spent 15 years at Amazon, building customer experiences and products across a wide swath of categories, including as VP of Delivery Experience. Connect with Dev on LinkedIn and read his blog post about how Ripple is working to accelerate financial inclusion through technology with partnerships with STASIS, the Republic of Palau, and Bhutan.Who remembers Pets.com?We normally shout out a Lifeboat badge winner, but today we’re congratulating user Ram on a Curious badge: they asked a well-received question on five separate days and maintained a positive question record. Stay curious!

Episode notesBefore joining Stack, Jody spent time at Pluralsight and AWS Training, two roles that helped him to understand the growing market for online educational self-taught developers. We interviewed his former colleagues at AWS training in this episode.Enjoy the frustration of debugging your own code. Maybe you it brings you eustress? Ben does not experience this, nor does he like the classic video game Myst. But it takes all kinds.Interested in learning more about the changing trends in Developer education? Check out data from our latest Dev Survey and research from the teams at Skillsoft, another member of the Prosus Ed-tech portfolio.Today’s lifeboat badge goes to Anton VBR for explaining: What's the function of dedent() in Python?

If you want to dive deeper on lucrative skills, you can read a blog post Mike wrote for us last month.If you want to learn more about Mike's background and career, check out his LinkedIn.Mike was previously on the blog and podcast discussing Skillsoft research about the certifications that are most in demand for top paying roles. You can read up on that and listen to his earlier interview here.As always, we want to shout out the winner of a Lifeboat badge. Today's hero is Philip, who answered the question: Substring is not working as expected if length is greater than length of String

Episode notesAn interesting podcast episode on the multiple delays that have kept Ethereum from its long-anticipated merge and kicked the difficulty bomb down the road.Since we recorded, more news broke about delaying the boom.How to Find Open Source Projects to Contributehttps://www.codetriage.com/https://www.coss.community/https://goodfirstissue.dev/A pretty cool write up on the creation of spring animations by a few Figma engineers.Looking to build your own image search engine? Check out APIs from Clarifai and Roboflow that make it easy to train your own ML model.A creative and interesting Codepen from a newly minted Figma engineer. And for those who enjoy the CSS art of yummy snacks, Cassidy’s Codepen has a few treats.Yet another rumor about Apple’s upcoming AR/VR headset. Will it ever arrive, and how would its demands for GPU-intensive work mesh with Apple’s hardware ecosystem?

Huge thanks to the more than 73,000 devs from 180 countries who spent 15 minutes each completing our 2022 Developer Survey. This year’s survey was longer than usual, since we wanted to ask about new topics as well as provide a historical throughline to understand how your responses have changed over the years.Among the takeaways from the survey: 2022 saw a 10% jump in how many folks are learning to code online (versus through a conventional coding school or from textbooks). Nearly 85% of organizations represented in the survey have at least some remote workers, while the vast majority of developers are still working remotely at least part of the time. You can read more about the results here.Worth noting: Just because you’ve learned to code doesn’t mean you have to pursue a career as a programmer. Here are four different career paths coders can follow, including product manager and sales engineer.Wondering how Ikea’s Friheten or Fjӓdermoln would actually look in your living room? The company’s new virtual design tool lets you scan rooms in your home, delete your furniture, and replace it with shiny new stuff from Ikea. You can also fill virtual showrooms to your heart’s content.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Jarzon for their answer to Make a hidden field required.

GitHub Copilot is now available to all developers. There’s also the GitHub Copilot Labs extension for Visual Studio Code, which has some neat tricks up its sleeve. Yes, Copilot is impressive; no, it’s not gunning for your job. ICYMI, check out our blog post exploring whether AI is poised to steal our livelihoods: The robots are coming for (the boring parts of) your job.Mullvad VPN is removing the option to add new subscriptions because they want to know “as little as possible” about their users: “We are constantly looking for ways to reduce the amount of data we store while still providing a usable service.”Data scraping is both ubiquitous and seemingly unavoidable—but it raises serious privacy concerns, writes David Golumbia for Real Life.Tech recs: a ladder to bypass (almost) any paywall, the smartest way to learn a new language, how to explore the JavaScript universe, a great place to listen to longform journalism, and the email-free way to read your favorite newsletters.Thanks to Liam for emailing the podcast to share Physics Girl’s terrific explanation of quantum cryptography.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user martineau for their answer to How to start and stop a thread.

RIP Internet Explorer (1995-2022), “a good tool to download other browsers.” Bummer epitaph, but the meme stands.Netlify’s unified web development workflow has out-of-this-world benefits for developer experience. Learn more by watching A Tale of Web Development in Two Universes.Netlify recently announced Netlify Edge Functions, a fully serverless runtime environment. Here’s what that means and how it works.For more on “The Edge” (not this guy or this guy), check out this episode of the Remotely Interesting podcast, featuring Phil, Salma, and Cassidy.Jamstack makes developers’ lives “pretty peachy,” to borrow Salma’s phrase. Here, she explains what Jamstack is and how it makes the web (and developers) faster.Salma helps “developers build stuff, learn things, and love what they do.” She loves helping people get into tech, where she started working after a career as a music teacher and comedian. Active in the developer community, she’s a Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies, a partnered Twitch streamer, and a relentless advocate for building a truly accessible web. Salma is the founder of Unbreak.tech, Women Who Stream Tech, and Women of Jamstack, projects that call for social change and equality in tech. Connect with her on Twitter or LinkedIn.Phil is passionate about browser technologies, the web’s empowering properties, and ingenuity and simplicity in the face of overengineering. He has built web apps for Google, Apple, Nike, R/GA, and The London Stock Exchange, and is a coauthor of Modern Web Development on the Jamstack (O’Reilly, 2019). Connect with Phil on Twitter or LinkedIn, or read his blog posts for Netlify.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Anton vBR for their answer to What’s the function of dedent() in Python?.

Docs for Devs: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing can be found here.Jared worked as a technical writer at Google for more than 14 years and recently transitioned to Waymo, the self-driving car company spun out under the Alphabet umbrella. You can find him on Twitter and LinkedIn.Zachary has been a technical writer at GitHub and the Linux Foundation, and now works as a staff technical writer at Stripe. You can find all her online accounts at her website.Interested in exploring approaches for collaboration and knowledge management on engineering teams? Why not try a tool developers already turn to regularly? Check out Stack Overflow for Teams, used by Microsoft, Bloomberg, and many others.Tired of security bottlenecks? Today’s episode is sponsored by Snyk,  a developer security platform that automatically scans your code, dependencies, containers, and cloud configs — finding and fixing vulnerabilities in real time, from the tools and workflows you already use. Create your free account at snyk.co/stackoverflow.

WWDC22 was last week (check out Apple’s highlights here). Among the most exciting demonstrations: passkeys, a new approach to authentication with the potential to finally replace passwords altogether. Apple also announced enhancements to Swift, its programming language, and a new flagship processor, the M2 chip.Now that iMessage users will be able to edit or even unsend text messages after the fact, will your group chat (or your relationship) ever be the same?Multitaskers rejoice: A new iPadOS function called Stage Manager organizes apps in a tile formation that allows users to rapidly tap from workspace to workspace.And yes, you can finally check the weather on your iPhone lock screen.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Stephen Docy for their answer to Proving that a two-pointer approach works (pair sum).

 Ever since personal information started flowing into applications on the web, securing that information has become more and more important. General security and privacy frameworks like ISO-27001 and PCI provide guidance in securing systems. Now the law has gotten involved with the European Union’s GDPR and California’s CPRA. More laws are on the way, and these laws (and the frameworks) are changing as they meet legal challenges. With the legal landscape for privacy shifting so much, every engineer must ask: How do I keep my application in compliance?On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Rob Picard and Matt Cooper of Vanta, who get that question every day. Their company makes security monitoring software that helps companies get into compliance quickly. We spoke about the shifting sands of privacy rules and regulations, tracking data flows through systems and across corporate borders, and how security automation can put up guardrails instead of gates. Many security frameworks are undergoing modernization to reflect the way that distributed applications function today. And more countries and US states are passing their own privacy regulations. The privacy space is surprisingly dynamic, forcing companies to keep track of these frequent changes to stay current and compliant. Not everyone has in-house legal experts to follow the daily developments and communicate those to the engineering team. For an engineering team just trying to understand the effort involved, it may be helpful to start figuring out where your data flows. Tracking it between internal services may be overkill; instead, track it across corporate boundaries, from one database, cloud provider, SaaS system, and dependency. Each of those should have their own data privacy agreement—plug into your procurement process to see what each piece of your stack promises on a privacy level. Your DevOps and DevSecOps teams will probably want to automate much of the security engineering process as possible. Unfortunately, automating security is hard. The best path may not be to automate the defenses on your system; it might be better to instead automate the context that you provide to engineers. If someone wants to add a dependency, pop up a reminder that these dependencies can be fickle. Automate the boring stuff—context, reminders, to-dos—and let humans do the complex problem solving we’re so good at. If you’re looking to add an in-house security expert as a service, check out Vanta.com. Their platform monitors connects to your systems and helps you prep for compliance with one or more security frameworks. If those frameworks change, you don’t need to do anything. Vanta changes for you. 

Temporal Technologies is a scalable open-source platform for developers to build and run reliable cloud applications.ICYMI, here’s a post we wrote with Ryland Goldstein, Head of Product at Temporal, discussing how software engineering has shifted from a monolithic to a microservices model—thereby introducing a whole new set of challenges for software engineers.Maxim, who grew up in Russia, is renowned in the microservices world. He spent decades architecting mission-critical systems at MSFT, Amazon, and Uber, where he designed Cadence and spun it out into Temporal. Netflix, Descript, Instacart, Datadog, Snap, and plenty more are all betting their critical systems on Temporal’s OSS technology, so Maxim has a dedicated following in the dev community.Dominik’s father is a nuclear physicist, so Dominik had early access to computers growing up in Germany. His professional path led him from SAP in Germany to SAP in Palo Alto, then to Cisco, and finally to Temporal.Replay, Temporal’s inaugural developer experience conference, is happening IRL from August 25-26, 2022 in Seattle. Check it out!Connect with Maxim on LinkedIn or Twitter.Connect with Dominik on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Medium.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Thanos for their answer to How to wrap text without regard to space and hyphen. (This makes up for the Snap, right?)

HASH, where Maggie works along with Stack Overflow cofounder Joel Spolsky, is an open-core platform for creating simulations that help people make better decisions.Explore Maggie’s writing on everything from digital anthropology to best practices for illustrating invisible programming concepts.Maggie recommends the Nielsen Norman Group website as the best resource for folks getting up to speed on research-based UX.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Sten for their answer to Detecting transparency in an image.

The first step in quantum computing? Quantum internet: a network capable of sending quantum information between far-distant computing machines (as in, one on Earth and one on Mars). Still have questions?In case it’s been a while since your last physics course: Schrödinger’s cat.Retool’s 2022 State of Engineering Time reveals how software engineers spend their time, what they want to do more (and less) of, and the most frustrating and satisfying parts of their jobs.A great resource from GitHub for folks working on open-source projects: Why creating a popular OSS library is a marathon, not a sprint.Cassidy recommends Centered again—the app that helps you stay in your flow state.Congrats to Ceora on her new role at Auth0!

The Web3 crime of the century? Seth Green’s Bored Ape NFT is kidnapped by dastardly phishing scammers, kiboshing the TV series Green was developing around the Bored Ape character. Read more.Ceora served as a resident emcee at this year’s Remix Conf. She and Cassidy offer advice for developers who want to give talks or host conferences. In tech industry news: Broadcom acquires VMWare for $61 billion, one of the largest tech acquisitions in history.Today in tech recs: Matt recommends Logitech’s MX Mechanical keyboard; Adam recommends roadmap.sh, a community dedicated to creating roadmaps, guides, and other resources to guide developers as they start their careers or upskill along the way.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user munk for their answer to Python path as a string.

While blockchains are huge right now, finding one to build on that doesn’t use a ton of energy, has good privacy protections, and operates efficiently is harder than it looks. The original breakout blockchain, Bitcoin, was slow to adopt any innovations coming out of research. Other blockchains use the electricity of a small country to play elaborate gambling games. For someone looking to build the future of Web3, what are your options?On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk to Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman. After finding out that the Bitcoin blockchain wouldn’t incorporate all the good ideas generated around it—proof of stake, privacy improvements, and smart contracts to name a few—he decided to build his own. Arthur has a background in machine learning and statistics but spent his early 20s teaching self-driving cars how to turn left and working in quantitative finance for high-frequency trading. High-frequency trading was data-driven, but there was so much noise that machine learning didn’t do very well. Self-driving cars, meanwhile, presented a more structured problem, so neural networks could yield good results. Around that time, Arthur got bit by the crypto bug. It lived at the intersection of a lot of his interests: Cryptography touched on computer science and math, but his time in finance got him wondering about banks and money work. The idea of individual sovereignty scratched a personal philosophical itch. Naturally, Arthur decided to try some mining software. It took all of his computer’s resources, so he uninstalled it. But after seeing the price of Bitcoin break a dollar and other news items about it, he looked closer. He started to think about what a company could do if it didn’t have to maintain banking relationships. He thought about possible applications, like decentralized poker. When Bitcoin refused to adopt the improvements developed by competing alt coins, Arthur started thinking about a new blockchain that would respond to new developments and focus on efficient processing, security, and a good smart contract system. Forking the code wasn’t enough; he needed a new ledger. That’s when Tezos was born. It was initially built by a small team of OCaml programmers using that language’s functional subset. Arthur was inspired by the example of WhatsApp, which was built by a small team of senior Erlang engineers. While OCaml would limit the talent he could hire, it would be a very efficient way to build an error-free transaction system. He could have built the whole thing in Java, sure, but Arthur estimates that it would have cost a whole lot more. If you’re interested in learning more about what an engineer’s blockchain ecosystem looks like, check out the Tezos home page. Discover building on Tezos: https://tezos.com/build/

Jason is now a managing director at Redpoint Ventures and has led one investment so far, backing a company called Alchemy that is focused on infrastructure and dev tools for web3.He describes himself as a "very average" programmer, but an excellent engineer, and explains how he parlayed his unique skill set into key roles at Heroku and GitHub.Our lifeboat for the week goes to dfrib for suggesting a solution to: Error "nil requires a contextual type" using Swift

Following the success of the Mac Mini, Windows is getting into the tiny computer business. Oh, and it’s running on ARM chips. Oh, and Visual Studio and VS Code will now offer native ARM support.Video games got a lot of us into programming thanks to their openness to mods. It’s what made The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind such a hit 20 years ago. Minecraft may live forever thanks to its modding community and parent-friendly tools. Just don’t be surprised when you have to ban local kids for virtual arson and murder. The old security exploit hits are still out there: cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and cross-site request forgery. Could be because 86% of developers do not view application security as a top priority.Two great questions today: Is it illegal to ride a drunk horse? and a Lifeboat-worthy response from Markus Meskanen on Checking if a number is not in range in Python

Companies like Meta, Twitter, and Netflix are enacting hiring freezes and layoffs, a situation that’s not great for anybody but is likely to have outsize effects on people of color in tech.Gen Z may not understand file structures, but they sure understand Twitter toxicity. MegaBlock from Gen Z Mafia allows users to block bad tweets, their authors, and every single account that liked the offending tweet. There, doesn’t that feel better?Apple’s WWDC 2022 is just around the corner. What are you most excited about?Machine-learning start-up Inflection AI raises $225 million in equity financing to use AI to improve human-computer communication. Another reminder that building sophisticated AI systems isn’t cheap: who could forget that Open AI paid its top researcher just shy of $2 million in 2016?Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Patricia Shanahan for their answer to Difference between int and double.

Highly-touted cryptocurrencies like TARA don’t always solve the problems they’re supposed to, as Bloomberg reports.If you’re looking for a compelling deep-dive into a crypto scammer, Cassidy recommends BBC podcast The Missing Cryptoqueen.Ceora is working to improve the quality of her commit messages in order to turn what’s now a personal project into an open-source project that others can contribute to. One great resource she’s found: Zen and the art of writing good commit messages.Attention devs: if you have tips for basic project maintenance and hacks for improving commit messages, Ceora wants to hear from you.Read up on the benefits of test-driven development.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Nina Scholz for their answer to What’s the difference between Object.entries and Object.keys?.

