Itamar Friedman, CEO and cofounder of CodiumAI, and Kyle Mitofsky, a Senior Software Engineer on Stack Overflow’s public platform, join the home team for a conversation about code integrity and how AI tools are changing the way developers work.

Episode notes:

CodiumAI plugs into your IDE and suggests meaningful test suites as you code. See what they’re up to on their blog or scope out their open roles. You can also follow them on Twitter.

Connect with Kyle on Linked, Twitter, or GitHub.

Connect with Itamar on LinkedIn.

Today’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to Héctor M. for answering Convert a string to a Boolean in C#. Thanks for spreading some knowledge.

TRANSCRIPT

The post Stress test your code as you write it (Ep. 581) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Jim Highsmith, an original signatory on the Agile Manifesto, tells Ben and Ryan about what software development looked like at the time of the Apollo program, the evolution of user interface, and the meeting where “17 adventurous techies changed the world.” Plus: How a savvy shoe choice helped introduce Agile to Nike.

Episode notes:

Jim is a pioneering software developer who was one of 17 original signatories to the Agile Manifesto. 

His first engineering job was on a little NASA program you may have heard of: Project Apollo.

His latest book is Wild West to Agile: Adventures in software development evolution and revolution; get your copy here.

Find Jim on LinkedIn or his website.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is nCod3d for answering How can I find how many useful digits are in any given a number N?. Thanks for spreading some knowledge.

TRANSCRIPT

The post The meeting that changed how we build software (Ep. 579) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Today is a special episode recorded at Apple’s campus in Cupertino as part of this year’s WWDC. We got the chance to sit down with the folks who help to build Apple’s developer tools and discuss their newest releases, plus a hint of how they hope developers will create apps for their new headset and the world of spatial computing.

Episode notes:

Our guests today are Christopher Thielen, product manager for languages and frameworks at Apple, and Josh Shaffer, a Senior Director of Software at Apple with a focus on Swift frameworks. 

We discuss the introduction of Swift Macros, improving widgets with App Intents, and some of the new paradigms for crafting apps in visionOS.

If you want to get the full picture of all the updates Apple announced for software developers, you can watch this year’s State of the Union or dive into particulars with 175 different videos focused on key elements of the announcements.

TRANSCRIPT

The post Chatting with Apple at WWDC: Macros in Swift and the new visionOS (Ep. 578) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

But for any piece of tech to work as intended, you have to make sure everyone on the team agrees on using this technology to solve that problem.

If you’re thinking about rolling out a new tool to your team, you should also be thinking about how to get colleagues and management on board, how to embed that tool in your everyday workflows, and how to assess whether it’s working as it should. Tech that solves human problems needs humans to participate in those solutions.

However passionate you might be, declaring that Tool X will improve every aspect of every business process is unrealistic, and unlikely to earn you the support of your colleagues and managers—especially if you’re asking them to learn something new or tweak their workflows to accommodate a tool whose value they’re not convinced of. 

Particularly when budgets are tight, many companies scrutinize tool usage to make sure they’re spending money wisely, not wasting it on shelfware—software you buy but never use. If your team isn’t aligned around the need for a new tool, adoption will probably be underwhelming, and your solution will end up gathering metaphorical dust.

In this article, we’ll lay out some strategies for keeping your new tool from becoming shelfware.

Focus on use cases

You can make a more compelling case for adoption by identifying the most impactful use case for your solution and leading with that. Aligning yourself from the beginning with a specific process like cloud migration or product releases can also help you articulate and demonstrate the value of a new tool. 

In a recent post on our blog, Chelsea Troy, a staff data engineer at Mozilla, suggests starting by talking about the problem you’re trying to solve (“We get so many notifications that we miss important alerts and aren’t able to focus on our work”) rather than centering your proposed solution (“Look at this neat tool I found for managing alerts”).

Another tried-and-true method of showcasing a tool’s value and sparking interest among the wider org is to roll it out first to one or two teams in a pilot, like Dropbox did with Stack Overflow for Teams.

Identify your advocates

A successful tool adoption starts with the early adopters, who play a critical role in demonstrating a tool’s value and communicating that value throughout the org. These early adopters are your true leaders, says Stack Overflow engineering manager Peter O’Connor. Identify champions at the individual-contributor level: tech leads or stack engineers who have the knowledge and credibility to drive adoption by demonstrating and socializing the tool’s value.

Once your early adopters are in place, using your tool to solve their problems and telling all their friends about it, it’s time to think about identifying someone in leadership who can serve as an executive sponsor and high-level advocate for your adoption. This person can help ensure that your proposed implementation aligns with your company’s strategic goals, assist in building support and overcoming resistance from other executives, and otherwise provide support and direction to drive adoption. An executive sponsor should understand:

• What problems the new tool can solve, and how that positive change will impact the organization
• Who’s involved in introducing the new tool and how those teams/individuals can support adoption
• How implementation will affect employees, consultants, and customers

To encourage ongoing usage after your initial rollout, it can be helpful to identify power users or advocates who can spread the news about the tool’s value, help others get up and running, and incorporate the tool into your existing workflows.

Build consensus over time

You want people to want to use your tool. For that to happen, you must understand the context of the technical system you’re operating in. “Context is king” when it comes to getting technical teams to make big changes, says Troy: “Who has context on the system is who has power on the team. And that drives more technical decisions than we’d like to admit.”

Understanding that context requires talking to your teammates about what they need—and, more importantly, listening to them. Commit to understanding what your colleagues need and show them that their input matters to you.

Your goal, in Troy’s view, is to create “an environment in which people are able to ask questions and express concerns.” Make your coworkers feel heard, and they’ll be more likely to listen when it’s your turn to speak. This environment, Troy explains, “makes the difference between the big changes that sail through with support and the ones that get stuck in the mud because the team dragged their feet or outright resisted them.”

This view is echoed by O’Connor, the engineering manager at Stack Overflow. Rather than issuing commands and rushing the adoption timeline, he says, teams that roll out new tools successfully ask for input, take time to build consensus, and foster a sense of psychological safety in their teams.

