The Stack Overflow Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Our stack is HTML and CSS Jan 15, 2021

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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?

What would you pay for /dev/null as a service? Jan 12, 2021

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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?

Programming in PowerPoint can teach you a few things Jan 08, 2021

Show notes

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.

What can you program in just one tweet? Jan 05, 2021

Show notes

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?

Welcome to 2021 with special guest Joel Spolsky Jan 01, 2021

Show notes

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.

It's hard to get hacked worse than this Dec 29, 2020

Show notes

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

A Very Crypto Christmas Dec 25, 2020

Show notes

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..

All Time Highs: Talking crypto with Li Ouyang of Coinbase Dec 22, 2020

Show notes

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.

Adventures in Javascriptlandia Dec 18, 2020

Show notes

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?

Diving into headless automation, active monitoring, Playwright and Puppeteer Dec 15, 2020

Show notes

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