You may be running your code in containers. You might even have taken the plunge and orchestrated it all with YAML code through Kubernetes. But infrastructure as code becomes a whole new level of complicated when setting up a managed Kubernetes service. On this sponsored episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with David Dymko and Walt Ribeiro of Vultr about what they went through to build their managed Kubernetes service as a cloud offering. It was a journey that ended not just with a managed K8s service, but also with a wealth of additional tooling, upgrades, and open sourcing. When building out a Kubernetes implementation, you can abstract away some of the complexity, especially if you use some of the more popular tools like Kubeadm or Kubespray. But when using a managed service, you want to be able to focus on your workloads and only your workloads, which means taking away the control plane. The user doesn’t need to care about the underlying infrastructure, but for those designing it, the missing control plane opens a whole heap of trouble. Once you remove this abstraction, your cloud cluster is treated as a single solid compute. But then how do you do upgrades? How do you maintain x509 certifications for HTTPS calls? How do you get metrics? Without the control plane, Vultr needed to communicate to their Kubernetes worker nodes through the API. And wouldn’t you know it: the API isn’t all that well-documented. They took it back to bare necessities, the MVP feature set of their K8s cloud service. They’d need the Cloud Controller Manager (CCM) and the Container Storage Interface (CSI) as core components to have Vultr be a first-class citizen on a Kubernetes cluster. They built a Go client to interface using those components and figured, hey, why not open-source this? That led to a few other open-source projects, like a Terraform integration and a command-line interface. This was the start of a two-year journey connecting all the dots that this project required. They needed a managed load balancer that could work without the control plane or any of the tools that interfaced with it. They built it. They needed a quality-of-life update to their API to catch up with everything that today’s developer expects: modern CRUD actions, REST best practices, and pagination. All the while, they kept listening to their customers to make sure they didn’t stray too far from the original product. To see the results of their journey, listen to the podcast and check out Vultr.com for all of their cloud offerings, available in 25 locations worldwide.

Supabase, the open-source database-as-a-service company, raised $80 million in Series B funding in a round led by Felicis Ventures. In case you were wondering: YYes, the company is named for the Nicki Minaj song!.Today in tech recs: Cassidy recommends budgeting app Lunch Money for everything from crypto to cash. Matt recommends Magnet for window management.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user dfrib for their answer to Error "nil requires a contextual type" using Swift.

Ian and Corey met at Microsoft, where they built Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 (which boasted its own CD-ROM).They went on to found Mattermost in 2016 to give developers one platform for collaborating across tools and teams.Ian, who previously founded the game company SpinPunch, calls Mattermost “yet another of those video game companies turned B2B software companies,” like Slack and Discord. Says Ian: “Games are all the risk of a movie plus all the complexity of a B2B SaaS product.”Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Diogo for their answer to How can I call functions from one .cpp file in another .cpp file?.Connect with Ian on LinkedIn.Connect with Corey on LinkedIn.

Check out a manager’s toolkit for preventing burnout put together by Gitlab Cassidy once asked Stephen Colbert for his favorite website. His answer may surprise you.Today in tech recs: Pokémon GO (for extra motivation to get outside) and the Apple Watch activity tracker (to track activity and remind you to move around). Jon recommends that you not get a treadmill desk. Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user JLRishe for their answer to Error "TypeError: $(...).children is not a function".Follow Jon on LinkedIn or Twitter.

You can check out Michael’s bio here and tune in to his podcast Cloud Unfiltered.If you're interested in some of open source work Michael and his colleagues are doing, check out API Clarity.

Stack Overflow’s 2019 Developer Survey found that respondents overwhelmingly considered Elon Musk to be the person with the greatest influence on technology. Now that Musk is taking over Twitter, it’s safe to say that influence will increase.James Stanier, engineering director at Shopify, has some thoughts on one of our perennial topics: transitioning from IC to manager. He’s proposed a 90-day trial period for IC engineers moving into management roles. Listen to Stanier on the Dev Interrupted podcast.Ben talks up Samsung’s The Frame, which lets you display your favorite NFT or old-fashioned art when you’re not using it as a TV. Because who wants to look at a blank screen?Cassidy recommends Adam Grant’s book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know and Matt recommends an LG C1 TV for folks in the market for a stunning gaming experience.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Drew Reese for their answer to Deprecation notice: ReactDOM.render is no longer supported in React 18.

The crew has complicated feelings about products like Apple’s augmented reality glasses and Google Glass. Ceora put it best: “I'm very cautious about any big tech company having any more access to my perception of reality.” On the other hand, products like Envision smart glasses that help visually-impaired people navigate their environments exemplify how AR technology can enable accessibility and empower users.Speaking of different perceptions of reality, New York mayor Eric Adams dusts off that old chestnut about how remote workers “can’t stay home in your pajamas all day.” (Watch us.)Matt recommends Oh My Git!, an open-source game that teaches Git. Ceora recommends Popsy, which allows you to turn your Notion pages into a website for free.And some recommended reading: How to make the most out of a mentoring relationship from the GitHub blog and How to use the STAR method to ace your job interview from The Muse.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user metadept for their answer to Generate a two-digit positive random number in JavaScript.Find Adam on LinkedIn here.

If you’re not familiar with Stacks, Stack Overflow’s design system, it’s a robust CSS and JavaScript Pattern library that helps users create coherent experiences in line with Stack Overflow’s best practices and design principles. Explore more on Netlify or GitHub.Missed our April Fool’s prank this year? Relive the hilarity and the pain.Atomic CSS is a CSS architecture approach favoring single-purpose classes named based on visual function.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user ceejayoz for their answer to How do I do a database backup on Amazon RDS every hour?.Connect with Ben Kelley.Learn more about Aaron Shekey’s work.

A high school class on Pascal launched Andi’s interest in programming (starting on an Apple IIc).Andi was bored with his university studies and took on an extra-credit programming project that turned into PHP3, the version that built a million websites.PHP gets a lot of hate, and we have two theories about why. First, it’s primarily brownfield development, and we all know that hell is other people’s code. Second, it democratized development—a great thing in many ways - that nevertheless led to a lot of less than professional code making it’s way to production.Andi cofounded Zend Technologies to oversee PHP advances and served as CEO from 2009 until the company’s acquisition in 2015. After Zend Technology, Andi became one of what he jokes was “five folks in a garage” building a new graph database for Amazon.Now, at Google, Andi runs the operational database for Google Cloud Platform, including managed third parties and cloud-native databases Spanner, Bigtable, and Firestore.His background in programming makes Andi sensitive to the importance of prioritizing developer experience: “the number-one person using our services are our developers. And so we need to make [our technology] super-productive and simple and easy and fun for developers to use.”Connect with Andi on LinkedIn.

Average tenure at Google has been reported at 1.1 years,  which stands in contrast to a broader average of 4.2 years for software developers across the board.Tech jobs at many so called titans and disrupters last less than two years, according to research from Dice.Uber is forging an unlikely alliance with two taxi tech firms.The ultimate chron job - ensuring users can access a chronological feed on their favorite social media without sacrificing your recommendation algorithm's potency or data. Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to alkber, who explained how to convert seconds to minutes, hours and days in Java

Cassidy is co-organizing Devs for Ukraine, a free online engineering conference from April 25-26 to raise funds in support of Ukraine. Register today and donate if you can.Plex.tv is a hub for live TV, on-demand streaming content, and your own media library. Read the full story of Fast’s speedy shutdown.Following the ultimate personal security checklist will protect your digital security and privacy—but it might also raise eyebrows at the FBI.Today’s tech recs: Ben recommends TENS therapy, an electrical alternative to acupuncture (it’s tech, technically). Cassidy recommends Covatar for unique, personalized digital art like NFT avatars.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Joseph Silber for their answer to What’s a regex that matches all numbers except 1, 2 and 25?.

Read about how New Relic achieved pay equity—and what, exactly, that means.Last month, hacker group Lapsus$ released screenshots showing it had successfully breached Okta’s internal systems using compromised credentials. What does it all mean? Read about it here and here.Matt recounts a harrowing example of a man-in-the-middle attack that nearly emptied a friend’s bank accountToday’s recommendations: Cassidy recs Midjourney, an AI art-making tool currently in beta. (Learn more about Midjourney here.) Matt recommends Elden Ring to folks who want a more “adult” version of the Ceora-approved Breath of the Wild.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Subhajit for their answer to Send HTML in email via PHP.

Quizzes and games like Roblox are a good way to build your knowledge, whether you’re learning to code or becoming a K-pop expert.ICYMI: Listen to our conversation with HashiCorp cofounder Mitchell Hashimoto, who recently returned to an IC role after serving as CEO and CTO.Connect with Jon on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Roko C. Buljan for their answer to Pure CSS 3 image slider—without JavaScript or radio inputs.

React 18 is the latest major version of React. Cassidy also provides an excellent summary of React history.Ceora is working on some CSS art (inspired by K-pop, natch) using CodePen.Cassidy explains why Tanya Reilly’s talk-turned-blog-post Being Glue, which Ceora shouted out in Episode 425, was pivotal in shaping her career decisions.Why do women in software engineering have to worry about being seen as “not technical enough”?Today’s tech recs: Ceora recommends the Nintendo Switch™, Matt recommends Flexbox Froggy for people who want to learn CSS flexbox, and Cassidy recommends Loom.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user JosefZ for their answer to Start Windows Terminal from the CLI and pass in an executable command to run.

Read a profile of Mattaniah on People of Color in Tech (POCIT) here.Connect with Mattaniah on LinkedIn or follow her on TikTok.Who remembers Vine??This week’s tech recs: Cassidy recommends her Hifiman headphones. Ben recommends his hybrid RAV4 (42 miles on the battery alone). Matt recommends Spline, a design app for 3D web experiences. Ceora’s recommendation is a clear phone case from Five Below, perfect for displaying a photo of your favorite K-pop idol (or, you know, your dog).Plus, Mattaniah and the team get gushy about “incredible,” “joyful,” “super accessible” creative code educator Daniel Shiffman.This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Maulik Hirani for their answer to New Google Places Autocomplete and its pricing.

Why has this empty NPM package been installed 700,000 times? We’ve got the answer for ya.A nice article and podcast on flow state, including the claim that 23 minutes is the magic number of minutes it takes to find your flow.Thanks to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, Manjusha, for explaining how to: Parse a pipe-delimited file in Python

Vercel is a developer-first, frontend-focused platform. Together with Google and Meta, Vercel built Next.js, an open-source React framework that helps developers build high-performance web experiences with ease.PlanetScale is a MySQL-compatible serverless database platform that enables infinite SQL horizontal scale.Tools like Webflow and Squarespace have made web development accessible for casual programmers, but what does this mean for professional developers?This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Michael Thelin for their answer to How can I play a Spotify audio track with Python?.Find Guillermo on LinkedIn here.Find Sam on LinkedIn here.

Once a company reaches a certain size, their customers might start asking for proof that it has good security and data habits. They want to know if there’s a business continuity plan in place in case disaster strikes. For many companies, formalizing this proof means submitting to an auditing process known as SOC 2. If you’re a developer at one of these companies, particularly if you provide or use SaaS applications, you’ll end up having to implement the controls these audits require. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with James Ciesielski, CTO and co-founder, and Megan Dean, information security and risk compliance manager, both of Rewind. We talk about how you can prep for and successfully get through a SOC 2 audit, how backing up your SaaS data can provide business continuity, and the benefits of establishing a relationship with your auditor. A SOC 2 report shows your customers the level of security controls that you have in place. It’s based on the auditing standards set by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. You tell them what controls you have in place and they verify it. Once a company starts attracting enterprise-level customers, a SOC 2 becomes a must-have. Companies perform SOC 2 audits using a variety of tools: sometimes it’s purpose-built SaaS tools; sometimes it’s a cascade of spreadsheets. Ultimately, what’s important is providing an audit trail for your controls, a record that proves that your security does what you claim it does. Trust, but verify. The process can grow complicated, as companies can have 100 to as many as 300 SaaS applications running in their business. That’s a lot of important business data on someone else’s cloud. Many of these SaaS applications operate data on the shared responsibility model: they ensure the service is available and secure, and you ensure that your data is accurate and secure. A key part of these security controls is disaster recovery and business continuity. Imagine that you’re using a SaaS application to track your audit process. What happens if a disgruntled employee wrecks your data, or your cat walks over your keyboard, hitting just the right combination of keys to delete something important? Or what if you unwittingly get flagged on a T&C violation and get deplatformed? Your audit trail could be lost if you haven’t upheld your end of the shared responsibility model and backed up your data. Ultimately, having experts who know the process can help. Your auditor, too, can be a resource, so get to know them. They want you to succeed. They want to help you improve your audit process because it makes their lives easier.

Geriatric millennials unite.Learn more about GitHub’s move to put prebuilt Codespaces into public beta, plus check out CodeSandbox, home of self-proclaimed lazy developers.Meanwhile, in blockchain: Polygon, a solution designed to expand transaction efficiency and output for Ethereum, raised $450 million “to consolidate its lead in the race to scale Ethereum.”Is Decentraland the most annoying blockchain project? The competition is fierce.The 2022 Java Developer Productivity Report found that microservices and CI/CD are decreasing developers’ productivity, not increasing it. The team talks through what that means.This week, Ben recommends the book Appleseed by Matt Bell, Cassidy recommends the productivity app Centered, Adam points listeners to Unix-like operating system SerenityOS, and Ceora shouts out Tanya Reilly’s talk-turned-blog-post Being Glue.Find Adam on LinkedIn here.

Danielle’s path to software engineering began when she was accepted into MIT’s Women’s Technology Program, an education and mentorship opportunity for high schoolers interested in engineering or computer science. She later earned her CS degree from MIT.Danielle’s first role out of college was a junior developer working on Meteor, a full-stack JavaScript framework that was just starting a GraphQL project they called Apollo. She tells the team how Meteor started looking at GraphQL and how that became Apollo.If McDonald’s is a REST API, then Chipotle is GraphQL. Think about it!Find Danielle on LinkedIn here.This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user torek for their answer to Why doesn’t Git natively support UTF-16?.

The team pays tribute to Microsoft’s Visual Studio, an IDE and source code editor that turns 25 this month.Read Simon Willison’s article on how companies can financially support the open-source contributors they rely on. Learn more about open source’s diversity problem, and how to address it, here and here.Why are K-pop NFTs so unpopular with fans? The Atlantic digs in.ICYMI: Listen to our conversation with HashiCorp cofounder Mitchell Hashimoto: Moving from CEO back to IC.

David is a CS major who worked in Apple’s music group in the 90s and went on to become CEO of eMusic in the aughts. At Venrock, David invested in early-stage crypto, consumer, and enterprise tech companies. He was early to crypto as a node maintainer on the Bitcoin blockchain and an Ethereum miner, setting up a rig in his basement several years ago.At CoinFund, he focuses on early- and growth-stage crypto and blockchain companies and technologies like Upshot, a platform for crowdsourced NFT appraisals, and Rarible, a digital art NFT platform.ICYMI: Listen to our episode Web3 won’t save us.This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user M-M for their answer to Find the area of an n-interesting polygon.

Learn more about GitHub’s ​​machine learning-based code scanning, which finds security issues before they make it to production.Google invests $100 million in a skills training program for low-income Americans. Is there a catch?Take2 is a New Zealand program that teaches incarcerated people to code: building marketable skills, opening up employment opportunities, and dramatically reducing recidivism. At the time of writing, Take2 has a 100% success rate in preventing recidivism.We have two Lifeboat badges this week: Varad Mondkar, for answering How does the app:layout_goneMarginLeft and its variants affect the view arrangements in constraintlayout?, and Eugene Sh., for answering What is this “a.out” file and what makes it disappear?.

Expensify is an expense management solution that integrates with your travel, ERP, and finance/accounting software. Check out their full list of integrations.Expensify engineers rely on Stack Overflow for Teams to make knowledge accessible and shareable, rather than wading through swathes of documentation. Read the case study.Flat organizations like Expensify have minimal or no middle management, meaning there’s no management layer between staff and executives. A similar model for decentralized management is Holacracy.Find David Barrett on LinkedIn here.