Make adoption frictionless

You can minimize friction around adoption if you invest the time and energy up front to talk with and listen to your teammates, understanding the nature of their pain points and laying out how your solution will improve things. If you come charging in with a fully formulated plan and no interest in a collaborative discussion, teams will be slow to adopt a new tool or simply reject it.

Keep in mind that a tool that fits seamlessly into the ecosystem of tools and processes your team is already using has a much better chance of being adopted enthusiastically than a tool that interrupts an established workflow. That’s one reason why developers tend to adopt our paid platform quickly and easily when our customers introduce it: they’re already used to turning to Stack Overflow’s public platform when they get stuck.

In a previous role, my colleague Ryan Donovan saw firsthand how reluctant people are to use a new tool if it introduces clunkiness to their workflow. He was tasked with helping the engineering org adopt a Q&A product, but people primarily went to Slack for questions. 

“Nobody was using the tool because it had a lot of proscriptive processes around it,” said Donovan. “First, all the questions were routed through pre-selected categories that we selected instead of letting the people with the questions select tags. Second, while the new tool had a Slack integration, leadership wanted to route questions to new channels specifically created to host questions. Both of these demanded workflow changes. No surprise that everyone still asked their questions in the team channels.” 

Say no to shelfware

You may have noticed that many of the strategies we recommend here come into play before the tool is actually rolled out. That’s because the best way to avoid shelfware is to do your homework ahead of time: 

• Learn where your tool can have the biggest impact
• Enlist advocates to demonstrate and socialize your tool
• Build consensus over time
• Minimize friction around adoption

To learn more about making tool adoption successful, register for our upcoming webinar: Five ways to drive tool adoption and avoid the dreaded “shelfware.”

The post How to keep your new tool from gathering dust appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Ben and Ryan talk with Jonathan Frankle and Abhinav Venigalla of MosaicML, a startup trying to make artificial intelligence efficient and accessible for everyone by lowering the cost, time, and complexity it takes to train a powerful AI model.

Episode notes:

MosaicML is a platform for training and deploying large AI models at scale. Explore their docs, check out their blog, and keep an eye on their open roles.

Jonathan Frankle is the Chief Scientist at MosaicML and an incoming Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvard.

Abhinav Venigalla is the NLP Architect at MosaicML.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is singmotor for rescuing How to remove columns with too many missing values in Python from the dustbin of history.

TRANSCRIPT

The post MosaicML: Deep learning models for sale, all shapes and sizes (Ep. 577) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

A few months ago, we wrote about the overlap between people with ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) and people who code for a living. We noted the plethora of online advice by and for programmers with ADHD and the rise in ADHD diagnoses for both kids and adults. And we wondered whether there’s anything to the fairly widespread idea that coding is a particularly good career fit for a person with ADHD. (For our purposes, we’ll use “developer” and “programmer” more or less interchangeably to refer to people whose jobs involve a lot of coding.) 

“Coding can give ADHD brains exactly the kind of stimulation they crave,” writes one full-stack developer. “Not only is coding a creative endeavor that involves constantly learning new things, but also once one problem is solved, there’s always a brand new one to try.”

Of course, when you’re talking about two things as complex as 1) the human brain and 2) computer programming, generalizations like “people with ADHD make great programmers” can only take you so far. Takes like that risk collapsing the experiences of people with ADHD, skimming over individual variations and nuances in favor of an appealing soundbite. 

For this follow up post, we spoke with two Stack Overflow software engineers with ADHD about their experiences being diagnosed as adults, taking medication, and communicating about their ADHD at work. Here’s what developers with ADHD want you to understand.

It’s less superpower, more invisible disability

It can be frustrating for people with ADHD to hear a symptom like hyperfocus referred to as a “superpower,” when in reality hyperfocus has downsides—plus it exists in conjunction with other symptoms that can be much less empowering, like executive dysfunction. 

As someone with an OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) diagnosis, I’ve heard similarly frustrating takes: I wish I had OCD so my house could be as clean as yours! (You do not wish this.) Oh, I’m super-OCD too; I color-code my bookshelves. (Not the same!)

In fact, ADHD is an invisible disability, which is exactly what it sounds like: “a physical, mental or neurological condition that is not visible from the outside, yet can limit or challenge a person’s movements, senses, or activities” (Invisible Disabilities Association). Plenty of forms of neurodivergence, including autism spectrum disorder, depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), and learning differences can be considered invisible disabilities. 

Sure, developers with conditions like ADHD might occasionally find that an output of their condition gives them an edge. In part one of this series, we recognized that the hyperfocus associated with ADHD—“a state of laser-like concentration in which distractions and even a sense of passing time seem to fade away,” as one developer put it—can help programmers access the sought-after flow state. 

Other developers with ADHD say their thinking style lends itself to creative problem-solving. “One positive aspect of being a dev with ADHD,” explained one engineer we talked to, “is that my brain zooming around different ideas can help with inventiveness and creativity, and seeing things in a different light can really help with solving more difficult problems.” Intersectional thinking FTW.

Still, many developers want to be clear that it’s not all upside. “You get into flow, and you’re being really, really productive,” one software engineer explained, “but on the opposite end of that, time goes by really quickly, and you realize, ‘Oh, crap, I had three other things I promised somebody today, but I just lost a few hours.’” The engineer also pointed out that developers who progress past the senior level or switch tracks into management are no longer responsible for their individual productivity alone; their role is to multiply the productivity of their team. “That’s where executive dysfunction holds me back a lot,” they said.

It’s not the coding; it’s the accommodations

What if it’s not that people with ADHD make good developers; it’s that developers are more likely to have access to the accommodations that make ADHD manageable?

Companies that employ developers, particularly tech companies with flexible and hybrid schedules and robust healthcare coverage, are in a better position to accommodate people with ADHD (and other invisible disabilities) than employers in other industries. 

