The Stack Overflow Podcast (The Stack Overflow Podcast)

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

Paul and Sara reminisce about the days before Git, when version control was very different from what it is today, and Paul accidentally left many a project in shambles. Do you remember the days of Subversion and CVS? 

Later, we dig into Sara's new adventure with Jupyter Notebooks. They are extremely useful for developers, but what would it take to make them a tool for any kind of knowledge worker? Default to a PowerPoint style, obviously.

Last but not least, we dig into the endless argument over the 10X developer, Reed Hastings' love for the 100X developer, and the true formula for attracting employees that will contribute their genius without wrecking the team.  Clive Thompson has a great piece on the myth, meritocracy, and messy reality of rockstar coders.

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

Watch Arpin’s talk on how a low-cost, low-tech solution can simplify online payments.

Arpit isn’t the first engineer we’ve talked to whose career was sparked by the digital pets of the 90s. Listen to Episode #431: Words of wisdom for self-taught developers.

It’s time to get excited about Hacktoberfest, an annual DigitalOcean event that encourages people to contribute to open-source projects throughout the month of October.

Connect with Arpit on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Last but not least, today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Belzebub for their answer to the question Custom alert dialog with rounded corners and a transparent background.

Check out more about Microsoft's efforts to ditch passwords here.

When  2FA just won't do, 3FA to the rescue. Just pray we aren't headed towards five factors.

Get started with MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud today. 

Read more from the MongoDB DevRel team at the MongoDB Developer Center.

Learn more about Google’s Gemini models. 

Shout out to thitemple for their Lifeboat-worthy answer to In TypeScript, how do I declare a function that returns a string type array?.

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".

To kick things off, we talk about Yap, a fun new project from Paul’s company, Postlight. Employees get to partake in a Labs program where they can pursue side projects that interest them. Yap is "an ephemeral, real-time chat room with up to six participants. Your messages appear and disappear as quickly as you type them.” It was built with Elixir...ooooh.

For our interview this week we sat down with Jon Gottfried and Mary Siebert from Major League Hacking. Jon is the company’s co-founder and Mary is the Hackathon Community Manager. We discuss how this organization has become a global phenomenon over the past few years, reaching hundreds of thousands of developers. 
 

Things that happen these days at Major League Hackathons: 
 

• Painting succulents

• Cup stacking competitions

• Therapy dogs, lots of them

If you're interested in sponsoring a Major League Hackathon, check out the info here.

This is our last episode of the year. We’ll be back in 2020 with some more amazing guests and brilliant banter. Thanks for tuning in, see ya in the new year.
 

Andrew has worked in many roles, including as Executive Manager at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, where he established and grew a platform engineering function that supported 7,000 engineers.

You can find him on LinkedIn here.

You can learn more about Compass, a developer experience platform, here.

Shout to Amelio for earning a stellar question badge and helping over six hundred thousand people with this gem: Getting the name of a variable as a string

Postman is an API development platform that lets developers prototype, document, test, and demo all their APIs in one place.

Postman’s cofounder and CEO recently wrote about the rise of agentic AI.

Find Sterling on LinkedIn. 

Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Knossos, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering What is the difference between TextView and TextViewCompat. 

APIs, AI, GraphQL, REST, gRPC, API-first, Sterling Chin, Postman, technology, software development

SPONSORED BY PLURALSIGHT

Early in the days of high-traffic web pages and apps, any engineer operating the infrastructure would have a server room where one or more machines served that app to the world. They named their servers lovingly, took pictures, and watched them grow. The servers were pets. But since the rise of public cloud and infrastructure as code, servers have become cattle—you have as many as you need at any given time and don’t feel personally attached to any given one. And as more and more organizations find their way to the cloud, more and more engineers need to figure out how to herd cattle instead of feed pets. 

Show notes

Gartner forecasts that around $500 billion will be spent worldwide on end user cloud computing during 2022. Firment says that’s only 25% of IT budgets today, but he expects it to grow to 65% by 2025.

Don’t doubt the power of your people. Gartner estimates that 50% of all cloud IT migration projects are delayed up to two years simply because of the lack of skills.

Pluralsight just published its State of the Cloud report. 75% of of all leaders want to build new products and services in the cloud, but only 8% of the technologists have the experience to actually work with cloud related tools. 

Today we’re highlighting a Great Question badge winner—a question with a score of 100 or more—awarded to Logan Besecker for their question: How do you cache an image in JavaScript?

Want to start earning your cloud certificates? Head over to Pluralsight.

Connect with Ben  or Ryan on Twitter. Find Drew on LinkedIn.

Since the day a hiring manager first wheeled a whiteboard into a conference room, software engineers have dreaded the technical interview, which can be an all-day process (or multi-day homework assignment). If you’re interviewing for multiple roles, you can expect to write out a bubble sort in pseudocode for each one. These technical interviews do no favors for hiring companies, either, because the investment needed from both parties limits the number of candidates a company can consider. In this age of data-driven decisions, perhaps there’s a way that AI and ML can help candidates and companies find each other.  

On this episode of the podcast, sponsored by Turing AI, we chat with Chief Revenue Officer Prakash Gupta about building a better hiring process with AI. Turing helps companies scale their engineering programs quickly with remote developers from around the world. We talk about how to vet a profession without standard markers, the benefits of soft skills, and how AI-assisted hiring helps everyone involved. 

While companies have been outsourcing development for years, COVID made the software industry almost entirely remote. Suddenly, every company has the ability to hire the best developers regardless of location. And good developers can find work at companies of all sizes without packing up and settling in Silicon Valley. 

But when any company could conceivably interview any candidate, how do you vet candidates at scale? There is no standardized board certification for software engineers, after all. Every interviewer has to vet the candidates themselves, and that’s where human biases come in. 

On one side, you have Fortune 500 companies developing complex systems and undergoing digital transformation projects, plus startups looking to scale their engineering organizations as their product finds market fit. On the other, you have a new generation of engineers trained on bootcamps and online resources who may not have opportunities where they live. That’s where Turing comes in, matching 1.7 million engineers from over 140 countries with jobs at hundreds of companies. 

Turing strives to mitigate bias by collecting hundreds of signals about candidates over a four- to six-hour process. This process covers projects candidates have worked on, technology aptitude, and soft skills through 30-minute tests, candidates’ online presence in places like GitHub and Stack Overflow, and qualitative assessments refined over two years of feedback loops. 

A process that once consisted of ten interviews can now drop to two or three at the most. Some Turing customers have eliminated interviews altogether, relying on Turing’s AI-powered solutions to surface and evaluate the best candidates. To see how Turing can streamline your interview process, either as a candidate or a company, check out turing.com today.

Palmer says that a huge percentage of today’s top websites, including apps like ChartGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, were built with Vercel’s Next.JS. 