Ceora shouts out Mermaid, a JavaScript-based diagramming and charting tool that creates diagrams dynamically based on Markdown-inspired text definitions. Coinbase’s bouncing QR code ad proved so popular it crashed the app. Considered passé pre-pandemic, QR codes have obvious value now: they’re touch-free, easy to scan, and ubiquitous. (Just don’t call it a comeback.)In preparation for his move from New Zealand to Canada, Matt is overhauling his hardware and transitioning to an M1 MacBook Pro for performance and efficiency.Speaking of hardware, Intel is buying Israeli chipmaking company Tower Semiconductor for $5.4 billion to build out its Intel Foundry Service division, launched last year to build chips for other companies.This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Basile Starynkevitch for their answer to the question Can you make a computed goto in C++?

Here’s a useful primer on functional programming with JavaScript.This tutorial will guide you in exploring the fundamentals of functional programming with React.If you’re looking for more info on functional programming in React, we’d like to tell you why hooks are the best thing to happen to React.Functional not your thing? Learn why object-oriented programming (OOP) has become such a dominant paradigm.

Learn more about AlphaCode here.Check out an amazing video essay critiquing the NFT market, The Line Goes Up.Read up on Josh Wardle, the developer who built Wordle for his partner to help pass the time during the pandemic, then sold it to the NY Times for a sweet seven figures.

You can learn more about Clement's career on his LinkedIn and on Twitter (assuming you speak French).You can learn more about Dailymotion here and check out the roles they are hiring for here.You can find Cassidy Williams on Twitter and at her website. You can find Ceora Ford on Twitter and at her website.Our Lifeboat badge winner of the week is Swati Kiran, who helped solve an error causing permission problems in an angular app.

These days, every company looking at analyzing their data for insights has a data pipeline setup. Many companies have a fast production database, often a NoSQL or key-value store, that goes through a data pipeline.The pipeline process performs some sort of extract-transform-load process on it, then routes it to a larger data store that the analytics tools can access. But what if you could skip some steps and speed up the process with a database purpose-built for analytics?On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Rohit (Ro) Amarnath, the CTO at Vertica, to find out how your analytics engine can speed up your workflow. After a humble beginning with a ZX Spectrum 128, he’s now in charge of Vertica Accelerator, a SaaS version of the Vertica database. Vertica was founded by database researcher Dr. Michael Stonebreaker and Andrew Palmer. Dr. Stonebreaker helped develop several databases, including Postgres, Streambase, and VoltDB. Vertica was born out of research into purpose-built databases. Stonebreaker’s research found that columnar database storage was faster for data warehouses because there were fewer read/writes per request. Here’s a quick example that shows how columnar databases work. Suppose that you want all the records from a specific US state or territory. There are 52 possible values here (depending on how you count territories). To find all instances of a single state in a row-based DB, the search must check every row for the value of the state column. However, searching by column is faster by an order of magnitude: it just runs down the column to find matching values, then retrieves row data for the matches. The Vertica database was designed specifically for analytics as opposed to transactional databases. Ro spent some time at a Wall Street firm building reports—P&L, performance, profitability, etc. Transactions were important to day-to-day operations, but the real value of data came from analyses that showed where to cut costs or increase investments in a particular business. Analytics help with overall strategy, which tends to be more far-reaching and effective. For most of its life, Vertica has been an on-premises database managing a data warehouse. But with the ease of cloud storage, Vertica Accelerator is looking to give you a data lake as a service. If you’re unfamiliar, data lakes take the data warehouse concept—central storage for all your data—and remove limits. You can have “rivers” of data flowing into your stores; if you go from a terabyte to a petabyte overnight, your cloud provider will handle it for you. Vertica has worked with plenty of industries that push massive amounts of data: healthcare, aviation, online games. They’ve built a lot of functionality into the database itself to speed up all manner of applications. One of their prospective customers had a machine learning model with thousands of lines of code that was reduced to about ten lines because so much was being done in the database itself. In the future, Vertica plans to offer more powerful management of data warehouses and lakes, including handling the metadata that comes with them. To learn more about Vertica’s analytics databases, check out our conversation or visit their website.

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

SphereEX builds distributed data systems, making it easier for organizations to load balance massive data stores across multiple servers. Now that open-source software has taken over Western software, it’s China’s turn. Even big companies like Baidu and Bytedance are opening up their projects. Trista is the only female Apache member in China, which is both an honor and a demonstration of how much work needs to be done to support women in STEM. This episode’s Lifeboat badge shoutout goes to swati kiran for her answer to Error: EACCES: permission denied, mkdir '/usr/local/lib/node_modules/node-sass/build'.

Ceora has her second brain stored in Notion, complete with GIFs and pretty color to get that aesthetic.Ancient history in blog years: Cassidy talks about the perils of being bleeding-edge instead of cutting-edge: Apollo Mission: The pros and cons of being an early adopter of new technology Everybody is aboard the VS Code train, which has the hottest TikTok around. Cassidy recommends the MonoLisa font helping viewers read your code during a livestream.Today’s lifeboat goes to Bill the Lizard for Using IFF in Python.

Neopets: A little-known gateway into a software career. (Nineties kids will remember.)Among the products Mitchell helped build at Hashicorp: Terraform, Vagrant, and Vault.Not many C-level execs return to IC roles, but you might be surprised how many managers move back to being individual contributors.Follow Mitchell on Twitter here.

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

The Twitter thread that brought Cryptoland to the team’s attention.Ceora wonders whether participants in a hypothetical, decentralized version of YouTube (a YouTube-like dApp) would need coding skills to contribute meaningfully.Why is Ethereum so expensive and so congested?Ben outlines how Solana has become the fastest-growing blockchain in the world by evolving the Ethereum concept to make it more scalable and less congested.

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

The inspiration for today's episode was a terrific article from The Guardian about the many ways in which the modern world, specifically the software we use every day, was designed to steal our attention. During the episode, we discuss Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor know as the "father of flow" for his  pioneering research on flow states. Sadly, Prof. Csikszentmihalyi passed away in 2021, but you can find a terrific  tribute to him and his work here.In the second half of the episode, we discuss "The California Ideology" and the ways in which hustle culture and libertarian ideals helped to shape Silicon Valley and the world of technology more broadly.Congrats to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, UrbanoJVR, who answered the question: What is the difference between 'mvn verify' vs 'mvn test'?

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

You can find Maureen here. You can find Scott here.There is a wealth of free courses available through the AWS training website, including Operations, Advanced Networking, Machine Learning, and Data Science.   

You can find Philippe on Twitter here and learn more about CrowdSec here.They recently put together a list of the IP addresses trying to exploit the new Log4j vulnerability.For a prescient view of today's cybersecurity challenges, Humeau recommends John Brunner's classic 1975 sci-fi novel, The Shockwave Rider.

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

Esther and Matt are graduate students in computer science at the University of Washington, where they study community networks.Esther explains how open-source, community-owned and -operated LTE networks are a good solution for expanding public internet access and ensuring digital equity.Matt walks the team through Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), a shared wireless spectrum that allows users to build their own LTE networks.Chris Webb of the Black Brilliance Research Project lays out how a digital stewardship program in Detroit helped inspire his work.

Developers are leading the Great Resignation, according to some reports. Others feel developers aren't resigning, so much as seizing the moment to find better opportunities. You can find out hosts online at the links belowCassidyCeoraRyanBenHave an experience with the Great Resignation you want to share with our podcast and blog? Hit us up by email:PodcastPitches for the blogThanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Umer, for explaining how to: align an anchor to the right

Hear why Ben thinks the Workplace Stack Exchange and the Academia Stack Exchange have the richest questions in the Stack Exchange network (or maybe just the most sitcom-worthy).ICYMI: Jack Dorsey stepped down from Twitter. Will he be back?At Twitter, Tess Rinearson is leading a new team focused on crypto, blockchains, and decentralized tech. Follow her on Twitter here.The team winces over a review of a Tesla Model Y hatchback that describes phantom braking so frequent and so dangerous that it’s “a complete deal-breaker.”If you’re a fan of our show, consider leaving us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts.

What exactly is VanillaJS? Tongue-in-cheek, it's the most lightweight JavaScript framework out there and used by pretty much every website on the internet. Seriously though, it's just JavaScript…without a framework. If you're interested in reading and learning more about JavaScript, Chris has a bevy of courses and eBooks over at vanillajsguides.com. Like Chris's ideas so much you want to subscribe to his newsletter? Right over this way!Since you are a connoisseur of podcasts, check out Chris's own at vanillajspodcast.com.Chris has kindly put together a collection of resources for listeners like you at gomakethings.com/overflow. This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to prograils for their answer to How can I read the number of lines in Fortran 90 from a text file? 

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

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

Find Joel Spolsky on Twitter here.Jeff Atwood is on Twitter here.Geoff Dalgas is on Twitter here.Follow Jarrod Dixon on Twitter here.

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

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

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

The conversation was inspired by Epic's decision to make it's Kid's Web Service's parent verification free to all developers.Ben has been grappling with these questions since 2013, when he wrote about allowing screen time into his young son's life. One thing that old article does remind us; how incredibly indestructible the original iPad was. A true tank of a tablet!Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, javimuu, for explaining: How to get a Thumbail / Preview image from Server Video Url in Swift 3.0

We kick things off by weighing the merits of two gender-neutral regional pronouns: the familiar y’all and the under appreciated yinz. Now that’s covered...The global population of developers will hit 45 million by 2030, up from 26.9 million in 2021 (EDC). What platforms will they want to build on?Did Kubernetes solve all your problems? Did it create new ones?It seems there’s always an XKCD relevant to our conversation. Today, it’s How standards proliferate.

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

You can learn more about Roll, which describes itself as blockchain infrastructure for social money, here.If you want to follow them on social, check out @tryrollhq as well as their personal socials: @bradley_miles_ and @sidkal. If you are interested in this kind of tech, check out previous conversations on Web3 and our chat with Chris Dixon on blockchain.Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Notnooop, who explained how you can :Make An Emoji Enabling App

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

Rennie grew up in Kenya, Honduras, Somalia, and Oklahoma; his parents volunteered for the Peace Corps before working for the US Government overseas. Audio tape drives are real!  Check out this Retrocomputing question about how the Commodore 64 audio interface worked. If you  want  to remember something better, a 2014 study says you should write it out by hand. Rennie worked at Blackberry, and Ben remembered his colleagues at the Verge fondly hoping for their comeback. In fact, here's Ben hoping for their comeback!We did a podcast on moving from engineer to manager, which Rennie said was one of the hardest things to do. Rennie gave a shoutout to the book he's reading now, The Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson. Rennie works on our Platform team, which works on all of our reusable stuff, including our design system, Stacks. This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Vinzzz for explaining how to Create an array of random numbers in Swift.

You can find Alex's writing for Employ America here. You can find him on Twitter hereYou can find Hassan's blog here and his Twitter here.You can find their writing on the semiconductor industry and shortages here and here.Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is jasme, who helped someone figure out how to fix email validation with Laravel.

What is Web3? The Decentralized Internet of the FutureCassidyCeoraRyanBenThanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Tadeck, for showing us how to design a : Function for Factorial in Python

We start out the show talking about this article: I Don't Know How To Count That Low.Is Apple normalizing surveillance?Toyota trucks and Land Cruisers were very popular with ISIS. Instead of a lifeboat, we shoutout this fun question: How do I stop annoyed wizards from killing people all the time? A common problem for us muggles. 

Alex comes up with better ways to interact with technology and writes about it on his website. Is there a link between playing music and writing code? A previous article of ours covered the merger of the two in the music programming language, Sonic PI. If you're curious about the weird extremes of operating system development, check out TempleOS. Cassidy and Alex both take copious notes through Obsidian. Alex has a plugin that may help you organize notes automatically.  

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

This episode was inspired by Joma Tech's review of his first ten years in coding. Ben Popper shared  a fair amount of his coding journey through the series Ben Popper is the Worst Coder in the World. Should you actually write out code on paper as some of us had to do? Maybe.Modding games gets people into programming. For Ryan, Freedom Force got him into Python. Today, it's Minecraft and Roblox. Want to jump start your career? Find a community on Discord or Twitter and make some contacts. The software industry is made of people. Hackathons helped Cassidy find a deeper love for coding, oh and her husband too.

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

At LinkedIn scale, it pays to save your developers a few minutes or even seconds on repeat tasks. Sara walks us through her experience managing senior engineers, and trying to improve developer experience and tooling, on a massive, global platform with over a billion user interactions a month.Paul  shares some of his firm's latest work, helping to visualize the impact of climate change at Probable Futures. Interested in doing work in software focused on climate change? Paul recommends you learn a bit about NetCDF files.Follow Sara on Twitter here.Follow Paul on Twitter here.Enjoy our brain teaser of the week: a new way to cut pizza.

Graybeard conference alert! Eran and Ryan both started their technology journeys on the venerable Commodore 64. During his academic days, Eran helped to map all the BGP (background gateway protocol) gateways in the world. This got a fair bit of press recently during the six hour Facebook outage.Nexar provides smart dashcams and an app that help cars understand the roads around them. While networked cameras on every car could be a privacy nightmare, Nexar says that they have privacy as a foundational part of the SDLC.

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

Read more about the climate debate surrounding NFTs here.We really enjoyed this piece: You either die an MVP, or live long enough to build content moderation.You can find Ben on Twitter here.You can send ideas for blog posts to Ryan Donovan at our pitch box.You can find Cassidy on Twitter here and read the newsletter she helps us curate here.You can find Ceora on Twitter here and check out more about Apollo GraphQL here.

You can learn more about Paul here.You can read more about Physna here.Paul is excited about the Metaverse. So are we! 

Check out more about Microsoft's efforts to ditch passwords here.When  2FA just won't do, 3FA to the rescue. Just pray we aren't headed towards five factors. 

Right now, most development teams provide visibility into their overall process and lifecycle through standup meetings and spreadsheets. It can be a painfully manual process that uses up valuable engineering time. Value stream management aims to solve that by mapping out the entire software development life cycle and providing visibility into areas where things are breaking down or getting stuck. It borrows ideas from Agile and the automate-all-the-things attitude from DevOps to ensure engineering teams are moving fast with direction, avoiding bottlenecks, and reaching the the key objectives management planned weeks ago.In this episode, we chat with Nick Mathison and Sylvan Carbonell from HCL Software DevOps about value stream management and how their product, HCL Accelerate, brings visibility into the entire gamut of the SDLC, from the request coming in from a customer to deploying code to the production servers. At the foundation of this process is a good map of the company’s value stream. Think of it as bringing all your teams together to map out the entire workflow of your development cycle on a whiteboard, from receiving feature requests and bug reports, assigning out tickets, merging code, requesting code reviews, passing build tests, QA processes, and finally deploying to production. The value stream map brings that whiteboard to life. Once the process is mapped out and the data flows revealed, it is very easy to track where the work is at any given time and how fast it is flowing through the value stream. Every company has little idiosyncrasies that make their process unique: their specific slowdowns, time sinks, and manual approvals that grind development to a halt. Value stream management spots those and helps you eliminate them. In a value stream, you’re no longer watching individual devs; your best metrics cover the “two-pizza team,” a team small enough to be fed by two pizzas. This team’s interactions—working through epic tickets, code reviews, internal support, etc.—provides the best metrics to identify ways to increase the value that a team provides. With many technology companies working fully remotely during the pandemic, understanding each team’s process is critical. HCL offers a way to accomplish this without bringing lengthy standups back in the picture.Start benefiting from value stream management today with the forever-free Community Edition of HCL Accelerate. Try HCL Accelerate now.

Go get your copy of They Key here.Our frequent collaborator, Cassidy Williams of Netlify, helped design the key and joined this episode to share her love for all things mechanical keyboard. 

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

Tarn and his brother Zach are the brains behind Dwarf Fortress and the community that rose around it.Dr. Tarn Adams  received a math PhD, but left his post-doc because he was too busy making games. A bug created the statue Planepacked, a massive structure that contained the entire history of the world as well as 73 copies of the statue itself.Many people, including one of our hosts, found out about Dwarf Fortress through a Let's Play session in a fortress called Boatmurdered. If you want a more human readable  version of Dwarf Fortress, you can wishlist it on Steam or use one of the Lazy Newb packs.  

Former co-host Sara Chipps  now manages engineering teams at LinkedIn, but her best content is still on Twitter.Cassidy's former boss, Sarah Drasner, recently wrote a book to help engineers level up to management: Engineering Management for the Rest of Us. Cassidy's new favorite software tool is Astro, a single-site generator that looks to minimize the amount of client-side JavaScript in a site. The two books Ms. Chipps mention as the old standbys for new engineering managers are Peopleware and Smart and Gets Things Done. 

