The Stack Overflow Podcast

Dev, meet Ops. Ops, meet Dev.

19 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can check out more of Tom's work and some of his books on his website, Everything SysAdmin. Tom also wrote a great blog post for our site that ex...

Taking a risk and moving to a new team

16 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Ian is Brooklyn bred a tech junkie, NBA stats nerd, hip hop connoisseur, and co-creator of GameFlo and Ujima Now. He graduated from Brown University a...

Covid vaccine websites are frustrating. This developer built a better one.

12 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

It was a pandemic, Olivia was on maternity leave after giving birth, and she also had a toddler to take care of. Somehow she still managed to build a ...

Building a bug bounty program for the Pentagon

09 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Cleghorn works for Defense Digital Services. On Twitter, the group describes itself as  "a SWAT team of nerds on tours of duty."  You can read more ...

How long does good code last?

05 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

This week's discussion was inspired by an article from Sandi Metz, which you can find here. It begins with a terrific line, defining the half-life of ...

Chatting with Google's DeepMind about the future of AI

02 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can find  the paper on MuZero here.He blogs at Furidamu and can be found on Twitter here.The story on drug discovery powered by AI can be found h...

When it comes to package managers, don't forget security

26 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

If you’re a programmer working with npm, Sara has some basic advice on best practices that will keep your codebase safe.Today’s discussion was ins...

How to use interference to your advantage - a quantum computing catch up

23 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Blake has a PhD in physics from Yale and is the quantum platform lead. You can find him on Twitter here and read some of his recent writing here.Rober...

Introducing The Stack Overflow Podcast

22 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Welcome to The Stack Overflow Podcast!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-no...

How do digital nomads pay their taxes?

19 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

A nice story on how to avoid the Nomad Tax Trap.Got a lot of employees moving to Texas? The state is notorious for the number of patent lawsuits filed...

What makes for a great API?

16 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Pattern matching in Python 3 - a nice new feature, a  gift to Stack Overflow point seekers, or a big pain in the neck? Curious about the Jamstack? Y...

We're building a web app, got any advice?

12 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Thanks to Marceli Wac for sending us a question about cron jobs. We love getting mail from listeners and try our best to read interesting questions on...

How to think in React

09 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can check out Cassidy's course on React here. It will teach you how to "build a reusable and declarative React component library. It's perfect for...

Command Line Utilities: Fix-Server

05 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Check out the great post from Laura Nolan, a senior engineer at Slack, breaking down their outage. Paul wants some simple command line utilities for "...

Can't stop, won't stop, GameStop.

02 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Maybe you don't think GameStop is a tech story, but rest assured, the screenwriting duo behind The Social Network and  21 will inject plenty of nerde...

What are young developers into? They're all getting AWS certified

29 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can follow Brian on Twitter. and check out the Cloudcast here. If you're just getting started, he has a cloud basics podcast that covers a new to...

Owning the code, from integration to delivery

26 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Today's conversation was inspired by a great blog post from Charity Majors.We also discuss the Chrome team's decision to migrate Puppeteer to Typescri...

Gaming PCs to heat your home, oceans to cool your data centers

22 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Joe Biden just wants to ride his Peleton, but equipment connected to WiFi  with a camera and microphone can pose a real security risk.If you've got a...

What exactly does it mean to be a "senior" software engineer

19 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Joocelyn hosts the Git Cute podcast, which you can find here.She's working on a book about seniority in the software industry, which you can pre-order...

Our stack is HTML and CSS

15 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The title of this week's episode comes from a Hacker News thread where Guillermo argued that the complexity of front end performance goes beyond simpl...

What would you pay for /dev/null as a service?

12 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

How could you not love a team with a bio like this: "We’re a young and dynamic team of messy data-scientists who have failed at being employed on th...

Programming in PowerPoint can teach you a few things

08 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The starting point for today's conversation was an argument made by Guillermo Rauch in this blog post. "And each time, your frontend has an opportunit...

What can you program in just one tweet?

05 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

If you're interested in learning a bit of BBC Basic, there is a fun introduction here. You can tweet at this bot, and it will run the contents as code...

Welcome to 2021 with special guest Joel Spolsky

01 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

You can find the first episode of the SO podcast here. It was conducted over Asterix, open source telephony software that allowed for fancy operations...

It's hard to get hacked worse than this

29 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

There is a nice breakdown of the Solarigate attack here, but the most important thing to know is that just seeing the words BusinessLayer.dll is enoug...