For instance, when it comes to managing their ADHD at work, one of our engineers stressed the freedom of a job that can be largely asynchronous and remote: “It helps a lot that I have a job that supports flexible hours and isn’t babysitting me all day.” In tech and developer circles, the unfair stigma associated with ADHD and other forms of neurodivergence is beginning to dissipate, as we discussed on the Stack Overflow podcast last year. “I’ve been open about my diagnosis mostly,” said one interviewee. “I might not always refer to it by name, but I definitely bring up things that are relevant when I need to,” such as a need to establish a firm deadline to stay focused.

So a better way of putting the relationship between coding and ADHD might be that (some) coding jobs are likely to give (some) people with ADHD what they need to thrive professionally.

It’s also reasonable to assume that people with reliable, affordable healthcare are more likely to seek out and receive an ADHD diagnosis and the accommodations, including access to medication and therapy, that come with that diagnosis. That’s another reason why it might seem like there’s an overlap between people who code and people with ADHD—US-based developers tend to have good healthcare coverage through their employers.

A diagnosis might be life changing

Both software engineers we interviewed were diagnosed as adults, in both cases in their late 20s after they’d already embarked on their careers. “I was talking to a friend who mentioned she went to a doctor and was surprised to find that she had ADHD,” one of the engineers said. “She talked about the symptoms and I thought, ‘Hmm, that sounds familiar.’”

For both engineers, being diagnosed as adults cast their lifelong experiences in a new light. “I always just thought that I was lazy and had a tendency towards procrastination,” said one engineer. “But once I embraced [my diagnosis] and realized that a lot of stuff I thought was an ‘everyone problem’ was not actually a problem for neurotypical folks, I felt a lot better about myself and about the strategies I needed to cope.” 

Being diagnosed as an adult, said the other interviewee, “is really interesting, because you all of a sudden understand where a lot of your weird traits come from. You realize, ‘OK, that’s why this is hard for me; that’s why I struggle with this or that.”

One interviewee called their ADHD medication “a life-changer.” The other called it “a complete game-changer for me in terms of focus and ability to get things done.” An official diagnosis is generally a necessary prerequisite for ADHD medication, so for many folks, getting a diagnosis is the first big step toward effectively managing their ADHD.

A diagnosis can also give people with ADHD the confidence to ask for accommodations at work or school—and even the awareness to know what kinds of accommodations are available and would benefit them. “A diagnosis definitely helped me at work,” said one engineer. “I haven’t ever asked for formal accommodations, but knowing more about how I personally work—for example, if I don’t have a deadline, it’s basically impossible for me to get it done—has helped me a lot in advocating for myself and my own working style.”

(Neuro)diversity is strength

As we said in part one, dispelling the stigma around neurodiversity requires an open dialogue about ADHD and other forms of neurodiversity or invisible disability. At Stack Overflow, we think everyone benefits when work and the hiring process are inclusive of neurodiverse people. An estimated 15-20% of the population is considered neurodiverse; that’s a lot of talent employers can miss out on if they’re not willing or able to offer certain accommodations. And you never know—the next person on your team to receive an ADHD diagnosis might be you.

The post What developers with ADHD want you to know appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Cameron Wolfe, Director of AI at Rebuy and deep learning researcher, joins Ben for a conversation about generative AI, autonomous agents, and balancing a PhD program with a tech career. 

Episode notes:

Rebuy is an AI-powered personalization platform. Check out their developer hub, explore case studies, or keep up with their blog.

Cameron is a PhD student in computer science and member of the OptimaLab at Rice University. 

Autonomous agents are AI-powered programs that can create tasks for themselves in response to a given objective. They “can create tasks for themselves, complete tasks, create new tasks, reprioritize their task list, complete the new top task, and loop until their objective is reached,” according to one beginner’s guide to autonomous agents.

Follow Cameron’s work on Twitter or Substack, or his website. Read his publications here.

This week’s Lifeboat badge honoree is Mark Setchell for sharing their knowledge with the world: I need to convert a fixed-width file to ‘comma-delimited’ in Unix.

TRANSCRIPT

The post Balancing a PhD program with a startup career (Ep. 576) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Today’s guest is Ilit Raz, founder and CEO of Joonko, which aims to build a more equitable workplace by automating the recruitment of diverse talent from underrepresented communities.

Episode notes:

Joonko is an automated diversity recruiting layer named for Japanese mountain climber ​​Junko Tabei, the first woman to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. You can learn about their talent pool, keep up with their blog, or check out their open positions.

ICYMI, read our blog post about how the recent tech layoffs have had a disproportionate impact on women, people of color, and immigrants.

Connect with Ilit on LinkedIn.

This week’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to pppery for their answer to Why use positional-only parameters in Python 3.8+?.

TRANSCRIPT

The post This product could help build a more equitable workplace (Ep. 575) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Miško Hevery, creator of Angular and longtime Googler, tells Ben about building the future of web applications in his new role as CTO of Builder.io. 

Episode notes:

Angular is an open-source web framework used by millions of developers. Explore the Angular community. 

Miško is currently CTO at Builder, an API-driven, drag-and-drop headless CMS with a visual editor. Explore their docs or see what they’re up to on their blog.

Builder’s full-stack web framework is Qwik, which just reached 1.0.

Let Miško walk you through why Hydration is Pure Overhead.

ICYMI, listen to our episode with Builder CEO Steve Stewell.

Connect with Miško on LinkedIn, Twitter, or GitHub. You can also check out his website.

This week’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to ORION for their answer to Unicode symbol that represents “download”.

TRANSCRIPT

The post How the creator of Angular is dehydrating the web (Ep. 574) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Pierre-Étienne Meunier, creator and lead developer of open-source version control system Pijul, joins the home team to talk about version control, functional programming, and why OCaml is a source of French national pride.

Episode notes:

Pierre-Étienne’s interest in computing began with the functional programming language OCaml, created by Xavier Leroy. Before OCaml, Pierre-Étienne explains, “everyone thought functional programming was doomed to be extremely slow.”

Pijul is a free, open-source distributed version control system. You can get started here. Want a GitHub-like interface? Find it here.