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

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

You can send ideas for blog posts to Ryan Donovan at our pitch box.You can find Cassidy on Twitter here and read the newsletter she helps us curate here.You can find Ceora on Twitter here and check out more about Apollo GraphQL here.Cassidy's piece on GraphQL, the first item she ever wrote for Stack Overflow, is here. Want to learn more about AVIF and how it compresses images so well? Check out good read from Netflix's tech blog here.Instead of a lifeboat badge we're highlighting an amazing question: Can celestial objects be used in cryptography?

You can learn more about Sam on his LinkedIn here. You can find him on Twitter here.Learn more about Oso, check out the code, and join their Slack community here.Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Evgeny Lisin, who answered the question: How to find UIWebView in Project and replace it with WKWebView?

You can find Angie's blog here, catch her on Twitter here, and connect with her on LinkedIn here.You can check out Applitools and  learn about the visual AI system it uses for testing here.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to  Alex Klyubin for explaining: What is the difference between Jar signer and Apk signer?

Nick is now Sourcery's CTO.  You can find him on Twitter here.Brendan serves as Sourcery's CEO. You can find him on Twitter here.You can try out Sourcery for free here and check out the company's open positions here.Our lifeboat badge of the week, fittingly, goes to Martin Evans, for explaining how to parse an integer from a string in Python.

Paul is stepping away down as CEO of Postlight to focus more on understanding climate change and how we can address it. The science hurts his brain. Cassidy Williams, currently at Netlify, has published articles on our blog and provides links in our newsletter.We dig into some of the results of the dev survey, including how kids today are learning to code on the internet. There's so much to learn from now!Did everyone step back from working full time? Our survey data shows a decrease in full time employed respondents. Was there an existential moment for everyone during the pandemic where they thought that there must be something else?Our surveyed devs love Svelte but get paid the most for Ruby on Rails. This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Suren Raj for his answer to Java convert bytes[] to File.

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

In 1987, Anita Borg, AnitaB.org's namesake, saw how few women were at a "systems" conference. A few casual chats turned into the listserv, Systers, which continues to offer a place for women in engineering to meet and discuss. Grace Hopper—that's Navy Rear Admiral Hopper to you, civilian—was the first to devise a theory of programming languages that were machine-independent. She created the FLOW-MATIC programming language, which served as the basis for COBOL. Quincy started in electrical engineering and learned FORTRAN. That experience with how computers operate on hardware helped her teach C++. The difference is like listening to vinyl vs. mp3s. Should UX designers create technology that you need to adapt to or adapts to you? And will different generations create different interaction paradigms?We're out of lifeboat badges, so we summoned a Necromancer winner! Congrats to stealth who was awarded the badge for their answer to the question, Adding multiple columns in MySQL with one statement.

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

Ethan started his career when the marquee tag was king and is bullish on its comeback. His focus as an investor is on developer tools & infrastructure, open source software, space, and emerging compute.We talk about his time as a Product Group Leader at Facebook, and his strong feelings on the state of DevOps.You can find his investor profile here, his blog here, and on Twitter here.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Denys Vuika, who answered the question: How do I configure Yarn as the default package manager for Angular CLI?  

Mason began his career as a developer, went on to be a CEO, but also found time to produce 80s alt rock album full of advice on how to run your startup.Slack began life as a video game company, eventually pivoting to make an internal chat tool it had built into its main business. Descript had a similar journey, taking  the editing software Mason and his team developed at Detour, and moving it to become the center of a new business after Detour was acquired by Bose.Headquartered in Montreal, Lyrebird is the AI division of Descript . It was founded by PhD students studying under Yoshua Bengio, who won the Turing Prize in 2019 for his pioneering research into deep learning and neural networks.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes Avinash, who explained what to do with a invalid syntax error that arises while running an AWS command

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

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

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

You can read Max's full article on Kubernetes on our blog here.You can find Max on Twitter here and his personal website here.Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Mantas, who answered the question: Determine if all the values in a PHP array are null

Beaudette cut his teeth in the days of AOL chat rooms, then became an early Wikipedian. More recently he worked at Reddit, where his team of ten professional community managers supported 300 million monthly unique visitors. Before his recent promotion to VP,  Beaudette was on the Trust and Safety team at Stack Overflow. For more detail on his experience, check out his LinkedIn here.Our lifefboat badge of the week goes to Arty-chan for answering the question:What is gitlab instance url, and how can i get it?

You can find Tara on  Twitter here. Sam is on Twitter here.You can learn more about Loveshark's latest games and the roles they are hiring for here.Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Elliott Frisch, for answering the question: Convert list of integer into comma separated string?  

You can find some fun video of Cassidy putting Copilot to the test here.If you want to take the Jamstack survey, check it out here.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Andomar, who answered the question: Will multiple calls to `now()` in a single postgres query always give same result?  

We discuss how Simões learned to code and the feature set that allowed Poker Now to differentiate itself in a crowded space. Simões shares the tech stack he used to craft the first version of Poker Now, and how he rebuilt the service after it crashed under the weight of a massive wave of new users. During the peak of lockdown, his site went from an average of 100 concurrent users to more than 10,000 at a time.Lastly, we chat about the allure of leaving a regular job behind to work on a passion project, and about the challenges of maintaining a service and earning a living as a solo developer.Today we're celebrating Divakar, who was awarded a lifeboat badge for answering the question: Searching a sequence in a NumPy array.

If you want to catch up on the first half of the episode, you can find it here.

The massive shift to remote work that so many companies undertook over the last year has pushed many to adopt an asynchronous, merge driven workflow that has been pioneered and perfected by software developers. With tools like Airtable, and Coda, the boundary between programming and other forms of media and knowledge work is beginning to blur. What happened to Google Wave? Can products with passionate fans get pushed into the Commons after they are sunset?Peek under the hood, and it's spreadsheets all the way down. Some companies are now turning a simple spreadsheet into an interactive web app. Spreadsheets on steroids, what could go wrong?No Lifeboat badge this episode, but tune in tomorrow, we'll have Part 2 of our live episode from the Fishbowl. 

You can learn more about Lightship, Niantic's AR SDK, here. They are hiring developers, and openings can be found here.Richard can be found on LinkedIn here. Kelly can be found on LinkedIn here.A big thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Karim, for answering the question: Check if value exists in Array object Javascript or Angular?  

As explained in this piece, "A headless CMS is a back-end only content management system (CMS) built from the ground up as a content repository that makes content accessible via a RESTful API or GraphQL API for display on any device." Shopify has leaned hard into GraphQL and APIs in general. The goal, as Coates describes it, is to allow developers to bring their own stack to the front-end, but provide them with the benefits of Shopify's back-end, like edge data processing for improved speed  at global scale. Shopify also offers a wealth of DevOps tooling and logistical support when it comes to international commerce. We also discuss Liquid, the flexible template language Shopify uses for  building web apps.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to chunhunghan for answering the question: How to customize the switch button in a flutter?

If you're full up on technical content and just want funny retweets, follow Adam on Twitter hereIf you're interested in learning more about tag pages, check out what the community created for Rust.Thanks to Peter Cordes, our lifeboat badge winner of the week, for answering the question: How can I accurately benchmark unaligned access speed on x86_64?

You can check out all the details about Collectives in our launch post here.We detailed the user research that allowed our community to help shape this product in a Meta post here.Teresa is on Twitter here and Jascha is on LinkedIn here. 

We chatted with three guests:Miguel Jetté: Head of AI R&DJosh Dong: AI Engineering ManagerJenny Drexler: Senior Speech ScientistWhen Jette was studying mathematics in the early 2000s, his focus was on computational biology, and more specifically, phylogenetic trees, and DNA sequences. He wanted to understand the evolution of certain traits and the forces that explain why our bones are a certain length or our brains a certain size. As it turned out, the algorithms and techniques he learned in this field mapped very well to the emerging discipline of automatic speech recognition, or ASR. During this period, Montreal was emerging as a hotbed for artificial intelligence, and Jette found himself working for Nuance, the company behind the original implementation of Siri. That experience led him to several positions in the world of speech recognition, and he eventually landed at Rev, where he founded the company’s AI department. Jette describes Rev as an “Uber for Transcription.” Anyone can sign up for the platform and earn money by listening to audio submitted by clients and transcribing the speech into text. This means the company has a tremendous dataset of raw audio that has been annotated by human beings and, in many cases, assessed a second time by the client. For someone looking to build an AI system that mastered the domain of speech to text, this was a goldmine. Jette built the earliest version of Rev’s AI, but it was up to our second guest, Josh Dong, to productize and scale that system. He helped the department transition from older technologies like Perl to more popular languages like Python. He also focused on practical concerns like modularity and reusable components. To combine machine learning and DevOps, Dong added Docker containers and a testing pipeline. If you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of keeping a system like Rev’s running at tremendous scale, you’ll want to check out this part of the show. We also explore some of the fascinating future and promise this technology holds in our time with Jenny Drexler. She explains how Rev is moving from a hybrid model—one that combines Jette’s older statistical techniques with Dong’s newer machine learning approach—to a new system that will be ML from end-to-end. This will open up the door for powerful applications, like a single system that can convert speech text across multiple languages in a single piece of audio. “One of the things that's really cool about these end to end models is that basically, whatever data you have, it can learn to handle it. So a very similar architecture can do sequence to sequence learning with different kinds of sequences. The model architecture that you might use for speech recognition can actually look very similar to what you might use for translation. And you can use that same architecture, to say, feed in audio in lots of different languages and be able to do transcription for any of them within one model. It's much harder with the hybrid models to sort of put all the right pieces together to make that happen,” explains Drexler.If you’re interested in learning more about the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence that can understand our spoken language and learn how to respond, check out the full episode. If you want to learn more about Rev or check out some of the positions they have open, you can find their careers page here.

Bligh explains her love for front end and the simple pleasure of bringing a designer’s vision to lifeWe also talk about making the transition from journalism and digital media to the world of software development. You can find her on Twitter here.You can check out Contact here.Learn more about Makers here.Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Rami Amro Ahmed, who answered the question: What is the difference between Model Factory and a DB seeder in Laravel?

You can check out some more of Henley's work on his blog here. Recent pieces include: A theory of how developers seek informationAll my career rejectionsNavigate your code like it's 2021 Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?An inquisitive code editor: Overcome bugs before you know you have themHow much time does the average developer spend typing in their editor versus researching, exploring, and pondering? Henley believes half an hour of inputting actual code a day is realistic, despite what you've heard about the 10X developer in your area. 

You can find Jenn on Twitter here. She is the creator of the wonderful website, make8bitart.com. You can check out Glitch here and dig into some of its WebXR projects.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Ruberandinda Patience, who explained why you got a 404 Not Found, even though the route exist in Laravel.

Karl is interested in the use of low code tools to extend development work beyond the engineering department. He also believes this approach, when done properly, allows teams to release new iterations more rapidly.Check out his company, draft.dev.Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.This week's lifefboat badge goes to Günter Zöchbauer, who explained: How to use 2 mixins in State in Flutter? 

Innocent is  a research associate at the MIT Gov /Lab. You can find him on Twitter here.Luke is the Founder and Executive Director of the civic technology organization Grassroot, as a practitioner-in-residence in 2021. You can follow him on Twitter here.Our lifeboat of the week goes to John Rotenstein, who explained: Why some services are called “AWS XXX” and the others “Amazon XXX”. 

You can read more about Spiros on his LinkedIn or Twitter.There is some good backstory on his first company, Log Insight, here. A rundown of the acquisition that led to Spiros joining Splunk is here. There are also some interesting details in Splunk's blog on the deal, which calls out Omnition as a "a stealth-mode SaaS company that is innovating in distributed tracing, improving monitoring across microservices applications."If you enjoy the conversation and want to hear more, Spiros has done some interesting talks that are up on Youtube here.Our lifeboat of the week goes to Willie Mentzel, who explains how to: Round Double to 1 decimal place in kotlin: from 0.044999 to 0.1. 

You can check out our piece how developers can be their own operations department here.Our piece on preventing scope creep while working from home is here.You can follow Mike on Twitter here and learn more about building apps for Slack here.This week's lifeboat badge goes to averroes for helping us to : Check if integer == null 

Chou, a  Stanford educated computer scientist and electrical engineer, cut her teeth in Silicon Valley with stints at Facebook, Quora, and Pinterest, where she advocated for a stronger focus on diversity. Block Party describes its mission as building "anti-harassment tools against online abuse, but more fundamentally we are building solutions for user control, protection, and safety."As CEO and lead engineer, Chou gets to choose the company's tools. Block Party is built with technologies like Render, Flask, and Jinja. Paul is very jealous of this stack.Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Bryan Oakley, who answered the question: How to redirect print statements to Tkinter text widget?  

Eric was a build engineer at Apple for many years, then started a FeaturePeek which went through Y-combinator. He talks about what he learned from those experiences and how he'll be applying that knowledge to his new job at Netlify.The teams combined forces to make the process of submitting and gathering feedback on deploy previews easier and more broadly accessible outside technical teams. As Cassidy explained:“Based on technology from FeaturePeek, Deploy Previews enables reviewers to comment, screen record, and annotate right from the actual preview link. No new tabs. No new tools. Everyone’s feedback is recorded back in the GitHub pull request and can even extend to popular productivity tools such as Clubhouse.io, Linear, and Trello.”This feature set is near and dear to Ben’s heart. Now folks from marketing and design can offer feedback and be more tightly involved in the development process for new features, products, and websites. All without really learning Git! Also discussed this episode: weirdware, workflow automation, Jerry Garcia, compound bows, and the spread of Git and branch methodology to areas well outside software development.

David helps us understand where great designers fit on web companies these days, somewhere between front-of-the-front-end and back-of-the-front-end.Right now a lot of projects have to be maintained in multiple places - one for marketing, one for design, one for development. David shares thoughts on how to combine workspaces and where design systems can be integrated with tools.Congrats to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Jon, for helping unpack this riddle: Execution failed for task ':fluttertoast:compileDebugKotlin'

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

Sara has been part of the open source community since 2001 and was formerly on the board of the .NET foundation. Recently she was elected to the board of the OpenJS foundation and was eager to get back in the trenches, helping people solve computer problems.In this episode we talk about coding interviews and brushing up on your puzzle solving chops.Later we dive into Ember.js, the framework Sara will be using with her new colleagues at LinkedIn.We explore what it’s like to join a team when everyone is still remote and you never get the chance to onboard with your team in person.This week’s lifeboat badge winner is Perfect28, who answered the question: Linq OrderBy custom order. Spoiler alert, there are char arrays involved. 

You can find Tommy on Twitter here and check out his NFT collection here.Evan tweets his undying love for The Mets here.Before you lay out your critique of NFTs, here's a great documentary on fraud and forgery in the fine art world. Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Oriol, who answered the question: What is the difference between 'remove' and 'removeChild' method in javascript?

You can check out the badge Github gave to folks for helping with the Mars flight here. You can learn more about F´, NASA’s open source flight software and embedded system framework, here.Paul tells the story of a shady financial operator who offered to take his blog public during the dot com boom. Yes, Ftrain.com was once an IPO candidate.Who copies and pastes from Stack Overflow? We dig into some of the data from our April Fools joke to get a sense of the scale and collaboration happening across our community.Paul takes a tutorial on coding with Ethereum but decides decarbonizing is the real future for software.Today's lifeboat badge winner is Scott M., who answered the question: How to remove one line from a txt file? 

You can check out Frontend Mentor here. Try a few challenges or join their Slack, where thousands of students are chatting about how they are approaching the projects.You can follow Matt on Twitter here. If you want to read about how he made the jump from personal trainer to web developer, he did a nice interview with Indie London.Our lifeboat of the week goes to Banex for answering the question: why do we use NULL in strtok()?

You can follow David on Twitter here and read his blog here.Check out more about Dapper Labs and it's work with the NBA and NFTs here.David has written some influential pieces on the world of digital music and the role of software platforms. Check out a few of his pieces here.Read about David's adventure's setting up a Minecraft server for his kids and using software for griefer detection. Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Keith Thompson, for answering the question: Go lang differentiate “\n” and line breakAs Keith eloquently explains, "There is no distinction between a 'real' and an 'unreal' line break." 

