The Stack Overflow Podcast

Latest Episodes:

“Move fast and break things” doesn’t apply to other people’s savings Mar 07, 2023

Show notes

Flourish is a fintech platform for registered investment advisers (RIAs) that was recently acquired by MassMutual.

After studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon, Christine spent almost 12 years at Goldman Sachs, where she was VP of fixed systematic marketing making, responsible for automating electronic trades of interest-rate products like US Treasury bonds and interest rate swaps.

Christine’s time at the world’s second-largest investment bank gave her a healthy wariness of Frankencode, the scourge of legacy stacks everywhere.

Find Christine on LinkedIn.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner amirali for their answer to I can't set up JDK on Visual Studio Code.

The nature of simulating nature: A Q&A with IBM Quantum researcher Dr. Jamie Garcia Mar 03, 2023

Show notes

A chemist by training, Jamie serves as Senior Research Manager of Quantum Applications and Software at IBM Quantum, which offers cloud access to advanced quantum computers capable of solving highly complex, highly interconnective, and dynamic problems.

Learn about the superconducting qubits IBM Quantum uses to program quantum computers. (Need to back up a bit? Learn what a qubit is.)

Jamie explains how a heavy hex architecture allows IBM to limit crosstalk between qubits to ensure coherence times long enough to complete practical calculations within hours, not years.

IBM Quantum’s Qiskit Runtime allows users to optimize workloads and efficiently execute them on quantum systems at scale.

As you might expect, Jamie and her colleagues are already thinking hard about the intersection of quantum and AI. Learn about System Two, IBM’s next-generation quantum system.

Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Congrats are in order for Stellar Question badge winner Dmitry z for asking How can I use environment variables in docker-compose?.

The open-source game engine you’ve been waiting for: Godot Feb 28, 2023

Show notes

W4 Games is dedicated to strengthening the open-source Godot Engine, a cross-platform game engine for 2D and 3D games. Their mission is “to help the video game industry reclaim their control of the technology powering their games and reverse a dramatic trend where they have to rely on proprietary solutions from an ever-shrinking number of vendors.”

To start learning more about Godot, explore some of the best games made with Godot or join the community.

Connect with Juan on Twitter, GitHub, or LinkedIn.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is Martijn Pieters for their answer to 'While' loop one-liner.

ML and AI consulting-as-a-service Feb 24, 2023

Show notes

Tribe is a distributed community of AI industry leaders, including ML engineers and data scientists, dedicated to helping companies apply machine learning to their business operations. Explore their case studies to see Tribe’s expertise in action.

Founder and CEO Jaclyn Rice Nelson formerly worked at Google, partnering with enterprise companies and incubating new ventures. As an early employee at CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth equity firm, she advised companies including Airbnb on scaling technical infrastructure, ensuring data security, and boosting growth with machine learning.

As we explored on our blog last year, the generative AI space has been expanding rapidly. Many of Tribe’s specialists have opted out of full-time employment, but are willing to provide companies without internal AI expertise with the skills they need to leverage this rapidly evolving technology inside their business.

Connect with Jackie on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is PM 2Ring for their answer to Sort a list to form the largest possible number.

Shorten the distance between production data and insight Feb 22, 2023

Show notes

Modern networked applications generate a lot of data, and every business wants to make the most of that data. Most of the time, that means moving production data through some transformation process to get it ready for the analytics process. But what if you could have in-app analytics? What if you could generate insights directly from production data?

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Stanimira Vlaeva, Developer Advocate at MongoDB, and Fredric Favelin, Technical Director, Partner Presales at MongoDB, about how a serverless database can minimize the distance between producing data and understanding it.

Episode notes:

Stanimira talked a lot about using BigQuery with MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud Run. If you need to skill up on these three tools, check out this tutorial.

Once you’ve got the hang of it, get your data connected with Confluent Connetors.

With Atlas, you can transform your data in JavaScript.

Connect with Stanimira on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Connect with Fredric on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Stellar Question winner SubniC for Get name of current script in Python.

Authorization on rails Feb 21, 2023

Show notes

Oso is authorization as a service. Check out the docs or explore use cases.