For the second goal, you can see what Vercel is up to with its v0 project, which lets developers use text prompts and images to generate code. 

Third, the Vercel AI SDK, which aims to to help developers build conversational, streaming, and chat user interfaces in JavaScript and TypeScript. You can learn more here.

If you want to catch Jared posting memes, check him out on Twitter. If you want to learn more abiout the AI SDK, check it out 

here.

A big thanks to Pierce Darragh for providing a great answer and earning a lifeboat badge by saving a question from the dustinbin of history. Pierce explained: How you can split documents into training set and test set

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

You can find Alex's writing for Employ America here. You can find him on Twitter here

You can find Hassan's blog here and his Twitter here.

You can find their writing on the semiconductor industry and shortages here and here.

Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is jasme, who helped someone figure out how to fix email validation with Laravel.

Hear why Ben thinks the Workplace Stack Exchange and the Academia Stack Exchange have the richest questions in the Stack Exchange network (or maybe just the most sitcom-worthy).

ICYMI: Jack Dorsey stepped down from Twitter. Will he be back?

At Twitter, Tess Rinearson is leading a new team focused on crypto, blockchains, and decentralized tech. Follow her on Twitter here.

The team winces over a review of a Tesla Model Y hatchback that describes phantom braking so frequent and so dangerous that it’s “a complete deal-breaker.”

If you’re a fan of our show, consider leaving us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts.

Bit lets you generate composable software simplicity, speed and quality. 

Connect with Laly on LinkedIn. 

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner and blog contributor Charlie Martin for their answer to How does this proof, that the halting problem is undecidable, work?

.

Read Eira’s two-part series about developers with ADHD here and here.

Chris recommends that devs with ADHD employ a “second brain” to help them track and remember information. Read Eira’s article on what second brains reveal about how we work.

A few years back Chris joined us to talk about the most lightweight web “framework” around: VanillaJS. Listen to the episode.

Chris offers classes and workshops for front-end developers, plus daily advice for developers with ADHD.

Connect with Chris through his website or social media.

Clockwise is a time orchestration platform that optimizes schedules to create more time in your day. Clockwise AI, their new GPT-powered scheduling assistant, is launching in beta. Join the waitlist here to get early access. (They’re also hiring!)

Ryan wrote a recent article about whether meetings are making developers less productive.

Cal Newport’s instant classic Deep Work is about learning to tune out distractions and focus on cognitively demanding tasks.

Speaking of classics, Paul Graham of Y Combinator wrote about maker’s vs. manager’s schedules back in 2009.

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.

Kudos to Stack Overflow user Joe Caruso, who won a Great Question badge with Get current time in hours and minutes.

Stack Overflow’s 2019 Developer Survey found that respondents overwhelmingly considered Elon Musk to be the person with the greatest influence on technology. Now that Musk is taking over Twitter, it’s safe to say that influence will increase.

James Stanier, engineering director at Shopify, has some thoughts on one of our perennial topics: transitioning from IC to manager. He’s proposed a 90-day trial period for IC engineers moving into management roles. Listen to Stanier on the Dev Interrupted podcast.

Ben talks up Samsung’s The Frame, which lets you display your favorite NFT or old-fashioned art when you’re not using it as a TV. Because who wants to look at a blank screen?

Cassidy recommends Adam Grant’s book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know and Matt recommends an LG C1 TV for folks in the market for a stunning gaming experience.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Drew Reese for their answer to Deprecation notice: ReactDOM.render is no longer supported in React 18.

William is the CEO of Lightning AI and the creator of PyTorch Lightning, the lightweight PyTorch wrapper for high-performance AI research.

Dive into their docs or explore the developer community.

ICYMI: Across tech, layoffs are boosting share prices.

Follow William on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Shoutout to Brian61354270, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils' in Python 3.12.

You can learn more about Anthony here.

His favorite terminal tool at the moment is Warp, which describes itself as "a blazingly fast, Rust-based terminal reimagined from the ground up to work like a modern app." 

His personal website features a live chat function. Sometimes it's actually Tony, sometimes it's just a bot. 

No lifeboat badge today. We''ll be taking a break for the holidays and will resume episodes in 2023. Until then, enjoy the holidays. 

Eric was a build engineer at Apple for many years, then started a FeaturePeek which went through Y-combinator. He talks about what he learned from those experiences and how he'll be applying that knowledge to his new job at Netlify.

The teams combined forces to make the process of submitting and gathering feedback on deploy previews easier and more broadly accessible outside technical teams. As Cassidy explained:

“Based on technology from FeaturePeek, Deploy Previews enables reviewers to comment, screen record, and annotate right from the actual preview link. No new tabs. No new tools. Everyone’s feedback is recorded back in the GitHub pull request and can even extend to popular productivity tools such as Clubhouse.io, Linear, and Trello.”

This feature set is near and dear to Ben’s heart. Now folks from marketing and design can offer feedback and be more tightly involved in the development process for new features, products, and websites. All without really learning Git! 

Also discussed this episode: weirdware, workflow automation, Jerry Garcia, compound bows, and the spread of Git and branch methodology to areas well outside software development.

Cortex is an internal developer portal that cuts noise and helps devs build and continuously improve software. Explore their docs or see what’s happening on their blog.

Cortex is also hiring, so if you’re an engineer who wants to work on these kinds of problems, check out their careers page.

Connect with Anish on LinkedIn or X.

Ganesh is also on LinkedIn and X.

Shoutout to Alex Chesters, who earned a Great Question badge with How to count occurrences of an element in a Swift array?. 

Gone in a Flash. Actually it took quite a while. Adobe explains its decision to stop supporting Flash here.

You can learn more about Ruffle, the Flash emulator written in Rust, here.

Here are some tips on writing a developer resume from a hiring manager who's written an entire book on the topic.

You can read more about the Supreme Court case considering the limits of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act here and here

Our Lifeboat badge of the week goes to a user named simply 4386427, who answered the most basic and frustrating question: why does “printf” not work?

Ionic is a platform for building and deploying modern mobile applications and micro frontend experiences. It’s open source, too. 

Two mobile tools got multiple mentions on this episode: Xcode and Material Design. 

Connect with Maria on LinkedIn. 

Tarn and his brother Zach are the brains behind Dwarf Fortress and the community that rose around it.

Dr. Tarn Adams  received a math PhD, but left his post-doc because he was too busy making games. 

A bug created the statue Planepacked, a massive structure that contained the entire history of the world as well as 73 copies of the statue itself.

Many people, including one of our hosts, found out about Dwarf Fortress through a Let's Play session in a fortress called Boatmurdered. 

If you want a more human readable  version of Dwarf Fortress, you can wishlist it on Steam or use one of the Lazy Newb packs. 

They also:

• Explore key challenges engineering leaders face, including data capacity, relevance, and throttling issues.
• Highlight how emerging AI tools and applications are transforming software engineering practices.