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

You can check out our deep dive into the copy paste data here. We saw over 40 million copies in the two weeks worth of activity we analyzed.Kyle  Pollard graduated from the University of Northern British Columbia and worked as a computer technician and  programmer for the City of Prince George in Canada.  You can find him on Github, Twitter, and his website.There’s lots of info about Cassidy’s various projects at cassidoo.co.  You can catch her coding live at @cassidoo, Thursdays at 12:30 PT/2:30 Central/3:30 Eastern.Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is TJ Crowder, who answered the question: How can I see the source of built-in JavaScript functions?

You can follow David on Twitter here. If you want to check out his new book, The Business of Belonging,  the first chapter is available here.You can find out more about CMX here and learn more about Bevy here.Cesar prefers to remain off social media, but you can find him on LinkedIn.

Dave Winer wrote a fun piece on the lost apps of the 80s. We explore the paradox of software that is "too good" to become popular among mainstream consumers. Microsoft has been releasing new versions of its flagship flight simulator each year for a whopping 38 years now. Now we know what makes it seem so very, very real. But just how big can that next patch be? Another day, another data breach. At this point, we've become numb to the notion that our identity is compromised.  Is acceptance better for your health than constantly being on guard? See for yourself.

You can find Michelle on Twitter here.You can learn more about building apps with Twilio here.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to TryingToLearn for explaining the error that pops up in Python when: you can't assign to literal.

Lots of people who work outside of programming learn Python as part of their job. When folks from telecom, academia, or medical science want to build a web app to help with their job or share their findings with the world, they may feel they need to learn Javascript, CSS, HTML, and half a dozen frameworks to get started. Anvil is a platform that hopes to enable the creation of great web apps with nothing but Python code. You can drag and drop your user elements and rely on Anvil to handle your server and database. He also created Skulpt, which you can check out here. It's decscribed as follows, "Python. Client Side. Skulpt is an entirely in-browser implementation of Python. No preprocessing, plugins, or server-side support required, just write Python and reload. Want to go deeper? Check out his talk on Full Stack Web Development with nothing but Python here. You can follow him on Twitter here and Github here.

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

You can find Roberta on Twitter. For anyone who understands Portuguese, you can also check out her podcast. Check out Roberta's recent blog post on best practices, and when to ignore them.If you're interested in Dapper, an open source project built by Stack Overflow folks that works as a simple object mapper .Net, you can check it out here.Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Colonel Panic, for explaining: What the boolean literals in PowerShell are  

Shay is a developer advocate building open source tools and writing education content. Outside of work she writes poetry, indulges fad hobbies, and reads whatever’s left out on the coffee table. Steve Gill a Developer Relations Manager, currently managing the SDK tools team at Slack. The tools teams develops all of our open sourced SDK, such as Bolt for JavaScript, Python, and Java. In his spare time, he enjoys playing ice hockey, woodworking and gaming.You can find Shay on  LinkedIn and  TwitterLearn more about Steve on LinkedIn and Twitter If you're interested in Bolt, there is lots to learn here.No lifeboat this week, but thanks to Alex for emailing us to ask: "alternatives to more better element usage?" If you have ideas, we're all ears.

You can find out more about Suyog and his career here. True story, he once worked on tablets way before tablets were a thing.He's on Twitter here. You can check out Elastic Cloud and it's suite of services here.Suyog talks a bit about data gravity, a concept you can learn more about here.If you're a fan of release notes and want to get a sense of what Suyog worked on at Elastic over the years, check out his blog archives here.Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, lhf, for anwering the question: How can I get the current UTC time in a Lua script?

You can check out more of Tom's work and some of his books on his website, Everything SysAdmin. Tom also wrote a great blog post for our site that explains his method for crafting a positive feedback loop between Dev and Ops using real-time documentation.You can find Tom on Twitter and check out his books on Sys Admin and  Cloud System Administration.

Ian is Brooklyn bred a tech junkie, NBA stats nerd, hip hop connoisseur, and co-creator of GameFlo and Ujima Now. He graduated from Brown University and was a teaching fellow at FullStack Academy before coming to Stack Overflow. You can find him on Twitter and Github.Kyle  Pollard graduated from the University of Northern British Columbia and worked as a computer technician and  programmer for the City of Prince George in Canada.  You can find him on Github, Twitter, and his website.Our lifeboat this week goes to  Max Pevsner, who answered a question, but cautioned against taking his advice: Don't reuse cell in UITableView

It was a pandemic, Olivia was on maternity leave after giving birth, and she also had a toddler to take care of. Somehow she still managed to build a website, macovidvaccines.com, that provided far better service than what was available through government and private industry.You can find out more about Olivia on the sites below. TwitterWebsiteLinkedIn

Cleghorn works for Defense Digital Services. On Twitter, the group describes itself as  "a SWAT team of nerds on tours of duty."  You can read more about the group's goals on their website. You can see some of his work over on Hacker One.

This week's discussion was inspired by an article from Sandi Metz, which you can find here. It begins with a terrific line, defining the half-life of software as, "the amount of time required for half of an application's code to change so much that it becomes unrecognizable."This topic also connected to a post we ran on the Stack Overflow blog this week,  Sacrificial Architecture: learning from abandoned systems. The author, Mohamad Aladdin, suggest that one should "think of your code quality as if it will run forever, but adapt to change as if your code will be obsolete tomorrow."Our lifeboat badge winner for this episode is Ishmael, who explained why JSON dumps your formatting and how to fix it.

You can find  the paper on MuZero here.He blogs at Furidamu and can be found on Twitter here.The story on drug discovery powered by AI can be found here. 

If you’re a programmer working with npm, Sara has some basic advice on best practices that will keep your codebase safe.Today’s discussion was inspired by a blog post from Michel Gorny which you can find here.Need to simplify the address where people can send you bitcoins? Check out https://ens.domains/, which even offers .club for your TLD.Thanks to Tagir Valeev for answering the question: How to Split odd and even numbers and sum of both in collection using Stream. You’re our lifeboat badge winner of the week.

Blake has a PhD in physics from Yale and is the quantum platform lead. You can find him on Twitter here and read some of his recent writing here.Robert is VP of IBM Quantum Ecosystem Development, IBM Research. He's the author of Dancing with Qubits  and has put together a great list of tutorial videos on his website.No Lifeboat badge winner today, but if you're a fan of Schrödinger's cat, be sure to check out this question from our Quantum Computing Stack Exchange.  

Welcome to The Stack Overflow Podcast!

A nice story on how to avoid the Nomad Tax Trap.Got a lot of employees moving to Texas? The state is notorious for the number of patent lawsuits filed there, and having employees living in the area may expose companies to great legal liability.If the work from home boom is here to stay, get ready for a lot of "cost-of-living" adjustments to follow.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to kd12 for explaining: How to get an element by its data-id in jQuery

Pattern matching in Python 3 - a nice new feature, a  gift to Stack Overflow point seekers, or a big pain in the neck? Curious about the Jamstack? You can find lots of great information on how it works and who works with it here.Want to follow Matt? He's on Twitter here.Our lifeboat badge winner for this episode is Jim Mischel, who explained how to: Find the first character in a string that is a letter. 

Thanks to Marceli Wac for sending us a question about cron jobs. We love getting mail from listeners and try our best to read interesting questions on the show. The goal for Ben's app is simple: let anyone register their intention to show up to the dog park at a certain time so that strangers can have a better chance of arriving at the same time and get some exercise for the pups. What's the simplest web app that would collect the least personal information and reset every 24 hours. Bonus points if we can do it without a database! Kristina Lustig, a veteran Stacker, wrote a great blog post for us: I followed my dreams and got demoted to software developer. Our lifeboat of the week goes to Mike Nakis, who answered the question: What is the difference between memberwise copy, bitwise copy, shallow copy and deep copy?

You can check out Cassidy's course on React here. It will teach you how to "build a reusable and declarative React component library. It's perfect for developers who are looking to build a scalable design system for their team and product." If you're not in the mood to subscribe, Cassidy would recommend Free Code Camp.There's lots of info about Cassidy's various projects at cassidoo.co.  You can catch her coding live at twitter.com/cassidoo, Thursdays at 12:30 PT/2:30 Central/3:30 Eastern.Sara  made it to the ending credits of Hades, so you know she's a fan. Cassidy is excited for the latest version of Stardew Valley and has been impressed with  Half Life Alyx and the Valve Index VR headset.

Check out the great post from Laura Nolan, a senior engineer at Slack, breaking down their outage. Paul wants some simple command line utilities for "fix-server" and "boot-it-all-up."Clubhouse was known early on for being popular with Silicon Valley, but it's increasingly becoming a global phenomenon. You don't have to wait for it to go public to invest,  you can buy shares right now in Agora, the Chinese company powering its real time audio chat.Got ideas for how we can version Q&A on Stack Overflow to ensure questions with accepted answers don't become outdated or obsolete? We're planning to work on this problem, so send suggestions our way.This week's Lifeboat badge winner is Quinn, who answered the question: How to replace a string in a file using regular expressions? 

Maybe you don't think GameStop is a tech story, but rest assured, the screenwriting duo behind The Social Network and  21 will inject plenty of nerdery into the Hollywood version.Sara is eager to share the history of CSS, and all the ways it has let her down.We dig into a wise act of self-prersevation from Ben B Johnson. As he writes:  "Similar to SQLite, Litestream is open source but closed to contributions. This keeps the code base free of proprietary or licensed code but it also helps me continue to maintain and build Litestream.As the author of BoltDB, I found that accepting and maintaining third party patches contributed to my burn out and I eventually archived the project. Writing databases & low-level replication tools involves nuance and simple one line changes can have profound and unexpected changes in correctness and performance. Small contributions typically required hours of my time to properly test and validate them.I am grateful for community involvement, bug reports, & feature requests. I do not wish to come off as anything but welcoming, however, I've made the decision to keep this project closed to contributions for my own mental health and long term viability of the project."Hurray for new approaches that don't ignore personal wellbeing. Today's lifeboat badge winner is Quinn, who explained: How to replace a string in a file using regular expressions

You can follow Brian on Twitter. and check out the Cloudcast here. If you're just getting started, he has a cloud basics podcast that covers a new topic each month. And if you are just really, really into containers, well he's got you covered. Paul was talking with someone who mentors a lot of young coders. What are they all into these days? Typescript? Web Assembly? Nope, they're all getting AWS certified.A certification for AWS , Azure, and GCP has become an efficient way to break into the job market. Companies like Cloud Guru make it simple to understand what you need. We discuss what this new on-ramp to the world of software means for the rising generation of coders, or those looking to become programmers down the line.

Today's conversation was inspired by a great blog post from Charity Majors.We also discuss the Chrome team's decision to migrate Puppeteer to Typescript, and the way in which large tech organizations are increasingly interconnected by a set of open source tools and platforms. Lastly, we discuss the impact expanded funding for community colleges could have on the pipeline of software engineers entering the job market.Today's lifeboat badge winner is Abdul Saboor, who answered the question: How do you convert negative data into positive data in SQL Server?

Joe Biden just wants to ride his Peleton, but equipment connected to WiFi  with a camera and microphone can pose a real security risk.If you've got a chicken coop or greenhouse that needs a little warmth this winter, maybe team it up with your gaming PC or bitcoin mining rig, which tend to give off a lot of heat.Speaking of heat, we dive into datacenters that were sunk under the ocean in an effort to create more economically efficient and environmentally friendly computing.Our favorite meme of the week, a Heroku app that puts a chilly Bernie Sanders anywhere in the world.Our lifeboat badge winner is Lukas Kalbertodt, who answered the question: What's the most efficient way to insert an element into a sorted vector?  

Joocelyn hosts the Git Cute podcast, which you can find here.She's working on a book about seniority in the software industry, which you can pre-order here.You can follow her on Twitter at javavvitch.Our lifeboat badge goes to LMc for explaining how one can: Count the Letter Frequency in a String with Python

The title of this week's episode comes from a Hacker News thread where Guillermo argued that the complexity of front end performance goes beyond simplifying your stack to bare web primitives.You can find out more about Vercel, which  recently raised a $40 million round, on Guillermo's blog, where he details what the company has planned for the future.You can find more info on Next.JS here. It's a very active tag on Stack Overflow with dozens of new questions a day.Our lifeboat badge for this episode goes to paxdiablo for answering the question: What does .split() return if the string has no match?

How could you not love a team with a bio like this: "We’re a young and dynamic team of messy data-scientists who have failed at being employed on the real market. Our experience in losing data and throwing files away is more than amazing! Over the years, we have managed to get rid of so much important data at home and even at work." Find out how you pay other people to throw your data away here.The New York Times reports on the rising prices of old computers and their parts. Retro-computing is fun, especially when you're stuck at home for...feels like a while now.Stack Overflow memes have made it to Tik Tok, and it is joyous.To round things out we chat about our love of e-ink, the desire to buy a reMarkable 2, and this amazing piece of digital wall art.This week's lifeboat badge winner is Gordon Larrigan, who answered the question:  How can you sort an array of arrays in JavaScript?

The starting point for today's conversation was an argument made by Guillermo Rauch in this blog post. "And each time, your frontend has an opportunity to impress, delight, perform, be accessible and memorable. What's more, frontend is an area of technological and artistic differentiation, while backend becomes increasingly commoditized, turnkey and undifferentiated."Sure, programming in PowerPoint isn't very practical. That doesn't mean it can't be lots of fun, and teach you a few things.Speaking of learning things, we chat a bit about Alan Kay, who has a wonderful talk on the ways we can use computers to illustrate complex concepts to children.

If you're interested in learning a bit of BBC Basic, there is a fun introduction here. You can tweet at this bot, and it will run the contents as code and reply with a video of the results.If you are interested in life-logging and want to see it done with a lot of very pretty graphs, check out this post, My Year in Data.Last but not least we chat about Svelte, which lets you create "cybernetically enhanced web apps." Shout to Murali, a listener who suggested this topic.Our lifeboat of the week goes to koekenbakker for answering the question:  R plots: Is there a way to draw a border, shadow or buffer around text labels?  

You can find the first episode of the SO podcast here. It was conducted over Asterix, open source telephony software that allowed for fancy operations like voice messaging and recording calls! What would social software look like if we designed them to remove commerce and popularity? Are services like Mightybell an interesting example of where we might be headed?If you want to build a model of something - say traffic patterns in your town or a hypothetical zombie invasion - you should check out a new project Joel is involved in, Hash.ai.  

There is a nice breakdown of the Solarigate attack here, but the most important thing to know is that just seeing the words BusinessLayer.dll is enough to make our eyes glaze over and our defenses go down.One interesting second order effect of this intrusion is that it will be difficult to know when all malicious code and access has really been removed. It brought to mind the classic Turing Award Lecture, Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson. If you're trying to entertain kids over the holidays, Ben will be messing around with Roblox, which lets you create your own mini-games and has several hooks to deeper programming capabilities.Our Lifeboat badge winner this week is Chinito, who answered the question of how you can: Set style using pure JavaScript

With Bitcoin hitting all time highs, there has been a lot of speculation about what will happen next in the market crypto market.Meanwhile, regulators are targeting Ripple with a lawsuit and arguing that crypto isn't really a currency after all. You have until Jan, 4, 2021 to participate in our annual Winter Bash. By answering questions on Stack Overflow and across Stack Exchange, you can unlock some unique digital flair for your avatar.Don't forget to tune in the first day of the new year for episode 300 of the podcast, we booked a very special guest. Check out this episode to learn more.. 

There is a lot to think about when designing trading algorithms, especially in the world of cryptocurrency, where prices can be extremely volatile and limited liquidity means a single trader moving big volume can have a hefty influence on price.Bitcoin is at a record breaking price these days, but investing in it is not for the faint of heart. To learn more, we chat with Li, who is a software engineer at Coinbase. You can find her on Twitter here.If you're interested in learning more about Bitcoin, we would have to recommend Bitcoin Developer. After all, they were kind enough to recommend our Bitcoin Stack Exchange as a key resource. 

You can read more about Javascriptlandia here. It is part of larger conversation happening on Google's Open Source Blog and through initiatives like Github allowing corporations into their Sponsors program.For a delightfully old school and interactive website about Myles, click here. For his Twitter, go here.You can find Jory's website here and her Twitter presence here.This week's lifeboat badge goes to Marijn van Vliet for answering the question: How do I return a char array from a function?