Read the article that led to this conversation: Beyond Git: The other version control systems developers use. 

Pierre-Étienne is currently working on a new project with the creators of the open-source game engine Godot. We hosted Godot cofounder and lead developer Juan Linietsky on the podcast a few months back; listen here.

Nix is a package management and system configuration tool. Learn how it works or explore the NixOS community. 

Connect with Pierre-Étienne on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Rachit for answering Passing objects between fragments.

TRANSCRIPT

The post For those who just don’t Git it (Ep. 573) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Today’s guest is Dagna Bieda, a career coach who specializes in helping developers and engineers level up their careers. She shares why developers should promote the value of their contributions, how soft skills can make or break a coding career, and why a moment of burnout inspired her to start coaching.

Episode notes:

Visit Dagna’s website, theMindfulDev.com, to learn more about her coaching process, which is built around understanding what fulfillment looks like for each client. 

Dagna is on LinkedIn.

You can also connect with Ceora on Twitter or her website.

Ryan is also on Twitter, especially when there’s a good AI joke to be shared.

Gold star for Lifeboat badge winner JasonHorsleyTech for rescuing the question Installing PHP 7.3 on a new MacBook Pro with the new A1 chip (Apple silicon).

TRANSCRIPT

The post Great code isn’t enough. Developers need to brag about it (Ep. 571) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Simon Bennetts, founder and project lead of OWASP ZAP, joins the home team to talk about how he came to create the world’s most-used web app scanner, why open-source projects need long-term contributors, and how recent AI advancements could introduce new security vulnerabilities.

Episode notes:

Simon is the founder and longtime project lead of OWASP ZAP, an integrated penetration testing tool that helps uncover vulnerabilities in web apps, including compromised authentication, sensitive data exposure, and SQL injection. ZAP is OWASP’s most active project and the world’s most popular web app scanner. 

Check out other OWASP projects here or explore ZAP’s docs.

Check out our blog post on how you can mitigate the ten most-found OWASP vulnerabilities in Stack Overflow C++ snippets.

Jit, where Simon is a distinguished engineer, is a DevSecOps platform that allows high-velocity engineering teams to embed security requirements throughout the DevOps workflow. You can explore Jit’s docs here.

Today we’re shouting out the question CSP Alerts by OWASP even though CSP header is added, definitively answered by one Simon Bennetts.

Simon is on LinkedIn and Twitter.

TRANSCRIPT

The post Stung by OWASP? Chatting with the creator of the most popular web app scanner (Ep. 570) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Cassidy and Ceora talk with Astro creator Fred K. Schott and Cloudflare’s Brendan Irvine-Broque and Michael Hart about the intersection of open source and AI. Plus: Cassidy’s impressive robot credentials.

Episode notes:

Cloudflare offers zero-trust security and performance tools for web and SaaS apps.

Cloudflare Workers allows devs to deploy serverless code globally to over 285 data centers around the world.

Astro is an open-source web framework built for speed. Houston is a bot that lets you chat with their docs.

Check out Confbrew, a conference session Q&A bot from Markprompt and Contenda (where Cassidy is CTO). 

Connect with Brendan on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.

Connect with Michael on Twitter.

Connect with Fred on LinkedIn.

While you’re at it, follow Ceora and Cassidy on Twitter. 

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner The Nail for saving if->return vs. if->else efficiency from oblivion.

TRANSCRIPT

The post Read the docs? We prefer to chat with them (Ep. 568) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

The home team talks with Luca Galante of Humanitec about how platform engineering is more art than science, how self-service platforms empower developers with “golden paths,” and why he’s excited, not anxious, about AI tools (at least for now).

Episode notes:

Luca currently heads up product at Humanitec, a platform orchestrator that provides self-service “golden paths” for developers.

Get up to speed (or refresh your memory) on what platform engineering involves and what an internal developer platform is.

Dynamic configuration management (DCM) is a methodology for configuring compute workloads.

Stop by the Platform Engineering Slack channel.

Hear from top DevOps and platform engineering leaders at PlatformCon 2023, a virtual event held June 8-9.

Find Luca on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Cheers to Lifeboat badge winner Devart for rescuing How can I show the table structure in SQL Server query? from the dustbin of history.

TRANSCRIPT

The post Building golden paths for developers (Ep. 567) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Ben and Ceora talk through some thorny issues around AI-generated music and art, explain why creators are suing AI companies for copyright infringement, and compare notes on the most amusing/alarming AI-generated content making the rounds (Pope coat, anyone?).

Episode notes:

Getty Images is suing the company behind AI art generator Stable Diffusion for copyright infringement, accusing the company of copying 12 million images without permission or compensation to train its AI model.

Meanwhile, a group of artists is suing the companies behind Midjourney, DreamUp, and Stable Diffusion for “scraping and collaging” their work to train AI models. 

One of those artists, Sarah Anderson, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about seeing her comics gobbled up by AI models and regurgitated as far-right memes.

Speaking of copyright violations, did Vanilla Ice really steal that hook from David Bowie and Freddie Mercury? (Yes.)

Check out the AI model trained on Kanye’s voice that sounds almost indistinguishable from Ye himself.

Read The Verge’s deep dive into the intersection of AI-generated music and IP/copyright laws.

Watch the AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti that’s been called “the natural end point for AI development.”

ICYMI: The Pope coat was real in our hearts.

Columbia University’s Data Science Institute recently wrote about how blockchain can give creators more control over their IP, now that AI-generated art is clearly here to stay.

Congrats to today’s Lifeboat badge winner, herohuyongtao, for answering How can I add a prebuilt static library in a project using CMake?.

TRANSCRIPT

The post When AI meets IP: Can artists sue AI imitators? (Ep. 566) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

The home team welcomes a student and a professor from engineering powerhouse Olin College for a discussion of computer science education and how Olin prepares its students to hit the ground running as software engineers.