Episode notes:

• Connect with Maureen Makes on LinkedIn. Learn more about Recursion and their open roles here.
• Read about Knowledge Solutions, a subscription-based API service that provides continuous access to Stack Overflow’s public dataset to train and fine-tune large language models.

Carol is an applied clinical and intervention scientist: she develops and tests cognitive, behavioral, and social interventions that activate key mechanisms to elicit change. Learn more about understanding and mitigating code review anxiety (the full version of her article is here).

You can also check out the code review anxiety workbook.

Pluralsight’s Developer Success Lab is a team of scientists studying how developers work, learn, and innovate. 

Explore more of Carol’s work on code review anxiety, her bio, or her other work, from developer productivity and stress management to coding with GenAI. 

Connect with Carol on LinkedIn or Mastodon.

Mobb offers AI-powered technology that automates vulnerability remediations with a goal of helping development teams significantly reduce their security backlogs and free up more time for innovation. 

Check out their blog or dive into their docs.

Connect with Eitan on LinkedIn.

Shoutout to Konrad, who won a Stellar Question badge for What is the difference between private and protected members of C++ classes?.

Cassidy helps to write The Overflow newsletter and is two months into a new gig as a Principal Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify. That's where she broke Prod, but it turned out ok.

We chat about Hey what it means for software engineers when prominent coders are arguing with big mobile platforms about the fees that the owners of the OS collect. What's old is new again. 

Bot armies are farming gold in World of Warcraft, which takes us down a wandering path of wondering how often people have access to powerful computers, but limited access to money they can spend on essentials.

Last but not least, we try to dissect a great question from our Software Engineering Stack Exchange: ways to explain code when told it doesn't make sense.

Shout out to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, "wizard", who answered the following question: is there an equivalent method to C's scanf in Java.

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

You can learn more about Tim's company, Checkly.hq, which works on active monitoring for developers. 

The team there also works on  Headless Recorder, a Chrome extension that records your browser interactions and generates a Playwright or Puppeteer script. 

They also operate The Headless Dev, which helps coders learn Playwright and Puppeteer. 

This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Ravindra Bagale for answering the question:  How to Convert Integer to Character Array using C

Check out a manager’s toolkit for preventing burnout put together by Gitlab 

Cassidy once asked Stephen Colbert for his favorite website. His answer may surprise you.

Today in tech recs: Pokémon GO (for extra motivation to get outside) and the Apple Watch activity tracker (to track activity and remind you to move around). Jon recommends that you not get a treadmill desk. 

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user JLRishe for their answer to Error "TypeError: $(...).children is not a function".

Follow Jon on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Part 1

The crew chats about how Paul and Sara made the transition from individual contributors to managers overseeing teams of engineers. Sara used to see this transition as a form of selling out, but has a new perspective after having made the shift. Paul admits he still doesn’t feel like a “CEO” and how he approaches his role as the co-founder who focuses on creating signal instead of operations. OF course, we argue about Bitcoin, and finally we examine the role luck plays in life, especially for The Rock. 

Interview - Kent C Dodds

Kent admits that when he first tried programming, he just couldn’t understand strings, and decided the career path wasn’t for him. He ended up on a track that would have made him an accountant or business intelligence analyst. From that perch, however, he began to find ways to automate and improve his workflows. Not only did this help him stand out at work, it reawakened his interest in coding, which is now his full time career. 

Part 2 

Sara talks about the difference between writing code for software applications, and writing firmware, which she got into while helping to launch and run Jewelbots. Paul and Sara recall what it was like working in tech during the 90s, when they had to constantly worry about how to conserve RAM. We also talk about the days before Git, when folks passed a hard drive around from hand to hand. The kids today have no idea how good they have it.

Jetify gives developers a cloud environment for building AI powered applications. 

Check out their blog or explore Jetify Cloud, a suite of managed services designed to make software development easier for teams.

Daniel is on LinkedIn. 

Stack Overflow user Dhaval Simaria earned a Lifeboat badge by explaining the Difference between pushing a docker image and installing helm image. 

The company says v0 is intended to author the first draft of your site or app, then help you iterate quickly. It won't mean the end of junior web developers, says Lee, as a polished final draft still requires a human touch. And it's not a low code no code approach, as the system allows you to switch easily between the GenAI approach and the actual code.

You can learn more about v0 here and head over here to join the waitlist.

You can find Lee on LinkedIn or his website.

Congrats to Stack Overflow user Jonathon Reinhart, who earned a Lifeboat badge for answering the question: How can I import a static library in Python?

You can find Michelle on Twitter here.

You can learn more about building apps with Twilio here.

Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to TryingToLearn for explaining the error that pops up in Python when: you can't assign to literal.

You can find some of Jack's art and other projects here.

Ben breaks through and answers his first SO question—by copy/pasting from the comments, of course. 

Sara finds the relevant XKCD.

Later, we check out Darling.hq, a MacOS translation layer for Linux 

If you are in the mood to learn programming with colors and shapes, check out the website that Jack built: Maria.cloud 

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 the Principal Developer Advocate 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.

You can read more about Spiros on his LinkedIn or Twitter.

There is some good backstory on his first company, Log Insight, here. A rundown of the acquisition that led to Spiros joining Splunk is here. There are also some interesting details in Splunk's blog on the deal, which calls out Omnition as a "a stealth-mode SaaS company that is innovating in distributed tracing, improving monitoring across microservices applications."

If you enjoy the conversation and want to hear more, Spiros has done some interesting talks that are up on Youtube here.

Our lifeboat of the week goes to Willie Mentzel, who explains how to: Round Double to 1 decimal place in kotlin: from 0.044999 to 0.1.

If you want to hear more of her work, check out Alexandra’s Instagram. 

She uses Tidal Cycles and Supercollider to make algorithms that get people to dance. 

Interested in algoraves? You may be able to find one near you or run your own. 

Check out Alexandra in her ad for Logitech, then check out her favorite keyboard

. 

Joocelyn hosts the Git Cute podcast, which you can find here.

She's working on a book about seniority in the software industry, which you can pre-order here.

You can follow her on Twitter at javavvitch.

Our lifeboat badge goes to LMc for explaining how one can: Count the Letter Frequency in a String with Python

Maxwell, a solution architect at xMatters, took a winding road to get to where he is. After a computer engineering education, he held jobs as field support engineer, product manager, SRE, and finally his current role as a solutions architect, where he serves as something of an SRE for SREs, helping them solve incident management problems with the help of xMatters. 

When he moved to the SRE role, Maxwell wanted to get back to doing technical work. It was a lateral move within his company, which was migrating an on-prem solution into the cloud. It’s a journey that plenty of companies are making now: breaking an application into microservices, running processes in containers, and using Kubernetes to orchestrate the whole thing. Non-production environments would go down and waste SRE time, making it harder to address problems in the production pipeline. 

