The Stack Overflow Podcast

Latest Episodes:

How to keep the servers running when your Mastodon goes viral Mar 31, 2023

Show notes

A Principal Engineer at GitHib, Kris is president of the Nivenly Foundation and an admin at Hachyderm, an instance of the decentralized social network powered by Mastodon.

The ongoing changes at Twitter have fueled interest in alternative, decentralized platforms like Mastodon and Discord.

Read Leaving the Basement, Kris’s post about scaling and migrating Hachyderm out of her basement.

Watch Kris’s conversation with DigitalOcean Chief Product Officer Gabe Monroy about building decentralized IT platforms.

Find Kris on Twitter, GitHub, Twitch, or YouTube.

Congrats to

Lifeboat badge

winner

metakeule

for answering

How can I get an error message in a string in Go?

The next gen web browser has no tabs, only spaces Mar 28, 2023

Show notes

Today’s guests from Browser Co. are software engineer Victoria Kirst and design lead Dustin Senos of The Browser Company

The Browser Company is building a new kind of browser designed to keep users “focused, organized and in control.” Arc, their browser, is “full of big new ideas about how we should interact with the web” and has been called “the best web browser to come out in the last decade.”

For an introduction to and first look at Arc, start with this video. You can also join the waiting list or subscribe to the Substack.

Follow The Browser Company on Twitter.

Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Connect with Dustin on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Special thanks to Ellis Hamburger, owner of the best username, for facilitating this terrific conversation with Victoria and Dustin.

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Todd for answering How can I name a @Service with multiple names in Spring?.

After crypto’s reality check, an investor remains cautiously optimistic Mar 24, 2023

Show notes

In his role at SwissOne Capital, Kenny champions investments in Web3 and the metaverse. A writer on all things crypto since 2013, he’s a regular contributor to the US Chamber of Commerce.

The collapse of Three Arrows Capital and FTX eroded investor trust in crypto, but Kenny remains “cautiously optimistic” about the market’s future.

Connect with Kenny on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Congratulations are in order for Lifeboat badge winner xray1986 for their answer to Unicode symbol that represents "download".

Moving up a level of abstraction with serverless on MongoDB Atlas and AWS Mar 22, 2023

Show notes

The history of computing has been a story of moving up levels of abstraction: from hard-coding algorithms and directly manipulating memory addresses with assembly languages to using more natural language constructs in high-level general purpose languages to abstracting the hardware of the computer in cloud compute. Now serverless functions take that abstraction even further. We’ve made the algorithms that process data simple and natural; MongoDB wants to do the same for how we persist data.

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Andrew Davidson, SVP Products at MongoDB, about how they’re turning a database into a fully-managed service that developers can use in a more natural way. Along the way, we discuss how the cost bottleneck has moved from the storage media to developers’ minds, how greater abstractions can enable developers, and how to get insights from production data faster.

Episode notes

Try MongoDB Atlas on AWS for free.

You can get started with MongoDB Atlas directly from the AWS Marketplace.

If you’re at a startup, you can take advantage of their special offer for startups.

The community edition of their classic database is available to download as well.

If you’re looking to learn a thing or two before diving in, check out MongoDB University.

Our thanks to Great Question badge winner Derek 朕會功夫 for asking How can I reverse an array in JavaScript without using libraries? You know the rarest kung fu of all: asking great questions.

What our engineers learned building Stack Overflow Mar 21, 2023

Show notes

The inbox improvements were Radek’s graduation project. Not bad for a newbie.

Not everyone likes change, and the inbox change was no exception. So we looked into fixing that.

Read about what our engineering team learned building and scaling Stack Overflow to support millions of users.

Connect with Radek on LinkedIn.

Find Cobih on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Longtime Stacker Yaakov Ellis is also on LinkedIn.

Congrats to user HelloCW on receiving a Socratic Badge for asking a well-received question on 100 separate days and maintaining a positive question record.

Let’s talk large language models Mar 17, 2023

Show notes

Our recent Pulse Survey showed how technologists visiting Stack Overflow feel about emergent technologies. The consensus is clear: AI assistants will soon be everywhere, and developers aren’t sure how they feel about that. Check out the podcast here or dive into the blog.

Learn more about the emergent abilities of large language models (LLMs).

For more on the intersection of AI and academia, listen to our episode with computer science professor Emery Berger or read his essay on how academics are coping with AI that can ace exams and do everyone’s homework.

Catch up on the adventures of the worst coder in the world.

Congrats to user d1337, whose question How to assign a name to the size() column? won a Stellar Question badge.

Visible APIs get reused, not reinvented Mar 15, 2023

Show notes

With so many companies offering API products, it can be hard to get your particular APIs discovered and used by the developers who need them most. You might have the best, most useful solutions out there, but if you’re relying on the digital equivalent of foot traffic for discoverability, it might as well not exist. And if an API solution can’t be found, then someone else is going to reinvent it.

On this sponsored episode, we chat with SmartBear API Technical Evangelist Frank Kilcommins about the growing challenges of API visibility and how to outsmart the invisibility trap with the right development strategies and tools.

Episode notes:

Kilcommins suggests you can get better visibility for your APIs with SmartBear's new free API exploration tool.

Open specifications like the Open API Initiative help make your endpoints easier to understand—both by humans and computers.

Connect with Frank Kilcommins on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Congrats to Stack Overflow user WorstCase, who asked five well-received questions on five separate days and earned themselves a shiny new Curious badge.

Developers believe AI will soon be everywhere, but aren't sure how to feel about it Mar 14, 2023

Show notes

You can dive deeper into the research, including some lovely matrix charts, on our blog.

Erin has also explored tag trends among our most loved languages and job insights from our community.

Learn more about Joy on her LinkedIn.

Thanks to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, russbishop, for helping to answer the question: Where is the app content folder in the simulator of Xcode?

Quiet quitting and loud layoffs Mar 10, 2023

Show notes

Per one count, more than 280,000 people were laid off from tech jobs in 2022 and the first two months of 2023.

What do layoffs have in common with farting at a party? Both are a bad look if you’re the only one doing it.

ICYMI: On a recent episode, we talked about how these layoffs are reshaping the job market and where to find software engineering roles outside of tech.

Just laid off, or worried you might be? Cohost Ryan Donovan has some advice.

Connect with Wesley on LinkedIn.

From writing code to teaching code Mar 08, 2023

Show notes

Writing code that runs without errors—and without all the bugs that only show up when the program runs—is hard enough. But teaching others to write code and understand the underlying concepts takes a deeper understanding. Now imagine doing that for 37 courses.

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with Bharath Thippireddy, a VIP instructor at Udemy who has taught more than half a million students. We talk about how he went from a humble Java developer to one of Udemy’s top instructors (and a budding movie star!). Along the way, we discuss whether Java or Python is better for beginners and how to balance theory with syntax.

Episode notes:

Like a lot of today’s content creators, Bharath got his start posting videos on his Youtube channel in 2012.

Today, you can find all of Bharath’s courses on his Udemy page.

You can find out more about Bharath from his website or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Udemy is one of our launch partners for our online course recommendations.

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner desertnaut for their answer to

What is the meaning of exclamation and question marks in Jupyter Notebook?