Episode notes:

Olin College of Engineering has one of the top-ranked undergrad engineering programs in the US. Its computing curriculum is a concentration within the engineering major, not a standalone major. The upshot is a liberal arts-informed course of study with fewer math and theory requirements than a typical CS degree and a greater emphasis on practical, job-ready skills like code quality, testing, and documentation. To learn more about how software design is taught at Olin, explore the course.

Andrew Mascillaro is a senior at Olin majoring in electrical and computer engineering. He’s currently a software engineering intern at Tableau. You can find him on LinkedIn.

Steve Matsumoto is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Olin; his academic interests include crypto and cybersecurity. You can find him on GitHub or through his website.

TRANSCRIPT

The post How a top-ranked engineering school reimagined CS curriculum (Ep. 565) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Paul van der Boor is a Senior Director of Data Science at Prosus and a member of its internal AI group. He talks with Ben about what’s happening in the world of generative AI, the power of collective discovery, and the gap between a shiny proof of concept and a product that people will actually use.

Episode notes:

Prosus, one of the world’s largest tech investors, acquired Stack Overflow in 2021.

Check out the annual State of AI Report from Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth.

Read our CEO’s recent post on Stack Overflow’s approach to Generative AI.

Connect with Paul on LinkedIn. 

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is suvayu for their answer to How to put a big centered “Thank You” in a LaTeX slide.

TRANSCRIPT

The post Is this the AI renaissance? (Ep. 564) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Computer scientist Jean Yang, founder and CEO of monitoring and observability platform Akita, tells the home team how her drive to improve developer tooling led her from academia to Silicon Valley. 

Episode notes: 

Akita is a monitoring and observability platform that watches API traffic live and automatically infers endpoint structure.

Jean, who comes from a family of computer scientists, earned a PhD from MIT and taught in the CS department at Carnegie Mellon University before founding Akita.

Read Jean’s post on the Stack Overflow blog: Monitoring debt builds up faster than software teams can pay it off.

Jean is on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Congrats are in order for Stellar Question badge winner legendary_rob for asking Adding a favicon to a static HTML page.

TRANSCRIPT

The post When setting up monitoring, less data is better (Ep. 563) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Paulo and Guilherme Silveira, brothers and cofounders of edtech platform Alura, join the home team for a conversation about polyglot programming, edtech, and the role of generative AI.

Episode notes:

Alura is a Portuguese-language edtech platform where users can learn programming, backend and mobile development, data science, design and UX, DevOps, and more.

They started small, grew into a bustling online program, then purchased a majority stake in FIAP, a private university in São Paulo, Brazil.  

Paulo and Stack Overflow Director of Engineering Roberta Arcoverde cohost a popular Portuguese-language podcast about programming, design, startups, and technology.

Paulo’s new open-source project is full of career resources for T-shaped developers.

Connect with Alura CEO Paulo Silveira on LinkedIn.

Connect with Alura Chief Education Officer Guilherme Silveira on LinkedIn.

Connect with Roberta Arcoverde on LinkedIn.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is netblognet for their answer to Get JSON object from URL.

TRANSCRIPT

The post We bought a university: how one coding school doubled down on brick and mortar (Ep. 561) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

For this episode, we talked with Matt Butcher, CEO at Fermyon Technologies, about distributed computing, the long-term promise of WebAssembly, and the HR mix-up that switched his career from lawn care to computer programming. 

Episode notes:

Fermyon offers serverless cloud computing. Spin is their developer tool for building WebAssembly microservices and web applications; check it out on GitHub.

Like past podcast guest David Hsu of Retool (and yours truly), Matt earned a degree in the humanities before deciding to prioritize his “side gig” in tech.

Follow Fermyon on GitHub. Matt is on LinkedIn.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner keineahnung2345 for saving Hamming distance between two strings in Python from the dustbin of time.

TRANSCRIPT

The post The philosopher who believes in Web Assembly (Ep. 560) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

The home team welcomes Alex Olivier, cofounder and product lead at Cerbos, for a conversation about how to centralize business logic in a microservices environment, the value of stateless applications, and what’s under Cerbos’s hood.

Episode notes:

Cerbos is an open-source, scalable authorization-as-a-service that aims to make implementing roles and permissions a cinch. Explore their docs or see how their customers are using Cerbos. 

Stateless applications like Cerbos don’t retain data from previous activities, giving devs predictable plug-and-play functionality across cloud, hybrid, on-prem, and edge instances.

Connect with Alex on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Hoopje for rescuing Print in bold on a terminal from the dustbin of history.

TRANSCRIPT

The post Going stateless with authorization-as-a-service (Ep. 559) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Marco Palladino, CTO and cofounder of Kong, joins Ryan to talk about the evolution of API protocols over time and why building the API is only half the battle.

Episode notes:

If you prefer, you can read this as a Q&A article or watch the video.

Kong is a cloud-native API platform. The first iteration of an API marketplace Marco and his colleagues built was Mashape.

Developments like GraphQL and gRPC have become critical as the number of APIs increases over time.

Find Marco on LinkedIn and Twitter.

TRANSCRIPT

The post Building an API is half the battle (Ep. 558) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Of those who lost their jobs in the most recent round of layoffs, 45% were women—which doesn’t sound bad until you remember that less than a third of tech industry roles and less than a quarter of tech leadership roles are filled by women. Other underrepresented groups, especially Black tech workers, have also been impacted at outsize rates. And the layoffs have revealed cracks in an immigration system that hasn’t been overhauled since LISTSERV was born.

Women and people of color are more likely to have jobs perceived as expendable

Women and people of color aren’t being laid off at higher rates because we were dead-weight DEI hires in the first place. According to Sarah Kaplan, director of the University of Toronto’s Institute for Gender and the Economy, it’s because “the roles that historically underrepresented groups are hired into tend to be seen as the most expendable.”.

This includes less technical roles and ones perceived as less prestigious or farther from the product—like field and customer support, human resources, communications, and marketing. “Overall, definitely nontechnical roles are more affected, women are more affected,” Reyhan Ayas, a senior economist at Revelio Labs, told The Washington Post.

