The Stack Overflow Podcast

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Going from engineer to entrepreneur takes more than just good code Nov 04, 2022

Show notes

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.

Making location easier for developers with new data primitives Nov 02, 2022

Show notes

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 notes

If 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.

Homelabbing tricks to level up your WFH game Nov 01, 2022

Show notes

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?

How to get more engineers entangled with quantum computing Oct 28, 2022

Show notes

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.

Goodbye Webpack, Hello Turbopack! The big news from today’s Next.JS conference Oct 25, 2022

Show notes

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.

A flight simulator for developers to practice real world challenges and surprises Oct 25, 2022

Show notes

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.

He went from .NET and VS Code to working on Web3 Oct 21, 2022

Show notes

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.

Faster feedback loops make for faster developer velocity Oct 19, 2022

Show notes

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 ask

If 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

Driverless cars give us the heebie jeebies Oct 18, 2022

Show notes

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.

The robots are coming… but when? Oct 14, 2022

Show notes

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.

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