The Stack Overflow Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Meet the design system that lets us customize and theme Stack Overflow Apr 26, 2022

Show notes

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.

How a college extra-credit project became PHP3, still the bedrock of the web Apr 22, 2022

Show notes

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.

What's the average tenure of a software developer at a big tech company? Apr 19, 2022

Show notes

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

Warning signs that hot startup hiring engineers might not last Apr 15, 2022

Show notes

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?.

“Your salary shouldn’t be dictated by how good a negotiator you are.” Apr 12, 2022

Show notes

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 account

Today’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.

Words of wisdom for self-taught developers Apr 08, 2022

Show notes

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.

The new version of React, great tools for learning CSS, and the double standard for female engineers Apr 05, 2022

Show notes

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.

Embracing ambiguity in software with one of YouTube’s UX engineers Apr 01, 2022

Show notes

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.

Give us 23 minutes, we’ll give you some flow state Mar 29, 2022

Show notes

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

Human laziness is the ultimate security threat Mar 25, 2022

Show notes

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.