The Stack Overflow Podcast

Latest Episodes:

How do digital nomads pay their taxes? Feb 19, 2021

Show notes

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

What makes for a great API? Feb 16, 2021

Show notes

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.

We're building a web app, got any advice? Feb 12, 2021

Show notes

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?

How to think in React Feb 09, 2021

Show notes

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.

Command Line Utilities: Fix-Server Feb 05, 2021

Show notes

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?

Can't stop, won't stop, GameStop. Feb 02, 2021

Show notes

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

What are young developers into? They're all getting AWS certified Jan 29, 2021

Show notes

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.

Owning the code, from integration to delivery Jan 26, 2021

Show notes

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?

Gaming PCs to heat your home, oceans to cool your data centers Jan 22, 2021

Show notes

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?