The Stack Overflow podcast is a weekly conversation about working in software development, learning to code, and the art and culture of computer programming. Hosted by Paul Ford and Ben Popper, the series features questions from our community, interviews with fascinating guests, and hot takes on what’s happening in tech. Founded in 2008, Stack Overflow is empowering the world to develop technology through collective knowledge. It’s best known for being the largest, most trusted online community for developers and technologists. More than 100 million people come to Stack Overflow every month to ask questions, help solve coding problems, and develop new skills.
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For a long time, tech culture has focused too narrowly on technical skills; this has resulted in a tech community that too often puts companies and code over people. Greater Than Code is a podcast that invites the voices of people who are not heard from enough in tech: women, people of color, trans and/or queer folks, to talk about the human side of software development and technology. Greater Than Code is providing a vital platform for these conversations, and developing new ideas of what it means to be a technologist beyond just the code.
Featuring an ongoing panel of racially and gender diverse tech panelists, the majority of podcast guests so far have been women in tech! We’ve covered topics including imposter syndrome, mental illness, sexuality, unconscious bias and social justice. We also have a major focus on skill sets that tech too often devalues, like team-building, hiring, community organizing, mentorship and empathy. Each episode also includes a transcript.
We have an active Slack community that members can join by pledging as little as $1 per month via Patreon. (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode)
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What Gemini means for the GenAI boom
Gemini, Google’s new AI model, is great at competitive programming, among other things.AI Explained is a YouTube channel that covers the latest developments in AI.One problem with regulating AI is that the technology evolves (much) faster than regulators can.Wikifunctions is an open repository of code that anyone can use or contribute to.Did we need another study to tell us that longer commutes are bad for mental health? Probably not, but here’s one anyway.Are governments spying on you through push notifications? Sounds like it! In fact, push notifications are a privacy nightmare.
One weird trick for teaching users your software
CommandBar is a user assistance platform (UAP). Their flagship product, Copilot, is an embedded user assistant agent that companies can configure to help their users with on-demand help, including interactive walkthroughs and personalized responses. Read James’s article about why CommandBar built Copilot, then get started with their docs.Follow James on LinkedIn and Twitter.Follow CommandBar on LinkedIn and Twitter.If you’ve ever wondered Why "Yarn 2" is Yarn 3.0.1, Lifeboat badge winner Ilias Karim has your answer.
Are LLMs the end of computer programming (as we know it)?
Do LLMs herald the end of computer programming (as we know it)? A Harvard lecture weighs in on this contentious topic.An epic hardware bug story.Question from the academic trenches: How bad will it look to prospective employers if you refuse to defend your PhD? (Answer: Pretty bad.)Another intriguing question: Were postal pneumatic tubes in Berlin really cleaned with wine?The Jetsons misled us about many aspects of the future, from flying cars to the role of pneumatics, but they were onto something with the series of tubes.Before influencers and social media algorithms, there were coolhunters.Congrats to Stack Overflow user tjati, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering What does 'HTML is escaping' mean?.
Will developers return to hostile offices?
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.
Can GenAI 10X developer productivity?
Bito AI is an AI coding tool that helps developers work more productively with features like code completion within the IDE and personalized answers drawn from your codebase. Get started with their docs here.ICYMI: Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is a way of addressing LLM hallucinations and outdated training data.Listen to our recent episode about how an original architect of Jira is rethinking meaningful engineering metrics.Connect with Anand on LinkedIn or Twitter.com. Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Jan Kardaš, whose answer to Go: Retrieve a string from between two characters or other strings earned them a Lifeboat badge.
Cloudflare Workers have a new skill: AI inference-as-a-service
Cloudflare is a cloud provider used by almost 20% of all websites. Developers new to Cloudflare can get started here.Cloudflare recently launched Workers AI, an open, pay-as-you-go AI inference-as-a-service platform that lets developers run machine learning models on the Cloudflare network from their own code. Developers can get started here.On a related note, read Ryan’s article exploring the infrastructure and code behind edge functions or check out his conversation with Vercel CTO Malte Ubl.Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is a strategy that helps address both LLM hallucinations and out-of-date training data.Connect with Rita on LinkedIn.Connect with Cassidy through her website.Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Bamieh, whose answer to What does the function call app.use(cors()) do? earned them a Lifeboat badge.