At the heart of their issues was the incident response process. They had several bottlenecks that prevented them from delivering value to their customers quickly. Incidents would send emails to the relevant engineers, sometimes 20 on a single email, which made it easy for any one engineer to ignore the problem—someone else has got this. They had a bad silo problem, where escalating to the right person across groups became an issue of its own. And of course, most of this was manual. Their MTTR—mean time to resolve—was lagging. 

Maxwell moved over to xMatters because they managed to solve these problems through clever automation. Their product automates the scheduling and notification process so that the right person knows about the incident as soon as possible. At the core of this process was a different MTTR—mean time to respond. Once an engineer started working to resolve a problem, it was all down to runbooks and skill. But the lag between the initial incident and that start was the real slowdown. 

It’s not just the response from the first SRE on call. It’s the other escalations down the line—to data engineers, for example—that can eat away time. They’ve worked hard to make  escalation configuration easy. It not only handles who's responsible for specific services and metrics, but who’s in the escalation chain from there. When the incident hits, the notifications go out through a series of configured channels; maybe it tries a chat program first, then email, then SMS. 

The on-call process is often a source of dread, but automating the escalation process can take some of the sting out of it. Check out the episode to learn more. 

HarperDB is a startup that focuses on highly scalable databases that handle real-time data. 

Harper is built on Node.js and Express with a little help from Fastify. 

They know where they excel and where they don't. High data throughput like  gaming and vision, great! High data resolution and transactional software like financial applications, not so great. It's speed over accuracy. 

Instead of a Lifeboat badge today, we shared a relevant question: Q: How to create HarperDB table with lambda.

About three years ago, when our public platform engineering team at Stack started growing, we realized that we needed a more robust formal project management system that could scale with all the creativity coming on board. That’s when we started looking at formal, by-the-book frameworks to empower and coach our teams to their fullest potential. We landed on Agile and Scrum. 

Admittedly, our development team was nervous about implementing Scrum and Agile at first. So we focused on the goals of introspection and accountability rather than the rigidness of enforcement.

Agile and Scrum get a lot of hate. But is that their fault or are you doing it wrong?

We talked about this on the podcast a few years ago, when Ben, Paul, and Sara wondered, “Is Scrum making you a worse engineer?” 

It’s about providing support—not punishing people. Done right, Agile and Scrum can be a force of freedom and autonomy when they start with trust.

Connect with Shanda and Jon on LinkedIn.

We conclude with a big high five to Lifeboat badge winner jminkler for their answer to how to create an Instagram share link in PHP (thank you).

‘Til next time.

You can find David on LinkedIn.

You can learn more about Arcjet here.

You can subscribe to to the console.dev newsletter and podcast here.

Congrats to Stack Overflow user Greg Hewgill who earned a Populist badge for his answer to the question: 

What’s a good tool to determine the lowest version of Python required? 

Greg is getting close to the magic one million rep mark!

After founding two companies, including StrongDM, a dynamic management access platform (explore their docs here), Elizabeth took a “break” by co-authoring a book. 

Founder vs Investor: The Honest Truth About Venture Capital from Startup to IPO is about what she learned as a founder and executive about the founder-investor relationship. Order it on Bookshop or Amazon.

Elizabeth’s co-author is investor and advisor Jerry Neumann, managing director of Neu Venture Capital.

One option for your next weekend outing: a ride and tie.

Connect with Elizabeth on LinkedIn.

Connect with Jerry Neumann on LinkedIn.

Nice work: User Reap’s answer to Get String Name from Enum in C# earned them a Lifeboat badge.

Vercel is a developer-first, frontend-focused platform. Together with Google and Meta, Vercel built Next.js, an open-source React framework that helps developers build high-performance web experiences with ease.

PlanetScale is a MySQL-compatible serverless database platform that enables infinite SQL horizontal scale.

Tools like Webflow and Squarespace have made web development accessible for casual programmers, but what does this mean for professional developers?

This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Michael Thelin for their answer to How can I play a Spotify audio track with Python?.

Find Guillermo on LinkedIn here.

Find Sam on LinkedIn here.

Schematic offers SDKs for packaging, pricing, and entitlements. 

Check out Ben’s article on feature flags. 

Listen to Bill Tarr from AWS and Brian Rinaldi (then at LaunchDarkly and now at Localstack) talk about the opportunity to extend feature flags beyond deployment and rollout and into entitlement management and monetization.

Find Fynn on LinkedIn.

Find Ben on LinkedIn.

feature flags, software development, technical debt, business strategy, product management, feature management, DevOps, software engineering, pricing models, entitlements

Juvoni describes himself as someone who helps people explore ideas and strategies for improvement. He focuses on combining multiple skills, better thinking and tools for thought, inner engineering healthy habits, and discovering how systems in the world affect us.

You can follow him on Twitter:  https://twitter.com/juvoni

You can join the Personal Development Nerds Facebook group here:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/pdnerds/

The PDNerds discord server can be joined at www.pdn.community

Find Juvoni's book recommendations on his site: www.juvoni.com/books

He can be contacted at juvoni@hey.com

If you are or know a Black software engineer, you can recommend they join /dev/color a community dedicated to helping black software engineers empower each other to become industry leaders.
http://devcolor.org/

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.

2024 was a defining year for AI investment. Read the HumanX/Crunchbase report.

You can learn more about HumanX or register for next year’s event, April 7-9, 2026 in San Francisco.

Follow Stefan on LinkedIn.

Follow Jager on LinkedIn. 

At Netlify Compose 2023, Biilmann announced their new composable web platform. 

This isn’t Netlify’s first rodeo—we talked to them for episodes 588 and 456.

You can find Matt Biilmann on X or LinkedIn (and perhaps elsewhere). 

Today’s shoutout goes to Dick Lucas who asked a topical question, How to prevent Netlify from treating warnings as errors because process.env.CI = true?, viewed by over 84,000 people.

When most people talk about Web3 or cryptocurrencies and related technologies, they usually mean blockchains. But blockchain is only the first generation of distributed ledger technology (DLT). As with any new technology, once people see how it works, new generations come along rapidly to address the faults in the previous ones. 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan chat with Matt Woodward, head of developer relations at Swirlds Labs. Swirlds Labs created the Hedera ecosystem, a DLT built on a hashgraph, not a blockchain. We chat about what the difference is between a blockchain and a hashgraph, Hedera’s focus on environmental sustainability, and why the Web3 version of “Hello, World!” takes a little more effort. 

Show notes

Hedera’s hashgraph is a third-generation DLT: it’s an open-source consensus algorithm and a data structure that uses a direct acyclic graph and two novel inventions, the gossip about gossip protocol and virtual voting. 

Where Bitcoin can only handle between three and seven transactions per second, a hashgraph can support upwards of 10,000. 

