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

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

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

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

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

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+?.

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".

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.

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

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

Connect with Mauricio on LinkedIn. 

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner 

The Nail

, who pinned a solid answer on the question, 

if->return vs. if->else efficiency

.

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

Dagna is on LinkedIn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simon is on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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

You can follow Paige on Twitter or her LinkedIn.

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

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

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

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

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

Connect with Brendan on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.

Connect with Michael on Twitter.

Connect with Fred on LinkedIn.

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

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

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

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

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

Stop by the Platform Engineering Slack channel.

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

Find Luca on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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

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

Episode notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ICYMI: The Pope coat was real in our hearts.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Jean is on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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

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

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

Episode notes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connect with Alura CEO Paulo Silveira on LinkedIn.

Connect with Alura Chief Education Officer Guilherme Silveira on LinkedIn.

Connect with Roberta Arcoverde on LinkedIn.

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

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

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

Follow Fermyon on GitHub. Matt is on LinkedIn.

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

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

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

Connect with Alex on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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

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

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

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

Find Marco on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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

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

Episode notes:

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

Learn more about Ripple at their home page. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connect with Dean on Twitter or Telegram

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

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

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

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

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

Congrats to 

Lifeboat badge

 winner 

metakeule

 for answering 

How can I get an error message in a string in Go?

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

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

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

Follow The Browser Company on Twitter.

Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Connect with Dustin on LinkedIn or Twitter.

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

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

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".

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

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

Episode notes

Try MongoDB Atlas on AWS for free.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Connect with Radek on LinkedIn. 

Find Cobih on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Longtime Stacker Yaakov Ellis is also on LinkedIn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode notes:

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

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

Connect with Frank Kilcommins on Twitter and LinkedIn. 

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

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

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

Learn more about Joy on her LinkedIn.

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

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

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

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

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

Connect with Wesley on LinkedIn.

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

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

Episode notes:

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

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

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

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

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner desertnaut for their answer to 

What is the meaning of exclamation and question marks in Jupyter Notebook?

.

Flourish is a fintech platform for registered investment advisers (RIAs) that was recently acquired by MassMutual.

After studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon, Christine spent almost 12 years at Goldman Sachs, where she was VP of fixed systematic marketing making, responsible for automating electronic trades of interest-rate products like US Treasury bonds and interest rate swaps.

Christine’s time at the world’s second-largest investment bank gave her a healthy wariness of Frankencode, the scourge of legacy stacks everywhere.

Find Christine on LinkedIn.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner amirali for their answer to I can't set up JDK on Visual Studio Code.

A chemist by training, Jamie serves as Senior Research Manager of Quantum Applications and Software at IBM Quantum, which offers cloud access to advanced quantum computers capable of solving highly complex, highly interconnective, and dynamic problems.

Learn about the superconducting qubits IBM Quantum uses to program quantum computers. (Need to back up a bit? Learn what a qubit is.)

Jamie explains how a heavy hex architecture allows IBM to limit crosstalk between qubits to ensure coherence times long enough to complete practical calculations within hours, not years.

IBM Quantum’s Qiskit Runtime allows users to optimize workloads and efficiently execute them on quantum systems at scale. 

As you might expect, Jamie and her colleagues are already thinking hard about the intersection of quantum and AI. Learn about System Two, IBM’s next-generation quantum system.

Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Congrats are in order for Stellar Question badge winner Dmitry z for asking How can I use environment variables in docker-compose?.

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.

Tribe is a distributed community of AI industry leaders, including ML engineers and data scientists, dedicated to helping companies apply machine learning to their business operations. Explore their case studies to see Tribe’s expertise in action.

Founder and CEO Jaclyn Rice Nelson formerly worked at Google, partnering with enterprise companies and incubating new ventures. As an early employee at CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth equity firm, she advised companies including Airbnb on scaling technical infrastructure, ensuring data security, and boosting growth with machine learning.

As we explored on our blog last year, the generative AI space has been expanding rapidly. Many of Tribe’s specialists have opted out of full-time employment, but are willing to provide companies without internal AI expertise with the skills they need to leverage this rapidly evolving technology inside their business.   

Connect with Jackie on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is PM 2Ring for their answer to Sort a list to form the largest possible number.

Modern networked applications generate a lot of data, and every business wants to make the most of that data. Most of the time, that means moving production data through some transformation process to get it ready for the analytics process. But what if you could have in-app analytics? What if you could generate insights directly from production data?

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Stanimira Vlaeva, Developer Advocate at MongoDB, and Fredric Favelin, Technical Director, Partner Presales at MongoDB, about how a serverless database can minimize the distance between producing data and understanding it.

Episode notes:

Stanimira talked a lot about using BigQuery with MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud Run. If you need to skill up on these three tools, check out this tutorial. 

Once you’ve got the hang of it, get your data connected with Confluent Connetors. 

With Atlas, you can transform your data in JavaScript. 

Connect with Stanimira on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

Connect with Fredric on LinkedIn. 

Congrats to Stellar Question winner SubniC  for  Get name of current script in Python. 

Oso is authorization as a service. Check out the docs or explore use cases.

Sam’s post “Why Authorization is Hard” covered what makes authorization challenging, some approaches to solving it, and their associated tradeoffs. You can also watch Sam’s talk at PyCon US 2022. Since it’s impossible to address everything that makes authorization hard in just 5,000 words, Sam is currently at work on a follow-up article called “Why Authorization is Hard Part II.”

Sam first learned web development via Rails for Zombies, a beginner-level Rails course. In creating Oso, he tasked himself with “putting rails on authorization.”

ICYMI: Read Sam’s post about best practices for securing REST APIs or listen to his previous podcast appearance, where we talked about how Oso makes security easier for developers.

Find Sam on LinkedIn or GitHub.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is OscarRyz for their answer to I am trying to solve '15 puzzle', but I get 'OutOfMemoryError'.

Retool is a development platform that lets users—95% of whom are engineers—build internal tools quickly with a drag-and-drop interface.

Read David’s account of how Retool won early sales deals in the company’s Operator Playbook series.

Connect with David on LinkedIn.

Today we’re shouting out Stellar Question badge winner ahajib for asking How to convert a list to a dictionary with indexes as values?.

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.

Emery Berger, Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, joins Ben for a conversation about the impact of AI on academia. As a young sci-fi fan, he was fascinated by computers that could spit out solutions (a fascination that survived exposure to BASIC and COBOL). Now his CS students are using Copilot to do the same thing. How can educators (and students) adapt?

Episode notes:

Professor Emery Berger is a systems builder who studies “programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that transparently improve reliability, security, and performance.”

AI giveth and AI taketh away: an incredible tool for developers is creating new challenges for CS educators and students. Read Emery’s 2022 essay “Coping with Copilot.”

You can also find Emery on GitHub or Twitter.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is mbcrump for their answer to How do I generate a random integer in C#?.

With companies taking a long look at developer experience, it’s time to turn that attention on the humble pull request. The folks at LinearB took a look at a million PRs — four million review cycles involving around 25,000 developers — and found that it takes about five days to get through a review and merge the code. CI/CD has done wonders getting deployments down to a day or less; maybe it’s time for continuous merge next. 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with COO Dan Lines and CEO Ori Keren, co-founders of LinearB, about why PRs are the chokepoint in the software development lifecycle, uncovering and automating the hidden rules of review requests, and their free tool, gitStream, that’ll find the right reviewer for your PR right now. 

Episode notes: 

So why do reviews take so long? Context switches, team leads who review everything, and the bystander effect are top contenders.

Dan and Ori hope their gitStream tool can reduce the time PRs take by automating a lot of the hidden rules for reviews. Check it out at gitstream.cm or linearb.io/dev.

Dan Lines hosts his own podcast: Dev Interrupted. Check out this episode with Stack Overflow’s very own Ben Matthews.  

Connect with Dan Lines and Ori Keren on LinkedIn. 

Shoutout to Rudy Velthuis for throwing a Lifeboat to the question Why should EDX be 0 before using the DIV instruction?

It’s not just you: We all need subtitles now.

Google introduces MusicLM, a model that generates music from text. The examples are pretty-mind blowing and raise big questions about licensing and copyrights for non-AI creators.

Taking the uncanny valley to a new low? Nvidia’s streaming software now includes a feature that deepfakes eye contact.

Beware the potentially dangerous intersection of AI and stan Twitter.

Thanks to Siavash Kayal, a fan of the show and data engineer at Cleo, who sent along a great list of open-source data engineering projects folks can work on.

Today we’re shouting out Stellar Question badge winner Paragon for asking how to Open two instances of a file in a single Visual Studio session.

John spent 25 years at Oracle before joining Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO (OCTO), a team that’s been called the company’s “secret weapon” in collaborating with major customers to solve their tech problems and drive long-term deals.

For more on his approach to tech and business, you can read this article he wrote on the seven points of driving lasting innovation

Learn more about OCTO from Business Insider.

Settle down for a good read: the full story of how the BBC’s microcomputer changed history.

Connect with John on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Today’s 

Lifeboat badge

 winner is 

vscjones

 for their answer to 

How can I find the number of business days in the current month with JavaScript?

.

Naturally, tech layoffs are top-of-mind for many of us. Despite comparisons to the dot-com bubble, what we’re seeing right now is different. Here’s what the tech and media layoffs really tell us about the economy.