The rise of remote work during the pandemic allowed more women and people of color to enter the tech workforce because remote work made barriers like childcare and unaffordable housing within commuting distance of the office easier to overcome. At Meta, for instance, US hires for remote roles in 2022 were more likely to be people of color, while global hires were more likely to be women. But when companies make cuts, remote workers may be more likely to lose their jobs—they certainly feel more anxious about it, according to Harvard Business Review. Since companies often follow the “last in, first out” rule when determining which jobs to cut, recently hired remote workers—more likely to be women and people of color—are often the first to be laid off.

The reasons why roles seen as less technical and/or less prestigious tend to be stacked with representatives of underrepresented groups are manifold and complex, including structural barriers like historical access to education and economic resources, geographic location, social conditioning in school, and cultural and familial expectations. But the result is that industry-wide layoffs fall disproportionately on people who are already underrepresented in tech.

Our immigration system is failing H-1B visa holders

For foreign-born tech employees in the US on H1-B visas, a layoff isn’t just a job loss: it can uproot their entire lives, and their families’ lives. The H-1B visa program allows people with specialized skills who are sponsored by an employer to come to the US to live and work. H1-B visa holders can stay in the US for no longer than six years unless an employer sponsors their permanent residency (their green card). 

The number of H-1B visas awarded is capped at 85,000, and big tech companies account for a hefty percentage of these, with nearly 70% of the visas going to people in “computer-related” roles. Because only a limited number of employment-based residency applications can be granted every year, people can wait decades for a green card, tying H1-B visa holders to the same employer for years and making them especially vulnerable in the event of layoffs.

When someone on an H1-B visa is laid off, they have 60 days to secure sponsorship with another employer or leave the country. “These visa holders have built lives here for years, they have a home, and children, and personal and professional networks that extend for years,” Linda Moore, president and CEO of TechNet, told WIRED. When the companies responsible for sponsoring most H1-B visas are the same companies laying off workers, the system fails the workers (and the companies) it exists to serve.

Part of the problem is we’re using a legacy system from the 80s. The H1-B system hasn’t changed substantially in more than 35 years, writes Anna Kramer for WIRED, but in those decades, the US has become a dominant presence in science and technology, a rise fueled in large part by foreign-born talent. The immigration system hasn’t evolved along with the reality of the industry, and that creates problems—not just for individuals, but for companies and the industry as a whole.

“Tech companies have invested decades and millions of dollars into lobbying for kinder rules and an increase in the number of visas available, and in sponsoring hundreds of thousands of workers,” writes Elliott. “Yet the process remains unchanged, and layoffs mean some skilled workers that companies may want to hire from competitors either now or in future will instead leave the country.” And that’s our loss.

A problem for everyone

The erosion of diversity in tech is a problem for everyone, not just individual members of underrepresented groups. “If you don’t have a diverse workforce, you’re going to get technologies that exacerbate inequalities in our society,” Kaplan told Fast Company, referring to technologies like AI-powered facial recognition or credit score assessment. “We should care that the tech sector is not diverse, because it’s creating technologies that shape our lives.”

The post The people most affected by the tech layoffs appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Ben and Cassidy sit down with The Browser Company to talk about reimagining the web browser—and the way we use the internet. Plus: The best username out there (don’t @ us).

Episode notes:

Today’s guests from The Browser Company are software engineer Victoria Kirst and design lead Dustin Senos.

The Browser Company is building a new kind of browser designed to keep users “focused, organized and in control.” Arc, their browser, is “full of big new ideas about how we should interact with the web” and has been called “the best web browser to come out in the last decade.” 

For an introduction to and first look at Arc, start with this video. You can also join the waiting list or subscribe to the Substack.

Follow The Browser Company on Twitter.

Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Connect with Dustin on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Special thanks to Ellis Hamburger, owner of the best username, for facilitating this terrific conversation with Victoria and Dustin.

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Todd for answering How can I name a @Service with multiple names in Spring?.

TRANSCRIPT

The post The next gen web browser has no tabs, only spaces (Ep. 554) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Kenny Hearn, Fund Manager and Head of Research at SwissOne Capital, tells Ben about his path from traditional asset management to Web3 specialist and why he remains optimistic about the future of the market.

Episode notes:

In his role at SwissOne Capital, Kenny champions investments in Web3 and the metaverse. A writer on all things crypto since 2013, he’s a regular contributor to the US Chamber of Commerce.

The collapse of Three Arrows Capital and FTX eroded investor trust in crypto, but Kenny remains “cautiously optimistic” about the market’s future.

Connect with Kenny on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Congratulations are in order for Lifeboat badge winner xray1986 for their answer to Unicode symbol that represents “download”.

TRANSCRIPT

The post After crypto’s reality check, an investor remains cautiously optimistic (Ep. 553) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Charles “Cobih” Obih and Radek Markiewicz of the Stack Overflow platform team join Ben and Ryan to talk about changes to the inbox and what it’s like to build Stack Overflow’s public platform. 

Episode notes:

The inbox improvements were Radek’s graduation project. Not bad for a newbie. 

Not everyone likes change, and the inbox change was no exception. So we looked into fixing that.

Read about what our engineering team learned building and scaling Stack Overflow to support millions of users.

Connect with Radek on LinkedIn. 

Find Cobih on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Longtime staff member Yaakov Ellis is on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Congrats to user HelloCW on receiving a Socratic Badge for asking a well-received question on 100 separate days and maintaining a positive question record.

TRANSCRIPT

The post What our engineers learned building Stack Overflow (Ep. 551) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

This is scary. People have lost their livelihoods. Thousands of people in the United States on H-1B work visas, along with their families, face deportation unless they can find another job within 60 days. Diversity gains in tech have been dealt a serious blow. These layoffs have spotlighted the tenuous and unsustainable situation the US immigration system creates for foreign-born workers; the disproportionate impact of tech layoffs on women, people of color, and parents; and the still-shifting landscape of the post-pandemic economy.