There’s been a lot of talk about the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies. Woodward says that a single Bitcoin transaction uses 1000kW-hours—the equivalent of driving a Tesla Model S 5,500 km—while Hedera uses 160 MW-hours of energy per year, about 2.5 million times less.

Congrats to the winner of a Stellar Question badge, g.revolution, for their question What is an anti-pattern? 100 users saved it for later. 

Find out more about Hedera and hit the start button. 

Connect with Matt, Ben, or Ryan on Twitter.

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.

Cassidy reflect on her time as a CTO of a startup and how the shifting environment for funding has created new pressures and incentives for founders, developers, and venture capitalists.

Ben tries to get a bead on a new Moore’s law for the GenAI era: when will we start to see diminishing returns and fewer step factor jumps? 

Ben and Cassidy remember the time they made a viral joke of a keyboard!

Ryan sees how things goes in cycles. A Stack Overflow job board is back! And what do we make of the trend of AI assisted job interviews where cover letters and even technical interviews have a bot in the background helping out.

Congrats to Erwin Brandstetter for winning a lifeboat badge with an answer to this question:  How do I convert a simple select query like select * from customers into a stored procedure / function in pg?

Beaudette cut his teeth in the days of AOL chat rooms, then became an early Wikipedian. More recently he worked at Reddit, where his team of ten professional community managers supported 300 million monthly unique visitors. Before his recent promotion to VP,  Beaudette was on the Trust and Safety team at Stack Overflow. 

For more detail on his experience, check out his LinkedIn here.

Our lifefboat badge of the week goes to Arty-chan for answering the question:What is gitlab instance url, and how can i get it?

What do companies want to gain through monitoring software—and what do they, and their employees, stand to lose? Read more.

In Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, Cal Newport makes the point that our world isn’t geared toward deep, focused, flow-state work; instead, it rewards the appearance of busyness. Workers who see their keystrokes or mouse movements tracked are likely to focus on those behaviors instead of their projects.

More than 50 countries are establishing rules to control their digital information and achieve data sovereignty. Read more.

Gather round for the latest in cautionary crypto tales: The Crypto Geniuses Who Vaporized a Trillion Dollars. If you’re in the market, you can buy their yacht, the Much Wow (we kid you not).

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Tonyyyy for their answer to the question In what way does wait(NULL) work exactly in C?.

Over the past five years, Intuit went through a total cloud transformation—they closed the data centers, built out a modern SaaS development environment, and got cloud native with foundational building blocks like containers and Kubernetes. Now they are looking to continue transforming into an AI-driven organization that leverages the data they have to make their customers’ lives easier. Along the way, they realized that their internal systems have the same requirements to leverage the data they have for AI-driven insights. 

Episode notes

Wadher notes that Intuit uses development velocity, not developer velocity. The thinking is that an engineering org should focus on shipping products and features faster, not making individual devs more productive. 

No, the robots aren’t coming for your jobs. Wadher says their AI strategy relies on helping experts make better insights. The goal is to arm those experts, not replace them. 

In terms of sheer volume, the AI/ML program at Intuit is massive. They make 58 billion ML predictions daily, enable 730 million AI-driven customer interactions every year, and maintain over two million personalized AI models. 

Intuit’s not here to hoard secrets. They’ve outsourced their DevOps pipeline tool, Argo. They found that a lot of companies used it for AI and data pipelines, and have recently launched Numaproj, which open sources a lot of the tools and capabilities that they use internally. 

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Bill Karwin for their answer to Understanding MySQL licensing. 

You can find Crystal on LinkedIn.

You can learn more about FSH Tech here.

Congrats to Stack OVerflow user David Conrad, who earned a lifeboat badge for answering the question: 

How do I create a map with key and value in one line in Java?

The starting point for today's conversation was an argument made by Guillermo Rauch in this blog post. "And each time, your frontend has an opportunity to impress, delight, perform, be accessible and memorable. What's more, frontend is an area of technological and artistic differentiation, while backend becomes increasingly commoditized, turnkey and undifferentiated."

Sure, programming in PowerPoint isn't very practical. That doesn't mean it can't be lots of fun, and teach you a few things.

Speaking of learning things, we chat a bit about Alan Kay, who has a wonderful talk on the ways we can use computers to illustrate complex concepts to children.

Tomasz is a general partner at Theory Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage software companies.

He coauthored the book Winning with Data, a deep dive into how big data has changed business best practices and organizational culture.

Find Tomasz’s writing here.

Follow Tomasz on LinkedIn or Twitter.com.

In honor of Tomasz’s early career, we’re shouting out Johnny Hujol’s answer to What exactly is a container in J2EE and how does it help?.

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.

Despite our hope for the power of robotics, the technology is still far from mainstream. That’s because the amount of effort needed to get hardware to do useful things at scale is…well…hard.

When Eliot started Viam, his goal was to address this challenge by creating software that supports a range of hardware builds right out of the box. As the company explains - “we’re addressing these issues by building a novel robotics platform that relies on standardized building blocks rather than custom code to create, configure and control robots intuitively and quickly. We’re empowering engineers – aspiring and experienced – across industries to solve complicated automation problems with our innovative software tools.” The company announced the opening of its public beta earlier this week.

While Eliot elaborates on his vision for Viam, Ben reflects on his time covering drones for The Verge and working on robotics at DJI.

Inquisitive badge winner, Neeta, gets props for asking well-received questions on 30 separate days.

Follow Ben and Eliot on Twitter.

In this episode: Why developers need to upskill faster than ever, the relationship between stock prices and layoffs, how the job market for developers has changed, and the evolution of engineering roles post-GenAI.

Listen to the full versions:

• The half-life of developer skills is shrinking rapidly - Stack Overflow
• AI isn't putting tech workers out of jobs, the stock price is - Stack Overflow
• The reverse mullet model of software engineering - Stack Overflow
• Say goodbye to "junior" engineering roles - Stack Overflow
• The evolution of fullstack engineers - Stack Overflow

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

Building a physics simulator for a robot helicopter as a student at Stanford helped Varun connect his interests in physics, machine learning, and AI. Check out that project here. His instructor? Andrew Ng.

Along with Ng, Varun was lucky to connect with some brilliant AI folks during his time at Stanford, like Jeffrey Dean, Head of Google AI; Daphne Koller, cofounder of Coursera; and Sebastian Thrun, cofounder of Udacity.

When Varun earned his PhD in computer science and AI, Koller and Thrun served as his advisors. You can read their work here.

In 2017, Udacity acquired Varun’s startup, CloudLabs, the company behind Terminal.  

Connect with Varun on LinkedIn.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user John Woo for their answer to the question Update the row that has the current highest (maximum) value of one field.

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

He's on Twitter here. You can check out Elastic Cloud and it's suite of services here.

Suyog talks a bit about data gravity, a concept you can learn more about here.

