The Stack Overflow Podcast

Taking stock of the crypto crash and tech turbulence

02 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Data show's Silicon Valley's share of new startup funding deals dropped below 20% for the first time.What does it mean to experiment with big changes ...

Talking UX philosophies and deployment best practices with Patreon's VP of Engineering

29 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Srivastava reflects on his upbringing in India, learning to write Assembly, and going to Stanford University to complete his Ph.D in computer science....

Here’s what it’s like to develop VR at Meta

22 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Cami and Cassidy take us down memory lane, sharing how they got into computer science together, hosted a web series (and still podcast together someti...

Cloudy with a chance of… the state of cloud in 2022

21 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

SPONSORED BY PLURALSIGHTEarly in the days of high-traffic web pages and apps, any engineer operating the infrastructure would have a server room where...

The creator of Homebrew has a plan to fix the funding problem in open source

18 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Over the years Homebrew, an open source package manager, has emerged as the project with the greatest number of individual contributors. Despite all t...

Want to work as a developer in Japan?

15 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Eric explains that great jobs are available for developers in Japan, but it can be tough to find these opportunities.We talk about interesting startup...

Another hard week in tech

11 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Episode notes:The team questions whether a print out of 60-90 days worth of code is the right benchmark for whether to lay someone off. Ben gives our...

Hashgraph: The sustainable alternative to blockchain

09 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

When most people talk about Web3 or cryptocurrencies and related technologies, they usually mean blockchains. But blockchain is only the first generat...

Fighting to balance identity and anonymity on the web(3)

08 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Shoemaker spent his childhood in Silicon Valley and learned Assembly when he was just 16 years old.In his early 20s, he applied to work at Apple and w...

Going from engineer to entrepreneur takes more than just good code

04 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

In today’s podcast, Matt, Ceora, and Cassidy reflect on Cara’s founder journey.Cara shares her experiences living in New York and San Francisco—...

Making location easier for developers with new data primitives

02 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

When Foursquare launched in 2009, the app was consumer facing, letting you know where friends had checked in and what spots might appeal to you. Peopl...

Homelabbing tricks to level up your WFH game

01 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The group laughs about setting up JIRA workflows and Trello boards for our family lives—Matt says heck no.Ceora speaks to the power of homelabbing a...

How to get more engineers entangled with quantum computing

28 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Katzgraber reflects on his time as a university professor up until 2020 and why he switched to working at Amazon.He walks us through a quantum computi...

Goodbye Webpack, Hello Turbopack! The big news from today’s Next.JS conference

25 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

We got the chance to sit down with Guillermo Ruach, Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel and co-creator of Next.JS, about the news coming out of today's con...

A flight simulator for developers to practice real world challenges and surprises

25 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Freund reflects on his early days at Applied Materials, where he worked on a machine that inspected silicon wafers.It was in this early role that Freu...

He went from .NET and VS Code to working on Web3

21 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

John explains that Web3 is about the convergence of technology, economics, and social trends.He elaborates that foundations begin with service-based a...

Faster feedback loops make for faster developer velocity

19 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Having trouble with understanding your team’s productivity outside of frameworks and tooling? Create a backlog and work through it: Instant Agile! H...

Driverless cars give us the heebie jeebies

18 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Before jumping into driverless car talk, Ben shares a heads up about fake jobs at credible companies that are actually phishing scams meant to steal y...

The robots are coming… but when?

14 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Despite our hope for the power of robotics, the technology is still far from mainstream. That’s because the amount of effort needed to get hardware ...

The right way to job hop

11 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Ceora and Cassidy talk about why engineers are so good at job hopping — and why it can pay to upgrade roles every year or two.Ceora speaks openly ab...

A chat with Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks on the path from developer to leader

07 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Matt takes us back to the origins of his open source days and the spark that inspired his love for engineering — including the point at which he dis...

Meet the AI helping you chose what to watch next

05 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Our guests have done most of their ML work on AWS offerings, from AWS Personalize for their initial recommendation engine to SageMaker for model train...

The many strengths of neurodivergence

04 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Mariann shares how she and her UX research team at Stack Overflow are taking steps to create a more inclusive product experience, while reflecting on ...

Cassidy becomes a CTO!

30 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Ceora shares her experience representing Auth0 at REFACTR TECH, reflecting on what it was like being back in-person after years of virtual events.Cass...

Don't let software steal your time

28 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Guilo gives building UI components as an example of where software innovation has given him time back: he started building them as static images in Ph...

Ethereum finally merges, semiconductors stay scarce

27 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

It finally happened. In the words of the Ethereum Foundation, ETH is now “ready for its interstellar voyage,” having transitioned from proof of wo...

We hate Scrum and Agile too...when it's done wrong

23 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

About three years ago, when our public platform engineering team at Stack started growing, we realized that we needed a more robust formal project man...

Five nines uptime without developer burnout

22 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Like other folks we’ve talked to on the podcast, Chronosphere was born out of work pioneered at Uber. When you can’t find solutions to help you sc...

Can integrating hardware with software save developers time and energy?

21 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

We dive into some of the ways developers can customize their keyboard with shortcuts, macros, and apps to eliminate repetitive tasks and automate the ...

A serial entrepreneur finally embraces open source

20 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Appsmith is an open-source, low-code platform for building and maintaining internal tools like custom dashboards, admin panels, and, of course, CRUD a...

Hypergrowth headaches

16 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Like a lot of good tools, Backstage started as a way to stop using a spreadsheet. They knew it was something worth open-sourcing when conference atten...

What science says about achieving the flow state

14 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Show notesIf you’re interested in diving deeper into Professor Fritz’s research on developer flow states, check out his list of publications. Flo...

Hackathons and free pizza: All about Stack Overflow’s new Student Ambassador Program

13 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

As part of an effort to work with students at college and universities, Stack Overflow is partnering with Major League Hacking (MLH) to recruit our fi...

Plug-and-play AI for your own projects

09 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

AssemblyAI is an AI-as-a-service provider focused on speech-to-text and text analysis. Their mission is to make it easy for developers and product tea...

Flow state at your fingertips - how keyboards impact developer productivity

08 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

For those not familiar with the MX series, you can read more about the different versions, including the mechanical one, here.If you don't know about ...

Does AI-assisted coding make it too easy for student to cheat on schoolwork?

06 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

You can find a great essay on AI helping students, and what that means for their teachers, here.Here's a piece on W4 Games plans to monetize the Godot...

Environments on-demand

02 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

ReleaseHub provides on-demand environments for development, staging, and production. Every developer knows that environments can be a bottleneck, so R...

What companies lose when they track worker productivity

30 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What do companies want to gain through monitoring software—and what do they, and their employees, stand to lose? Read more.In Deep Work: Rules for F...

The luckiest guy in AI

26 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Varun is the cofounder and CTO of AKASA, which develops purpose-built AI and automation solutions for the healthcare industry.Building a physics simul...

Why AI is having an on-prem moment

23 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Learn why some companies are moving AI and ML data and models off the cloud and back on premises.Oxide is a rack-scale server with tightly integrated ...

Combining the best of engineering cultures from Silicon Valley and Shanghai

19 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Born and raised in China, Liam arrived in the US to attend the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied human-computer interaction. Afte...

The last technical interview you'll ever take

17 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Since the day a hiring manager first wheeled a whiteboard into a conference room, software engineers have dreaded the technical interview, which can b...

A history of open-source licensing from a lawyer who helped blaze the trail

16 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Heather is a General Partner at OSS Capital, which provides VC backing to seed-stage COSS (commercial open source) startups. Her law practice focuses ...

A conversation with Spencer Kimball, creator of GIMP and CockroachDB

12 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Spencer was one of the original creators of open-source, cross-platform image editing software GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), authored while h...

The internet’s Robin Hood uses robo-lawyers to fight parking tickets and spam calls

09 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

DoNotPay offers more than 250 “automated justice” services in every US state, from suing robo-callers to annulling marriages to fighting eviction....

Satellite internet: More useful than sending a car into space

05 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

A coding error reportedly caused the massive outage at Canadian telecom company Rogers that affected more than 10 million customers—a quarter of Can...

Monitoring data quality with Bigeye

02 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Bigeye is a data observability platform that helps teams measure, improve, and communicate data quality clearly at any scale. Explore more on their Yo...

San Francisco? More like San Francisgo

29 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed says a seismic shift (definitely not an exodus) is underway as tech workers continue working from home and compan...

Team analytics: Less creepy, more empowering

26 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Multitudes helps managers and CTOs create happier, higher-performing teams, using data they already have. Multitudes is focused on software developmen...

Game Boy emulators, PowerPoint developers, and the enduring appeal of Pokémon GO

22 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Pokémon GO is six years old (it makes us feel old, too). Check out NoobBoy, the Game Boy emulator. Need more nineties nostalgia? You can still play ...

How APIs can take the pain out of legacy system headaches

20 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Today's episode is sponsored by Opentext. You can learn more about their information management solutions here.You can find out more about Claire and ...

Code completion isn’t magic; it just feels that way

19 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Anvil is an open-source web framework for building full-stack applications entirely in Python.Ready to dig deeper into code completion? Check out Mere...

At your next job interview, you ask the questions

15 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The GPU shortage is (allegedly) over! Read about it at The Verge.Learn how low code demands more creativity from developers.On the job market? Don’t...

Money that moves at the speed of information

12 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Devraj Varadhan is the SVP of Engineering at Ripple, which provides crypto and blockchain solutions for businesses. Ripple’s mission is to provide p...

A conversation with Stack Overflow's new CTO, Jody Bailey

08 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Episode notesBefore joining Stack, Jody spent time at Pluralsight and AWS Training, two roles that helped him to understand the growing market for onl...

Skills that pay the bills for software developers

07 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

If you want to dive deeper on lucrative skills, you can read a blog post Mike wrote for us last month.If you want to learn more about Mike's backgroun...

Developers vs the difficulty bomb

05 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Episode notesAn interesting podcast episode on the multiple delays that have kept Ethereum from its long-anticipated merge and kicked the difficulty b...

Exploring the interesting and strange results from our 2022 Developer Survey

01 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Huge thanks to the more than 73,000 devs from 180 countries who spent 15 minutes each completing our 2022 Developer Survey. This year’s survey was l...

GitHub Copilot is here. But what’s the price?

28 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

GitHub Copilot is now available to all developers. There’s also the GitHub Copilot Labs extension for Visual Studio Code, which has some neat tricks...

Living on the Edge with Netlify

24 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

RIP Internet Explorer (1995-2022), “a good tool to download other browsers.” Bummer epitaph, but the meme stands.Netlify’s unified web developme...

An Engineer's Field Guide to Great Technical Writing

21 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Docs for Devs: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing can be found here.Jared worked as a technical writer at Google for more than 14 years ...

Our favorite features and updates from WWDC

17 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

WWDC22 was last week (check out Apple’s highlights here). Among the most exciting demonstrations: passkeys, a new approach to authentication with th...

Privacy is a moving target. Here’s how engineering teams can stay on track.

16 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

 Ever since personal information started flowing into applications on the web, securing that information has become more and more important. General ...

Run your microservices in no-fail mode

14 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Temporal Technologies is a scalable open-source platform for developers to build and run reliable cloud applications.ICYMI, here’s a post we wrote w...

Want to be great at UX research? Take a cue from cultural anthropology.

10 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

HASH, where Maggie works along with Stack Overflow cofounder Joel Spolsky, is an open-core platform for creating simulations that help people make bet...

On the quantum internet, data doesn’t stream; it teleports

07 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The first step in quantum computing? Quantum internet: a network capable of sending quantum information between far-distant computing machines (as in,...

Kidnapping an NFT

03 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The Web3 crime of the century? Seth Green’s Bored Ape NFT is kidnapped by dastardly phishing scammers, kiboshing the TV series Green was developing ...

Talking blockchain, functional programming, and the future with Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman

01 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

While blockchains are huge right now, finding one to build on that doesn’t use a ton of energy, has good privacy protections, and operates efficient...

How a very average programmer became GitHub's CTO

31 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Jason is now a managing director at Redpoint Ventures and has led one investment so far, backing a company called Alchemy that is focused on infrastru...

Games are good, mods are immortal

27 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Following the success of the Mac Mini, Windows is getting into the tiny computer business. Oh, and it’s running on ARM chips. Oh, and Visual Studio ...

Turns out the Great Resignation goes both ways

24 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Companies like Meta, Twitter, and Netflix are enacting hiring freezes and layoffs, a situation that’s not great for anybody but is likely to have ou...

Make your open-source project public before you’re ready

20 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Highly-touted cryptocurrencies like TARA don’t always solve the problems they’re supposed to, as Bloomberg reports.If you’re looking for a compe...

Building out a managed Kubernetes service is a bigger job than you think

18 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

You may be running your code in containers. You might even have taken the plunge and orchestrated it all with YAML code through Kubernetes. But infras...

Open-source is winning over developers and investors

17 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Supabase, the open-source database-as-a-service company, raised $80 million in Series B funding in a round led by Felicis Ventures. In case you were w...

Software is adopted, not sold

13 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Ian and Corey met at Microsoft, where they built Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 (which boasted its own CD-ROM).They went on to found...

Feeling burned out? You’re not the only one.

10 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Check out a manager’s toolkit for preventing burnout put together by Gitlab Cassidy once asked Stephen Colbert for his favorite website. His answer...

Why security needs to shift left into the SDLC

05 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

You can check out Michael’s bio here and tune in to his podcast Cloud Unfiltered.If you're interested in some of open source work Michael and his co...