In praise of analog technology: why Millennials and Gen Z are springing for paper maps.

Make Time, a way of “rethinking the defaults of constant busyness and distraction so you can focus on what matters every day,” was developed in response to always-on Silicon Valley culture.

Wifi routers can now be used to detect the physical positions of humans and map their bodies in 3D. Terrifyingly dystopian or interestingly practical? Why not both?

In recent accessibility news, a brain-computer interface (BCI) that converts speech-related neural activity into text allows a person with paralysis due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to communicate at 62 words per minute, nearly 3.5 times faster than before. From the abstract: “These results show a feasible path forward for using intracortical speech BCIs to restore rapid communication to people with paralysis who can no longer speak.” 

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Holger for their answer to Sort an array containing numbers using a 'for' loop.

Astro is a site builder that lets you use the frontend tools you already love (React, Vue, Svelte, and more) to build content-rich, performant websites. 

Astro extracts your UI into smaller, isolated components (“islands”) and replaces unused JavaScript with lightweight HTML for faster loads and time-to-interactive (TTI).

Ben and Nate explain why Astro’s compiler was written in Go (“seemed like fun”).

To learn more about Astro, start with their docs or see what people are doing with the framework.

Connect with Ben on LinkedIn, GitHub, or via his website.

Connect with Nate on GitHub.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Aurand for their answer to How to convert list to queue to achieve FIFO.

In complex service-oriented architectures, failure can happen in individual servers and containers, then cascade through your system. Good engineering takes into account possible failures. But how do you test whether a solution actually mitigates failures without risking the ire of your customers? That’s where chaos engineering comes in, injecting failures and uncertainty into complex systems so your team can see where your architecture breaks. 

On this sponsored episode, our fourth in the series with Intuit, Ben and Ryan chat with Deepthi Panthula, Senior Product Manager, and Shan Anwar, Principal Software Engineer, both of Intuit about how use self-serve chaos engineering tools to control the blast radius of failures, how game day tests and drills keep their systems resilient, and how their investment in open-source software powers their program. 

Episode notes: 

Sometimes old practices work in new environments. The Intuit team uses Failure Mode Effect Analysis, (FMEA), a procedure developed by the US military in 1949, to ensure that their developers understand possible points of failure before code makes it to production. 

The team uses Litmus Chaos to inject failures into their Kubernetes-based system and power their chaos engineering efforts. It’s open source and maintained by Intuit and others. 

If you’ve been following this series, you’d know that Intuit is a big fan of open-source software. Special shout out to Argo Workflow, which makes their compute-intensive Kubernetes jobs work much smoother. 

Connect on LinkedIn with Deepthi Panthula and Zeeshan (Shan) Anwar.

If you want to see what Stack Overflow users are saying about chaos engineering, check out 

Chaos engineering best practice

, asked by 

User NingLee

 two years ago.

In a win for accessibility, GitHub Copilot now responds to voice commands, allowing developers to code using their voices.

Speaking of accessibility, learn how Santa Monica Studio worked with disabled gamers and the community to build accessibility into God of War Ragnarök.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has determined that lab-grown meat is safe to eat.

Looking for some high-quality entertainment content? Look no further than Simone Giertz’s YouTube channel, where she builds robots to (among other things) wash her hair and wake her up with a slap in the face.

Blast from the past: Listen to our episode with MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner ralf htp for their answer to How to listen for and react to Ace Editor change events.

First, some self-administered back-patting for the Stack Overflow editorial team: great engineering blogs give tech companies an edge (The New York Times says so). 

Hiring aside, engineering blogs are fresh sources of knowledge, insight, and entertainment for anyone working in tech. You can learn a lot from, for instance, blog posts that break down an outage or security incident and detail how engineers got things up and running again. One classic of the genre: Amazon’s explanation of how one engineer brought the internet to its knees. And here’s an example from our own blog. 

When you’ve finished catching up on the Stack Overflow blog, check out those from Netflix and Uber.

Good news for late-night impulse shoppers: Instagram is removing the shopping tag from the home feed, reports The Verge. Is this a response to widespread user pushback, and does this herald the end of New Instagram? We can hope.

Sony announces Project Leonardo, an accessibility controller kit for PS5.

Did you know? Using only Tetris, you can build a machine capable of universal computation.

Developer advocate Matt Kiernander is moving on to his next adventure. If you’re looking for a developer advocate or engineer, connect with him on LinkedIn or email him.

One of Matt’s favorite conversations on the podcast was 

our episode with Mitchell Hashimoto

, cofounder and CEO of HashiCorp. It’s worth a (re)listen.

At an SaaS company like Intuit that has hundreds of services spread out across multiple products, maintaining development velocity at scale means baking some of the features that every service needs into the architecture of their systems. That’s where a service mesh comes in. It automatically adds features like observability, traffic management, and security to every service in the network without adding any code. 

In this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Anil Attuluri, principal software engineer, and Yasen Simeonov, senior product manager, both of Intuit, about how their engineering organization uses a service mesh to solve problems, letting their engineers stay focused on writing business logic. Along the way, we discuss how the service mesh keeps all the financial data secure, how it moves network traffic to where it needs to go, and the open source software they’ve written on top of the mesh. 

Episode notes:

For those looking to get the same service mesh capabilities as Intuit, check out Istio, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project. 

In order to provide a better security posture for their products, each business case operates on a discrete network. But much of the Istio service mesh needs to discover services across all products. Enter Admiral, their open-sourced solution. 

When Intuit deploys a new service version, they can progressively scale the amount of traffic that hits it instead of the old version using Argo Rollouts. It’s better to find a bug in production on 1% of requests than 100%.

If you want to learn more about what Intuit engineering is doing, check out their blog. 

Congrats to Great Question badge winner, 

HelpMeStackOverflowMyOnlyHope

, for asking 

Detect whether input element is focused within ReactJS

There is a ton of great research to be found on Prof. Kapfhammer's website, including: 

• Flaky Tests: Finding and fixing unpredictable and harmful test cases
• Database Testing: Automatically testing relational database schemas
• Web Testing: Detecting and repairing poor responsive web page layout

We've written a bit about how Stack Overflow is upping its unit testing game and how you can evaluate multiple assertions in a single test.

Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Survivor, for answering the question: Is it possible to find out if a value exists twice in an arraylist?

Juri is currently Director of Developer Experience (Global) and Director of Engineering (Europe) at Nrwl, founded by former Googlers/Angular core team members Jeff Cross and Victor Savkin.

Nrwl has compiled everything you need to know about monorepos, plus the tools to build them, here.

Connect with Juri on LinkedIn or explore his website.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner penguin2718 for their answer to Storing loop output in a dataframe in R.

Any large organization with multiple products faces the challenge of keeping their brand identity unified without denying each product its own charisma. That’s where a design system can help developers avoid reinventing the wheel every time, say,  a new button gets created 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Demian Borba, Principal Product Manager, and Kelvin Nguyen, Senior Engineering Manager, both of Intuit. We chat about how their design system is evolving into a platform, how AI keeps their brand consistent, and why a design system doesn’t have to solve every use case. 

Episode notes

Treating a design system as a platform means providing a baseline of tokens—colors, typography, themes—and allowing developers to deviate so long as they use the right tokens. 

Alongside a company-wide push towards greater AI usage, Intuit’s design system team is beginning to leverage AI to help developers make better design decisions. As an example, they’re including typeahead functionality to suggest possible solutions to design decisions. 

The team is using a Figma plugin to manage a lot of the heavy lifting. Their presentation at Config 2022 built a lot of excitement for what’s possible. 

Congrats to RedVelvet, who won a great question badge for The most efficient way to remove first N elements in a list?

Find Kelvin  and Demian  on Linkedin.

LogRocket helps software teams create better experiences through a combination of session replay, error tracking, and product analytics.

LogRocket’s machine-learning layer, Galileo, cuts through the noise generated by conventional error monitoring and analytics tools to identify critical issues affecting users.

LogRocket is hiring, so check out their open roles or connect with Matt Arbesfeld on LinkedIn. You can also give LogRocket a free trial.

Adobe closed out 2022 and celebrated 40 years with an employee-only Katy Perry concert. Related: Ceora makes the case for virtual concerts.

DeepMind is teaching AI to play soccer, which naturally makes us think of QWOP.

ICYMI: Ghost calls out Substack and Substack responds.

BeReal is the iPhone app of the year. But not even Resident Youth Ceora knows anyone who actually uses it.

Some 2023 recommendations from the team: 

Ceora recommends Realworld (not to be confused with BeReal), an app that guides you through tasks and decisions big and small, from deciding on health insurance to improving your credit.

Cassidy recommends Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott.

Matt suggests fellow side hustlers check out The Freelance Manifesto: A Field Guide for the Modern Motion Designer by School of Motion founder Joey Korenman.

Ben recommends Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a terrific novel about a love triangle between indie video game creators, especially fun if you grew up with Oregon Trail, Myst, and Super Mario. 

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. 

If you want to read more about Jessica, you can check out the blog we worked on together for the launch of our Overflow Offline initiative. If you've ever wondered what it's like learning to code from an XML file of raw Stack Overflow data, be sure to check this episode out.

You can learn more about the Supreme Court case that led to Jessica's release here.