If you're a fan of release notes and want to get a sense of what Suyog worked on at Elastic over the years, check out his blog archives here.

Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, lhf, for anwering the question: How can I get the current UTC time in a Lua script?

It finally happened. In the words of the Ethereum Foundation, ETH is now “ready for its interstellar voyage,” having transitioned from proof of work to proof of stake. With no centralized authority insisting on a ship date, we’re witnessing a feat. We’re all wondering what comes next. 

The Great Debate about hybrid and remote work continues. Is the decentralized talent movement winning? What can we do to prevent cabin fever? What do government workers do with their laptops if they need to cross the border?

The semiconductor chip shortage hasn’t ended yet, but some companies seem to be hurting more than others. What gives?

We conclude with a reflection on the new Apple Watch—and whether it can actually save our lives.

Be sure to follow @mattkander and @benpopper on Twitter to keep the convo going.

Big thanks to Androidian who is our latest Inquisitive badge recipient for coming to Stack Overflow for 30 separate days, maintaining a positive question record.

Catch you all later.

You can send ideas for blog posts to Ryan Donovan at our pitch box.

You can find Cassidy on Twitter here and read the newsletter she helps us curate here.

You can find Ceora on Twitter here and check out more about Apollo GraphQL here.

Cassidy's piece on GraphQL, the first item she ever wrote for Stack Overflow, is here. 

Want to learn more about AVIF and how it compresses images so well? Check out good read from Netflix's tech blog here.

Instead of a lifeboat badge we're highlighting an amazing question: Can celestial objects be used in cryptography?

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

In the beginning, the nascent Java language project, codenamed Project Green and later Oak, was designed to create interactive televisions. Think of the kind of overlays and interactivity that you see with most flat screen TVs today. Back in 1995, this was brand new territory. There was no hardware or operating system standard for a computing platform within a TV, so the team had to figure out how to create a programming language that could run on virtually anything. Code it once and run it everywhere through a virtual machine. 

Interactive TV was ahead of its time in the early 90s, but Java found a strong foothold for its cross-platform ideas in web applets and WebStart programs that downloaded and ran an application entirely from a web address. This evolved over time, and today it provides a lot of the processing muscle for server-side web apps and cloud-based SaaS applications. Here at Stack Overflow, the Java tag has remained one of the most popular over the years, with 1.7 million total questions on the site. 

When Sun announced Java in 1995, they did so with Marc Andreessen—then cofounder and “rockstar” at Netscape—on stage with them. Andreessen had agreed to integrate Java into the Navigator browser, a major coup for a brand new language. At the time, Navigator was the clear leader in the browser market, taking over 75% of the share. Even before this announcement at the SunWorld conference, the volume of downloads of the language became so great that it overwhelmed the T1 line attached to the java.sun.com web server. 

Today's episode covers the past and present of Java. Tomorrow, we'll air episode two, which takes us from the present and looks towards the future. If you want to learn more, Oracle has put together a wealth of resources to celebrate Java's 25th anniversary.

The mission of Night Shift Development is to democratize data analytics to help organizations and users of all skill levels understand their data. Their flagship product, ClearQuery, is a data intelligence and analytics platform designed for nontechnical users. 

ClearQuery has a free version that lets you try out the full array of features. Learn how it works and register here to get started, gratis.

Learn how Stack Overflow implemented semantic search to allow users to search using natural language.

Read about why self-healing code is the future of software development.

Tim is on LinkedIn. 

Thanks and congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Boann, whose answer to Sort four numbers without an array has been viewed 23,000 times and counting.

The Twitter thread that brought Cryptoland to the team’s attention.

Ceora wonders whether participants in a hypothetical, decentralized version of YouTube (a YouTube-like dApp) would need coding skills to contribute meaningfully.

Why is Ethereum so expensive and so congested?

Ben outlines how Solana has become the fastest-growing blockchain in the world by evolving the Ethereum concept to make it more scalable and less congested.

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

You can follow Matt on Twitter here. If you want to read about how he made the jump from personal trainer to web developer, he did a nice interview with Indie London.

Our lifeboat of the week goes to Banex for answering the question: why do we use NULL in strtok()?

SPONSORED BY FIREHYDRANT

While FireHydrant is mostly known for their incident management software, they’re introducing Signals to modernize alerting and consolidate it with incident management. 

FireHydrant was born out of an incident where a database was dropped at 5:30pm on a Friday right before network maintenance started. It also led to Robert’s social media handle, Bobby Tables. 

This one time…at band camp…Robert got paged in the middle of trumpet practice…on his sabbatical.

Congrats to Great Question badge winner timdim for asking How can I flush GPU memory using CUDA (physical reset is unavailable)?. 100 people thought it was worth voting for.

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Marcin Wyszynski, founder and CEO at Spacelift. Marcin says Spacelift aims to be for infrastructure-as-code what GitHub is to git. It centralizes everything about your IaC system: it runs code, deploys within CI/CD pipelines, tracks the progress of your infrastructure, and gives you insight into who made what changes and why. Today it works with the IaC tools already out there: Terraform, Cloud Formation, and Pulumi, with plans to add support for services like Ansible and Kubernetes in the future. 

Like a lot of programmers, Marcin got into coding through games. Once he ran through the limited number of Commodore 64 games at his local shop in Poland, he learned to program his own. But he never thought of programming as a career, so when it came time to pick a college major, he followed a group of his peers into sociology. Sociology, with its heavy focus on statistics, brought him back to programming. 

He landed his first job at Google reviewing copy for Ads, which lasted until he could automate himself out of it. Google gave him increasingly technical roles until he moved into an SRE position handling tape backups, a job that is mostly very boring until it becomes extremely exciting. After that, it was a stint at Facebook spinning up point-of-presence clusters around the world, then CTO at a startup that didn’t catch on as he’d hoped. 

With this wealth of experience under his belt, he went into consulting. As a consultant, he had his bag of best practices, open-source tools, processes, and scripts that he brought with him, but he also built bespoke pieces of technology for every single one of his clients. One need his clients had in common was a way to manage the code that defined their infrastructure. 

During Marcin’s career, there were many times when he built the thing he needed: games, automation, scripts. When his consulting clients would leave for a new organization, they would reach out to ask if he could provide them with the solution he had built for infrastructure as code. Realizing that he had created something which addressed a pain point common to many companies, he decided to turn this solution into a new company: Spacelift. 

Spacelift aims to take the heavy lifting out of infrastructure-as-code, automate it, and make it auditable. When a change gets made, everyone can see it and comment on it. From the product manager to the junior dev, everyone knows what’s going on, even if an infrastructure change doesn’t fit the original architecture docs. Plus, the SRE team no longer need to go on archeological expeditions to find a database secretly running and costing the company five figures a month. 

To learn more about Spacelift, check out their website at https://spacelift.io/, where you can start a free trial and see it in action. 

