The Stack Overflow Podcast

Column by your name: The analytics database that skips the rows

16 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

These days, every company looking at analyzing their data for insights has a data pipeline setup. Many companies have a fast production database, ofte...

Gen Z doesn’t understand file structures

15 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

It’s not news that, as Cassidy says, “remote has grown wildly fast”—but Remote has gone from about 25 employees in March 2020 to 900 now (a 3,...

China’s only female Apache member on the rise of open source in China

11 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

SphereEX builds distributed data systems, making it easier for organizations to load balance massive data stores across multiple servers. Now that op...

There’s no coding Oscars. Write software that works

08 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Ceora has her second brain stored in Notion, complete with GIFs and pretty color to get that aesthetic.Ancient history in blog years: Cassidy talks ab...

Moving from CEO back to IC: A chat with Mitchell Hashimoto on his love for code

04 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Neopets: A little-known gateway into a software career. (Nineties kids will remember.)Among the products Mitchell helped build at Hashicorp: Terraform...

A collaborative hub for infrastructure as code

02 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Marcin Wyszynski, founder and CEO at Spacelift. Marcin says Spacelift aims to be for infrastruc...

Next stop, Cryptoland?

01 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The Twitter thread that brought Cryptoland to the team’s attention.Ceora wonders whether participants in a hypothetical, decentralized version of Yo...

Using synthetic data to power machine learning while protecting user privacy

28 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

You can learn more about Gretel here. The company is hiring for numerous positions. Think your commits are anonymous? Think again: DefCon researchers...

How to defend your attention and find a flow state

25 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The inspiration for today's episode was a terrific article from The Guardian about the many ways in which the modern world, specifically the software ...

Who's going to pay to fix open source security?

21 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Will no one think of the maintainers? As The New Stack points out, watching millions of projects fail because of a bug in an open source library has b...

A chat with the folks who lead training and certification at AWS

18 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

You can find Maureen here. You can find Scott here.There is a wealth of free courses available through the AWS training website, including Operations...

Safety in numbers: crowdsourcing data on nefarious IP addresses

14 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

You can find Philippe on Twitter here and learn more about CrowdSec here.They recently put together a list of the IP addresses trying to exploit the n...

Making Agile work for data science

12 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Data scientists and engineers don’t always play well together. Data scientists will plan out a solution, carefully build models, test them in notebo...

Helping communities build their own LTE networks

11 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Esther and Matt are graduate students in computer science at the University of Washington, where they study community networks.Esther explains how ope...

Are developers helping to drive the Great Resignation?

07 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Developers are leading the Great Resignation, according to some reports. Others feel developers aren't resigning, so much as seizing the moment to fin...

Professional ethics and phantom braking

04 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Hear why Ben thinks the Workplace Stack Exchange and the Academia Stack Exchange have the richest questions in the Stack Exchange network (or maybe ju...

Teaching developers about the most lightweight web “framework” around, VanillaJS

21 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What exactly is VanillaJS? Tongue-in-cheek, it's the most lightweight JavaScript framework out there and used by pretty much every website on the inte...

Bringing AI to the edge, from the comfort of your living room

17 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Bill gives an  overview of edge computing and why it matters.His team wants to enable developers by democratizing access to AI. OpenVINO is an open-s...

Skills, not schools, are in demand among developers

16 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The pathway to a software developer job has shifted over the years. It used to be that you had to go through a college computer science program before...

An oral history of Stack Overflow - told by its founding team

14 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Find Joel Spolsky on Twitter here.Jeff Atwood is on Twitter here.Geoff Dalgas is on Twitter here.Follow Jarrod Dixon on Twitter here.See Privacy Polic...

Zero to MVP without provisioning a database

10 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

PlanetScale is built on Vitess, the open-source database clustering system that runs at colossal scale hosting YouTube, Slack, and GitHub.A familiar t...

Feeling insecure about your code's security?

07 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

This “Trojan source” bug (get it?) could threaten the security of all code.In its annual report on its user community, GitHub found that developer...

Is crypto the key to a democratizing the metaverse?

03 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Ethan's book, Once a Bitcoin Miner: Scandal and Turmoil in the Cryptocurrency Wild West, is available now.The metaverse isn’t just inevitable; it’...

Does modern parenting have to rely on spyware?

30 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The conversation was inspired by Epic's decision to make it's Kid's Web Service's parent verification free to all developers.Ben has been grappling wi...

Who is building clouds for the independent developer?

23 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

We kick things off by weighing the merits of two gender-neutral regional pronouns: the familiar y’all and the under appreciated yinz. Now that’s c...