Her company's mission is to build a better justice system from the inside, specifically by educating incarcerated individuals so they can teach the next generation and have valuable skills upon release. Read more about Unlocked Labs here.

Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to mx0 for answering the question: How do you extract the 'src' attribute from an 'img' tag using Beautiful Soup?

Follow Ben on Twitter and if you enjoy the show, be sure to leave us a rating and review.

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. 

Ben asks Matt to explain Mastodon to him like he’s five. Matt says the experience feels a lot like…LinkedIn?

Matt explains that he took social media apps off his phone for a while…just to chill out. (Ed. note, they're already back on.)

We cover the latest AI to emerge that can write essays, jokes, and yes, some code.

While everyone’s confused about the state of social media and AI chat, physicists have created a wormhole using a quantum computer. (Though it may have been a publicity stunt.)

Follow Ben and Matt.

Shout out to Lifeboat Badge winner ralf htp for their answer to the question ‘how to listen for and react to Ace Editor change events.’ Your answer has helped more than 20,000+ people, so rock on.

Steve was working as an engineering manager at ShopStyle and found that an increasing amount of his team's time was spent working on custom requests from departments like marketing and sales. They tried moving to a headless CMS but the data and components couldn't keep up with ever evolving needs. They wanted a drag and drop system connected to their code, data, and components.

This pain point inspired him strike out on his own to create a new product. The vision was a tool that would allow colleagues from across a company to make changes to web pages without requesting dev time, but would also ensure that any changes made would be up to the standards of the design department and not introduce errors that engineering would then have to fix. 

Hence, the company's pitch for a plug & play system that integrates with your existing sites & apps. It relies on a few key ideas:

• API-based infrastructure that is native to your tech stack
• Works with any frontend or backend
• Build with your own data, like product catalogs or customer data platforms, to create rich, dynamic experiences

You can check it out for yourself over at Builder.io.

Follow Steve on Twitter and TikTok where he breaks down websites and effects he finds interesting.

Congrats to phoenisx for being awarded the Necromaner badge after answering the question: Property 'share' does not exist on type 'Navigator"? 

SPONSORED BY COMMERCE LAYER

Around the world, billions of people can sell their wares online, in part thanks to solutions that handle the complexities of securely and reliably managing transactions. Businesses, large and small, can sell directly to customers. But a lot of these ecommerce services provide a heavier surface than many need by managing product catalogs and requiring inflexible interfaces. 

On this sponsored podcast episode, Ben and Ryan talk with Filippo Conforti, co-founder of Commerce Layer, an API-only ecommerce platform that focuses on the transaction engine. We talk about his early years building ecommerce at Italian luxury brands, the importance of front-ends (and micro-frontends) to ecom, and how milliseconds of page load speed can cost millions. 

Episode notes

Conforti was the first Gucci employee building out their ecommerce, so he got to experience life in a fast-moving startup within a big brand. When he left five years later, the team had grown to around 100 people. 

The ecommerce space is crowded—one of Commerce Layer’s recent clients evaluated around 40 other platforms—but Conforti thinks Commerce Layer stands out by making any web page a shoppable experience. 

Conforti thinks composable commerce back ends that neglect the front end neutralize the benefits. Commerce Layer provides micro-frontends—standard web components that you can inject into any web page to create shoppable experiences. 

Getting your ecommerce platform as close to your customer makes real monetary difference. A report from Deloitte finds that a 100ms response time increase on mobile translates to an 8% increase in the conversion rate. 

Thanks to Mitch, today’s Lifeboat badge winner, for their answer to the question, How to get all weekends within a date range in C#? 

Webpack has been king for several years. Vercel wants folks to embrace Turbopack, but their claims about speed raised a lot of backlash after it was first announced. Lee explains why he thinks the Rust-based approach will ultimately be a big benefit to developers and how organizations who are deeply ingrained with existing tools can safely and incrementally migrate to what is, for now, a very Alpha and experimental release. 

We go over the routing and rendering updates in Next.JS 13, exploring where it might offer developers more flexibility and the ability to use React server components to ship less, maybe a lot less, JavaScript. As Lee says in the episode: 

“So to your point about wanting to ship less JavaScript, that was a kinda fundamental architectural decision of where we headed with the app directory. And the core of this is because it's built on React server components. 

The key thing with React server components is that as your application grows in size from one component to a hundred thousand components, the amount of client-side JavaScript you send can be exactly the same. It can be constant because you can render every single component on the server. 

And that's a lot different from the world of React applications today, where every new component you add for data fetching or just putting some HTML on the screen also adds additional client-side JavaScript.

So this is kind of inverting the default, back from the client to be server first. Now, of course, we still love client-side interactivity that React provides making really interactive and rich UI experiences, but the default for data fetching or just getting HTML to the browser happens from the server, and that's gonna help us reduce the amount of JavaScript.”

You can learn more about Lee on his website, LinkedIn, and Twitter. To diver deeper into his take on how Rust will impact the future of Javascript, check out a post he wrote here.

You can learn more about Andrew, from building out a telco in Canada to cyber security at Deloitte, on his LinkedIn.

Validation Cloud bills itself as the world’s fastest node infrastructure and cites networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Binance as clients it supports. Learn more at the company’s website here.

The company announced the launch of it's latest product, Javelin, earlier today.

Shout out to this week’s lifeboat badge winner, Derek, for helping answer the question: How do you open  the file chooser in an Android app using Kotlin?

Data show's Silicon Valley's share of new startup funding deals dropped below 20% for the first time.

What does it mean to experiment with big changes to an engineering org, in public and in real time?

SBF would like the chance to explain himself.

Today's lifeboat badge goes to CodeCaster for explaining: What is E in floating point?

Srivastava reflects on his upbringing in India, learning to write Assembly, and going to Stanford University to complete his Ph.D in computer science.

He shares his early career experiences at big tech names like Yahoo!, Google, Twitter, and Google.

The group reflects on some of the engineering challenges at Patreon including technical debt, migrations to open source services, and troubleshooting bugs.

Srivastava walks us all through upcoming product features that his engineering team is working to implement.

Andy wins a Lifeboat Badge for answering this question about a list of all tags on Stack Overflow.

Follow Ben, Matt, Cassidy, and Utkarsh.

Cami and Cassidy take us down memory lane, sharing how they got into computer science together, hosted a web series (and still podcast together sometimes), and overlapped at two jobs together.

We discuss the technologies being used to build in/for the Metaverse like  Horizon Workroom,  Presence Platform, Insights SDK, and of course, React. 

Cami shares how object and scene recognition work in VR.

Cami reveals a family secret — so listen up if you want to know how to beat Cassidy at board games.

Blackbishop wins the Illuminator Badge for answering and editing 500 different questions on Stack Overflow.

Follow Ben, Matt, Cassidy, and Cami.

We’re taking a break for the Thanksgiving holiday so no podcast this Friday…have a good one, and see you next week.

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.

Over the years Homebrew, an open source package manager, has emerged as the project with the greatest number of individual contributors. Despite all that, it’s creator Max Howell, couldn’t make a living off the occasional charity of the millions of people who used the software he built. This XKCD cartoon is probably the most frequently repeated joke on the podcast over the last three years.

While he is not a crypto bull, Max was inspired with a solution for the open source funding dilemma  by his efforts to buy and sell an NFT. A contract written in code and shared in public enforced a rule sending a portion of his proceeds to the digital objects original creator. What if the same funding mechanism could be applied to open source projects? 

In March of 2022, Max and his co-founder launched Tea, a sort of spirtual successor to Homebrew. It has a lot of new features Max wanted in a package manager, plus a blockchain based approach to ensuring that creators, maintainers, and contributors of open source software can all get paid for their efforts. 

You can read Max’s launch post on Tea here and yes, of course there is a white paper. Follow him on Twitter here.

Eric explains that great jobs are available for developers in Japan, but it can be tough to find these opportunities.

We talk about interesting startups that are gaining traction in the Japanese tech sector (like Visual Alpha, Treasure Data, and Exawizards, to name a few examples of companies on the Japan Dev platform).

Matt is impressed to learn Japan Dev generates an average of $60,000/month in revenue.

Eric reflects on starting Japan Dev as a side project while he was employed full-time as an engineer.

Eric elaborates on why he doesn’t think venture capital is a good fit for Japan Dev.

Night owls unite! Eric says that his most productive hours are between midnight to 4AM.

Follow Matt and Eric.

Episode notes:

The team questions whether a print out of 60-90 days worth of code is the right benchmark for whether to lay someone off. 

Ben gives our podcast  listeners a heads up to reports of repo jacking on GitHub (who got ahead of the issue quickly).

We reflect on whether or not we’re okay with generative AI—and question tradeoffs between copyright and the ability for more people to create stuff.

Ben discusses how his internet browser might be becoming his second brain.

Matt and Cassidy get props from Ben for their rising popularity on Stack Overflow’s YouTube channel.

Follow Ben, Matt, and Cassidy.

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.

Shoemaker spent his childhood in Silicon Valley and learned Assembly when he was just 16 years old.

In his early 20s, he applied to work at Apple and was continually rejected. So he went to work for seven startups instead.

Finally, in 2009, Shoemaker ended up at Apple overseeing the review process for the App Store.

After seven years at Apple, Phillip became interested in cryptocurrency after discovering his personal information on the dark web.