As the year winds to a close, some big employers are facing lower-than-expected attrition rates—in other words, fewer people than expected are quitting. What a difference a year or two makes.

People have strong opinions on the return-to-office conversation. Read Eira’s article and let us know how you feel.

We are just beginning to explore the effects of prompting on the capabilities and performance of LLMs.

The Humane AI pin can be described as a cross between two of humanity’s most beloved technologies: Google Glass and the pager.

People are using low-cost drones, 3D printers, and private satellites to preserve irreplaceable cultural heritage sites before they are destroyed or lost to time. (Stay tuned while Eira figures out how to apply this tech as a cemetery tour guide.)

Stack Overflow user FlipperPA earned a Lifeboat badge with their answer to The 'Black' formatter - Python.

You can find Ferdinandi's post and video here.

12 years ago, back when Stack Overflow was a brand new site with just a few thousand users, someone asked a basic question: What is the difference between a framework and a library?

FreeCodeCamp has its own take on this question with a pretty interesting answer. "When you use a library, you are in charge of the flow of the application. You are choosing when and where to call the library. When you use a framework, the framework is in charge of the flow. It provides some places for you to plug in your code, but it calls the code you plugged in as needed."

There was no Lifeboat badge to call out this week, so we honored a Lifejacket winner instead. Shout out to Andreas for answering the queston: Are byte arrays initialised to zero in Java?

Will AI fundamentally change software development or just add some efficiencies around the edges?  Surveys from Stack Overflow and Github find north of 70% have probably already tried using it and many incorporate it into their daily work through a helper in the IDE. 

It's also worth reflecting a bit on the technology sectors that didn't have as great a 2023: crypto, VR, and quantum computing still seem far from mainstream adoption. 

We dive a little into the half-life of skills, which seem to be shrinking, especially in IT. Got any resolutions to learn something new this year?

And what about the data we use for training? We highlight a comment from Kian Katanforoosh, a lecturer who helped create Stanford's Deep Learning course with Andrew Ng, who says we'll run out of high quality data as soon as 2030.

A big thanks and congrats to Stack Overflow user  Corn3lius for helping to answer a question and being awarded a life boat badge: How can I create spoiler text?

SPONSORED BY DOIT

The broken nose in jail scam is on the rise. With AI improvements, it’ll get harder to spot. 

OWASP, a non-profit dedicated to software security, tracks the top ten security risks for LLMs.

We’ve spoken with DoiT on the podcast before about LLM hallucinations. 

DoiT’s sales pitch is simple: they provide technology and expertise to clients who want to use the cloud, free of charge, with the big cloud providers paying the bills.

It was a pandemic, Olivia was on maternity leave after giving birth, and she also had a toddler to take care of. Somehow she still managed to build a website, macovidvaccines.com, that provided far better service than what was available through government and private industry.

You can find out more about Olivia on the sites below. 

Twitter

Website

LinkedIn

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+?.

Ben is now the full time IT department for his two sons, one of whom is in kindergarten and one in first grade. The children have transitioned from public school to Zoom, Google Classroom, Konstella, FaceTime, and five million other services. 

Paul's neighbors in his apartment building are digging old laptops out of storage and leaving them in front of his door. They bleach them first, so that they are 100% disinfected. Then Paul slaps on a little Ubuntu/Lubuntu and those old machines are suddenly zippy netbooks that help adults and kids work and study from home. 

Sara reveals she has an amazing "resting interested face" - a skill that makes her the most popular person at any live talk in front of an audience. 

That box of old cables finally came in handy! We shout out our lifeboat badge winners, as we near the major milestone of 1000 lifeboats. Keep them coming.

Stacklok helps developers and open-source communities build safer software, secure the supply chain, and choose safer dependencies. Trusty is their free-to-use service that employs a statistical analysis of author/repo activity and a package’s source of origin to assess its trustworthiness.

Craig cofounded the Kubernetes project, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

He is also the former VP of Research and Development at VMWare.

Follow Craig on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Stack Overflow user netcorefan, who earned a Lifeboat badge with their answer to Need a workaround to access ReadOnlySpan inside a function that returns an IEnumerable.

You can learn more about OverflowAI and sign up to be an alpha tester here.

You can check out Ellen and Jody on Linkedin. 

Congrats to Ben Lindsay, who was awarded a Lifeboat badge for his answer to: How can I divide each element in a tuple by a single integer?

You can learn all about 100 Days of Code on their website.

Alex also published a newsletter about habit forming and self-improvement. You can learn more about that and subscribe here.

If you want to follow Alex on Twitter, you can find him here.

This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Chris, who helped a user understand why ComponentDidCatch was not working in their react-native app.

Following the success of the Mac Mini, Windows is getting into the tiny computer business. Oh, and it’s running on ARM chips. Oh, and Visual Studio and VS Code will now offer native ARM support.

Video games got a lot of us into programming thanks to their openness to mods. It’s what made The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind such a hit 20 years ago. 

Minecraft may live forever thanks to its modding community and parent-friendly tools. Just don’t be surprised when you have to ban local kids for virtual arson and murder. 

The old security exploit hits are still out there: cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and cross-site request forgery. Could be because 86% of developers do not view application security as a top priority.

Two great questions today: 

Is it illegal to ride a drunk horse?

 and a Lifeboat-worthy response from Markus Meskanen on 

Checking if a number is not in range in Python

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

Plex.tv is a hub for live TV, on-demand streaming content, and your own media library. 

Read the full story of Fast’s speedy shutdown.

Following the ultimate personal security checklist will protect your digital security and privacy—but it might also raise eyebrows at the FBI.

Today’s tech recs: Ben recommends TENS therapy, an electrical alternative to acupuncture (it’s tech, technically). Cassidy recommends Covatar for unique, personalized digital art like NFT avatars.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Joseph Silber for their answer to What’s a regex that matches all numbers except 1, 2 and 25?.

Why can’t configuration be made simple? 

Apple is making it easier for users to repair their iPhones with used parts.

Texas is swapping human graders for AI.

Automattic (owner of WordPress) is acquiring Beeper for $125M.

Silicon Valley or not, San Francisco’s train system still uses floppy disks. But don’t worry, an upgrade is coming—in 2030.

Shoutout to Bite code, who earned a Stellar Question badge with How do I change the URI (URL) for a remote Git repository?.

Alex graduated from NYU with a degree in computer science and worked as a developer and engineer at several startups in New York City, eventually assuming senior roles like engineering team lead and director of technology. 

Along the way, however, she found herself face with discrimination and harassment. In 2016, she dramatically altered her appearance, an experience she discusses in a humorous and poignant talk - Shaving My Head Made me a Better Developer. 

In 2016 she read the book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and was inspired to  do more to help people impacted by the justice system. She began organizing donations of unused laptops, and then moved on to help found the Code Cooperative in October of 2016.  the group describes itself as a community of people who learn, use, and build technology to create life changing possibilities for individuals and communities impacted by incarceration.

