The Stack Overflow Podcast

Latest Episodes:

How a top-ranked engineering school reimagined CS curriculum Apr 28, 2023

Show notes

Olin College of Engineering has one of the top-ranked undergrad engineering programs in the US. Its computing curriculum is a concentration within the engineering major, not a standalone major. The upshot is a liberal arts-informed course of study with fewer math and theory requirements than a typical CS degree and a greater emphasis on practical, job-ready skills like code quality, testing, and documentation. To learn more about how software design is taught at Olin, explore the course.

Andrew Mascillaro is a senior at Olin majoring in electrical and computer engineering. He’s currently a software engineering intern at Tableau. You can find him on LinkedIn.

Steve Matsumoto is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Olin; his academic interests include crypto and cybersecurity. You can find him on GitHub or through his website.

Is this the AI renaissance? Apr 25, 2023

Show notes

Prosus, one of the world’s largest tech investors, acquired Stack Overflow in 2021.

Check out the annual State of AI Report from Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth.

Read our CEO’s recent post on Stack Overflow’s approach to Generative AI.

Connect with Paul on LinkedIn.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is suvayu for their answer to How to put a big centered "Thank You" in a LaTeX slide.

When setting up monitoring, less data is better Apr 21, 2023

Show notes

Akita is a monitoring and observability platform that watches API traffic live and automatically infers endpoint structure.

Jean, who comes from a family of computer scientists, earned a PhD from MIT and taught in the CS department at Carnegie Mellon University before founding Akita.

Read Jean’s post on the Stack Overflow blog: Monitoring debt builds up faster than software teams can pay it off.

Jean is on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Congrats are in order for Stellar Question badge winner legendary_rob for asking Adding a favicon to a static HTML page.

Ops teams are pets, not cattle (ep. 556) Apr 19, 2023

Show notes

A common refrain you’ll hear these days is that servers should be scaled out, easy to replace, and interchangeable—cattle, not pets. But for the ops folks who run those servers the opposite is true. You can’t just throw any of them into an incident where they may not know the stack or system and expect everything to work out. Every operator has a set of skills that they’ve built up through research or experience, and teams should value them as such. They’re people, not pets, and certainly not cattle—you can’t just get a new one when you burn out your existing ones.

On this episode of the podcast—sponsored by Chronosphere—we talk with Paige Cruz, Senior Developer Advocate at Chronosphere, about how teams can reduce the cognitive load on ops, the best ways to prepare for inevitable failures, and where the worst place to page Paige is.

Episode notes:

Chronosphere provides an observability platform for ops people, so naturally, the company has an interest in the happiness of those people.

If you’re interested in the history of the pets vs. cattle concept , this covers it pretty well.

Previously, we spoke with the CEO of Chronosphere about making incidents easier to manage.

We’ve covered this topic on the blog before, and two articles came up during our conversation with Paige.

You can connect with Paige on Twitter, where she has a pretty apropos handle.

Congrats to Stellar Question badge winner Bruno Rocha for asking How can I read large text files line by line, without loading them into memory?, which at least 100 users liked enough to bookmark.

We bought a university: how one coding school doubled down on brick and mortar Apr 18, 2023

Show notes

Alura is a Portuguese-language edtech platform where users can learn programming, backend and mobile development, data science, design and UX, DevOps, and more.

They started small, grew into a bustling online program, then purchased a majority stake in FIAP, a private university in São Paulo, Brazil.

Paulo and Stack Overflow Director of Engineering Roberta Arcoverde cohost a popular Portuguese-language podcast about programming, design, startups, and technology.

Paulo’s new open-source project is full of career resources for T-shaped developers.

Connect with Alura CEO Paulo Silveira on LinkedIn.

Connect with Alura Chief Education Officer Guilherme Silveira on LinkedIn.

Connect with Roberta Arcoverde on LinkedIn.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is netblognet for their answer to Get JSON object from URL.

The philosopher who believes in Web Assembly Apr 14, 2023

Show notes

Fermyon offers serverless cloud computing. Spin is their developer tool for building WebAssembly microservices and web applications; check it out on GitHub.

Like past podcast guest David Hsu of Retool (and yours truly), Matt earned a degree in the humanities before deciding to prioritize his “side gig” in tech.

Follow Fermyon on GitHub. Matt is on LinkedIn.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner keineahnung2345 for saving Hamming distance between two strings in Python from the dustbin of time.

Going stateless with authorization-as-a-service Apr 11, 2023

Show notes

Cerbos is an open-source, scalable authorization-as-a-service that aims to make implementing roles and permissions a cinch. Explore their docs or see how their customers are using Cerbos.

Stateless applications like Cerbos don’t retain data from previous activities, giving devs predictable plug-and-play functionality across cloud, hybrid, on-prem, and edge instances.

Connect with Alex on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Hoopje for rescuing Print in bold on a terminal from the dustbin of history.

Building an API is half the battle Apr 07, 2023

Show notes

If you prefer, you can read this as a Q&A article or watch the video.

Kong is a cloud-native API platform. The first iteration of an API marketplace Marco and his colleagues built was Mashape.

Developments like GraphQL and gRPC have become critical as the number of APIs increases over time.

Find Marco on LinkedIn and Twitter.

From cryptography to consensus: Q&A with CTO David Schwartz on building blockchain apps Apr 05, 2023

Show notes

Right now, plenty of people are building businesses on social media platforms, on streaming platforms, and on market platforms that they don’t control. That platform can make the rules in any way they want and remove access at any time. That means founders are potentially one step away from losing their livelihood. The same goes for consumers buying from these platforms: if you lose access to your account, there goes all your purchases. As it turns out, you were licensing everything, not buying it.

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Ripple CTO David Schwartz about the promise that decentralized trust and distributed consensus has for software development — and for more transparency in ownership.

Episode notes:

Cross-border payments, while they might not be the sexiest app, are one of the best product-market fits for blockchains.

Learn more about Ripple at their home page.

Check out the documentation to learn more about building on the XRP Ledger.

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, asmeurer, for their answer to What does `S` signify in SymPy?

From Smalltalk to smart contracts, reflecting on 50 years of programming Apr 04, 2023

Show notes

Smart contracts aren’t actually new. Computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer Nick Szabo coined the term in 1994 (possibly earlier, depending on who you ask).

Old problems seem to keep coming back. Bret Victor gave a talk in 2013 called “The Future of Programming,” where he talked about problems from 1973 that were still relevant.

To learn more about the Agoric blockchain, check out their homepage.

If you’d rather shape how the blockchain itself operates, much of Agoric’s code is open source.

Connect with Dean on Twitter or Telegram

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

The Stack Overflow Podcast

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected