The Stack Overflow Podcast

Latest Episodes:

The AI that writes music from text Feb 07, 2023

Show notes

It’s not just you: We all need subtitles now.

Google introduces MusicLM, a model that generates music from text. The examples are pretty-mind blowing and raise big questions about licensing and copyrights for non-AI creators.

Taking the uncanny valley to a new low? Nvidia’s streaming software now includes a feature that deepfakes eye contact.

Beware the potentially dangerous intersection of AI and stan Twitter.

Thanks to Siavash Kayal, a fan of the show and data engineer at Cleo, who sent along a great list of open-source data engineering projects folks can work on.

Today we’re shouting out Stellar Question badge winner Paragon for asking how to Open two instances of a file in a single Visual Studio session.

Why developer experience is the key to better software, straight from the OCTO’s mouth Feb 03, 2023

Show notes

John spent 25 years at Oracle before joining Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO (OCTO), a team that’s been called the company’s “secret weapon” in collaborating with major customers to solve their tech problems and drive long-term deals.

For more on his approach to tech and business, you can read this article he wrote on the seven points of driving lasting innovation

Learn more about OCTO from Business Insider.

Settle down for a good read: the full story of how the BBC’s microcomputer changed history.

Connect with John on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Today’s

Lifeboat badge

winner is

vscjones

for their answer to

How can I find the number of business days in the current month with JavaScript?

What do the tech layoffs really tell us? Jan 31, 2023

Show notes

Naturally, tech layoffs are top-of-mind for many of us. Despite comparisons to the dot-com bubble, what we’re seeing right now is different. Here’s what the tech and media layoffs really tell us about the economy.

In praise of analog technology: why Millennials and Gen Z are springing for paper maps.

Make Time, a way of “rethinking the defaults of constant busyness and distraction so you can focus on what matters every day,” was developed in response to always-on Silicon Valley culture.

Wifi routers can now be used to detect the physical positions of humans and map their bodies in 3D. Terrifyingly dystopian or interestingly practical? Why not both?

In recent accessibility news, a brain-computer interface (BCI) that converts speech-related neural activity into text allows a person with paralysis due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to communicate at 62 words per minute, nearly 3.5 times faster than before. From the abstract: “These results show a feasible path forward for using intracortical speech BCIs to restore rapid communication to people with paralysis who can no longer speak.”

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Holger for their answer to Sort an array containing numbers using a 'for' loop.

The less JavaScript, the better Jan 27, 2023

Show notes

Astro is a site builder that lets you use the frontend tools you already love (React, Vue, Svelte, and more) to build content-rich, performant websites.

Astro extracts your UI into smaller, isolated components (“islands”) and replaces unused JavaScript with lightweight HTML for faster loads and time-to-interactive (TTI).

Ben and Nate explain why Astro’s compiler was written in Go (“seemed like fun”).

To learn more about Astro, start with their docs or see what people are doing with the framework.

Connect with Ben on LinkedIn, GitHub, or via his website.

Connect with Nate on GitHub.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Aurand for their answer to How to convert list to queue to achieve FIFO.

How chaos engineering preps developers for the ultimate game day Jan 25, 2023

Show notes

In complex service-oriented architectures, failure can happen in individual servers and containers, then cascade through your system. Good engineering takes into account possible failures. But how do you test whether a solution actually mitigates failures without risking the ire of your customers? That’s where chaos engineering comes in, injecting failures and uncertainty into complex systems so your team can see where your architecture breaks.

On this sponsored episode, our fourth in the series with Intuit, Ben and Ryan chat with Deepthi Panthula, Senior Product Manager, and Shan Anwar, Principal Software Engineer, both of Intuit about how use self-serve chaos engineering tools to control the blast radius of failures, how game day tests and drills keep their systems resilient, and how their investment in open-source software powers their program.

Episode notes:

Sometimes old practices work in new environments. The Intuit team uses Failure Mode Effect Analysis, (FMEA), a procedure developed by the US military in 1949, to ensure that their developers understand possible points of failure before code makes it to production.

The team uses Litmus Chaos to inject failures into their Kubernetes-based system and power their chaos engineering efforts. It’s open source and maintained by Intuit and others.

If you’ve been following this series, you’d know that Intuit is a big fan of open-source software. Special shout out to Argo Workflow, which makes their compute-intensive Kubernetes jobs work much smoother.

Connect on LinkedIn with Deepthi Panthula and Zeeshan (Shan) Anwar.

If you want to see what Stack Overflow users are saying about chaos engineering, check out

Chaos engineering best practice

, asked by

User NingLee

two years ago.

From your lips to AI’s ears Jan 24, 2023

Show notes

In a win for accessibility, GitHub Copilot now responds to voice commands, allowing developers to code using their voices.

Speaking of accessibility, learn how Santa Monica Studio worked with disabled gamers and the community to build accessibility into God of War Ragnarök.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has determined that lab-grown meat is safe to eat.

Looking for some high-quality entertainment content? Look no further than Simone Giertz’s YouTube channel, where she builds robots to (among other things) wash her hair and wake her up with a slap in the face.

Blast from the past: Listen to our episode with MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner ralf htp for their answer to How to listen for and react to Ace Editor change events.

How to build a universal computation machine with Tetris Jan 20, 2023

Show notes

First, some self-administered back-patting for the Stack Overflow editorial team: great engineering blogs give tech companies an edge (The New York Times says so).

Hiring aside, engineering blogs are fresh sources of knowledge, insight, and entertainment for anyone working in tech. You can learn a lot from, for instance, blog posts that break down an outage or security incident and detail how engineers got things up and running again. One classic of the genre: Amazon’s explanation of how one engineer brought the internet to its knees. And here’s an example from our own blog.

When you’ve finished catching up on the Stack Overflow blog, check out those from Netflix and Uber.

Good news for late-night impulse shoppers: Instagram is removing the shopping tag from the home feed, reports The Verge. Is this a response to widespread user pushback, and does this herald the end of New Instagram? We can hope.

Sony announces Project Leonardo, an accessibility controller kit for PS5.

Did you know? Using only Tetris, you can build a machine capable of universal computation.

Developer advocate Matt Kiernander is moving on to his next adventure. If you’re looking for a developer advocate or engineer, connect with him on LinkedIn or email him.

One of Matt’s favorite conversations on the podcast was

our episode with Mitchell Hashimoto

, cofounder and CEO of HashiCorp. It’s worth a (re)listen.

How Intuit improves security, latency, and development velocity with a service mesh Jan 18, 2023

Show notes

At an SaaS company like Intuit that has hundreds of services spread out across multiple products, maintaining development velocity at scale means baking some of the features that every service needs into the architecture of their systems. That’s where a service mesh comes in. It automatically adds features like observability, traffic management, and security to every service in the network without adding any code.

In this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Anil Attuluri, principal software engineer, and Yasen Simeonov, senior product manager, both of Intuit, about how their engineering organization uses a service mesh to solve problems, letting their engineers stay focused on writing business logic. Along the way, we discuss how the service mesh keeps all the financial data secure, how it moves network traffic to where it needs to go, and the open source software they’ve written on top of the mesh.

Episode notes:

For those looking to get the same service mesh capabilities as Intuit, check out Istio, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project.

In order to provide a better security posture for their products, each business case operates on a discrete network. But much of the Istio service mesh needs to discover services across all products. Enter Admiral, their open-sourced solution.

When Intuit deploys a new service version, they can progressively scale the amount of traffic that hits it instead of the old version using Argo Rollouts. It’s better to find a bug in production on 1% of requests than 100%.

If you want to learn more about what Intuit engineering is doing, check out their blog.

Congrats to Great Question badge winner,

HelpMeStackOverflowMyOnlyHope

, for asking

Detect whether input element is focused within ReactJS

Flake it till you make it - how to handle flaky tests Jan 17, 2023

Show notes

There is a ton of great research to be found on Prof. Kapfhammer's website, including:

Flaky Tests: Finding and fixing unpredictable and harmful test cases
Database Testing: Automatically testing relational database schemas
Web Testing: Detecting and repairing poor responsive web page layout

We've written a bit about how Stack Overflow is upping its unit testing game and how you can evaluate multiple assertions in a single test.

Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Survivor, for answering the question: Is it possible to find out if a value exists twice in an arraylist?

Commit to something big: all about monorepos Jan 13, 2023

Show notes

Juri is currently Director of Developer Experience (Global) and Director of Engineering (Europe) at Nrwl, founded by former Googlers/Angular core team members Jeff Cross and Victor Savkin.

Nrwl has compiled everything you need to know about monorepos, plus the tools to build them, here.

Connect with Juri on LinkedIn or explore his website.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner penguin2718 for their answer to Storing loop output in a dataframe in R.

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