You can find the original tweet here. AWS will work with them on publicity and open source their version so that there can be a flow of value in both directions. You can learn more about Tim's company, Checkly.hq, which works on active monitoring for developers. The team there also works on  Headless Recorder, a Chrome extension that records your browser interactions and generates a Playwright or Puppeteer script. They also operate The Headless Dev, which helps coders learn Playwright and Puppeteer. This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Ravindra Bagale for answering the question:  How to Convert Integer to Character Array using C

As promised, here is the grass hat.You can find out more about Earthly here.We spend a little time talking about Nix OS the operating system you can roll back if you don't like a patch.Raise your hand if you remember learning computer science with Turbo Pascal.Maybe you didn't know, but discs aren't as slow as people think. Adam's recent episode is about upending common assumptions on IO performance. Shoutout to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, Josh Smift, for answering the question: How to delete *.web files only if they exist. 

You can read about GraphQL here and Apollo here. Cassidy Williams, who curates our newsletter, wrote about her experience as an early adopter of the technology last summer.You can find more on Meteor here. Schmidt also helped create Monument,  which he describes as "an affordable live/work art event space in downtown San Francisco. The upstairs is 24 private bedrooms and studio spaces and the downstairs is a 200+ capacity person event venue and makerspace. Our goal is to connect creative people across different fields, and in particular build bridges between art and technology." 

Gone in a Flash. Actually it took quite a while. Adobe explains its decision to stop supporting Flash here.You can learn more about Ruffle, the Flash emulator written in Rust, here.Here are some tips on writing a developer resume from a hiring manager who's written an entire book on the topic.You can read more about the Supreme Court case considering the limits of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act here and hereOur Lifeboat badge of the week goes to a user named simply 4386427, who answered the most basic and frustrating question: why does “printf” not work?

You can find more about Resner here. Learn more about the topics we discussed by following some of Resner's suggested links below: People to follow on Twitter: Safyia Noble, Ruha Benjamin, and Kamal Sinclair.Ellen Pao and Project Include.Eli Pariser and New Public by Civic Signals.

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.  

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.   

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?   

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. 

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.

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? 

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.

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. 

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.  

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.

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 

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.    

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.

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.

"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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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 

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!

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? 

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? 

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.   

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.

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.

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/

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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? 

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.

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.   

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?  

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? 

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?  

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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!

If you're in the market for a used car and some retro web design, look no further.Thanks to our Lifeboater of the week, Günter Zöchbauer, for explaining how to use the MyHomePage widget in Flutter.

You can find Textmoji here. A few taps and you're the hippest typographer in your company's work chat. Seek, the app from iNaturalist, is available on Android and iOS. You can find it here. Ben has over 30 plants, a dozen insects, and five amphibians, so if you're feeling competitive, it's gonna be a long hike to catch up.It can be hard selling software or design in a period where vendors and potential clients can rarely meet in person. Paul has been enjoying Whimsical, which advertises itself as allowing users to "communicate visually at the speed of thought." We also spend some time discussing Supabase, an open source Firebase alternative.As discussed in the intro to this episode, we wanted to share some resources connected to the ongoing protests and memorials happening in the US. Black and Brown, a group of employees within Stack Overflow, put together some recommendations of social media accounts to follow.Antiracism Center: TwitterAudre Lorde Project: Twitter | Instagram | FacebookBlack Women’s Blueprint: Twitter | Instagram | FacebookEqual Justice Initiative (EJI): Twitter | Instagram | Facebook

Has there ever been a tech startup that raised shy of $3 billion, inflation-adjusted for any era, while barely making a ripple with actual customers? Magic Leap just pocketed a fresh $350 million in funding, on the condition that its co-founder and CEO Rony Abovitz, agree to step aside and allow new leadership to take the reins. We chat AR/VR, dot-com flameouts, and why crazy tech is worth believing in.Sara hips us to the 11th anniversary of Node.js and the 25th anniversary of Javascript. The latter has the distinction of being the only language to appear in the top 10 for most loved and most hated languages on our 2020 developer survey. Paul and Sara reminisce about Javascript callbacks. Hard work builds character, don't ya know.This episode was recorded before the recent protests, and so does not contain any discussion of current events in the United States. We will touch on it in future episodes, but you can find Stack Overflow's statement on it here.

Brian is a contributor to Deno, and walks us through what this project has to offer.  He also made it easy to work with Deno right in the browser. You can check it out here.You can learn more about Begin here. If you want to follow Brian, you can find him on Twitter here and on Github here.We spend a bunch of time digging into the overlaps between Deno, Rust, Java, and Typescript. In case you missed it, Typescript is now the second most beloved language, based on the results of our 2020 Developer Survey. 

Sara is spending her time as a fully remote worker trying to learn more about open source governance and foundations. Turns out there is a lot of overlap with the work Stack does alongside its community. Paul has a project for playing with math in your storytelling. You can check it out here.Our lifeboat of the week goes to Stack Overflow user Scolytus, who answered the following question: Why am I getting an error when creating a C Struct initialization with char array?

You can read up on Deno 1.0 here.The star-studded ceremony for the 2020 Webby's can be watched on repeat here (not that we're doing that...)This is the Wired story about Lee Holloway, a brilliant coder who helped build Cloudflare, but then mysteriously fell into decline. It's a sad but beautifully written tale.Thanks to Stack Overflow user htamas for saving a question and winning a lifeboat : Gradle project refresh failed, unable to get the CMake.Ryan's piece on how coders beg, borrow, and steal can be found here.

Before we can move on to business as usual, the crew has to recount each and every way in which our first live podcast went spectacularly wrong. Laggy video, overwhelming audio, and too many silly hats. But hey, DevAroundTheSun did raise over $60,000 to help folks impacted by the COVID-19 crisis.We chat about Patio 11's law, and the incredible percentage of successful software startups that never gain any recognition in the mainstream tech press, but manage to build and grow successful, profitable operations.  The debate rages on about how permanent this new world of completely remote work will be. Which companies will return to renting expensive officers and pampering employees with food and snacks and which companies will decide to start hiring across the globe and cutting back on IRL engagements. Lastly we chat about Typescript, why it's getting so popular, and how it reminds Jenn of her days as an academic teaching Java to aspiring computer science majors. To learn more about Jenn, check her out her website. And to see what her company has been working on, head over to Glitch and Glimmer.

This episode was recorded Thursday, May 9th, two days after Stack Overflow announced it was going to furlough 15% of its staff. We talk about how this process played out internally and the ways in which we are hoping to grow our business so we can bring these great people back. You can read more about it in a blog post from our CEO here.After that, we discuss Zoom's acquisition of Keybase. Usage and wider public awareness of Zoom have been growing by leaps and bounds as the world shifts to remote work and learning during this pandemic. This has exposed some security issues with Zoom's platform, and the acquisition of Keybase seems to be aimed at shoring up their cybersecurity and encryption capabilities. Sara, never one to miss an opportunity to plug Bitcoin, hips us to The Halvening. What does it all mean? Read more about it here.Finally, Paul walks us through Deno, which was created by Ryan Dahl, who also created Node.js. Deno is  "a brand new JavaScript runtime for the backend, but instead of being written in C++, it’s written in Rust, based on the Tokio platform (which provides the asynchronous runtime needed by JavaScript), still running Google’s V8 engine though." You can read more about it here.Our lifeboater of the week is Stack Overflow user James Kanze, who was awarded the badge for answering the question: C++: What is the difference between ostream and ostringstream?Thanks for listening :)

In addition to her role as PM's on Microsoft's .NEt team, Claire is an Executive Director of the .NET Foundation. Jeff, meanwhile, is a Twitch Partner, technical educator and founder of @theLiveCoders. He can be found streaming live coding projects and challenges as CsharpFritz on Twitch. Both have been working with our own Sara Chipps to organize today's DevAroundTheSun event in order to raise money for those impacted by the COVID-19 crisis.In addition to this episode, you can tune in this morning at 9am Eastern Standard Time to catch a live episode of the Stack Overflow podcast on Twitch, where we'll be highlighting some of the fascinating talks and great speakers happing at DevAroundTheSun, and generally having a few laughs talking about software, tech, and life.

Sham Kakade is a professor of computer science, statistics, and data science at the University of Washington. A group from his university, along with volunteers from Microsoft, is creating a contact tracing app called Covid Safe. Sham explains how technology could make it possible for democratic nations to fight the pandemic while preserving civil liberties.You can read more about Sham’s app, Covid Safe, here.The app isn’t live in the iOS or Android app store yet, but you can download an Android demo here and help the team work out the bugs. You can also use that link to find their GitHub community.You can read Paul’s take on the contact tracing spec released by Apple and Google here.

You can read more about Sham's app, Covid Safe, here. You can  find his university bio here.The app isn't live in the iOS or Android app store yet, but you can download an Android demo here and help the team work out the bugs. You can also use that link to find their GitHub community.You can read Paul's take on the contact tracing spec released by Apple and Google here.This is a two part episode, so tune in Friday for the second half.

What happens when the grizzled captain decides they need to stop delegating and put their hands back on the helm? Sara is rewatching Star Trek and trying to find some wisdom in Picard's approach to crisis.Where did React come from? What's the line between a library, a framework, and a whole new language? You can learn lots more in this extensive video from the Women in React conference that happened remotely last weekend. One thing we didn't know about that conference was that they gave out original swag you can use while playing Animal Crossing. And just yesterday we noticed the Deserted Island DevOps conference, where the entire event is actually happening inside Animal Crossing. From there we got to talking about Second Life, Linden Bucks, and the amazing concert that Travis Scott put on in Fortnite recently. The longer this quarantine goes on, the closer we move to a truly virtual work world.  You can find the Fortnite concert here. It's just ten minutes long, but skip ahead to 2:10 if you want to see something really cool. Last but not least, Paul didn't take the easy way out. He finalyl sat down and did some parsing.  He is ready for you to make fun of him.

JJ came to our attention when we saw a tweet about his work to get an ETL pipeline with COBOL running on Kubernetes. Elizabeth comes from the world of Linux Systems Administration, but more recently has been working on COBOL and mainframe computing. She tells us that there is actually a cohort of college students actively learning and using COBOL, both for competitions like Mastering the Mainframe, but also because it's a language that can attract a high paying job at a number of big banks, healthcare providers, and government institutions. You can find JJ on Twitter here and on Github here. Prior to IBM he was a partner architect at Chef Software. You can read more about Elizabeth on her website, princessleia.com, and yes, we are going to have her back on the podcast in the future to talk about how and when she got that domain name.If you're interested in learning COBOL, a ton of resources are available here.As always, don't forget about the upcoming charity event, DevAroundTheSun, which is bringing together a lot of cool developers for talks and activities, with proceeds going to support those impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In this episode, we pay our respects to John Conway, a legendary mathematician known for the Game of Life and Surreal Numbers. Our math Stack Exchange paid respects to some of his lesser known results.Jon and Adam give us a rundown of some of their favorite April Fools projects from the past, many of which they helped build. Adam has a soft spot for Unikong, while Jon is more of a rubber duck man.Don't forget to check out DevAroundTheSun for ways tech folks can support those impacted by COVID-19. 

Jon is the team lead for Public Q&A, which is what we call the platform that hosts the 172 community sites across Stack. Adam is a senior software developer on the community team and a former community manager. Jon describes his job these days as intercepting all the meetings, phone calls, and busy work that would keep the devs on his team from actually writing code. That, and to deliver product on time and to spec, with the hope that a predictable product pipeline is the best way to keep all stakeholders happy.Adam spends most days writing code, although his most productive days are the ones when he deletes more than he creates. He was part of the team that helped ship our recent Dark Mode feature. If you want to learn more about some of our plans for upcoming changes to Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, tune in Friday for part two of this episode.

Monday's big story on Bloomberg was that the US unemployment system was being slowed by problems with an "ancient" programming language. Well, yah heard it here first. Also, ancient seems a bit extreme for something that is 60-years-old, but perhaps in the world of software, that does qualify as nearly pre-historic. After that, we switch to the biggest news in tech, or perhaps in the world, over the last week. Apple and Google have released a spec for a contact tracing system. As countries around the world work to slowly reopen their economies, contact tracing is a powerful tool for preventing new surges in coronavirus outbreaks. The system the duo of tech giants devised includes specs for bluetooth, cryptography, and APIs. You can read Paul's deep dive take on it at the link above.Last but not least, if you're interested in donating to help those affected by COVID-19, Sara is working with the .NET foundation on a project called Dev Around The Sun. They are providing assistance and mentorship to folks impacted by this pandemic, and you can learn more about how to donate time or funding at the link above. Be safe, be well, and we'll talk to you again on Tuesday. 

I asked Anna to describe herself in her own words. "Anna Lytical is a drag queen and engineer who creates sickeningly entertaining and educational coding tutorials in order to engage more LGBTQ+ people with coding and the tech industry. Anna shows how to use technology to represent yourself through various projects like websites, Instagram filters, glamorous command prompts and so much more."Sara has been a big fan for a while, both on Twitter and YouTube. Below are some highlights: PROFESSIONAL ENGINEER CODES WEBSITE BY ONLY COPYING & PASTINGYOU DIDN'T KNOW YOUR COMMAND PROMPT COULD LOOK THIS GLAM!Speaking of great coding projects, Sara is helping to support DevAroundTheSun. It's a 24-hour coding jam that offers mentorship and tutorials, with all proceeds going to help people impacted by COVID-19.  Check out the link above to learn how you can participate. 

Earlier this week, New Jersey Governer Phil Murphy announced that the state desperately needed the help of COBOL programmers. The 60-year-old programming language runs the state's unemployment system, and crashed under the historic influx of applications created by the COVID-19 crisis. So, if you're a COBOL programmer listening to this show or know a retired COBOL ace who wants to lend a hand, you can help get folks access to the funds they desperately need. In the second half of the episode, we talk about Ben's many trips to CES over the years a journalist. This annual pilgrimage got him added to lots of email lists from manufacturers and suppliers of electronic components. In the last few weeks, the emails have suddenly shifted: instead of offering widgets and wires, they are pitching the ability to make and deliver critical medical supplies. We dig into the ways in which technology, hardware, and manufacturing have changed over the last few decades and the ripple effects that massive global transformation is having today.  

It's just your hosts this episode - Paul, Sara, and Ben. We chat about the end of the influential open-source events that O'reillly held for many years, conferences that in many ways helped to form the personality of the early web. Engineers love to solve problems and create new tools. So what do you do when the best solution is to stay home? We have a few ideas about how to deal with the  moment.If we all go into cryosleep, will the bots keep trading the market, and for how long? Sara recommends a novel - Machines Like Me.

You can check out more about Aaron at his website. He is a designer, developer, and musician who worked at Github and Adobe prior to joining Stack. You can also read Aaron's post on how he built dark mode here. For the next 48 hours, you also have the option to try out our April Fool's gag, Ultra Dark Mode.

If you follow community issues on the Stack network, you may be familiar with Aaron Hall. He took the time to respond to a post from our CEO and subsequently came by Stack Overflow to engage more deeply with our leadership and community teams.  You can find his summary of events here. Most days, you can find him streaming on Twitch here.Nitsua60 is a moderator over on our RPG Stack Exchange, which is one of the 25 largest communities  our users have created. He's there to help guide curious role players through the important questions in life, like: How Can a Unicorn Establish a Foreign Location as its own Lair When its Already The Lair of a Lich? Answer --> here.We chat a little about the new Instagram account Stack Overflow just launched. We created fun animations that bring to life some of the best questions and answers from across the Stack network. Chatrooms are one of the less well known features of Stack communities. Nitsua60 said that not only has he seen more conversation in  the RPG chat, but a new room has been created for folks from across the family of Stack networks to chat about issues and emotions relating to the global pandemic we are all dealing with. It made him think of the recent op-ed from Stanley McChrystal about the importance of "digital leadership" and communication in modern crises. A great example of that is what's happening over at the Academia Stack Exchange. This community has seen a massive influx of activity as schools from kindergarten through university have shut down. In response, they put together an incredible set of resources for folks who are trying to adapt their workflow to the reality of shuttered schools , remote learning, and social distancing. We hope you're staying safe, and thanks as always to the brave folks working on the front lines to keep essential services running and medical care available.