Sam’s post “Why Authorization is Hard” covered what makes authorization challenging, some approaches to solving it, and their associated tradeoffs. You can also watch Sam’s talk at PyCon US 2022. Since it’s impossible to address everything that makes authorization hard in just 5,000 words, Sam is currently at work on a follow-up article called “Why Authorization is Hard Part II.”

Sam first learned web development via Rails for Zombies, a beginner-level Rails course. In creating Oso, he tasked himself with “putting rails on authorization.”

ICYMI: Read Sam’s post about best practices for securing REST APIs or listen to his previous podcast appearance, where we talked about how Oso makes security easier for developers.

Find Sam on LinkedIn or GitHub.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is OscarRyz for their answer to I am trying to solve '15 puzzle', but I get 'OutOfMemoryError'.

The only thing worse than building internal tools is maintaining them Feb 17, 2023

Show notes

Retool is a development platform that lets users—95% of whom are engineers—build internal tools quickly with a drag-and-drop interface.

Read David’s account of how Retool won early sales deals in the company’s Operator Playbook series.

Connect with David on LinkedIn.

Today we’re shouting out Stellar Question badge winner ahajib for asking How to convert a list to a dictionary with indexes as values?.

You don’t have to build a browser in JavaScript anymore Feb 14, 2023

Show notes

We talk about how Next is bringing image components, server components, and in-house analytics via split bee—and bundling them all together with Turbopack, powered by Rust, our Developer Survey most loved language of 2022.

Guillermo Rauch is the CEO and cofounder of Vercel and cocreator of Next.js, an open-source React framework that helps developers build fast, lightweight web applications. The most recent version is Next.js 13. You can find Guillermo on LinkedIn.

We previously talked with Guillermo about the security risks of laziness, how Next.js mixes static site and SPA functions, and the front-end trends that get him excited.

Kelsey Hightower is the Principal Developer Advocate at Google Cloud. Find him on Twitter or GitHub, or read about his very personal history with Kubernetes.

Kelsey has also distinguished himself on our podcast before.

Kyle Mitofsky is a Senior Software Engineer at Stack Overflow. Find him on Twitter or GitHub.

Does your professor pass the Turing test? (Ep. 537) Feb 10, 2023

Show notes

Emery Berger, Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, joins Ben for a conversation about the impact of AI on academia. As a young sci-fi fan, he was fascinated by computers that could spit out solutions (a fascination that survived exposure to BASIC and COBOL). Now his CS students are using Copilot to do the same thing. How can educators (and students) adapt?

Episode notes:

Professor Emery Berger is a systems builder who studies “programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that transparently improve reliability, security, and performance.”

AI giveth and AI taketh away: an incredible tool for developers is creating new challenges for CS educators and students. Read Emery’s 2022 essay “Coping with Copilot.”

You can also find Emery on GitHub or Twitter.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is mbcrump for their answer to How do I generate a random integer in C#?.

Engineering's hidden bottleneck: pull requests Feb 08, 2023

Show notes

With companies taking a long look at developer experience, it’s time to turn that attention on the humble pull request. The folks at LinearB took a look at a million PRs — four million review cycles involving around 25,000 developers — and found that it takes about five days to get through a review and merge the code. CI/CD has done wonders getting deployments down to a day or less; maybe it’s time for continuous merge next.

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with COO Dan Lines and CEO Ori Keren, co-founders of LinearB, about why PRs are the chokepoint in the software development lifecycle, uncovering and automating the hidden rules of review requests, and their free tool, gitStream, that’ll find the right reviewer for your PR right now.

Episode notes:

So why do reviews take so long? Context switches, team leads who review everything, and the bystander effect are top contenders.

Dan and Ori hope their gitStream tool can reduce the time PRs take by automating a lot of the hidden rules for reviews. Check it out at gitstream.cm or linearb.io/dev.

Dan Lines hosts his own podcast: Dev Interrupted. Check out this episode with Stack Overflow’s very own Ben Matthews.

Connect with Dan Lines and Ori Keren on LinkedIn.

Shoutout to Rudy Velthuis for throwing a Lifeboat to the question Why should EDX be 0 before using the DIV instruction?