The Stack Overflow Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Unpacking observability and OpenTelemetry with Spiros Xanthos of Splunk Jun 01, 2021

Show notes

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.

WFH? Developers learn to be their own operations department May 28, 2021

Show notes

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

Blocking the haters as a service May 25, 2021

Show notes

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?

Build engineering at Apple and the future of deploy previews May 21, 2021

Show notes

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.

Where design meets development inside Stack Overflow May 18, 2021

Show notes

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'

Why are good Ruby developers so hard to find? May 14, 2021

Show notes

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.

Saying goodbye to our co-host, Sara Chipps May 11, 2021

Show notes

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.

NFT art, Ethereum gas, and a dive into Gemini's data lake May 07, 2021

Show notes

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?

Open source contributors helped a helicopter fly on Mars May 04, 2021

Show notes

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?

One founder's journey from personal trainer to "frontend mentor" Apr 30, 2021

Show notes

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()?