Ben is now the full time IT department for his two sons, one of whom is in kindergarten and one in first grade. The children have transitioned from public school to Zoom, Google Classroom, Konstella, FaceTime, and five million other services. Paul's neighbors in his apartment building are digging old laptops out of storage and leaving them in front of his door. They bleach them first, so that they are 100% disinfected. Then Paul slaps on a little Ubuntu/Lubuntu and those old machines are suddenly zippy netbooks that help adults and kids work and study from home. Sara reveals she has an amazing "resting interested face" - a skill that makes her the most popular person at any live talk in front of an audience. That box of old cables finally came in handy! We shout out our lifeboat badge winners, as we near the major milestone of 1000 lifeboats. Keep them coming. 

Many countries around the world have now ordered citizens to work from home, exempting only those in essential industries. We have some tips on our blog about how to make remote work the best it can be, and a new piece up on how to handle remote hiring if your company is trying to fill positions during these unusual circumstances. Sara is nervous about working from home with her husband, who is also a software engineer. There can only be so many commits in a committed relationship. But she has double the space per person of Paul, who shares a 1200 square foot Brooklyn abode with a wife and two kids.  Ben, meanwhile, has decamped for upstate New York. Buzzfeed asks, if this sudden experiment in mass remote work goes well for certain companies, will they simply opt to transition to full remote forever after the pandemic ends. Stack Overflow was born remote, an idea that germinated across blogs and Skype calls. The very first episode of the Stack Overflow podcast tells the tale. Our community saved us from major egg on our face, warning us about a Let's Encrypt bug that would have left Stack Overflow with expired certificates. You can hear a more detailed explanation of how this works here.If you're cracking out an old computer to use for home schooling you children or lending to a neighbor, Paul asks you to consider that now, in this wild moment of uncertainty, an Ubuntu Linux machine might be just the solution you need.

When Robinhood went down at the beginning of March, many speculated it might have been caused by the extra  day, February 29th. This is a leap year after all. Robinhood blamed the outage on an unprecedented spike in usage. Either way, it go us thinking about time. For example, Postgres has a great understanding of time as a database. Like, it really knows all the different things that happened going back to literally year 4,000 BC including years that were skipped when they re-crafted the calendar and just like bananas stuff that happens with calendars over time. An excellent source of truth if it fits with your project.Next, a user shared the story of a wild interaction between Docker and the driver used by Razor peripherals. You can't have your fancy gaming mouse fired up and also be working on some container orchestration. Apparently they request the same GUID and get a bit confused if one already exists. If you're still feeling a little uncertain about exactly how Docker/Kubernetes works, Paul suggests this lovely illustrated guide for children or this comic, which is for grown ups.We chat about MySpace and whether it was ever cutting edge during its rise to prominence? Last, we dive into the pronunciation of "char", by the end of which, half of us have turned into full blown pirate impersonators.  

Sara reveals that she won a $500 gift card at a MongoDB hackathon, building an app that removed mustaches from people's pictures.  This was many years ago, and no we were not paid in JetBlue gift cards to have Eliot on the show, although MongoDB is a client of Stack Overflow in other areas.Mongo comes from humongous, cause, ya know, scale. That, plus HumongousDB.com was already taken and is a real mouthful to say. Eliot talks about the frustrations he and his co-founder, Dwight Merriman, experienced while working together at DoubleClick and ShopWiki. DoubleClick began as a New York City ad tech company and evolved into the heart of Google’s real-time ad business after being acquired. Frustrations with the database systems available at both these companies led the pair to decide it was time for a better mousetrap. Today, MongoDB is a public company  worth north of $7 billion and a staff of more than 1900 peopleWe chat about why relational databases are still the core of computer science education in high school and college across the United States, and whether or not this will ever change. During the show we skimmed some of the latest questions on Stack Overflow related to Mongo. Eliot took it back to his team and Tom Hollander, the PM for Mongo's chart product, delivered a great answer! Can you believe this website is free?

Echeruo's new venture is called Love and Magic, a startup studio that helps companies of all sizes maximize their ability to innovate. For anyone that has an idea they have been hoping to turn into a startup, Echeruo and his collaborators just introduced the Startup School of Alchemy. It's being taught at WeWork and Princeton University. It offers a six-week curriculum designed to help aspiring entrepreneurs find product-market fit.Apply with the code "stackoverflow" and you get $1000 off the course, a 40% discount.Echeruo says his time working in finance and with Microsoft Excel was what gave him the ability to think of how data from maps could be optimized by an algorithm and built into a useful mobile app. For those who don't know, our co-founder and Chairmam, Joel Spolsky, was part of the team at Microsoft that built Excel. Here is legendary 2015 talk, You Suck at Excel, where he organizes a spreadsheet to keep track of what he pays his Pokemon, ahem,I mean, uh, employees. You can take a deeper dive into the backstory of how Chinedu built HopStop below, related in his own words.I've always had difficulty with directions. When I grew up in Nigeria, I remember getting lost in my own house. It wasn’t like it was a mansion, it was a four-bedroom house. So you can imagine how I felt when I got to NYC and had to get around with the subway and bus system! I remember walking up once to one of those blown up maps in the subway station. My nose was a feet away from the dust laden map. The subway lines looked like tangled noodles. Complexity galore! New Yorkers used to walk around with these pocket guides—Hagstrom maps. I was going on a date in the Lower East Side. It doesn’t have the grid like the rest of the city. I got lost and was very late getting to the bar.I can't remember how, the date went but I remember what I did first thing next morning. I walked over to the subway station, grabbed a subway MAP and laid it on the floor and tried to figure it out. There’s driving directions. But there weren’t subway directions. So I was solving my own problems. I was looking for the complete directions—leave your house, turn left, go into this particular entrance, get on this train, get off at this station, use this exit. Because I was, in a lot of ways, the ultimate user, we ended up building a product that solved the complete problem—get me from where I am now to where I need to be. I was non-technical, I worked for a hedge fund. I may have been thinking algorithmically, I knew that this was computationally possible. But I didn’t know how to make it a reality. In conceiving the problem, I threw all the data into spreadsheets. I interned at this company when I was in college, where I learned about spreadsheets. I found the work very tedious, but I learned how to think about data, to think in tables. It allowed me to conceptualize complexity. To conceptualize the first subway data as a spreadsheet, I started by staring at the subway map laid on the wood floor of my apartment. The most obvious features were colors, lines, and stops. So those are the tables I typed into Excel first. Then I realized the lines also represented two train directions so I redid the spreadsheet. Then I realized the stops served multiple subway lines, so I redid the spreadsheet. Then I realized some of the stops would only be active during certain periods, so I redid the spreadsheet. We kept on learning and adjusting. It took us a long time before we had a data model that robustly described NYC's subway system. We even figured out how to automatically account for the frequent weekend NYC subway diversions.To build the first version of the app, I went to eLance, described to these computer scientists the data set in Excel, routes, stops, exits, entrances, and I sent it in. This developer in Siberia, Russia, emailed me, came up with a solution. But he turned out to be a complete genius, he built the core of the first version of Hopstop. Here I was, a Nigerian, sitting in my apartment using messenger, email, on a laptop. And I never met Alex for four years. We built Hopstop over four years without ever meeting each other.We ran very lean. Alex did all the coding. I did the subway data and user experience. I'd have to ride to different subway stations to note each subway entrance and exit, etc. When we added the bus system, Rajeev and his data team in India helped input the bus stops and schedules. And four years later, we were purchased by Apple, so quite the ride.

Glitch, a platform that makes it easy for anyone to create or remix a web app, has seen over five million apps created by users. You can read more about how it works here. If you want to learn a little about how it works with Docker, check out this piece here.If you want to know more about the shared history of Stack and Glitch, you can read up on it here. TLDR; Glitch was born out of Fog Creek software and counts Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor as founders. Glimmer is a new web magazine from the folks at Glitch. It focuses on creators and makers, with a special emphasis on unearthing the human stories of people building today's software.While you're here, don't forget to take 15-20 minutes and share your opinions in our 2020 Developer Survey. Whether Stack Overflow helped you during your journey as a programmer or not, we want to hear from everyone who codes. Some fun background for younger listeners: Geocities - a popular platform for building and hosting a personal website and linking it with others that share similar themes. BetaBeat - a website launched by The NY Observer that covered the SIlicon Alley tech scene. It was how Ben first met Anil, Joel, and many others. HerokuDockerIf you have comments, questions, or suggestions, please send us an email at [email protected]’s episode is brought to you by Refinitiv. Unlock new possibilities with consistent, high-value market data from Refinitiv. Try the Refinitiv Eikon Data API for the largest breadth and depth of data and community tools with native Python support. Check out refinitiv.com/stackpodcast to try the Eikon Data API today. Refinitiv. Data is just the beginning.

Paul and Sara walk us through the teetering tower of abstraction. Ben still hasn't mastered a single language, so it's a tough for him to know if it's better to start with the difficult fundamentals or stay in the simplified sandbox.Flatiron tries to teach developers how to code, but also how to communicate. Every student has to do some public writing or speaking about their education. We check out Human Readable Magazine and the painfully honest Reddit thread of early reviews.Rebekah tries to coach Ben through a mock interview for a junior web developer position. A torrent of word salad ensues. Paul and Sara show no mercy.New York City parking meters aren't the only systems being taken down by calendar bugs. We chat about the delightful Twitter thread on Y2038.You can follow Rebekah here and learn more about The Flatiron School here. 

You can find the podcast and article that inspired our chat here. It's the second of Kelsey Hightower's "Unpopular Opinions" series. We have heard the requests for full episodes transcripts and we know accessibility is important, so we're working on a solution. Stay tuned. The recipients of the lifeboat badges this episode were for questions that were between three and six years old. It's a testament to the ongoing value of the knowledge shared on our network and to the contributions of our community to help others through questions and answers. Last but not least, our 2020 Developer Survey is open. It takes about 15-20 minutes to complete, and we want to hear from as many coders as possible, regardless of age, experience, or occupation. 

What happens when millions of minimum byte packets start pinging off your network every few seconds? Bandwidth is a restriction most network engineers are familiar with. It's less often they have to think about packets per second. Teresa shares an awesome story of how a new feature for AOL Instant Messenger, AIM for you 90s nerds, turned up the heat on AOL's servers.After regaling us with war stories from the days of dial-up internet, we chat about what the job of a chief product officer is today. At a place like Stack Overflow, how do you unite functional departments across the company - from marketing to sales to engineering? How do you figure out the right incentives, so that the data you're measuring against is aligned with the long term health of the company and the community?"I don't focus on shipping, I focus on impact," Teresa told us. "That's where product management, engineering, and design come together. Product management is focused on value. Engineering is focused on quality, and design is focused on usability. If you think of that as Venn diagram, impact is where those three things overlap and happen."Lastly, we chat about the incredible velocity with which new coding languages and development frameworks emerge in the tech industry. Teresa shares her philosophy for encouraging an engineering team to level up and learn new skills while ensuring that this kind of continuous evolution doesn't create a lot of friction for the overall organization."That which we measure, we incentivize towards," is one of her favorite sayings, and Teresa applies it to scoping an overall product roadmap for a company, including what tools, new and old, to use along the way.

Alex graduated from NYU with a degree in computer science and worked as a developer and engineer at several startups in New York City, eventually assuming senior roles like engineering team lead and director of technology. Along the way, however, she found herself face with discrimination and harassment. In 2016, she dramatically altered her appearance, an experience she discusses in a humorous and poignant talk - Shaving My Head Made me a Better Developer. In 2016 she read the book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and was inspired to  do more to help people impacted by the justice system. She began organizing donations of unused laptops, and then moved on to help found the Code Cooperative in October of 2016.  the group describes itself as a community of people who learn, use, and build technology to create life changing possibilities for individuals and communities impacted by incarceration.If you want to get involved, you can donate a laptop or make a financial contribution here. If you would like to volunteer as a mentor, you can apply here.   

Three months ago, we interviewed Prashanth during his first week on the job. Now, with a full quarter of work under his belt, our new CEO reflects on what we accomplished over the last decade and lays out his vision for where Stack Overflow, as a company and community, will be heading over the next year and beyond.Paul explains why engineers prefer to give blunt feedback, even in a public setting.Sara drops some hints about our plans for the future of the Stack Exchange network. One of these big goals is to better integrate knowledge from these with the activity that happens on Stack Overflow, so that the knowledge being shared on Server Fault or Super User can easily be found by users on Stack Overflow, and vice versa. Stay tuned for more details and feel free to share your thoughts for what would work to improve the user experience.Prashanth talks about the forces reshaping the developer landscape: cloud services, machine learning, container orchestration, and more. How can we help new developers, both hobbyists and professionals, find what they need on our sites, and empower them so they feel comfortable asking questions and providing answers.

Software is eating the world, but what's on the menu for dessert?This week we chat about the best way for engineers to give feedback to executives. Paul explains the Purple room method they use at Postlight. Sara references Zero to One and why engineers and marketers have so much trouble communicating.As a member of a marketing department , it's true our job is to see the glass as half full. But sometimes the point of the exercise is to be aspirational. Police learn how to be suspicious, marketers learn how to sell, and engineers look for what's broken so they can fix it.We chat about the ten thousand or so parking meters that went on the fritz in New York City. The company says it was the result of a fraud prevention protocol. Was this a Y2K style glitch or a logic bomb?Sara finds the developer angle on the recent rift in the British Royal Family. New technologies always reshape the Monarchy's relationship to the public. From the first radio address to the televised coronation, to a Wordpress website and an Instagram post, each generation tries to use the modern medium to their advantage.We discuss a fairly devious bit of brilliant parenting. If your young child wants to be a YouTube star, and you can build them their own private version of the platform, with randomly generated likes and none of the cyber-bullying, are you protecting them? Or, perhaps, crafting a Truman Show for the internet age that will have consequences down the road.Last but not least, we check out the Blazor tag, one of the fastest growing areas of interest on Stack Overflow. It's a framework that extends the established Razor syntax. The goal is to enable developers to write client-side code in .NET, backed by WebAssembly.

For many years Matt worked on defending the quality of Google's web search results, and you may know him as the creator of the first version of SafeSearch.As Paul noted on the show, he was seen as one of the few people  with whom ordinary folks could communicate about the often inscrutable world of Google search results and rankings.  You can read his blog here.In 2016 Matt joined  USDS, initially at the Department of Defense. Since 2017, Matt has served as the USDS Administrator and is responsible for setting the overall direction and strategy for projects.  He has worked on everything from Healthcare.gov to online services for veterans to fraud prevention at the IRS. Topics discussed on this episode: The 1993 comedy film Dave, in which Kevin Kline plays a presidential body double who manages to fix government and melt the steely heart of Sigourney Weaver. Open source as an ever growing trend, even inside of big government. Which organization has more meeting and process, Google, or the US federal government?

To kick things off, we talk about Yap, a fun new project from Paul’s company, Postlight. Employees get to partake in a Labs program where they can pursue side projects that interest them. Yap is "an ephemeral, real-time chat room with up to six participants. Your messages appear and disappear as quickly as you type them.” It was built with Elixir...ooooh.For our interview this week we sat down with Jon Gottfried and Mary Siebert from Major League Hacking. Jon is the company’s co-founder and Mary is the Hackathon Community Manager. We discuss how this organization has become a global phenomenon over the past few years, reaching hundreds of thousands of developers.  Things that happen these days at Major League Hackathons:  Painting succulents Cup stacking competitions Therapy dogs, lots of them If you're interested in sponsoring a Major League Hackathon, check out the info here.This is our last episode of the year. We’ll be back in 2020 with some more amazing guests and brilliant banter. Thanks for tuning in, see ya in the new year. 

You can check out the back story of Dixon’s first company, SiteAdvisor, here. It was built during a time when spyware was a booming business and browsers had few systems in place to combat bad actors. The company was acquired by McAfee in 2006. It's a great trip through the history of web security at the time. Dixon next turned his attention to machine learning. He and his co-founders created Hunch, which worked to learn users’ tastes and recommend items they might enjoy. It was an early attempt to build the taste graph, a parallel to the social graph. It was acquired by eBay in 2011. Many of these techniques are now widely used across the biggest social networks in the world.Dixon then moved into the world of venture capital. You can read more about the Crypto Fund he helps to lead and the new startup school a16Zz is launching to help educate a new generation of programmers and founders. Application are still open.If you're interested in learning more about the background of Hashcash, which foreshadowed a lot of the ideas found in Bitcoin, there is some good info here.