Many of us have been through layoffs before, sometimes several times. My career at tech companies began in 2014, and in that time I’ve been laid off once. My colleague Ryan Donovan recently wrote about his experiences with tech startups and how to handle industry-wide layoffs, whether you recently lost your job or you’re just afraid you might.

As the discouraging headlines and meta-narrative about what the layoffs really mean continue, we thought it was worth revisiting how our core community of developers has been experiencing and coping with this ongoing reality—and exploring what sets this economic situation apart from previous dips and busts.

The post-pandemic economy isn’t what we expected

Any conversation about tech layoffs in 2023 has to account for the fact that, as The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson put it, “the post-pandemic economy has been much weirder than most people anticipated.”

In 2020, Thompson writes, people noted our rising dependence on technology like streaming video and food-delivery apps and predicted an “acceleration” of the rapidly digitalizing pandemic economy: “In this interpretation, the pandemic was a time machine, hastening the 2030s and raising tech valuations accordingly.” In response, hiring across tech jumped. By 2022, it was clear that the pandemic had produced less of a steady, sustainable acceleration and more of a…well, bubble. And we all know what bubbles tend to do.

But the current economy has less in common than you might think with the wreckage of the dot-com bubble or the Great Recession. Overall, it’s still a good time to work in tech, and the hiring market remains robust: One survey found that almost 80% of people laid off in tech found new roles within three months of launching their job search. There are more open tech positions than people to fill them (about 375,000, according to one estimate), and job listings between January and October 2022 were up 25% over the same period in 2021.

Company see, company do?

If the job market isn’t as dire as we think, why does this round of layoffs feel so widespread, affecting companies often perceived as more recession-proof than their peers? Part of the answer may be what organizational behavior experts have termed “copycat layoffs.” 

“Laying off employees turns out to be infectious,” writes Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic. “When executives see their corporate competitors letting go of workers, they seize what they see as an opportunity to reduce their workforce, rather than having no choice but to do so.” Organizations seeking to reduce risk in the face of an anticipated economic downturn may jump on the opportunity to trim costs without raising a ruckus. Companies that lay off employees while everyone else is doing it also reduce their risk of reputational damage: they’re not the only ones doing it, which suggests that layoffs are due to external economic factors, rather than company-specific shortcomings.

The jobs aren’t gone—they’ve just moved

In many cases, workers laid off by household-name tech companies have found new jobs outside the traditional parameters of the tech industry, where their skill sets are in high demand. As Matt McLarty, global field chief technology officer for MuleSoft, told CNBC, businesses that have long needed tech professionals to upgrade their stack or guide a long-delayed cloud migration can now scoop up freshly laid-off tech workers (and those for whom Silicon Valley has lost its luster). Companies in energy and climate technology, healthcare, retail, finance, agriculture, and more are hiring tech pros at a steady clip, even if FAANG companies are less bullish. It’s been said before that every company is a tech company, but in 2023, that’s truer than ever. 

In fact, the biggest difference for tech workers this year, reports The New Stack, is that “the greatest opportunities may not lie exclusively in the FAANG companies anymore, but in more traditional industries that are upgrading their legacy stacks and embracing cloud native.”

Some of those opportunities also lie with startups, including ones helmed by Big Tech veterans ready to turn their layoffs into lemonade. And efforts are underway to build the leading generative AI platform and an expanding ecosystem of related tools. “There’s a lot of investment firms that are still bullish about the startup space,” Lindsay Grenawalt, chief people officer at Cockroach Labs, which raised $278 million in Series F in late 2021, told The New Stack. 

So whether you’ve been affected by the recent spate of layoffs or not, it’s worth expanding your list of potential employers to include companies—even industries—you’ve never considered. You might find that they’re thrilled to have you.

One place to start is Indeed’s layoff support resources, offered in collaboration with Stack Overflow, Glassdoor, and Tech Up For Women. You’ll find free, automated tools to optimize your job search; paid professional services like career coaching and resume building; and articles and webinars to help you navigate things like negotiating a severance package, understanding unemployment eligibility, pivoting to a new career, and more.

We’re also teaming up with Indeed to provide a 45-minute learning and development webinar where experts at Indeed will share best practices for job hunting and professional development while answering your career questions. Register below to get your questions answered by the experts!

The post What’s different about these layoffs appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

The home team unpacks their complicated feelings about AI, the Beyoncé deepfake that got kpop hopes up, and the pandemic’s ripple effects on today’s teenagers. Ben, the world’s worst coder, tells Cassidy and Ceora about building a web app with an AI assistant. 

Episode notes:

Our recent Pulse Survey showed how technologists visiting Stack Overflow feel about emergent technologies. The consensus is clear: AI assistants will soon be everywhere, and developers aren’t sure how they feel about that. Check out the podcast here or dive into the blog.

Learn more about the emergent abilities of large language models (LLMs). 

For more on the intersection of AI and academia, listen to our episode with computer science professor Emery Berger or read his essay on how academics are coping with AI that can ace exams and do everyone’s homework.

Catch up on the adventures of the worst coder in the world.

Congrats to user d1337, whose question How to assign a name to the size() column? won a Stellar Question badge.

TRANSCRIPT

The post Let’s talk large language models (Ep. 550) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

The home team talks with Wesley Faulkner, Senior Community Manager at AWS, about what’s going on with this cycle of tech layoffs, how to position yourself for success on the job market, and why it’s worth interviewing for jobs you might not want. Plus: The two things you should do as soon as you get an offer.

Episode notes:

Per one count, more than 280,000 people were laid off from tech jobs in 2022 and the first two months of 2023.

What do layoffs have in common with farting at a party? Both are a bad look if you’re the only one doing it.

ICYMI: On a recent episode, we talked about how these layoffs are reshaping the job market and where to find software engineering roles outside of tech.

Just laid off, or worried you might be? Cohost Ryan Donovan has some advice.

Connect with Wesley on LinkedIn.

TRANSCRIPT

The post How to position yourself to land the job you want (Ep. 547) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Christine Ryu, Engineering Lead at fintech platform Flourish, joins the home team to talk about how technology is transforming finance for everyone from big banks to individual consumers. Christine explains what it’s like to move from Goldman Sachs to a tiny startup, how legacy tech stacks lead to Frankencode, and what an acquisition taught her about build vs. buy and good vs. perfect.