His interest grew in the topic of self sovereign identities, which led him to become CEO and co-founder of Identity.com.

Phillip and Ben reflect on the utility of Web3 in gaming.

Follow Ben and Phillip.

Thank you to lifeboat badge winner Marchingband for their answer to the question about running C or C++ code from Node.js in an efficient way.

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. 

When Foursquare launched in 2009, the app was consumer facing, letting you know where friends had checked in and what spots might appeal to you. People competed to be the “mayor” of certain locations and built guides to their favorite neighborhoods., The service expanded to allow merchants to offer discounts to frequent guests and track foot traffic in and out of the stores. While you can still use the Swarm app to find the best Manhattan in Manhattan, the company realized that real estate and data share the same three key rules: location, location, location. 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with Vin Sharma, VP of Engineering at Foursquare, about how they’re finding the atomic data that makes up their location data—their location data—and going from giving insight to individual app users about the locations around them to APIs that serve these location-based insights to developers at organizations like Uber, Nextdoor, and Redfin, who want to build location based insights and features into their own apps. 

Show notes

If you still want to check in at your local bakery and remember all the place you’ll go, the original Foursquare app is now Swarm. 

If you’re looking to build on their data instead, you can start with their developer documentation. 

They have almost 70 location attributes that they are starting to deconstruct and decompose into fundamental building blocks of their location data. Like data primitives—integers, booleans, etc.—these small bites of data can be remade with agility and at scale. 

Through the recent acquisition of Unfolded, Foursquare allows you to visualize and map location data at any scale. Want to see patterns across the country? Zoom out. Want to focus on a square kilometer? Zoom in and watch the data move. 

Today’s lifeboat shoutout goes to Rohith Nambiar for their answer to Visual Studio not installed; this is necessary for Windows development. 

You can find Vin Sharma on Twitter. 

The group laughs about setting up JIRA workflows and Trello boards for our family lives—Matt says heck no.

Ceora speaks to the power of homelabbing as a way to gain profitable skills. 

JJ talks about the VPN system he has running on his phone to access his home network using tools like WireGuard and ZeroTier.

Cassidy suggests setting up a personal knowledge base as a second brain (and recommends Obsidian). 

JJ shares how homelabbing is popular among kids under 18 as a pathway for them to get into the tech industry.

Follow, Ceora, Matt, Cassidy, and JJ.

High fives to Lifeboat Badge winner Manquer for the answer to his question How can I upgrade the Yii 1.x version to the Yii 2.0 latest release version?

Katzgraber reflects on his time as a university professor up until 2020 and why he switched to working at Amazon.

He walks us through a quantum computing challenge that he hosted with BMW, through his role at Amazon (and what real world applications he sees emerging from these types of collaboration experiments).

We discuss what inspires him to stay curious — raising the bar for scientific research, crowdsourcing breakthroughs, and opening up the playing field for more people to jump in.

Follow Ben, Ryan, Matt, and Helmut.

‘Til next time, all.

We got the chance to sit down with Guillermo Ruach, Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel and co-creator of Next.JS, about the news coming out of today's conference. The most interesting was a new product called Turbopack. You can read more about it here.

Freund reflects on his early days at Applied Materials, where he worked on a machine that inspected silicon wafers.

It was in this early role that Freund gained an appreciation for rigorous software testing protocols in the manufacturing process.

At WeWork, Freund was fascinated by the idea of a full stack business, which is a business building itself.

While Freund officially launched Wilco in 2021, the origin story for the company dates back to 2013 when he was hiring and managing a team of engineers—he saw a need in the market to help developers build critical skills to problems-solve in real-time.

You can think of Wilco as the equivalent of a flight simulator for engineers.

Shoutout to Lifeboat Badge winner Zico for their awesome answer to the question, “Hiding sensitive information in response”

Follow On and Ben.

John explains that Web3 is about the convergence of technology, economics, and social trends.

He elaborates that foundations begin with service-based architecture (SOA), the notion of how to design loosely coupled systems that consist of economic services and components.

He goes on to explain how DeFi represents this thinking of a loose composition of services.

With all of this, blockchain brings together technology and economic incentives into a holistic equation—people contribute because they want to contribute.

Nonsense it is not, says baby Yoda.

Crypto isn’t the end game. It’s a segue along the way.

Follow Ben, Matt, and John.

Learn more about the Global Blockchain Business Council and John’s company, ngEnterprise.

Speaking of awesomeness, we’d like to give a shout out to Stellar Question Badge winner GateKiller for asking a question “How can I get the DateTime for the start of the week?” that has been bookmarked by a hundred people.

Having trouble with understanding your team’s productivity outside of frameworks and tooling? Create a backlog and work through it: Instant Agile! How much of that backlog you work through is a good baseline measure. 

The Stack Overflow blog recently featured an article from Stack Overflow’s Director of Engineering, Ben Matthews: Does high velocity lead to burnout? That may be the wrong question to ask

If you're interested in seeing how Couchbase’s SQL database solutions can help improve your team’s velocity, check out Capella.  

Cory House helps teams deliver successful React projects through his consulting business, ReactJS Consulting.  

If you want to learn more about Matt, check out his LinkedIn.

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, 

Alohci

, who threw a great answer to rescue the question, 

Display button with  inline CSS

.

Before jumping into driverless car talk, Ben shares a heads up about fake jobs at credible companies that are actually phishing scams meant to steal your identity and hijack your bank accounts. Beware the job offer that seems too good to be true!

Jon, Cassidy, Ceora, Matt, and Ben reflect on whether they trust software to operate a vehicle.

Cassidy tells us that she once sat in a car that parked itself and screamed the entire time.

Matt brings us back to reality, reminding us that airplane flights have been automated for a while now.

Matt and Ben point out that in the medical technology space, robotic surgeons are so advanced that they have become more precise than human hands.

Shoutout to lifeboat badge winner GKG4 for a great answer to the question “how can I check if an array index is out of range?” which has been viewed 67,000 times.

Follow Jon, Ben, Ceora, Matt, and Cassidy.

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.

Ceora and Cassidy talk about why engineers are so good at job hopping — and why it can pay to upgrade roles every year or two.

Ceora speaks openly about the privileges of working in tech compared to other industries.

Apparently, in some places, it’s a thing for engineers to leave their teams and then rejoin the organization with a promotion to get ahead. Do you boomerang?

Cassidy’s husband’s favorite interview question to ask is, “If you had a magic wand and could change one thing about this company, what would you change?”

Ben poses a question about whether LinkedIn AB tests are disadvantageous to some career seekers over others.

Matt introduces us to the world of AI generated Pokémon.

Ceora, our resident voice of Gen Z, tells us why she thinks millennials are the only true generation to understand tech.

High fives to Unique Username for answering the question “how can I print to the console using JavaScript?” You get a Lifeboat Badge for helping 140,000 people.

Follow Ben, Ceora, Matt, and Cassidy.

Matt takes us back to the origins of his open source days and the spark that inspired his love for engineering — including the point at which he discovered Linux.

He shares how he began learning from the code itself, which was ultimately a different style of learning than what was available to him at university. Then, it was to the stacks, but not Stack Overflow. Think Barnes and Noble, not YouTube videos.

Imagine trying to  navigate getting your first engineering job during the dot-com crash of the late 90s and early 2000s.

We reflect on Matt's experience building projects with his daughter, including an AI-powered doorbell he built himself.

Speaking of insatiable curiousity, we’d like to give a big high five to Wonton, who received the Inquisitive Badge. Thanks for coming on 30 separate days to maintain a positive question track record.

Follow Matt, Ben, and Cassidy.

Our guests have done most of their ML work on AWS offerings, from AWS Personalize for their initial recommendation engine to SageMaker for model training and deployment pipeline. Now they’re building models from scratch in TensorFlow. 

Want to see these recommendations in action? Check out the offerings at Discovery+ and HBOMax. 

If you’re a ML/AL data scientist looking to shape the future of automated curation, check out their open roles. 

Follow our guests on LinkedIn:

• Shrikant Desai
• Sowmya Subramanian

Mariann shares how she and her UX research team at Stack Overflow are taking steps to create a more inclusive product experience, while reflecting on her experiences as a mother to a neurodiverse daughter.

Wesley talks about what it’s like to be a developer with dyslexia and why self-empathy and self-compassion have been important to his evolution as a senior leader.

Ceora explains why it’s important to be on a psychologically safe team from her perspective as a Black woman who is also neurodivergent.

We talk about giving people the space necessary to do their best work, implementing more inclusive hiring practices, and everyday routines that help us stay our happiest and most productive.

We conclude with a note about why supporting neurodiversity is good for everyone of all walks of life.

Follow Ceora, Wesley, and Marianne.

Ceora shares her experience representing Auth0 at REFACTR TECH, reflecting on what it was like being back in-person after years of virtual events.

Cassidy announces her move to CTO and how her current leadership role at Contenda fits into her career journey and future aspirations as a technologist.

Ben talks about Stack Overflow’s Flow State, the first IRL event he’s attended since 2019 and Stack’s first ever customer conference. 

In case Cassidy pulled you down a rabbit hole of wondering how eels reproduce, check out this piece in the New Yorker from 2020.

Be sure to follow Ceora and Cassidy on Twitter. 

