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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Unpacking the 2024 Developer Survey results
Read the blog post or dive into the results of our 2024 Developer Survey.A few highlights to get you started: most popular technologies,most admired and desired programming languages,feelings about/use of AI coding tools, andwhat we know about the global developer community.Speaking of our developer community, Stack Overflow user Frank earned a Stellar Question badge by wondering How to use C++ in Go.
How developer experience can escape the spreadsheet
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?.
How Stack Overflow fends off scraping bots
As Josh explains, DDoS attacks aim to take down a website, while bot scrapers try to gather as much data as possible without getting caught.Josh Zhang is a staff site reliability engineer (SRE) at Stack Overflow. Connect with him on LinkedIn.ICYMI: In 2022, Josh wrote an article for our blog about how Stack defends itself against DDoS attacks.Stack Overflow user Serge Ballesta won a Lifeboat badge for answering What does |= mean in c++.
On the web, data doesn’t define us. It creates us.
Jannis Kallinikos is a coauthor of Data Rules: Reinventing the Market Economy (MIT Press, 2024) with Cristina Alaimo, which lays out a framework for a new social science focused on the socioeconomic changes driven by data. You can read an excerpt from Data Rules on our blog here.Explore more of Dr. Kallinikos’s work.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Ebrahim Ghasemi for answering What is the structure of an application protocol data unit (APDU) command and response?
The problem with the tech debt mindset
Chelsea Troy defines technical debt and maintenance load in her blog post, “Stop saying ‘technical debt.’”Learn more about technical bankruptcy in this blog post, “Monitoring debt builds up faster than software teams can pay it off.”Joel Spolsky’s classic blog post on avoiding rewriting code from scratch – Things you should never do, part I.Technical debt as explained by Ward Cunningham, who coined the term.Code as an asset, a conversation from Hacker News.Middleware is the “software glue” that provides services to applications beyond those available from the operating system. Ratpack framework is a toolkit for creating high performance web applications.React is a front end javascript library.jQuery is a JavaScript library designed to simplify HTML.Questions about functional programming.User shout out! Nikoksr received the lifeboat badge after answering a question related to math.pow.
Java, but why? The state of Java in 2024
You can connect with Lenny Primak at Flow Logix, X, LinkedIn, Github, or Mastodon. Got questions about Java? Check out the site.Apache Groovy is a Java programming language. Virtual Threads reduce the effort put into writing and maintaining code as well as observing high-throughput concurrent applications.Apache Shiro is an open-source security framework that can do authentication, authorization, cryptography, and session management. Jakarta EE, or Jakarta Enterprise Edition, is a suite of services that helps developers write enterprise applications for the Java platform.
The framework helping devs build LLM apps
LlamaIndex is a data framework for building LLM applications. Check out the open-source framework or get started with the developer community, LlamaHub.Looking for a deeper understanding of RAG? Start with our guide.Wondering how to import `SimpleDirectoryReader` from LlamaIndex? This question has you covered.Jerry Chen is a partner at Greylock. Connect with him on LinkedIn.Read Jerry Lu’s posts on the LlamaIndex blog or connect with him on LinkedIn.
Why we built Staging Ground
Learn more about Staging Ground on our blog or in the help center.Find Kyle on Linked, GitHub, and Twitter.Spevacus is a full stack developer and Stack Overflow moderator. They’re a participant in Charcoal, a user-run group that fights spam and rude/abusive content across the Stack Exchange network.
We chat search from both sides now
Stack Overflow and Elastic are collaborating to improve the search experience using vector search and generative AI. Learn more about the new AI features for Stack Overflow for Teams, including Enhanced Search.Learn more about the Elastic platform, including vector search. Developers can start building here.Connect with Paul, Steffi, and Gregor on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user chepner won a Lifeboat badge for answering How do I use __repr__ with multiple arguments?.
What can devs do about code review anxiety?
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.
Happy people make better products
Still thinking about developer happiness and productivity? Read Eira’s article about the real 10x developers among us.Connect with Ben Borra through his website or LinkedIn.Asked and answered: Stack Overflow user Jian earned a Great Question badge with How do I close a frozen SSH session?.
How to build open source apps in a highly regulated industry
Before Medplum, Reshma founded and exited two startups in the healthcare space – MedXT (managing medical images online acquired by Box) and Droplet (at-home diagnostics company acquired by Ro). Reshma has a B.S. in computer science and a Masters of Engineering from MIT.You can learn more about Medplum here and check out their Github, which has over 1,200 stars, here.You can learn more about Khilnani on her website, GitHub, and on LinkedIn.Congrats to Stack Overflow user Kvam for earning a Lifeboat Badge with an answer to the question: What is the advantage of using a Bitarray when you can store your bool values in a bool[]?
A very special 5-year-anniversary edition of the Stack Overflow podcast!
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?
Say goodbye to "junior" engineering roles
How would all this work in practice? Of course, any metric you set out can easily become a target that developers look to game. With Snapshot Reviews, the goal is to get a high level overview of a software team’s total activity and then use AI to measure the complexity of the tasks and output.If a pull request attached to a Jira ticket is evaluated as simple by the system, for example, and a programmer takes weeks to finish it, then their productivity would be scored poorly. If a coder pushes code changes only once or twice a week, but the system rates them as complex and useful, then a high score would be awarded. You can learn more about Snapshot Reviews here.You can learn more about Flatiron Software here.Connect with Kirim on LinkedIn here.Congrats to Stack Overflow user Cherry who earned a great question badge for asking: Is it safe to use ALGORITHM=INPLACE for MySQL?
Making ETL pipelines a thing of the past
RelationalAI’s first big partner is Snowflake, meaning customers can now start using their data with GenAI without worrying about the privacy, security, and governance hassle that would come with porting their data to a new cloud provider. The company promises it can also add metadata and a knowledge graph to existing data without pushing it through an ETL pipeline.You can learn more about the company’s services here.You can catch up with Cassie on LinkedIn.Congrats to Stack Overflow user antimirov for earning a lifeboat badge by providing a great answer to the question: How do you efficiently compare two sets in Python?