Who owns this outage? Building intelligent, automated escalation chains

22 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Maxwell, a solution architect at xMatters, took a winding road to get to where he is. After a computer engineering education, he held jobs as field su...

What if the value of software platforms ACTUALLY flowed to the users?

19 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can learn more about Roll, which describes itself as blockchain infrastructure for social money, here.If you want to follow them on social, check ...

250 words per minute on a chorded keyboard? Only if you can think that fast.

16 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

GitHub's CEO, Nat Friedman, stepped down recently to focus on his startup roots. Chief product officer, Thomas Dohmke, will be moving to CEO. The Ver...

The polyglot who leads Stack Overflow's Platform team

12 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Rennie grew up in Kenya, Honduras, Somalia, and Oklahoma; his parents volunteered for the Peace Corps before working for the US Government overseas. ...

The semiconductor shortage: explained

09 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can find Alex's writing for Employ America here. You can find him on Twitter hereYou can find Hassan's blog here and his Twitter here.You can find...

Web3 won't save us

05 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What is Web3? The Decentralized Internet of the FutureCassidyCeoraRyanBenThanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Tadeck, for showing us how t...

The big problem with only being able to solve big problems

02 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

We start out the show talking about this article: I Don't Know How To Count That Low.Is Apple normalizing surveillance?Toyota trucks and Land Cruisers...

Software for your second brain

29 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Alex comes up with better ways to interact with technology and writes about it on his website. Is there a link between playing music and writing code...

A murder mystery: who killed our user experience?

27 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The infrastructure that networked applications lives on is getting more and more complicated. There was a time when you could serve an application fro...

The first ten years of our programming lives

26 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

This episode was inspired by Joma Tech's review of his first ten years in coding. Ben Popper shared  a fair amount of his coding journey through the...

Quality code is the easiest to delete

22 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Isaac's piece, Code quality: a concern for businesses, bottom lines, and empathetic programmers, ran recently on the Stack Overflow blog. A simple me...

Getting your first job off the CSS mailing list

19 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

At LinkedIn scale, it pays to save your developers a few minutes or even seconds on repeat tasks. Sara walks us through her experience managing senior...

Can AI solve car accidents and find you a parking space?

15 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Graybeard conference alert! Eran and Ryan both started their technology journeys on the venerable Commodore 64. During his academic days, Eran helped...

A database built for a firehose

12 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

HarperDB is a startup that focuses on highly scalable databases that handle real-time data. Harper is built on Node.js and Express with a little help...

Wait, we're all content moderators now?

08 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Read more about the climate debate surrounding NFTs here.We really enjoyed this piece: You either die an MVP, or live long enough to build content mod...

Building image search, but for any object IRL

05 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can learn more about Paul here.You can read more about Physna here.Paul is excited about the Metaverse. So are we! See Privacy Policy at https://...

It's 2FA's world, we're just living in it

01 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Check out more about Microsoft's efforts to ditch passwords here.When  2FA just won't do, 3FA to the rescue. Just pray we aren't headed towards five ...

Automate away your boring standup meetings

29 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Right now, most development teams provide visibility into their overall process and lifecycle through standup meetings and spreadsheets. It can be a p...

Become a better coder...with this one weird click

28 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Go get your copy of They Key here.Our frequent collaborator, Cassidy Williams of Netlify, helped design the key and joined this episode to share her l...

The paranoid style in application development

24 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

We talked about obscuring DNS traffic based on this article.Cassidy and Ben are pretty excited about all the new Apple stuff announced recently. Ryan,...

You don't need a math PhD to play Dwarf Fortress, just to code it

21 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Tarn and his brother Zach are the brains behind Dwarf Fortress and the community that rose around it.Dr. Tarn Adams  received a math PhD, but left hi...

Writing the roadmap from engineer to manager

17 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Former co-host Sara Chipps  now manages engineering teams at LinkedIn, but her best content is still on Twitter.Cassidy's former boss, Sarah Drasner,...

This AI-assisted bug bash is offering serious prizes for squashing nasty code

15 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

While every developer loves a good story about discovering and fixing a gnarly bug, not everyone enjoys the work of finding those bugs. Most folks wou...

Managing Kubernetes entirely in Git? Meet GitOps

14 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Weaveworks helps DevOps folks manage their Kubernetes settings entirely Paul's first computer was a Sinclair ZX-80, which had a clock speed of 3.25 M...

How valuable is your screen name?

10 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can send ideas for blog posts to Ryan Donovan at our pitch box.You can find Cassidy on Twitter here and read the newsletter she helps us curate he...