Speaking of the power of curiosity, today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user448810 for answering the question, Feasible implementation of a prime-counting function. Thanks for helping 6,000 people gain valuable knowledge.

Guilo gives building UI components as an example of where software innovation has given him time back: he started building them as static images in Photoshop, then Sketch brought connected, interactive components, and Finally, Figma let you collaborate and build an entire system together.  

If you missed any of the previous episodes, you can find them waiting for you here. 

Connect with Paolo Passeri on LinkedIn. 

Connect with Giulio Barresi on LinkedIn. 

Check out more mechanical keyboard products from Logitech. 

Congrats to KnutKnutsen for their answer to How can I specify a one-argument constructor using Lombok?, saving the question and picking up a Lifeboat badge. 

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.

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.

Like other folks we’ve talked to on the podcast, Chronosphere was born out of work pioneered at Uber. When you can’t find solutions to help you scale, sometimes you have to build them. 

Everything in Chronosphere was built from scratch, from the ingestion tier to the query layer. If you’re going to build something cloud native from the ground up, the clear choice for the team was Go. 

Cloud native observability changes the way developers interact with their code in production. Infrastructure is more complex, dev and test environments are gone, and data increases massively while data sources are more ephemeral. 

Congrats to david, who won a lifeboat badge for their answer to Can we convert a byte array into an InputStream in Java?

We dive into some of the ways developers can customize their keyboard with shortcuts, macros, and apps to eliminate repetitive tasks and automate the busywork that stands in the way of bigger, breakthrough innovations. 

Flow state can be affected by things as simple as the right lighting, so Logitech created keyboards that automatically adjust their keyboard backlighting. 

For those not familiar with the MX series, you can read more about the different versions, including the mechanical one, here.

If you don’t know about Cassidy’s passion for keyboards, you can check out her website here or listen to a previous episode diving deep into the details of mechanical keyboards here.

If you missed episode two, you can check it out below. In it, we chat with Marcel Twohig, Head of Design for the MX Series at Logitech, and Thomas Fritz, Associate Professor of Human Aspects of Software Engineering at the University of Zurich. We cover the research that Professor Fritz has done on flow states, the design work that Marcel and team have done to incorporate that research, and the tools that you can use to maximize your daily flow.

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.

Like a lot of good tools, Backstage started as a way to stop using a spreadsheet. They knew it was something worth open-sourcing when conference attendees paid more attention to the tool than the topics of the talks. 

Backstage treats docs-like-code, keeping markdown files in the same repo as the code. Down with wikis, up with pull requests!

If you want to learn more about Backstage, check out our recent webinar with Emma Indal, a web engineer at Spotify.

Show notes

If you’re interested in diving deeper into Professor Fritz’s research on developer flow states, check out his list of publications. 

Flow states can be affected by things as simple as the right lighting, so Logitech created keyboards that automatically adjust their keyboard backlighting. 

Lights can be used to indicate your interruptibility.; Prof. Fritz did some research on FlowLight, which indicates your willingness to be interrupted with a simple red light/green light protocol. These days, you can use your Slack status to the same effect. 

If you’re looking for apps to improve your daily flow, Cassidy recommends Centered.

As part of an effort to work with students at college and universities, Stack Overflow is partnering with Major League Hacking (MLH) to recruit our first cohort of Student Ambassadors. These folks will represent us on campus and lead the way in tackling challenges, earning rewards, and planning out the future of the program. 

Our pizza fund events are open to students in the US and Canada, and Global Hack Weeks are open to all. You can learn more about how to apply here.

ICYMI: Major League Hacking cofounder Jon Gottfried and Hackathon Community Manager Mary Siebert previously came on the podcast to describe what a Major League Hackathon looks like (the succulents were a surprise).

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Manquer for their answer to the question How can I upgrade Yii 1.x to Yii 2.0?.

AssemblyAI is an AI-as-a-service provider focused on speech-to-text and text analysis. Their mission is to make it easy for developers and product teams to incorporate state-of-the-art AI technology into the solutions they’re building. Their customers include Spotify, the Dow Jones, The Wall Street Journal, and the BBC. Need AI to run semantic analysis on your forum comments or automatically produce summaries of blog post submissions? Rent an ML model on-demand from the cloud instead of building a solution from scratch.

Just three months after its $28M Series A, AssemblyAI raised another $30M in a Series B round led by Insight Partners, Y Combinator, and Accel. In this economy?

When it comes to new and cutting-edge AI developments, what’s Dylan excited about right now? This open-source implementation of AlphaFold from GitHub user lucidrains.

Connect with Dylan on LinkedIn.

Today we’re shouting out the winner of an Inquisitive Badge: User Edson Horacio Junior asked a well-received question on 30 separate days and maintained a positive question record.

For those not familiar with the MX series, you can read more about the different versions, including the mechanical one, here.

If you don't know about Cassidy's passion for keyboards, you can check out her website here or listen to a previous episode diving deep into the details of mechanical keyboards here.

Stayed tuned for episode #2, airing next week, when we'll be digging deeper into the science behind keyboards and coders with Prof. Thomas Fritz and Marcel Twohig Head of Design for the MX series.

You can find a great essay on AI helping students, and what that means for their teachers, here.

Here's a piece on W4 Games plans to monetize the Godot engine.

Snap says it now has one million subscribers for its Snapchat+ offering.

There were no fresh lifeboats badges this week, so shoutout to Jemo for being awarded the Great Question badge. They asked: What's the difference between thread and coroutine in Kotlin

ReleaseHub provides on-demand environments for development, staging, and production. Every developer knows that environments can be a bottleneck, so ReleaseHub’s mission is to empower developers to share their ideas with the world more quickly and easily, sidestepping what Tommy calls “the big bottlenecks in development.”

As CTO of TrueCar, Tommy was leading an effort to rebuild that company’s tech stack, but he needed an environment management platform, and nothing on the market fit his needs. The homegrown environment management system he developed with his cofounders would become ReleaseHub.

Tommy joined Y Combinator in 2009.

Connect with Tommy on LinkedIn.

Today we’re shouting out the winner of an Inquisitive Badge: L-Samuels asked a well-received question on 30 separate days and maintained a positive question record.

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?.

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.

Learn why some companies are moving AI and ML data and models off the cloud and back on premises.

Oxide is a rack-scale server with tightly integrated hardware and software. Cofounder and Chief Product Officer Jessie Frazelle was an early core maintainer of Docker. You can find her on GitHub or LinkedIn.

Check out FauxPilot, a locally hosted version of GitHub Copilot.

It’s no secret that Instagram has made changes to its feed, emphasizing video content in an effort to compete with TikTok. Nor is it a secret that these changes have proved unpopular with creators, from Kylie Jenner to independent photographers and other artists. Just another reminder that these platforms are rarely for creators; they’re built to generate revenue. 

What Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot (of Roomba fame) might mean.

Earthships are sustainable dwellings constructed from recycled and natural materials. Built for off-the-grid living, they use thermal and solar power, harvest rainwater, and often incorporate gardens to supplement food supply.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user SILENT for their answer to the question In React and Next.js constructor, I am getting “Reference Error: localstorage is not defined”.

Born and raised in China, Liam arrived in the US to attend the University of California at Berkeley, where he studied human-computer interaction. After some initial “culture shock” at the differences between his education in China and the “open and innovative” Berkeley environment, Liam thrived. After graduating, he worked at LinkedIn before returning to China to found a startup called Zaihui, offering ecommerce SaaS solutions for retailers.

Liam describes the still-commonplace 9-9-6 schedule (working from nine in the morning until nine at night, six days a week) and the approach of assigning multiple teams to compete on different visions for the same product.

In Liam’s view, US and Chinese engineering teams take different approaches to work, work-life balance, innovation, and risk. US teams pursue “breakthrough innovations” that impress customers, while “hustling and hardworking” Chinese teams “want to move fast and break things” to copy what works and make it incrementally better. 

What would a hybrid of these approaches look like? Liam’s new startup, Immersive, is combining teams from the US and China to find out.

Follow Liam on LinkedIn.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Abhijit for their answer to the question Set difference versus set subtraction.

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.

Heather is a General Partner at OSS Capital, which provides VC backing to seed-stage COSS (commercial open source) startups. Her law practice focuses on intellectual property and open-source licensing, and she serves on the IEEE-ISTO Board of Directors.

Connect with Heather on LinkedIn or explore her work on her website.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user keshlam for their answer to the question Why do we need abstract classes in Java?.

Spencer was one of the original creators of open-source, cross-platform image editing software GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), authored while he was still in college. He went on to spend a decade at Google, plus two years as CTO of Viewfinder, later acquired by Square.

In 2014, he cofounded Cockroach Labs to back his creation CockroachDB, a cloud-native distributed SQL database.

Database sharding is essential for CockroachDB: “a critical part of how Cockroach achieves virtually everything,” says Spencer. Read up on how sharding a database can make it faster.

Like many engineers who find themselves in the C-suite, Spencer went from full-time programmer to full-time CEO. He says it’s been a “relatively gentle” evolution, but he can always go back.

Like lots of you out there, Spencer started programming on a TI-99/4, the world’s first 16-bit home computer.

Connect with Spencer on LinkedIn or learn more about him.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Hughes M. for their answer to the question Multiple keys pointing to a single value in Redis (Cache) with Java.