A Very Crypto Christmas

25 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

With Bitcoin hitting all time highs, there has been a lot of speculation about what will happen next in the market crypto market.Meanwhile, regulators...

All Time Highs: Talking crypto with Li Ouyang of Coinbase

22 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

There is a lot to think about when designing trading algorithms, especially in the world of cryptocurrency, where prices can be extremely volatile and...

Adventures in Javascriptlandia

18 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can read more about Javascriptlandia here. It is part of larger conversation happening on Google's Open Source Blog and through initiatives like G...

Diving into headless automation, active monitoring, Playwright and Puppeteer

15 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can find the original tweet here. AWS will work with them on publicity and open source their version so that there can be a flow of value in both ...

Cleaning up build systems and gathering computer history with Adam Gordon Bell

11 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

As promised, here is the grass hat.You can find out more about Earthly here.We spend a little time talking about Nix OS the operating system you can r...

Connecting apps, data, and the cloud with Apollo GraphQL CEO Geoff Schmidt

08 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can read about GraphQL here and Apollo here. Cassidy Williams, who curates our newsletter, wrote about her experience as an early adopter of the ...

Goodbye to Flash, we'll see you in Rust

04 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Gone in a Flash. Actually it took quite a while. Adobe explains its decision to stop supporting Flash here.You can learn more about Ruffle, the Flash ...

Why developers are increasingly demanding ethics in tech

01 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can find more about Resner here. Learn more about the topics we discussed by following some of Resner's suggested links below: People to follow ...

Big Tech is getting cozy with computer science departments

27 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can read more about the operating systems and business principles schools are adopting from their corporate sponsors here.You can read about the l...

React, Vue, jQuery: what flavor do you like your Vanilla JS?

24 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can find Ferdinandi's post and video here.12 years ago, back when Stack Overflow was a brand new site with just a few thousand users, someone aske...

Tim Berners Lee wants to put you in a pod, a web pod.

20 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can find out more about Sir Berners-Lee's work on Solid here.Other topics discussed in this episode: Docker puts a limit on free containers. That...

How do you make software reliable enough for space travel?

17 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can learn more about the Power of 10 here. TIOBE's latest index can be found here.Our lifeboat of the week goes to lealceldeiro for answering the...

If you could fix any software or technology, what would you change?

13 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Paul spent the weekend building a parser, cause who doesn't? He needed a Regex, found one on Stack Overflow, looked over the characters, and realized ...

Turning your coding career into an RPG with Sai Vennam

10 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can find Sai's videos here. Come for the deep dives on Docker, stay for the live lightboard  magic. Yes, I know what the comments say, but no, he...

The pros and cons of the SPA

06 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Pawel Skolski wrote this definition of the SPA in 2016. "A single-page application is an app that works inside a browser and does not require page rel...

Cleaning up the cloud to help fight climate change

03 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can find some more of Holly's work and bio here. She gave a great talk at KubeCon 2020, How to Love K8s and Not Wreck the Planet, which you can w...

Stack Overflow's CEO reflects on his first year

30 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can find a more in depth discussion of these topics on our blog. Prashanth shares his ideas about the importance of community and what it means to...

The story behind Stack Overflow in Russian with Nicolas Chabanovsky

27 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Nicolas will be the first to tell you that the version of Stack Overflow he helped to create began as a clone. It developed into a very popular site o...

How should tech titans act when productizing tiny open source projects?

23 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

We break down some thoughts on this issue, which came to light after a tweet from Tim Nolet.Later in the episode we talk about the debate raging right...

Making Kubernetes work like it's 1999 with Kelsey Hightower

20 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can find Kelsey on Twitter here. His Github is here. His personal journey with Kubernetes is detailed in a nice piece here.Kelsey has an interesti...

The downside of going viral with your programming joke

16 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

That skit made it to the front page of Reddit, and was soon seen across the internet. It's nice to make people laugh, but following the surge of inter...

Where do game developers fit in the world of software?

13 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Has there ever been a gaming company that brought more joy to the world than Nintendo? They were making playing cards back in 1889 and continue to fin...

Ben answers his first question on Stack Overflow

09 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can find some of Jack's art and other projects here.Ben breaks through and answers his first SO question—by copy/pasting from the comments, of ...

Talking Arduino, bits, and boards with Dr. Duino

06 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Sara shares the story of a developer conference that was smoke bombed by an Arduino bot gone haywire. It was this chaos that inspired her to dig deepe...

Who's afraid of a little merge conflict?