Authorization is complex. Oso is a library designed to help you structure it.

08 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can learn more about Sam on his LinkedIn here. You can find him on Twitter here.Learn more about Oso, check out the code, and join their Slack com...

Why yes, I do have a patent on a time machine

03 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can find Angie's blog here, catch her on Twitter here, and connect with her on LinkedIn here.You can check out Applitools and  learn about the vi...

Exploring the magic of instant python refactoring with Sourcery

31 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Nick is now Sourcery's CTO.  You can find him on Twitter here.Brendan serves as Sourcery's CEO. You can find him on Twitter here.You can try out Sour...

Changing of the guards: one co-host departs, and a new one enters

27 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Paul is stepping away down as CEO of Postlight to focus more on understanding climate change and how we can address it. The science hurts his brain. ...

Passwords are dead! Long live the new authentication flows.

24 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Every password can be compromised. Stych helps companies build authentication flows that don't need user passwords. Julianna grew up in Idaho, where ...

Extending the legacy of Admiral Grace Hopper

20 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

In 1987, Anita Borg, AnitaB.org's namesake, saw how few women were at a "systems" conference. A few casual chats turned into the listserv, Systers, wh...

Building a better developer platform

17 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

We're officially part of the Prosus family now that the acquisition has closed. It’s a huge milestone and a big deal for our company and community.P...

Move fast and make sure nobody gets pager alerts at 2AM

13 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Ethan started his career when the marquee tag was king and is bullish on its comeback. His focus as an investor is on developer tools & infrastru...

Using AI to fake your own voice, podcasting never been easier

10 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Mason began his career as a developer, went on to be a CEO, but also found time to produce 80s alt rock album full of advice on how to run your startu...

What's the blast radius when your database goes down?

06 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Mark started out on a 4k TRS-80. He had to program it in assembly language, as there wasn't enough memory to use the local Basic copy.Throughout his c...

Highlights from our 2021 Developer Survey

03 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

This year over 80,000 respondents took the time to share their feedback on the tools and trends that are shaping software development.We learned a lot...

Exploring the cutting edge of privacy and encryption with Very Good Security

30 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

We chat discrete mathematics, differential privacy, and homomorphic encryption. But don't worry, we also break it down in laymen's terms.Interested in...

Why startups should use Kubernetes from day one

27 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can read Max's full article on Kubernetes on our blog here.You can find Max on Twitter here and his personal website here.Our lifeboat badge winne...

From AOL chat rooms to Wikipedia, Reddit, and now, Stack Overflow

23 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Beaudette cut his teeth in the days of AOL chat rooms, then became an early Wikipedian. More recently he worked at Reddit, where his team of ten profe...

Crafting software and games for the selfie generation

20 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can find Tara on  Twitter here. Sam is on Twitter here.You can learn more about Loveshark's latest games and the roles they are hiring for here....

Github Copilot can write code for you. We put it to the test.

16 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can find some fun video of Cassidy putting Copilot to the test here.If you want to take the Jamstack survey, check it out here.Our lifeboat badge ...

Leaving your job to pursue an indie project as a solo developer

13 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

We discuss how Simões learned to code and the feature set that allowed Poker Now to differentiate itself in a crowded space. Simões shares the tech...

So you're not getting along with your engineering team

12 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

If you want to catch up on the first half of the episode, you can find it here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy ...

Is everyone starting to work like a developer?

09 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The massive shift to remote work that so many companies undertook over the last year has pushed many to adopt an asynchronous, merge driven workflow t...

Building for AR with Niantic Labs augmented reality SDK

06 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can learn more about Lightship, Niantic's AR SDK, here. They are hiring developers, and openings can be found here.Richard can be found on LinkedI...

Bring your own stack: Why developer platforms are going headless

02 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

As explained in this piece, "A headless CMS is a back-end only content management system (CMS) built from the ground up as a content repository that m...

How product development at Stack Overflow has evolved

29 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

If you're full up on technical content and just want funny retweets, follow Adam on Twitter hereIf you're interested in learning more about tag pages,...

Stack Overflow has a new product: Collectives™. Here's how we built it, and why.

25 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can check out all the details about Collectives in our launch post here.We detailed the user research that allowed our community to help shape thi...

From search trees to neural nets, a deep dive into natural language processing

23 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

We chatted with three guests:Miguel Jetté: Head of AI R&DJosh Dong: AI Engineering ManagerJenny Drexler: Senior Speech ScientistWhen Jette was st...

Tickets please! Exploring the joys of being a junior engineer

18 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Bligh explains her love for front end and the simple pleasure of bringing a designer’s vision to lifeWe also talk about making the transition from j...