DoNotPay offers more than 250 “automated justice” services in every US state, from suing robo-callers to annulling marriages to fighting eviction. It earned Joshua the title “Robin Hood of the internet.”

DoNotPay leverages AI and ML solutions, including GPT-3, to shape and refine its decision trees.

Read about how DoNotPay is helping crypto traders who’ve lost money file suit against fallen leaders.

Why PDFs are unfit for human (or computer) consumption.

Follow Joshua on Twitter.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user EM-Creations for their answer to the question The PHP header() function is not redirecting.

A coding error reportedly caused the massive outage at Canadian telecom company Rogers that affected more than 10 million customers—a quarter of Canada’s population.

In a rut? Hacker News has some advice for climbing out. (Hint: More screen time won’t help.)

The Verge reports on how Starlink and other companies that provide internet connectivity through low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites are shaping an “orbital internet.”

Michael Pollan’s 2019 book How to Change Your Mind—an exploration of psychedelic therapy’s history, current status, and future potential—is now a four-part Netflix documentary. We at Stack Overflow DO NOT recommend illegal drug use, but we can recommend the documentary.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Satpal for their answer to the question 'setinterval' with random time in JavaScript.

Bigeye is a data observability platform that helps teams measure, improve, and communicate data quality clearly at any scale. Explore more on their YouTube channel.

Bigeye cofounders Kyle Kirwan and Egor Gryaznov met at Uber, where Kyle worked on data and Egor was a staff engineer.

Kyle and Egor made a clean break with Uber before founding Bigeye, eager to avoid even the appearance of an Anthony Levandowski-like situation. If you’re not familiar with the ex-Google engineer sentenced to prison for stealing trade secrets (and later pardoned by Trump), catch up here.

Learn how to save your energy for innovation by choosing boring technology.

Connect with Kyle on LinkedIn.

Connect with Egor on LinkedIn.

Compiler is an original podcast from Red Hat discussing tech topics big, small and strange like, What are tech hiring managers actually looking for? And, do you have to know how to code to get started in open source? Listen to Compiler anywhere you find your podcasts or visit https://link.chtbl.com/compiler?sid=podcast.stack.overflow

San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed says a seismic shift (definitely not an exodus) is underway as tech workers continue working from home and companies like Salesforce (the city’s largest private employer) reduce office space. Breed says San Francisco lost $400 million in tax revenue in 2021, as companies shuttered offices or moved to other cities. San Francisco offices haven’t been this empty since 2009.

The Wall Street Journal reports that 71 cities (and counting) are offering cash grants and other incentives to lure remote workers from Silicon Valley to, say, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

If you’re a member in good standing of the Hellfire Club (or any D&D group), check out the free AI image generator from AI Dungeon.

Customizable open search platform You.com debuts YouCode, a specialized search engine intended to increase developer efficiency. You.com allows users to deploy AI to customize the sources they want to see, the order in which results appear, and how private results are, reports VentureBeat.

Matt is the proud owner of a new tongue scraper (TMI?), and Ben is 3D-printing him a customized holder. What are friends for?

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user LuLuGaGa for their answer to the question Is there a way to create BottomBar using SwiftUI?

Multitudes helps managers and CTOs create happier, higher-performing teams, using data they already have. Multitudes is focused on software development teams to start, but their bigger vision is to make it easier for any manager to understand and improve their teams’ culture and performance.

“Developers in our audience have expressed skepticism or dismay in the past about software that tracks performance or output,” Lauren explains. Multitudes’ approach is to break down an organization’s approach to ethical team analytics in order to balance delivering value to management with respect and support for the individual developers whose work is being measured. How does that work? Read Lauren’s blog post about data ethics.

Lauren founded Multitudes based on insights she acquired running Ally Skills NZ, which supports organizations in building equitable, inclusive teams. Before that, she worked with high-performance, fast-growth companies in Silicon Valley, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and New Zealand. A Stanford grad, Lauren is passionate about making equity the default both at work and in the wider world.

Check out Multitudes’ success stories or explore their blog.

Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Pokémon GO is six years old (it makes us feel old, too). 

Check out NoobBoy, the Game Boy emulator. Need more nineties nostalgia? You can still play DOOM on almost anything.

What kind of game could you build with PowerPoint? Two game developers go head-to-head over 24 hours to show you: Watch the video.

Did you know a moose can dive 20 feet deep and swim faster than Michael Phelps? It’s true.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user zvone for their answer to Error message "TypeError: descriptor 'append' requires a 'list' object but received a 'dict'".

Today's episode is sponsored by Opentext. You can learn more about their information management solutions here.

You can find out more about Claire and here career on her LinkedIn.

Opentext has a fascinating history. It began as an academic project at the University of Waterloo. The researchers were looking to digitize the Oxford English Dictionary, and created an early search engine, similar to Project Gutenberg. The private company spun out of that work.

No lifeboat badge today, so we'll shout out SDK, who claimed the benefactor badge for placing a bounty on his question: How to make a dynamic slide up transition? Seems like it worked, as the question now has an accepted answer :)

Anvil is an open-source web framework for building full-stack applications entirely in Python.

Ready to dig deeper into code completion? Check out Meredydd’s talk at PyCon 2022 (he even built a code completion engine live on stage). 

ICYMI: Listen to our previous episode with Meredydd about countering the complexity of web programming: Full-stack web programming with nothing but Python. 

Connect with Meredydd on LinkedIn or Twitter.

The Lifeboat badge shoutout is back. Today’s badge goes to user Tomasz Nurkiewicz for their answer to Best performance for string-to-Boolean conversion.

The GPU shortage is (allegedly) over! Read about it at The Verge.

Learn how low code demands more creativity from developers.

On the job market? Don’t be afraid to turn the tables on your interviewer.

This week’s tech recs: Help foster more equitable compensation conversations by taking Devocate’s Developer Relations Compensation Survey.

Cal.com offers scheduling infrastructure for anyone and everyone—and it’s open-source.

Appsmith is an open-source, low-code platform for building, shipping, and maintaining CRUD apps.

Finally, if you’re wondering how to get that startup idea from back-of-napkin to exit, start with Kernal.

Devraj Varadhan is the SVP of Engineering at Ripple, which provides crypto and blockchain solutions for businesses. Ripple’s mission is to provide practical access to investment tools that can deliver economic freedom for unbanked and underbanked people around the world. Plenty of companies have pressed pause on recruitment efforts, but Ripple is hiring. 

Before working at Ripple, Dev spent 15 years at Amazon, building customer experiences and products across a wide swath of categories, including as VP of Delivery Experience. Connect with Dev on LinkedIn and read his blog post about how Ripple is working to accelerate financial inclusion through technology with partnerships with STASIS, the Republic of Palau, and Bhutan.

Who remembers Pets.com?

We normally shout out a Lifeboat badge winner, but today we’re congratulating user Ram on a Curious badge: they asked a well-received question on five separate days and maintained a positive question record. Stay curious!

Episode notes

Before joining Stack, Jody spent time at Pluralsight and AWS Training, two roles that helped him to understand the growing market for online educational self-taught developers. We interviewed his former colleagues at AWS training in this episode.

Enjoy the frustration of debugging your own code. Maybe you it brings you eustress? Ben does not experience this, nor does he like the classic video game Myst. But it takes all kinds.

Interested in learning more about the changing trends in Developer education? Check out data from our latest Dev Survey and research from the teams at Skillsoft, another member of the Prosus Ed-tech portfolio.

Today’s lifeboat badge goes to Anton VBR for explaining: What's the function of dedent() in Python?

If you want to dive deeper on lucrative skills, you can read a blog post Mike wrote for us last month.

If you want to learn more about Mike's background and career, check out his LinkedIn.

Mike was previously on the blog and podcast discussing Skillsoft research about the certifications that are most in demand for top paying roles. You can read up on that and listen to his earlier interview here.

As always, we want to shout out the winner of a Lifeboat badge. Today's hero is Philip, who answered the question: Substring is not working as expected if length is greater than length of String

Huge thanks to the more than 73,000 devs from 180 countries who spent 15 minutes each completing our 2022 Developer Survey. This year’s survey was longer than usual, since we wanted to ask about new topics as well as provide a historical throughline to understand how your responses have changed over the years.

Among the takeaways from the survey: 2022 saw a 10% jump in how many folks are learning to code online (versus through a conventional coding school or from textbooks). Nearly 85% of organizations represented in the survey have at least some remote workers, while the vast majority of developers are still working remotely at least part of the time. You can read more about the results here.

Worth noting: Just because you’ve learned to code doesn’t mean you have to pursue a career as a programmer. Here are four different career paths coders can follow, including product manager and sales engineer.

Wondering how Ikea’s Friheten or Fjӓdermoln would actually look in your living room? The company’s new virtual design tool lets you scan rooms in your home, delete your furniture, and replace it with shiny new stuff from Ikea. You can also fill virtual showrooms to your heart’s content.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Jarzon for their answer to Make a hidden field required.

GitHub Copilot is now available to all developers. There’s also the GitHub Copilot Labs extension for Visual Studio Code, which has some neat tricks up its sleeve. 

Yes, Copilot is impressive; no, it’s not gunning for your job. ICYMI, check out our blog post exploring whether AI is poised to steal our livelihoods: The robots are coming for (the boring parts of) your job.