If you want to get involved, you can donate a laptop or make a financial contribution here. If you would like to volunteer as a mentor, you can apply here.

GitClear is a developer-friendly code review tool that aims to deliver higher developer satisfaction and faster releases. Check out their blog or find them on GitHub.

GitClear’s research focuses on how AI code-gen tools have impacted code quality (and not in a good way).

Find Bill on LinkedIn.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction 

00:30 Background of the Research

06:09 Business Model of GitClear

09:46 Copy Pasted Code

10:26 Churn Code

12:21 Code Readability

14:12 Code Suggestions and Auto-Completion

16:34 Drop in Moved Code

23:18 Larger Token Windows

26:31 Improving Gen AI

28:46 Conclusion

ICYMI: A backdoor in XZ, a popular open-source compression utility, highlights the risks of relying on open-source software maintained by small teams. Read more about the cyberattack here.

Apple’s new LLM, Ferret, could help Siri understand the user interfaces of mobile displays, potentially expanding the capabilities of Apple’s digital assistant. 

Shoutout to Stack Overflow user cheese1756, who earned a Great Question badge by asking How do I ensure that whitespace is preserved in Markdown?.

Find out why others have joined Shell. 

If you want to experience being a developer at one of the world’s largest energy companies, they’re hiring.

Amber Webb is on LinkedIn.

Naresh Kumar is on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Tomasz Kula, today’s Lifeboat badge winner, for dropping some knowledge on Multiple components binding with the same reactive form control update issue and saving it from ruin. 

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".

In today’s podcast, Matt, Ceora, and Cassidy reflect on Cara’s founder journey.

Cara shares her experiences living in New York and San Francisco— and why she and her co-founder ultimately located Stashpad in North Carolina.

She elaborates on the exact steps that she took to pivot her startup following limited initial interest in V1 of the product.

Despite being in the Bay Area and working at Twilio, she was struggling to meet people because her full brain power was going to her products.

She shares what it was like for her and her co-founder to hire Stashpad’s first employees.

The group discusses Stashpad’s pathway to monetization in the context of developers wanting free tools.

Follow, Ceora, Matt, Cassidy, and Cara.

Marchingband gets today’s lifeboat badge for their answer to the question about running C or C++ code from Node.js in an efficient way. 

Software is eating the world, but what's on the menu for dessert?

This week we chat about the best way for engineers to give feedback to executives. Paul explains the Purple room method they use at Postlight. Sara references Zero to One and why engineers and marketers have so much trouble communicating.

As a member of a marketing department , it's true our job is to see the glass as half full. But sometimes the point of the exercise is to be aspirational. Police learn how to be suspicious, marketers learn how to sell, and engineers look for what's broken so they can fix it.

We chat about the ten thousand or so parking meters that went on the fritz in New York City. The company says it was the result of a fraud prevention protocol. Was this a Y2K style glitch or a logic bomb?

Sara finds the developer angle on the recent rift in the British Royal Family. New technologies always reshape the Monarchy's relationship to the public. From the first radio address to the televised coronation, to a Wordpress website and an Instagram post, each generation tries to use the modern medium to their advantage.

We discuss a fairly devious bit of brilliant parenting. If your young child wants to be a YouTube star, and you can build them their own private version of the platform, with randomly generated likes and none of the cyber-bullying, are you protecting them? Or, perhaps, crafting a Truman Show for the internet age that will have consequences down the road.

Last but not least, we check out the Blazor tag, one of the fastest growing areas of interest on Stack Overflow. It's a framework that extends the established Razor syntax. The goal is to enable developers to write client-side code in .NET, backed by WebAssembly.

We discuss how a demand for more diverse clip art helped lay the foundation for some of the first black owned and operated software companies in the United States, and the ways in which social media has helped to empower a new generation of voices to demand change in the tech industry and beyond. 

You can check out some of the pioneering work on building digital community at Afrolink, NetNoir, and UBP.

McIlwain also draws attention to the history of computer technology as a tool of police surveillance, going all the way back to the Police Beat algorithm in 1968.  

You can find out more about Prof McIlwain here. You can purchase his book here.

We also spend some time this week talking about our new community initiatives. 

Sara, along with Juan Garza from our community team, wrote a big post outlining all the work we’re hoping to do in 2020 and how we’re using data to inform the changes we are making. 

Keep an eye out for future posts in this series, The Loop,  and let us know what you want to see by lending your voice to our Through The Loop survey.

Al Sweigert is the author of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python and many other books about programming. You can read them all for free here.

His scroll art project introduces beginners to programming by letting them turn loops and print() into animated ASCII art.

Al joined us from a retreat at the Brooklyn, NY-based Recurse Center, which offers free, self-directed retreats for programmers. Learn how to apply here.

PyCon US 2024 is May 15-23, 2024, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Connect with Al through his website.

Shoutout to user Alex. S., who asked Stack Overflow’s most popular Python question ever: What does the "yield" keyword do in Python?. It’s helped 3.3 million people and counting.

Graybeard conference alert! Eran and Ryan both started their technology journeys on the venerable Commodore 64. 

During his academic days, Eran helped to map all the BGP (background gateway protocol) gateways in the world. This got a fair bit of press recently during the six hour Facebook outage.

Nexar provides smart dashcams and an app that help cars understand the roads around them. 

While networked cameras on every car could be a privacy nightmare, Nexar says that they have privacy as a foundational part of the SDLC.

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

Most people are working remotely these days, but offices may return, and even if they don't, these skills could come in handy. Teamwork, persuasion, communication, and leadership, just a few of the things you can learn in this Technion course.

Big thanks to TwilioQuest, which has gotten Ben, the worst coder in the world, practicing his Javascript skills again.

What gives you that special feeling: a nice, sharp recursive function or a deep, winding ternary statement?  Paul and Sara debate the finer points of feeling smugly satisfied with your own code.

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

Audio tape drives are real!  Check out this Retrocomputing question about how the Commodore 64 audio interface worked. 

If you  want  to remember something better, a 2014 study says you should write it out by hand. 

Rennie worked at Blackberry, and Ben remembered his colleagues at the Verge fondly hoping for their comeback. In fact, here's Ben hoping for their comeback!

We did a podcast on moving from engineer to manager, which Rennie said was one of the hardest things to do. 

Rennie gave a shoutout to the book he's reading now, The Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson. 

Rennie works on our Platform team, which works on all of our reusable stuff, including our design system, Stacks. 

This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Vinzzz for explaining how to Create an array of random numbers in Swift.

Robin is the author of a practical handbook for Selenium test automation.

Connect with Robin on LinkedIn, Twitter, or via his website. 

Shoutout to user2651084, who earned a Great Question badge by asking How do I reset the Jupyter/IPython input prompt numbering?.