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.

On today’s episode, we chat with Marcos Grappeggia, the product manager for Duet, an AI-powered assistant that can help you craft code by suggesting snippets—even full functions—as you write. Grappeggia explains why he thinks tools like this will augment, but not replace, the human developers at work today.

Episode notes:

Interested in trying Duet? You can get on the waitlist here.

You can learn more about tuning and deploying your own version of Google’s foundation models in their Generative AI studio.
If tuning a model sounds like a stretch, you can head to Model Garden, where a wide selection of open-source and third-party models are available to try.

TRANSCRIPT

The post Pair programing? We peek under the hood of Duet, Google’s coding assistant. (Ep. 580) 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.

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.

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.

On this episode of the podcast, we talk to Mauricio Linhares, senior software engineer at Stripe, about the pain of migrating monoliths to microservices, defining zero-tier systems, and why plugging all your servers into the same power supply is a bad idea. 

Episode notes: 

While Mauricio and team had to get back to bare metal, most programmers are headed in the opposite direction. It’s why MIT switched from Scheme to Python. 

At Stack Overflow, we’re familiar with what happens to websites during physical failures, like hurricanes. 

Connect with Mauricio on LinkedIn. 
Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner The Nail, who pinned a solid answer on the question, if->return vs. if->else efficiency.

TRANSCRIPT

The post Building zero tier systems on bare metal (Ep. 572) 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.

We sit down with Forrest Brazeal, head of developer media at Google Cloud, to discuss all the AI-powered goodies announced at today’s I/O event. Plus, a conversation with Paige Bailey, lead product manager for generative models at Google, who contributed to many of the projects that debuted today.

Learn more about Forrest on his website and check out his newsletter.

You can follow Paige on Twitter or her LinkedIn.

Get on the list to try out some of the new stuff released today here.

TRANSCRIPT

The post A conversation with the folks building Google’s AI models and I/O releases (Ep. 569) 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.

A common refrain you’ll hear these days is that servers should be scaled out, easy to replace, and interchangeable—cattle, not pets. But for the ops folks who run those servers the opposite is true. You can’t just throw any of them into an incident where they may not know the stack or system and expect everything to work out. Every operator has a set of skills that they’ve built up through research or experience, and teams should value them as such. They’re people, not pets, and certainly not cattle—you can’t just get a new one when you burn out your existing ones. 

On this episode of the podcast—sponsored by Chronosphere—we talk with Paige Cruz, Senior Developer Advocate at Chronosphere, about how teams can reduce the cognitive load on ops, the best ways to prepare for inevitable failures, and where the worst place to page Paige is. 

Episode notes:

Chronosphere provides an observability platform for ops people, so naturally, the company has an interest in the happiness of those people. 

If you’re interested in the history of the pets vs. cattle concept , this covers it pretty well. 

Previously, we spoke with the CEO of Chronosphere about making incidents easier to manage. 

We’ve covered this topic on the blog before, and two articles came up during our conversation with Paige. 

You can connect with Paige on Twitter, where she has a pretty apropos handle. 

Congrats to Stellar Question badge winner Bruno Rocha for asking How can I read large text files line by line, without loading them into memory?, which at least 100 users liked enough to bookmark.  

The post Ops teams are pets, not cattle (Ep. 562) 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.

Right now, plenty of people are building businesses on social media platforms, on streaming platforms, and on market platforms that they don’t control. That platform can make the rules in any way they want and remove access at any time. That means founders are potentially one step away from losing their livelihood. The same goes for consumers buying from these platforms: if you lose access to your account, there goes all your purchases. As it turns out, you were licensing everything, not buying it. 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Ripple CTO David Schwartz about the promise that decentralized trust and distributed consensus has for software development—and for more transparency in ownership. 

Episode notes:

Cross-border payments, while they might not be the sexiest app, are one of the best product-market fits for blockchains. 

Learn more about Ripple at their home page. 

Check out the documentation to learn more about building on the XRP Ledger. 

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, asmeurer, for their answer to What does `S` signify in SymPy? 

TRANSCRIPT

The post From cryptography to consensus: Q&A with CTO David Schwartz on building real-world blockchain apps (Ep. 557) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Dean Tribble, CEO of Agoric, joins Ben and Ryan to talk about his journey from working on early programming languages at Xerox PARC to leading a company developing an open-source blockchain.

Episode Notes

Smart contracts aren’t actually new. Computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer Nick Szabo coined the term in 1994 (possibly earlier, depending on who you ask). 

Old problems seem to keep coming back. Bret Victor gave a talk in 2013 called “The Future of Programming,” where he talked about problems from 1973 that were still relevant. 

To learn more about the Agoric blockchain, check out their homepage. 

If you’d rather shape how the blockchain itself operates, much of Agoric’s code is open source. 