Mullvad VPN is removing the option to add new subscriptions because they want to know “as little as possible” about their users: “We are constantly looking for ways to reduce the amount of data we store while still providing a usable service.”

Data scraping is both ubiquitous and seemingly unavoidable—but it raises serious privacy concerns, writes David Golumbia for Real Life.

Tech recs: a ladder to bypass (almost) any paywall, the smartest way to learn a new language, how to explore the JavaScript universe, a great place to listen to longform journalism, and the email-free way to read your favorite newsletters.

Thanks to Liam for emailing the podcast to share Physics Girl’s terrific explanation of quantum cryptography.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user martineau for their answer to How to start and stop a thread.

RIP Internet Explorer (1995-2022), “a good tool to download other browsers.” Bummer epitaph, but the meme stands.

Netlify’s unified web development workflow has out-of-this-world benefits for developer experience. Learn more by watching A Tale of Web Development in Two Universes.

Netlify recently announced Netlify Edge Functions, a fully serverless runtime environment. Here’s what that means and how it works.

For more on “The Edge” (not this guy or this guy), check out this episode of the Remotely Interesting podcast, featuring Phil, Salma, and Cassidy.

Jamstack makes developers’ lives “pretty peachy,” to borrow Salma’s phrase. Here, she explains what Jamstack is and how it makes the web (and developers) faster.

Salma helps “developers build stuff, learn things, and love what they do.” She loves helping people get into tech, where she started working after a career as a music teacher and comedian. Active in the developer community, she’s a Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies, a partnered Twitch streamer, and a relentless advocate for building a truly accessible web. Salma is the founder of Unbreak.tech, Women Who Stream Tech, and Women of Jamstack, projects that call for social change and equality in tech. Connect with her on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Phil is passionate about browser technologies, the web’s empowering properties, and ingenuity and simplicity in the face of overengineering. He has built web apps for Google, Apple, Nike, R/GA, and The London Stock Exchange, and is a coauthor of Modern Web Development on the Jamstack (O’Reilly, 2019). Connect with Phil on Twitter or LinkedIn, or read his blog posts for Netlify.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Anton vBR for their answer to What’s the function of dedent() in Python?.

Docs for Devs: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing can be found here.

Jared worked as a technical writer at Google for more than 14 years and recently transitioned to Waymo, the self-driving car company spun out under the Alphabet umbrella. You can find him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Zachary has been a technical writer at GitHub and the Linux Foundation, and now works as a staff technical writer at Stripe. You can find all her online accounts at her website.

Interested in exploring approaches for collaboration and knowledge management on engineering teams? Why not try a tool developers already turn to regularly? Check out Stack Overflow for Teams, used by Microsoft, Bloomberg, and many others.

Tired of security bottlenecks? Today’s episode is sponsored by Snyk,  a developer security platform that automatically scans your code, dependencies, containers, and cloud configs — finding and fixing vulnerabilities in real time, from the tools and workflows you already use. Create your free account at snyk.co/stackoverflow.

WWDC22 was last week (check out Apple’s highlights here). Among the most exciting demonstrations: passkeys, a new approach to authentication with the potential to finally replace passwords altogether. 

Apple also announced enhancements to Swift, its programming language, and a new flagship processor, the M2 chip.

Now that iMessage users will be able to edit or even unsend text messages after the fact, will your group chat (or your relationship) ever be the same?

Multitaskers rejoice: A new iPadOS function called Stage Manager organizes apps in a tile formation that allows users to rapidly tap from workspace to workspace.

And yes, you can finally check the weather on your iPhone lock screen.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Stephen Docy for their answer to Proving that a two-pointer approach works (pair sum).

Ever since personal information started flowing into applications on the web, securing that information has become more and more important. General security and privacy frameworks like ISO-27001 and PCI provide guidance in securing systems. Now the law has gotten involved with the European Union’s GDPR and California’s CPRA. More laws are on the way, and these laws (and the frameworks) are changing as they meet legal challenges. With the legal landscape for privacy shifting so much, every engineer must ask: How do I keep my application in compliance?

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Rob Picard and Matt Cooper of Vanta, who get that question every day. Their company makes security monitoring software that helps companies get into compliance quickly. We spoke about the shifting sands of privacy rules and regulations, tracking data flows through systems and across corporate borders, and how security automation can put up guardrails instead of gates. 

Many security frameworks are undergoing modernization to reflect the way that distributed applications function today. And more countries and US states are passing their own privacy regulations. The privacy space is surprisingly dynamic, forcing companies to keep track of these frequent changes to stay current and compliant. Not everyone has in-house legal experts to follow the daily developments and communicate those to the engineering team. 

For an engineering team just trying to understand the effort involved, it may be helpful to start figuring out where your data flows. Tracking it between internal services may be overkill; instead, track it across corporate boundaries, from one database, cloud provider, SaaS system, and dependency. Each of those should have their own data privacy agreement—plug into your procurement process to see what each piece of your stack promises on a privacy level. 

Your DevOps and DevSecOps teams will probably want to automate much of the security engineering process as possible. Unfortunately, automating security is hard. The best path may not be to automate the defenses on your system; it might be better to instead automate the context that you provide to engineers. If someone wants to add a dependency, pop up a reminder that these dependencies can be fickle. Automate the boring stuff—context, reminders, to-dos—and let humans do the complex problem solving we’re so good at. 

If you’re looking to add an in-house security expert as a service, check out Vanta.com. Their platform monitors connects to your systems and helps you prep for compliance with one or more security frameworks. If those frameworks change, you don’t need to do anything. Vanta changes for you. 

Temporal Technologies is a scalable open-source platform for developers to build and run reliable cloud applications.

ICYMI, here’s a post we wrote with Ryland Goldstein, Head of Product at Temporal, discussing how software engineering has shifted from a monolithic to a microservices model—thereby introducing a whole new set of challenges for software engineers.

Maxim, who grew up in Russia, is renowned in the microservices world. He spent decades architecting mission-critical systems at MSFT, Amazon, and Uber, where he designed Cadence and spun it out into Temporal. Netflix, Descript, Instacart, Datadog, Snap, and plenty more are all betting their critical systems on Temporal’s OSS technology, so Maxim has a dedicated following in the dev community.

Dominik’s father is a nuclear physicist, so Dominik had early access to computers growing up in Germany. His professional path led him from SAP in Germany to SAP in Palo Alto, then to Cisco, and finally to Temporal.

Replay, Temporal’s inaugural developer experience conference, is happening IRL from August 25-26, 2022 in Seattle. Check it out!

Connect with Maxim on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Connect with Dominik on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Medium.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Thanos for their answer to How to wrap text without regard to space and hyphen. (This makes up for the Snap, right?)

HASH, where Maggie works along with Stack Overflow cofounder Joel Spolsky, is an open-core platform for creating simulations that help people make better decisions.

Explore Maggie’s writing on everything from digital anthropology to best practices for illustrating invisible programming concepts.

Maggie recommends the Nielsen Norman Group website as the best resource for folks getting up to speed on research-based UX.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Sten for their answer to Detecting transparency in an image.

The first step in quantum computing? Quantum internet: a network capable of sending quantum information between far-distant computing machines (as in, one on Earth and one on Mars). Still have questions?

In case it’s been a while since your last physics course: Schrödinger’s cat.

Retool’s 2022 State of Engineering Time reveals how software engineers spend their time, what they want to do more (and less) of, and the most frustrating and satisfying parts of their jobs.

A great resource from GitHub for folks working on open-source projects: Why creating a popular OSS library is a marathon, not a sprint.

Cassidy recommends Centered again—the app that helps you stay in your flow state.

Congrats to Ceora on her new role at Auth0!

The Web3 crime of the century? Seth Green’s Bored Ape NFT is kidnapped by dastardly phishing scammers, kiboshing the TV series Green was developing around the Bored Ape character. Read more.

Ceora served as a resident emcee at this year’s Remix Conf. She and Cassidy offer advice for developers who want to give talks or host conferences. 

In tech industry news: Broadcom acquires VMWare for $61 billion, one of the largest tech acquisitions in history.

Today in tech recs: Matt recommends Logitech’s MX Mechanical keyboard; Adam recommends roadmap.sh, a community dedicated to creating roadmaps, guides, and other resources to guide developers as they start their careers or upskill along the way.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user munk for their answer to Python path as a string.

While blockchains are huge right now, finding one to build on that doesn’t use a ton of energy, has good privacy protections, and operates efficiently is harder than it looks. The original breakout blockchain, Bitcoin, was slow to adopt any innovations coming out of research. Other blockchains use the electricity of a small country to play elaborate gambling games. For someone looking to build the future of Web3, what are your options?

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk to Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman. After finding out that the Bitcoin blockchain wouldn’t incorporate all the good ideas generated around it—proof of stake, privacy improvements, and smart contracts to name a few—he decided to build his own. 

Arthur has a background in machine learning and statistics but spent his early 20s teaching self-driving cars how to turn left and working in quantitative finance for high-frequency trading. High-frequency trading was data-driven, but there was so much noise that machine learning didn’t do very well. Self-driving cars, meanwhile, presented a more structured problem, so neural networks could yield good results. 

Around that time, Arthur got bit by the crypto bug. It lived at the intersection of a lot of his interests: Cryptography touched on computer science and math, but his time in finance got him wondering about banks and money work. The idea of individual sovereignty scratched a personal philosophical itch. 