What counts as art, anyway?

03 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Stack Overflow’s 2019 Developer Survey found that respondents overwhelmingly considered Elon Musk to be the person with the greatest influence on te...

Would you trust an AI to be your eyes?

29 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The crew has complicated feelings about products like Apple’s augmented reality glasses and Google Glass. Ceora put it best: “I'm very cautious ab...

Meet the design system that lets us customize and theme Stack Overflow

26 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

If you’re not familiar with Stacks, Stack Overflow’s design system, it’s a robust CSS and JavaScript Pattern library that helps users create coh...

How a college extra-credit project became PHP3, still the bedrock of the web

22 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

A high school class on Pascal launched Andi’s interest in programming (starting on an Apple IIc).Andi was bored with his university studies and took...

What's the average tenure of a software developer at a big tech company?

19 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Average tenure at Google has been reported at 1.1 years,  which stands in contrast to a broader average of 4.2 years for software developers across t...

Warning signs that hot startup hiring engineers might not last

15 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Cassidy is co-organizing Devs for Ukraine, a free online engineering conference from April 25-26 to raise funds in support of Ukraine. Register today ...

“Your salary shouldn’t be dictated by how good a negotiator you are.”

12 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Read about how New Relic achieved pay equity—and what, exactly, that means.Last month, hacker group Lapsus$ released screenshots showing it had succ...

Words of wisdom for self-taught developers

08 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Quizzes and games like Roblox are a good way to build your knowledge, whether you’re learning to code or becoming a K-pop expert.ICYMI: Listen to ou...

The new version of React, great tools for learning CSS, and the double standard for female engineers

05 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

React 18 is the latest major version of React. Cassidy also provides an excellent summary of React history.Ceora is working on some CSS art (inspired ...

Embracing ambiguity in software with one of YouTube’s UX engineers

01 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Read a profile of Mattaniah on People of Color in Tech (POCIT) here.Connect with Mattaniah on LinkedIn or follow her on TikTok.Who remembers Vine??Thi...

Give us 23 minutes, we’ll give you some flow state

29 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Why has this empty NPM package been installed 700,000 times? We’ve got the answer for ya.A nice article and podcast on flow state, including the cla...

Human laziness is the ultimate security threat

25 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Vercel is a developer-first, frontend-focused platform. Together with Google and Meta, Vercel built Next.js, an open-source React framework that helps...

Getting through a SOC 2 audit with your nerves intact

23 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Once a company reaches a certain size, their customers might start asking for proof that it has good security and data habits. They want to know if th...

Codespaces moves into public beta, the virtual real estate worth millions, and how microservices and CI/CD can hurt productivity

22 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Geriatric millennials unite.Learn more about GitHub’s move to put prebuilt Codespaces into public beta, plus check out CodeSandbox, home of self-pro...

McDonald’s is to Chipotle what REST APIs are to GraphQL

18 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Danielle’s path to software engineering began when she was accepted into MIT’s Women’s Technology Program, an education and mentorship opportuni...

Visual Studio turns 25, new ideas for supporting open source, and of course…NFTs

15 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The team pays tribute to Microsoft’s Visual Studio, an IDE and source code editor that turns 25 this month.Read Simon Willison’s article on how co...

Crypto feels broken. That’s because it’s the internet circa 1996.

11 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

David is a CS major who worked in Apple’s music group in the 90s and went on to become CEO of eMusic in the aughts. At Venrock, David invested in e...

Who says HTML and CSS aren't real programming?

08 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Learn more about GitHub’s ​​machine learning-based code scanning, which finds security issues before they make it to production.Google invests $...

Why David Barrett, CEO of Expensify, still takes his turn on PagerDuty

04 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Expensify is an expense management solution that integrates with your travel, ERP, and finance/accounting software. Check out their full list of integ...

The Great QR Code Comeback

01 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Ceora shouts out Mermaid, a JavaScript-based diagramming and charting tool that creates diagrams dynamically based on Markdown-inspired text definitio...

Is functional programming the hipster programming paradigm?

25 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Here’s a useful primer on functional programming with JavaScript.This tutorial will guide you in exploring the fundamentals of functional programmin...

Finally, an AI bot that can ace technical interview questions

22 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Learn more about AlphaCode here.Check out an amazing video essay critiquing the NFT market, The Line Goes Up.Read up on Josh Wardle, the developer who...

An algorithm that optimizes for avoiding ennui

18 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

You can learn more about Clement's career on his LinkedIn and on Twitter (assuming you speak French).You can learn more about Dailymotion here and che...