The AI assistant trained on your company’s data
Sana automates user enrollment, training reminders, and other manual/admin tasks associated with onboarding and learning. Sana AI, their AI assistant, is trained on a company’s data so employees can self-serve the knowledge they need.On a related note, listen to our interview with Gašper Beguš, director of the Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, about his research into how LLMs and humans acquire language.You can also read about how Stack Overflow implemented semantic search.Connect with Joel on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user Donagh Hatton received a well-earned Lifeboat badge with their answer to Why is StringBuilder much faster than String?.
Build vs. buy doesn't matter. Tool adoption does.
SPONSORED BY CHRONOSPHEREEpisode notes:Chronosphere is introducing Lens, a cloud-native observability tool to view data flows between services. At Uber, Rob created M3, an open-source metrics engine compatible with Prometheus. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, ralf htp, for their answer to How to read an image in Python OpenCV. If you want to meet Rob and the Chronosphere team, they’ll be at AWS re:Invent from Nov. 27 to Dec. 1.
Trust as a service for validating OSS dependencies
ICYMI, listen to part one of this conversation.Craig is the cofounder and CEO of Stacklok, which helps developers and open-source communities build safer software, secure the supply chain, and choose safer dependencies. Stacklok’s free-to-use service, Trusty, 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.Craig is on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user mprivat earned a well-deserved Lifeboat badge by answering Abstract class extending concrete classes.
How the cocreator of Kubernetes is helping developers build safer software
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.
He helped create Jira. Now he's searching for meaningful engineering metrics
Sleuth helps engineering teams systematically improve efficiency by tracking speed and release quality, preventing slowdowns and bottlenecks, and removing toil and unnecessary friction. Try it for free or see how teams are using Sleuth. Interested in the automations they offer for teams, check out their public marketplace.Dylan was an original architect on JIRA, so he’s not exactly new to issue- and project-tracking software.DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) is a research program that tries to understand what drives successful software delivery and operations performance. According to Dylan, one thing the best development teams have in common is their culture of continuous learning.Connect with Dylan on LinkedIn.
Tomasz Tunguz: From Java engineer to investor in eight unicorns
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?.
Why Stack Overflow is embracing Svelte
Giamir is the tech lead for Stacks, Stack Overflow’s design system.Svelte is a tool for building web apps. Delve into their docs or, if you’re brand-new to Svelte, start with this interactive tutorial.More than 90,000 devs responded to our 2023 Developer Survey where Svelte was ranked the second-most admired web framework. Connect with Giamir via his website or LinkedIn. Today we’re shouting out a topical question asked by Félix Paradis, who (like 73,000 others) wanted to know How to pass parameters to on:click in Svelte?.
Zero trust with zero problems
Alex and cofounder/CTO Paul Querna started ConductorOne because they saw that traditional identity governance (IGA) and privileged access management (PAM) needed to be rethought for cloud-forward companies.Before he cofounded Conductor One, Alev Bovee was a senior director of product management for zero trust and security at Okta.Read Ben’s article about how Computers are learning to decode the language of our minds.Would you trade an iris scan for some crypto? Sure, what could go wrong?Connect with Alex on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user Matthew Watson earned a Lifeboat badge for helping more than 32,000 people by answering Checking if an array is null or empty.
Forget the 10X engineer—it’s about building a 10X culture
Find out why others have joined Shell. Wondering what it’s like to be a developer at one of the world’s biggest energy companies? They’re hiring.Behavior-driven development is a conceptual approach to software development that calls for collaboration and alignment between developers, testers, and domain experts.One of the new technologies James and Tristan helped introduce at Shell is Kafka, an open-source distributed event streaming platform. Check out their docs here.Engineering teams at Shell use Stack Overflow for Teams to capture and share information. Get started for free here.Congratulations to David Snabel, winner of a Stellar Question badge for How do I see which version of Swift I’m using?.