Episode 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.

TRANSCRIPT

The post “Move fast and break things” doesn’t apply to other people’s savings (Ep. 545) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Dr. Jeannette (Jamie) Garcia, Senior Research Manager of Quantum Applications and Software at IBM Quantum, tells Ryan about IBM’s 433-qubit quantum computer and the real-life applications of quantum computing today. 

Episode 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?.

TRANSCRIPT

The post The nature of simulating nature: A Q&A with IBM Quantum researcher Dr. Jamie Garcia (Ep. 544) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Juan Linietsky, cofounder and lead developer of the Godot Engine, joins the home team for a conversation about what led him to create an open-source game engine, how open source is shaping game development, and the well-worn path from playing video games to learning to build them. 

Episode 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.

TRANSCRIPT

The post The open-source game engine you’ve been waiting for: Godot (Ep. 543) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

The home team talks with Jaclyn Rice Nelson, cofounder and CEO of Tribe AI, about the explosion of hype surrounding generative AI, what it’s like to work at a startup after working at Google, and how Tribe is leveraging the power of a specialist network.

Episode 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.

TRANSCRIPT

The post ML and AI consulting-as-a-service (Ep. 542) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Sam Scott, cofounder and CTO of Oso, joins the home team to talk about what makes authorization a challenge, the difference between authentication and authorization, and what zombies taught him about web development.

Episode 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’.

TRANSCRIPT

The post Authorization on Rails (Ep. 540) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

ADHD diagnosis rates are on the rise for both adults and kids, though as you might expect it’s tough to know whether this rise is attributable to a higher incidence of ADHD or simply an increase in the number of diagnoses made. Either way, more people are understanding their experiences and abilities through the lens of ADHD, and this includes many people who code. But is there really a connection between programming and ADHD? And could it be that people with ADHD are particularly well-suited to programming careers? 

A perfect fit?

Many developers with ADHD feel their job is a perfect fit for how they think and approach problems. “Coding can give ADHD brains exactly the kind of stimulation they crave,” explains full-stack developer Abbey Perini. “Not only is coding a creative endeavor that involves constantly learning new things, but also once one problem is solved, there’s always a brand new one to try.”

In addition to a revolving door of fresh challenges that can keep people with ADHD engaged, coding can reward and encourage a state of hyperfocus: a frequently cited symptom of ADHD that developer Neil Peterson calls “a state of laser-like concentration in which distractions and even a sense of passing time seem to fade away.” It’s easy to draw parallels between hyperfocus and the flow state, a distraction-free groove in which programmers, writers, musicians, artists, and other creators produce their best work (occasionally while forgetting to eat). Our paid platform, Stack Overflow for Teams, is popular with developers in large part because it helps them avoid distraction and protect the productive sanctity of their flow state.

But for every quality that makes coding perfect for people with ADHD (or vice versa), there’s another that could represent a particular hurdle. For instance, ADHD can make people more vulnerable to inattentive mistakes, missed deadlines, or unfinished projects. A perennial question on Reddit is some variation of “Programmers with ADHD, how do you stay on track?”

Combating stigma with candor

The reality is that while some forms of neurodivergence might lend themselves to certain careers (I’ve always thought that my obsessive-compulsive disorder makes me a better copyeditor, for example), individual results will continue to vary.

But it’s good news that many programmers with ADHD seem emboldened to share their experiences, offer advice, and ask for support and accommodation when they need it. And as we discussed on a recent podcast episode, more developers (and their managers) are having conversations about how to support the success of neurodiverse team members.

An open dialogue about ADHD and other forms of neurodiversity is a crucial step in dismantling the remaining stigma around neurodiversity in tech. These conversations happen best in psychologically safe environments—something for managers to take to heart, especially in a time when many of us are already feeling increased pressure thanks to industry-wide layoffs. 

Making work and hiring more accessible to neurodiverse people benefits everyone in the organization. Neurodiverse people can contribute unique problem-solving approaches, an affinity for hard skills like data analysis, and a tendency toward perfectionism that can elevate overall quality, says Mariann Lowery, Product/UX Research Lead at Stack Overflow. And making the workplace more inclusive can increase employee engagement and give us a greater sense of purpose at work—whether we identify as neurodiverse or not. 

The post Developer with ADHD? You’re not alone. appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

David Hsu, founder and CEO of Retool, joins Ben to talk about low-code and no-code tools: why some folks love to hate them and whether they really help devs work faster or just allow those of us who aren’t programmers to muck everything up. Or both! Plus: How David’s philosophy degree shaped his approach to business.

Episode 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?.

TRANSCRIPT

The post Because the only thing worse than building internal tools is maintaining them (Ep. 539) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Ben is joined by Kyle Mitofsky, a Senior Software Engineer on Stack Overflow’s public platform; Kelsey Hightower, Distinguished Engineer at Google Cloud; and Guillermo Rauch, cocreator of Next.js. They cover what’s new in Next.js 13, how growing demand for front-end applications has made the React codebase “ginormous,” and what’s required to support a sustainable community of open-source contributors.

Episode 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 a Distinguished Engineer 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.

TRANSCRIPT

The post You don’t have to build a browser in JavaScript anymore (Ep. 538) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

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#?.

The post Does your professor pass the Turing test? (Ep. 537) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

The home team discusses why it seems like everybody needs subtitles now, the AI that generates music from text, and a list of open-source data engineering projects for you to contribute to.

Episode 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.

TRANSCRIPT

The post The AI that writes music from text (Ep. 535) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

The home team convenes to talk about how tech layoffs are reshaping the industry, where to look for software engineering jobs beyond tech, the brain-computer interface that speeds up communication for people with paralysis, and Ben’s million-dollar game idea (free for the stealing). 

Episode 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.

TRANSCRIPT

The post What do the tech layoffs really tell us? (Ep. 533) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.