Information foraging: the tricks great developers use to find solutions

15 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can check out some more of Henley's work on his blog here. Recent pieces include:  A theory of how developers seek information All my career reje...

Forget view-source, young coders are learning by making Discord bots and hacking Roblox

11 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can find Jenn on Twitter here. She is the creator of the wonderful website, make8bitart.com. You can check out Glitch here and dig into some of i...

A good software tutorial explains the How. A great one explains the Why.

08 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Karl is interested in the use of low code tools to extend development work beyond the engineering department. He also believes this approach, when don...

Don't build it: advice on civic tech from MIT's GOV/LAB

04 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Innocent is  a research associate at the MIT Gov /Lab. You can find him on Twitter here.Luke is the Founder and Executive Director of the civic techn...

Unpacking observability and OpenTelemetry with Spiros Xanthos of Splunk

01 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can read more about Spiros on his LinkedIn or Twitter.There is some good backstory on his first company, Log Insight, here. A rundown of the acqui...

WFH? Developers learn to be their own operations department

28 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can check out our piece how developers can be their own operations department here.Our piece on preventing scope creep while working from home is ...

Blocking the haters as a service

25 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Chou, a  Stanford educated computer scientist and electrical engineer, cut her teeth in Silicon Valley with stints at Facebook, Quora, and Pinterest,...

Build engineering at Apple and the future of deploy previews

21 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Eric was a build engineer at Apple for many years, then started a FeaturePeek which went through Y-combinator. He talks about what he learned from tho...

Where design meets development inside Stack Overflow

18 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

David helps us understand where great designers fit on web companies these days, somewhere between front-of-the-front-end and back-of-the-front-end.Ri...

Why are good Ruby developers so hard to find?

14 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Ilya brought a host of good topics to the table. Bold Penguin went from one offshore developer, to one key dev, to one team, to multiple teams, multip...

Saying goodbye to our co-host, Sara Chipps

11 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Sara has been part of the open source community since 2001 and was formerly on the board of the .NET foundation. Recently she was elected to the board...

NFT art, Ethereum gas, and a dive into Gemini's data lake

07 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can find Tommy on Twitter here and check out his NFT collection here.Evan tweets his undying love for The Mets here.Before you lay out your critiq...

Open source contributors helped a helicopter fly on Mars

04 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can check out the badge Github gave to folks for helping with the Mars flight here. You can learn more about F´, NASA’s open source flight soft...

One founder's journey from personal trainer to "frontend mentor"

30 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can check out Frontend Mentor here. Try a few challenges or join their Slack, where thousands of students are chatting about how they are approach...

From music to trading cards, software is transforming curation and collecting

27 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can follow David on Twitter here and read his blog here.Check out more about Dapper Labs and it's work with the NBA and NFTs here.David has writte...

Non-fungible Talking

23 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Want to try developing with Ethereum? Free Code Camp has you covered.On the other hand, here are some thoughts on why it's not the greatest language f...

One in four visitors to Stack Overflow copies code

20 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can check out our deep dive into the copy paste data here. We saw over 40 million copies in the two weeks worth of activity we analyzed.Kyle  Pol...

How to build and maintain online communities, from gaming to open source

16 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can follow David on Twitter here. If you want to check out his new book, The Business of Belonging,  the first chapter is available here.You can ...

Two words for ya: networked spreadsheets

13 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Dave Winer wrote a fun piece on the lost apps of the 80s. We explore the paradox of software that is "too good" to become popular among mainstream con...

For Twilio's CIO, every internal developer is a customer

09 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can find Michelle on Twitter here.You can learn more about building apps with Twilio here.Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to TryingToLearn for...

Web programming with nothing but Python

06 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Lots of people who work outside of programming learn Python as part of their job. When folks from telecom, academia, or medical science want to build ...

What does being a "nerd" even mean these days?

02 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Despite its reputation, there is a Go To for every language. You can dive deeper with the Summer of Go To.There is a lot you can learn from it as a be...

How we keep Stack Overflow's codebase clean and modern

30 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can find Roberta on Twitter. For anyone who understands Portuguese, you can also check out her podcast. Check out Roberta's recent blog post on b...

We chat with Slack developers about building apps, APIs, and open source communities

26 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Shay is a developer advocate building open source tools and writing education content. Outside of work she writes poetry, indulges fad hobbies, and re...

A director of engineering explains scaling from dozens of employees to thousands

23 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can find out more about Suyog and his career here. True story, he once worked on tablets way before tablets were a thing.He's on Twitter here. You...