02 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Today's episode was inspired by a question on folks who postpone a merge for fear of being the one to resolve a conflict. Shout out to Candied Orange ...

Chris Anderson on drones, driverless cars, and creating communities around code

29 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Chris is the author of the New York Times bestselling books The Long Tail and Free as well as Makers: The New Industrial Revolution.He is lso the CEO ...

Episode 272: Pull Requests Are Welcome

25 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

"Sorry I missed your comment of many months ago. I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood." Life is lived in stages.Most people ar...

Next Level Command Line

22 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can check out more about the Github news here.Here is the farewell to updates from Moment.js.Would you take a nice bonus today for a pay cut in th...

Oracle wants to Tok, Nvidia Arms Up

18 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Oracle is in the midst of trying to negotiate and get approved a deal that would allow it to acquire Tik Tok's US Operations, and allow Tik Tok to avo...

What tech is like in "Rest of World"

15 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Sophie founded Rest of World in 2019 after a decade of living and working across Asia, Africa & the Middle East, and with companies like Uber and ...

How developers can become successful writers

11 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Along with her work writing and editing, Stephanie works as a product manager at Microsoft and runs Developer Content Digest, a biweekly newsletter wi...

The magic of metric, micro frontends, and breaking leases on Silicon Valley offices

08 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Every experienced software engineer can tell you a story about a standardization effort that ended up causing more problems than it solved. Queen Eliz...

Ok, who vandalized Wikipedia?

04 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can read the hilarious tale of how Paul was alerted to "Frenchpoop Butt" here.Enjoy an all time classic tale of a security expert being outwitted ...

The tiny open-source pillar holding up the entire internet

01 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

It's dependencies all the way down...Remote learning is a bad joke. Who has ideas for some tech or gaming inspired solutions? What's your favorite wa...

What it's like learning to program in prison

28 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Here is the Reddit comment that inspired us to reach out to Garry. This is the Vice news article that started the thread.  As you can see, the ban h...

Try your own cooking: turning our employees into Stack users

25 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Our guests this week were two of our employees: Yaakov Ellis and Stephanie Cantor. Yaakov is a Principal Web Developer, Community Advocate on the Publ...

Should managers of developers ever make technical decisions?

21 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

To start things off, we talk about the launch of Articles, a new content type for Stack Overflow Teams that lets you write longer, subjective pieces. ...

Maxing out our stats with Personal Development Nerds

18 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Juvoni describes himself as someone who helps people explore ideas and strategies for improvement. He focuses on combining multiple skills, better th...

Tik Tok's Tech Troubles / Developers Flee San Francisco

14 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Tik Tok has been accused of spying on users and siphoning up their data, although it's important to point out the same criticism has been leveled at m...

From web comics to React core with Rachel Nabors

11 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can read our story on Rachel and the work she is doing with the React community here.Nabors' is the author of Animation at Work, which you can fin...

Never program in bed

07 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Is there any more fitting end to a day of working from home, deep into months of a fully remote world, than using your smartphone to finish up a littl...

A few of our favorite haxx

04 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

No list of great hacks would be complete without the Samy worm that ran amok on Myspace back in 2005. As Rachel points out, lots of hackers start out ...

25 Years of Java - the present to the future

30 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

For this episode we spoke again with Georges Saab, Vice President of Software Development at the Java Platform Group and Manish Gupta, Vice President ...

25 Years of Java - the past to the present

29 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

For this episode we chatted with Georges Saab, Vice President of Software Development at the Java Platform Group and Manish Gupta, Vice President of G...

You down with GPT-3? Yeah you know me!

28 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

If you're wondering why GPT-3 matters and how it compares to prior efforts in this area, here is a good summary.If you want to dive deeper into the ef...

Forming new habits with 100 Days of Code

24 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can learn all about 100 Days of Code on their website.Alex also published a newsletter about habit forming and self-improvement. You can learn mor...

Code Newbie's approach to education and community

21 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Saron explains how she went from working in the marketing department of a startup to learning code, creating a supportive community for novice develop...

Is Scrum making you a worse engineer?

17 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

What began as a question on our Software Engineering Stack Exchange graduated into a blog post for further discussion. Paul points out that modern to...

A conversation on diversity and representation

14 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Syeeda and Ian talk with Sara and Paul about how affinity groups came to exist within Stack Overflow, and how the  BNB group helped to lead the desig...

How to interpret the compiler

10 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

This is a great crash course on just-in-time compilers written by Lin Clark, who works in advanced development at Mozilla on Rust and Web Assembly. It...