We discuss how a demand for more diverse clip art helped lay the foundation for some of the first black owned and operated software companies in the United States, and the ways in which social media has helped to empower a new generation of voices to demand change in the tech industry and beyond. You can check out some of the pioneering work on building digital community at Afrolink, NetNoir, and UBP.McIlwain also draws attention to the history of computer technology as a tool of police surveillance, going all the way back to the Police Beat algorithm in 1968.  You can find out more about Prof McIlwain here. You can purchase his book here.We also spend some time this week talking about our new community initiatives. Sara, along with Juan Garza from our community team, wrote a big post outlining all the work we’re hoping to do in 2020 and how we’re using data to inform the changes we are making. Keep an eye out for future posts in this series, The Loop,  and let us know what you want to see by lending your voice to our Through The Loop survey.

Brian shares a delightful tale of the time one of his co-workers accidentally deleted the company's database, and how they recovered it through binary transaction logs. No better way to learn than a trial by fire.Juan explains why typing is taking over frontend development. First off, we discovered unit tests, and learned types can take care of it.Paul dreams of a day when object-oriented PHP runs in the browsers. Sara has had nightmares about similar scenarios.Splice has lots of interesting products for musicians and technologists and they're hiring.Brian helped to build the amazing Brooklyn JS, so if you're in the NYC area, be sure to check it out.Juan helps to run an amazing community of developers in Colombia, as well as the Bogota JS meetup.Dylan TallChief made a drum machine in Excel and it's something special.

 Part 1The crew chats about how Paul and Sara made the transition from individual contributors to managers overseeing teams of engineers. Sara used to see this transition as a form of selling out, but has a new perspective after having made the shift. Paul admits he still doesn’t feel like a “CEO” and how he approaches his role as the co-founder who focuses on creating signal instead of operations. OF course, we argue about Bitcoin, and finally we examine the role luck plays in life, especially for The Rock. Interview - Kent C DoddsKent admits that when he first tried programming, he just couldn’t understand strings, and decided the career path wasn’t for him. He ended up on a track that would have made him an accountant or business intelligence analyst. From that perch, however, he began to find ways to automate and improve his workflows. Not only did this help him stand out at work, it reawakened his interest in coding, which is now his full time career. Part 2 Sara talks about the difference between writing code for software applications, and writing firmware, which she got into while helping to launch and run Jewelbots. Paul and Sara recall what it was like working in tech during the 90s, when they had to constantly worry about how to conserve RAM. We also talk about the days before Git, when folks passed a hard drive around from hand to hand. The kids today have no idea how good they have it.

Part 1Paul and Sara chat about what language is best to choose as your first when you're just getting started on your journey as a programmer. Probably not Mathmatica, but it's a neat one.Jupyter Notebooks - an in-browser notebook for working with Python. You can write your words, have your code right next to it, and see how things play out. Or as Tom Butterworth put it on DEV."Jupyter Notebook is an interactive web application that interfaces with the iPython repl, allowing you to run structured but iterative Python scripts. It is the de facto choice for data scientists to rapidly prototype pipelines, visualise data, or perform ad hoc analysis."Interview: Jess LeeJess Lee had some great perspectives to share on what it means to balance being an entrepreneur and a coder.Issac Lyman kicked off a community project on DEV to create a book that would help guide readers through their first year in code. 15 contributors ended up writing chapters for the book, which is available for free here.DEV is open source, and they have decided it can be a software platform other organizations can use to build their own communities. As Ben Halpern writes, "The future of our company will be based on delivering the DEV open-source software to power new standalone communities. We will work with a network of partners both inside and outside of the software ecosystem."Part 2We dig into D3.JS. Stack Overflow has a lot to teach folks on this subject.What's the best way to make a d3.js visualization layout responsive?Just don't ask about a good book for learning the subject!And finally, what's the difference between d3.js and jQuery? It's a silly question with some interesting answers and a nice history of the web in the background.

SHOW NOTESPart 1 (0:00-9:58)the crew discusses Google's declaration of Quantum Supremacy and tries to wrap their mind around qubits and superpositions. Ben mangles the pronunciation of ASP.net, Sara finds a name for her new pet snake, and Paul wonders how JFK would have pronounced quantum. Also, updates on the Stack Overflow helicopter.From our Physics and Quantum Computing Stack Exchanges: Is Quantum Computing just pie in the sky?Why is Google Quantum Supremacy experiment impressive?What does Google's claim of Quantum Supremacy mean?Interview (9:59-26:05)Clive Thompson. When it comes to bugs, Thompson says the best book on the subject is The Bug by Ellen Ulman. Got a different recommendation? Let us know in the comments below.You can check out Clive's band, the Dolorean Sisters, here. He is currently writing software to help optimize the group's set lists. Clive, you own me a blog post on this.Part 2 (26:52-fin)We chat about the wonderful Ian Allen and his introduction to programming.Paul declares CSS is a plate of scrambled eggs.Sara hips us to a wonderful talk - Cascading S**t Show. As you might have guessed from the title, the language in the video is NSFW.Later, Sara declares that CSS Grid is, in fact, just tables, mostly to troll her good friend Brenda Storer.Paul protests, but then remembers an old tweet.

Chloe Condon has a great post about how she created her medication reminder app and an official endorsement from Smash Mouth. You can find some writing from Iheanyi Ekechukwu on our blog here and you can find his podcast here. Learn about the Great Molasses Flood of 1919. It’s not funny so don’t laugh.   Decades old code is putting millions of critical devices at risk. Should we be regulating software more closely? Ben Popper is the worst coder in the world

Tilde Club: It’s your chance to LARP as a 70s sys admin! What you do on your computer is your business. Don’t be tricked by scammers.Paul makes the mistake of sharing his Anxiety Box on This American LifeSara’s favorite Kanye tweet is available, beautifully framed, for only $75. cKeys is an amazing Seattle non-profit that teaches folks how to make their own keyboards!When we recorded this episode Cassidy worked at CodePen, but not she works at React Training, so check them out.

Is it legal for source code containing undefined behavior to crash the compiler?https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57652799/is-it-legal-for-source-code-containing-undefined-behavior-to-crash-the-compilerTrue, you’re the boss, and the compiler works for you. But that doesn’t mean it always behaves just as you instructed. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56802645/understanding-the-as-if-rule-the-program-was-executed-as-writtenWhat is Logo, you ask?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)And what about Netlogo? https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/docs/programming.htmlWilliam Chipps’ golden years - so close, and yet so farhttp://wacretiring.com/

In this episode, Host Jon Skeet takes the reins along with Jay, Jess, Ilana, and special guests Casey Ashenhurst (SO Inclusion Manager & Senior People Ops Partner) and Cassie Montrose (SO Executive Assistant) to chat about hitting a million rep on Stack Overflow; Jon's thoughts on feminism and inclusion and how those have evolved over the years; and a rant about a regrettable Applebee's experience in Times Square. You should'a known better, Jon...

Happy Holidays from The Stack Overflow Podcast! On today's episode: Winter Bash 2017 details are revealed, Abby Reads Nice Tweets, and we ponder the questionable morality behind Santa's favorite narc, The Elf on the Shelf.

Today's hijinks include: Talking about engineering management (and pranks)with Ben Kamens; discussing a new study on how to ask a question on Stack Overflow, and chatting way too much about Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

Today's episode is a real scream. Recorded in a haunted house, this week's host is longtime podcast friend Anil Dash, joined by Fog Creek's Jenn Schiffer, Stack Overflow engineering manager Matt Sherman, news editor Ilana Yitzhaki, and executive producer Kaitlin Pike. Special guest is Leon Young of Cogniss.

On today's episode we chat about the nature of VR and reality with IBM Watson's Michael Ludden, plus SO marketing manager Rachel Ferrigno stops by to present the NYC Dev Hiring Ecosystem report.

On today's episode, we learn about travel-hacking and building a fully remote company with the co-founders of FlightFox, as well as chat with former Stack Overflow mods turned current Stack Overflow developers to learn about moderator processes at SO.

On this week's edition of The Stack Overflow Podcast, we get a visit from Gitlab CEO Sid Sijbrandij. We also chat with UX Research Kristina Lustig about Stack Overflow's mentorship program experiment. As usual, the gang gets into other shenanigans.

Today we welcome Jonathan Lipps, Dir. of Open Source at Sauce Labs, to chat (and sing) about some of the philosophies behind the tech that we all use every day. Also Stack Overflow PM Joe Friend is here to continue the conversation about improving the user experience on SO.

We're back! In today's episode: Jay, David, Ilana, Jess, and special guest Abby Mars read mean tweets, discuss what we are doing to prevent further mean tweets, and wait, the iPhone X does what with your face? Warning: Explicit content

Join us for a chat with CodeNewbie Founder (and all-around amazing person) Saron Yitbarek, stay for Kevin's failures and many many banana references.

In this week's episode: We chat with Linux Academy CEO and Founder Anthony James, we play a "Florida Man" edition of Fake News, and Matt Sherman wonders how computers work.

Today's shenanigans include Sarah Clatterbuck, Director of Engineering at LinkedIn and all-around awesome person! Also, Jay and David introduce Channels while Jess and Jenn compete to see who knows less about Star Wars.

Special SRE takeover! David and Ilana are joined by Tom Limoncelli, Mark Henderson, and Jason Harvey from the SO site reliability team to discuss the infrastructure and maintenance of the Stack Overflow sites. Plus, we're hiring! https://stackoverflow.com/company/work-here

IBM, You're wrong, remote work matters.

In today's episode the gang chats about remote work with Zapier CEO Wade Foster and celebrates SO en Español with CM Juan Garza. Plus in the News Stack Overflow converted to HTTPS and IBM makes a huge mistake.

Today we chat with SO developer Nick Larsen about dev interview tips, the new Stack Overflow Trends Tool, and tourist photography etiquette. Follow @stackpodcast on twitter for news and updates!

This week we welcome Joel back from leave, talk a LOT about the correct pronunciation of "hummus", and chat with special guest Sarah Drasner about the awesomeness that is SVG Animation. Also, NEW LOGO! I guess you can say we're official...

Anil Dash joins us for hosting duties again this week along with co-founders Jess Lee and Ben Halpern of the Practical Dev. Topics include Shabbat elevators, Failure, and racist AI.

On this week's episode, we talk about the what the data team has been up to lately as well as learning a thing or two about rockets. Guest host - Anil Dash!

On this week's episode, we discuss the results of the 2017 Stack Overflow Survey with resident data scientists Dr. Dave and Dr. Julia. Also this week, Joel is actually not here right now, and Jay and David go mad with power. Anything goes on this episode...

On this week's episode, Jenn Schiffer - aka jennmoneydollars - talks to us about joining Fog Creek as the company's new Community Engineer. She'll be focused on their brand new community, Glitch, which launched today. The gang also listens to Joel rant a lot about a shack he owns.

The gang tries to give tech support to Grandma Maebeline. It doesn't go well.

In this week's episode, Mazin Gilbert - VP of AT&T Labs Advanced Technology - joins us. The gang talks about the Amazon S3 outage as well as about an AI that's learned how to copy/paste code, just like a real developer! Finally, Joel provides tech support to Grandma Maebeline.

In this week's episode (with only a brief IT interlude), the gang talks about the Dell XPS-13, Macbook Pro touch bars, and ugh, Uber… And our special guest this week is Erica Brescia, co-founder and COO at Bitnami. She speaks to us about her passion for dev tools as well as the challenges of being a predominantly remote company (something that Stack Overflow knows a little bit about).

This week, Nick Craver wasn't available. So we decided to Stump Alex Miller. Will he win a fantastic prize?

In this week's episode, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress joins us to tell us how he built the organization that powers 27% of the internet and more importantly, what it was like going to the same high school as Beyoncé. The gang also tells us why the site nav changed colors. We also learn what programming languages are used on the weekends most and what programming languages college students use the most. Finally, Joel tries to Stump Alex Miller while the TSA watches.

Calling our guest today 'special' would be an understatement. He's the co-founder of Stack Overflow (and this podcast), founder of Discourse, prolific writer and blogger at codinghorror.com, and most importantly, the subject of many internal Stack Overflow memes. It's @codinghorror himself, Mr Jeff Atwood! Jeff and Joel chat about where we came from and where we are going, including clips from past podcasts. If you care at all about SO history, then this episode is a must-listen.

In this week's episode, Joel complains about Excel on Mac, the hosts play Start Up or Shut Up, and surprise! The One Minute Tech Review is NOT about light switches. And Stack Overflow's own Dr. Julia Silge comes by to tell her Developer Story.

On this week's episode, Joel rants about travel for the first time ever, Jay explains the Developer Survey (launched last week), and the hosts ponder the reason for Connecticut's existence. Also, our friend Scott Hanselman tells us what we should be doing.

On this week's episode, the gang talks about their favorite hats... for Winter Bash 2016! Developer Dan Luu comes by to tell Joel why he's wrong, and Joel talks about awful airports.

In this week’s podcast, Anil Dash - new CEO of Fog Creek and old friend of ours - stops by, as does Dr. Dave Robinson for our new segment, Dr Dave’s Data Desk with Dr. Dave Robinson. Because alliteration. And this week’s Stack Overflow Constitution question has the potential to destroy us all: Is it pronounced GIF with a hard G /ɡif/ or GIF with a J /jif/?

In this week's episode... Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria! Microsoft has now joined the Linux Foundation; Google has joined the .Net steering committee; and Visual Studio is available for Mac. The end times are here. Luckily, our good friend and Jewelbots founder Sara Rey Chipps stops by to make us feel better about the world.

In this week's episode, we chat about our annual company meetup, which took place this year in the sometimes sunny Philadelphia, and featured a now-viral talk. Our very special guest this week is Fereshteh Forough, the founder and executive director of Code to Inspire, which is celebrating its one year anniversary this week. Code to Inspire uses technology, education and outreach to support Afghan women in their fight for social, political, and economic equality.

In this week’s frightening episode, Joel gets a visit from his very own Annie Wilkes, er, number one fan: Genius.com CEO Tom Lehman. Meanwhile, it wouldn’t be a Halloween show without something dying: This year, it’s the Experts Exchange paywall. Finally, David forgets to turn off his phone and gets called mid-recording by a recruiter, and we decide to tape their increasingly odd conversation so we can share it with you, our listeners.

In this week's episode, the gang talks about terrible, awful, no good, very bad recruiter questions, and how to actually interview developers. Additionally, the gang plays our new game, Startup or Shut Up. Jay doesn't do very well.

In this week's episode, everyone tries to stump Nick Craver. Today's episode also stars Dr. Omoju Miller, data scientist extraordinaire, talking about media representations of developers and how the evil or geeky hacker stereotype hurts us.

In this week's episode, the hosts talk about the launch of Stack Overflow's latest product, Developer Story. They also talk about Jay's unique vernacular, and what angers programmers the most.

In this week's episode, our hosts talk about a few recent blog posts concerning the declining quality of Stack Overflow including what they got right, what they got very wrong, and what we can learn. Also listen to hear "Grandpa Joel" tell stories about the Xerox Alto.

In this week's episode, our hosts give updates on what's happening with Stack Overflow Documentation and the new Stack Overflow Constitution. They also argue about what to do with a time machine.

In this week's edition of the Stack Exchange podcast, our hosts talk about salary transparency for developers, Joel's One-Minute Tech Review, and why we're banning a particular insult from Stack Overflow.

Stack Exchange Podcast #71 - A Bunch of Bald Yaks by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast #70 - David Was Wrong And Jason Was Right by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast #69 - It's Too Rainy For A Parade by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode 68 - A Badger, A Horse, and a Dik-dik (The Documentation Episode) by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #67 - The Firehose of Nerd-dom by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #66 - Thank You For Saying Words To Us by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #65 - The Word Has Two Meanings, You See by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #64 - Diverse Hiring and a Cat Named Alan Turing by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #63 - The Plumber's Up To 67 Coins by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #62 - Delete This Whole Episode by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #61 - The "What Jay's Done Wrong" Podcast by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #60 - Are We That Predictable? by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #59 - He's One Of Those Science-ists by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #58 - Pack 'Em In Like Bees by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #57 - We Just Saw This On Florp by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #56 - Green or Red Curae by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #55 - Don't Call It A Comeback by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #54 - The One With All The Anachronisms by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #53 - Let's Go Rio by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #52 - We Didn't Need Headphones by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #51 - The Return of Coding Horror by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #50 - Listen to this Podcast by The Stack Overflow Podcast