Connect with Dean on Twitter or Telegram

TRANSCRIPT

The post From Smalltalk to smart contracts, reflecting on 50 years of programming (Ep. 556) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

A Principal Engineer at GitHub, Kris is president of the Nivenly Foundation and an admin at Hachyderm, an instance of the decentralized social network powered by Mastodon. 

The ongoing changes at Twitter have fueled interest in alternative, decentralized platforms like Mastodon and Discord.

Read Leaving the Basement, Kris’s post about scaling and migrating Hachyderm out of her basement.

Watch Kris’s conversation with DigitalOcean Chief Product Officer Gabe Monroy about building decentralized IT platforms.

Find Kris on Twitter, GitHub, Twitch, or YouTube.

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner metakeule for answering: How can I get an error message in a string in Go?

TRANSCRIPT

The post How to keep the servers running when your Mastodon goes viral (Ep. 555) 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.

The history of computing has been a story of moving up levels of abstraction: from hard-coding algorithms and directly manipulating memory addresses with assembly languages to using more natural language constructs in high-level general purpose languages to abstracting the hardware of the computer in cloud compute. Now serverless functions take that abstraction even further. We’ve made the algorithms that process data simple and natural; MongoDB wants to do the same for how we persist data. 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Andrew Davidson, SVP Products at MongoDB, about how they’re turning a database into a fully-managed service that developers can use in a more natural way. Along the way, we discuss how the cost bottleneck has moved from the storage media to developers’ minds, how greater abstractions can enable developers, and how to get insights from production data faster. 

Episode notes

Try MongoDB Atlas on AWS for free.

You can get started with MongoDB Atlas directly from the AWS Marketplace. 

If you’re at a startup, you can take advantage of their special offer for startups. 

The community edition of their classic database is available to download as well. 

If you’re looking to learn a thing or two before diving in, check out MongoDB University. 

Our thanks to Great Question badge winner Derek 朕會功夫 for asking How can I reverse an array in JavaScript without using libraries? You know the rarest kung fu of all: asking great questions. 

TRANSCRIPT

The post Moving up a level of abstraction with serverless on MongoDB Atlas and AWS (Ep. 552) 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.

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.

With so many companies offering API products, it can be hard to get your particular APIs discovered and used by the developers who need them most. You might have the best, most useful solutions out there, but if you’re relying on the digital equivalent of foot traffic for discoverability, it might as well not exist. And if an API solution can’t be found, then someone else is going to reinvent it. 

On this sponsored episode, we chat with SmartBear API Technical Evangelist Frank Kilcommins about the growing challenges of API visibility and how to outsmart the invisibility trap with the right development strategies and tools. 

Episode notes:

Kilcommins suggests you can get better visibility for your APIs with SmartBear’s new free API exploration tool. 

Open specifications like the Open API Initiative help make your endpoints easier to understand—both by humans and computers. 

Connect with Frank Kilcommins on Twitter and LinkedIn. 

Congrats to Stack Overflow user WorstCase, who asked five well-received questions on five separate days and earned themselves a shiny new Curious badge.

The post Visible APIs get reused, not reinvented (Ep. 549) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

This week we sit down with some fellow Stackers, Erin Yepis and Joy Cicman Liuzzo, to discuss the results of our latest Pulse Survey. Developers told us what emergent technology they expect to become mainstream, what they think is a fad that will pass, and how they feel about everything from AI to open source to blockchain.

Episode Notes

You can dive deeper into the research, including some lovely matrix charts, on our blog.

Erin has also explored tag trends among our most loved languages and job insights from our community.

Learn more about Joy on her LinkedIn.

Thanks to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, russbishop, for helping to answer the question: Where is the app content folder in the simulator of Xcode?

TRANSCRIPT

The post Developers think AI assistants will be everywhere, but aren’t sure how to feel about it (Ep. 548) 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.

Writing code that runs without errors—and without all the bugs that only show up when the program runs—is hard enough. But teaching others to write code and understand the underlying concepts takes a deeper understanding. Now imagine doing that for 37 courses. 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with Bharath Thippireddy, a VIP instructor at Udemy who has taught more than half a million students. We talk about how he went from a humble Java developer to one of Udemy’s top instructors (and a budding movie star!). Along the way, we discuss whether Java or Python is better for beginners and how to balance theory with syntax. 

Episode notes:

Like a lot of today’s content creators, Bharath got his start posting videos on his Youtube channel in 2012.

Today, you can find all of Bharath’s courses on his Udemy page.

You can find out more about Bharath from his website or connect with him on LinkedIn. 

Udemy is one of our launch partners for our online course recommendations. 

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner desertnaut for their answer to What is the meaning of exclamation and question marks in Jupyter Notebook?.

TRANSCRIPT

The post From writing code to teaching code (Ep. 546) 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.