How We Hire Developers at Stack

07 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

When it comes to hardware that cranks, Paul is a fan of Micro Center's in-house brand - PowerSpec.This week we chew through a great post from Jon Chan...

Java goes to outer space

03 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

From Mars rovers to Minecraft to the makeup of our DNA - these are some of the Java apps that may leave a mark on  the world of software for decades ...

Can't Pay Your Taxes if The Website Won't Load

30 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can read about the IRS and its Sisyphean efforts to modernize its computer systems here.Ben's Twitter thread on amazing and obscure trade periodic...

Paul Explains It All

26 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

This week, Ben and Paul are flying as a duo, a true dad-cast. We walk through the slow build of increasingly complex keyboard macros, followed by the ...

Chatting with Robin Ginn, executive director of the OpenJS Foundation

23 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can learn more about today's event and all the livestream broadcasts here.If you want to learn more about Robin, you can get in touch here. See P...

It Ain't Real Till You Break Prod

19 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Cassidy helps to write The Overflow newsletter and is two months into a new gig as a Principal Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify. That's where ...

Dropping knowledge with Drupal's creator, Dries

16 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Dries explains how Drupal began: as a intranet, not internet, message board for his college community. It's now the technology underpinning tens of mi...

Turn on, tune in, drop out, log off

12 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

This week on the pod, we chat about Cloudflare.tv, a 24/7 streaming channel dedicated to discussions of software, startups, and technology. We also d...

You're Over Reacting

09 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

If you're in the market for a used car and some retro web design, look no further.Thanks to our Lifeboater of the week, Günter Zöchbauer, for explai...

New tools for new times

05 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can find Textmoji here. A few taps and you're the hippest typographer in your company's work chat. Seek, the app from iNaturalist, is available o...

Javascript is ready to get its own place

02 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Has there ever been a tech startup that raised shy of $3 billion, inflation-adjusted for any era, while barely making a ripple with actual customers? ...

I would D.I.E. for that IDE

29 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Brian is a contributor to Deno, and walks us through what this project has to offer.  He also made it easy to work with Deno right in the browser. Yo...

Mayor of Open Source Town

26 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Sara is spending her time as a fully remote worker trying to learn more about open source governance and foundations. Turns out there is a lot of over...

Digging into Deno 1.0

22 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can read up on Deno 1.0 here.The star-studded ceremony for the 2020 Webby's can be watched on repeat here (not that we're doing that...)This is th...

A Glitch In The Matrix

20 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Before we can move on to business as usual, the crew has to recount each and every way in which our first live podcast went spectacularly wrong. Laggy...

An emotional week, and the way forward

15 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

This episode was recorded Thursday, May 9th, two days after Stack Overflow announced it was going to furlough 15% of its staff. We talk about how this...

.Net and DevAroundTheSun - We're doing an episode live!

12 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In addition to her role as PM's on Microsoft's .NEt team, Claire is an Executive Director of the .NET Foundation. Jeff, meanwhile, is a Twitch Partner...

Contact Tracing and Civil Liberties: Part 2

08 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Sham Kakade is a professor of computer science, statistics, and data science at the University of Washington. A group from his university, along with ...

Contact Tracing Calibration: Balancing Civil Liberties with Fighting the Pandemic

05 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

You can read more about Sham's app, Covid Safe, here. You can  find his university bio here.The app isn't live in the iOS or Android app store yet, b...

Make it So

01 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

What happens when the grizzled captain decides they need to stop delegating and put their hands back on the helm? Sara is rewatching Star Trek and try...

Mastering the Mainframe

28 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

JJ came to our attention when we saw a tweet about his work to get an ETL pipeline with COBOL running on Kubernetes. Elizabeth comes from the world o...

Jokes on Us

24 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In this episode, we pay our respects to John Conway, a legendary mathematician known for the Game of Life and Surreal Numbers. Our math Stack Exchange...

So, what's it like being a developer at Stack Overflow?

21 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Jon is the team lead for Public Q&A, which is what we call the platform that hosts the 172 community sites across Stack. Adam is a senior software...

The Great Bluetooth Trace

17 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Monday's big story on Bloomberg was that the US unemployment system was being slowed by problems with an "ancient" programming language. Well, yah hea...

Coding Tutorials Can Be A Real Drag

14 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

I asked Anna to describe herself in her own words. "Anna Lytical is a drag queen and engineer who creates sickeningly entertaining and educational co...