Naturally, Arthur decided to try some mining software. It took all of his computer’s resources, so he uninstalled it. But after seeing the price of Bitcoin break a dollar and other news items about it, he looked closer. He started to think about what a company could do if it didn’t have to maintain banking relationships. He thought about possible applications, like decentralized poker. 

When Bitcoin refused to adopt the improvements developed by competing alt coins, Arthur started thinking about a new blockchain that would respond to new developments and focus on efficient processing, security, and a good smart contract system. Forking the code wasn’t enough; he needed a new ledger. 

That’s when Tezos was born. It was initially built by a small team of OCaml programmers using that language’s functional subset. Arthur was inspired by the example of WhatsApp, which was built by a small team of senior Erlang engineers. While OCaml would limit the talent he could hire, it would be a very efficient way to build an error-free transaction system. He could have built the whole thing in Java, sure, but Arthur estimates that it would have cost a whole lot more. 

If you’re interested in learning more about what an engineer’s blockchain ecosystem looks like, check out the Tezos home page. Discover building on Tezos: https://tezos.com/build/

Jason is now a managing director at Redpoint Ventures and has led one investment so far, backing a company called Alchemy that is focused on infrastructure and dev tools for web3.

He describes himself as a "very average" programmer, but an excellent engineer, and explains how he parlayed his unique skill set into key roles at Heroku and GitHub.

Our lifeboat for the week goes to dfrib for suggesting a solution to: Error "nil requires a contextual type" using Swift

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

Companies like Meta, Twitter, and Netflix are enacting hiring freezes and layoffs, a situation that’s not great for anybody but is likely to have outsize effects on people of color in tech.

Gen Z may not understand file structures, but they sure understand Twitter toxicity. MegaBlock from Gen Z Mafia allows users to block bad tweets, their authors, and every single account that liked the offending tweet. There, doesn’t that feel better?

Apple’s WWDC 2022 is just around the corner. What are you most excited about?

Machine-learning start-up Inflection AI raises $225 million in equity financing to use AI to improve human-computer communication. Another reminder that building sophisticated AI systems isn’t cheap: who could forget that Open AI paid its top researcher just shy of $2 million in 2016?

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Patricia Shanahan for their answer to Difference between int and double.

Highly-touted cryptocurrencies like TARA don’t always solve the problems they’re supposed to, as Bloomberg reports.

If you’re looking for a compelling deep-dive into a crypto scammer, Cassidy recommends BBC podcast The Missing Cryptoqueen.

Ceora is working to improve the quality of her commit messages in order to turn what’s now a personal project into an open-source project that others can contribute to. One great resource she’s found: Zen and the art of writing good commit messages.

Attention devs: if you have tips for basic project maintenance and hacks for improving commit messages, Ceora wants to hear from you.

Read up on the benefits of test-driven development.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Nina Scholz for their answer to What’s the difference between Object.entries and Object.keys?.

You may be running your code in containers. You might even have taken the plunge and orchestrated it all with YAML code through Kubernetes. But infrastructure as code becomes a whole new level of complicated when setting up a managed Kubernetes service. 

On this sponsored episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with David Dymko and Walt Ribeiro of Vultr about what they went through to build their managed Kubernetes service as a cloud offering. It was a journey that ended not just with a managed K8s service, but also with a wealth of additional tooling, upgrades, and open sourcing. 

When building out a Kubernetes implementation, you can abstract away some of the complexity, especially if you use some of the more popular tools like Kubeadm or Kubespray. But when using a managed service, you want to be able to focus on your workloads and only your workloads, which means taking away the control plane. The user doesn’t need to care about the underlying infrastructure, but for those designing it, the missing control plane opens a whole heap of trouble. 

Once you remove this abstraction, your cloud cluster is treated as a single solid compute. But then how do you do upgrades? How do you maintain x509 certifications for HTTPS calls? How do you get metrics? Without the control plane, Vultr needed to communicate to their Kubernetes worker nodes through the API. And wouldn’t you know it: the API isn’t all that well-documented. 

They took it back to bare necessities, the MVP feature set of their K8s cloud service. They’d need the Cloud Controller Manager (CCM) and the Container Storage Interface (CSI) as core components to have Vultr be a first-class citizen on a Kubernetes cluster. They built a Go client to interface using those components and figured, hey, why not open-source this? That led to a few other open-source projects, like a Terraform integration and a command-line interface. 

This was the start of a two-year journey connecting all the dots that this project required. They needed a managed load balancer that could work without the control plane or any of the tools that interfaced with it. They built it. They needed a quality-of-life update to their API to catch up with everything that today’s developer expects: modern CRUD actions, REST best practices, and pagination. All the while, they kept listening to their customers to make sure they didn’t stray too far from the original product. 

To see the results of their journey, listen to the podcast and check out Vultr.com for all of their cloud offerings, available in 25 locations worldwide.

Supabase, the open-source database-as-a-service company, raised $80 million in Series B funding in a round led by Felicis Ventures. In case you were wondering: YYes, the company is named for the Nicki Minaj song!.

Today in tech recs: Cassidy recommends budgeting app Lunch Money for everything from crypto to cash. Matt recommends Magnet for window management.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user dfrib for their answer to Error "nil requires a contextual type" using Swift.

Ian and Corey met at Microsoft, where they built Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 (which boasted its own CD-ROM).

They went on to found Mattermost in 2016 to give developers one platform for collaborating across tools and teams.

Ian, who previously founded the game company SpinPunch, calls Mattermost “yet another of those video game companies turned B2B software companies,” like Slack and Discord. Says Ian: “Games are all the risk of a movie plus all the complexity of a B2B SaaS product.”

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Diogo for their answer to How can I call functions from one .cpp file in another .cpp file?.

Connect with Ian on LinkedIn.

Connect with Corey on LinkedIn.

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.

You can check out Michael’s bio here and tune in to his podcast Cloud Unfiltered.

If you're interested in some of open source work Michael and his colleagues are doing, check out API Clarity.

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.

The crew has complicated feelings about products like Apple’s augmented reality glasses and Google Glass. Ceora put it best: “I'm very cautious about any big tech company having any more access to my perception of reality.” 

On the other hand, products like Envision smart glasses that help visually-impaired people navigate their environments exemplify how AR technology can enable accessibility and empower users.

Speaking of different perceptions of reality, New York mayor Eric Adams dusts off that old chestnut about how remote workers “can’t stay home in your pajamas all day.” (Watch us.)

Matt recommends Oh My Git!, an open-source game that teaches Git. Ceora recommends Popsy, which allows you to turn your Notion pages into a website for free.

And some recommended reading: How to make the most out of a mentoring relationship from the GitHub blog and How to use the STAR method to ace your job interview from The Muse.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user metadept for their answer to Generate a two-digit positive random number in JavaScript.

Find Adam on LinkedIn here.

If you’re not familiar with Stacks, Stack Overflow’s design system, it’s a robust CSS and JavaScript Pattern library that helps users create coherent experiences in line with Stack Overflow’s best practices and design principles. Explore more on Netlify or GitHub.

Missed our April Fool’s prank this year? Relive the hilarity and the pain.

Atomic CSS is a CSS architecture approach favoring single-purpose classes named based on visual function.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user ceejayoz for their answer to How do I do a database backup on Amazon RDS every hour?.

Connect with Ben Kelley.

Learn more about Aaron Shekey’s work.

A high school class on Pascal launched Andi’s interest in programming (starting on an Apple IIc).

Andi was bored with his university studies and took on an extra-credit programming project that turned into PHP3, the version that built a million websites.

PHP gets a lot of hate, and we have two theories about why. First, it’s primarily brownfield development, and we all know that hell is other people’s code. Second, it democratized development—a great thing in many ways - that nevertheless led to a lot of less than professional code making it’s way to production.

Andi cofounded Zend Technologies to oversee PHP advances and served as CEO from 2009 until the company’s acquisition in 2015. After Zend Technology, Andi became one of what he jokes was “five folks in a garage” building a new graph database for Amazon.

Now, at Google, Andi runs the operational database for Google Cloud Platform, including managed third parties and cloud-native databases Spanner, Bigtable, and Firestore.

His background in programming makes Andi sensitive to the importance of prioritizing developer experience: “the number-one person using our services are our developers. And so we need to make [our technology] super-productive and simple and easy and fun for developers to use.”

Connect with Andi on LinkedIn.

Average tenure at Google has been reported at 1.1 years,  which stands in contrast to a broader average of 4.2 years for software developers across the board.

Tech jobs at many so called titans and disrupters last less than two years, according to research from Dice.

Uber is forging an unlikely alliance with two taxi tech firms.

The ultimate chron job - ensuring users can access a chronological feed on their favorite social media without sacrificing your recommendation algorithm's potency or data. 

Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to alkber, who explained how to convert seconds to minutes, hours and days in Java

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?.

Read about how New Relic achieved pay equity—and what, exactly, that means.

Last month, hacker group Lapsus$ released screenshots showing it had successfully breached Okta’s internal systems using compromised credentials. What does it all mean? Read about it here and here.

Matt recounts a harrowing example of a man-in-the-middle attack that nearly emptied a friend’s bank account

Today’s recommendations: Cassidy recs Midjourney, an AI art-making tool currently in beta. (Learn more about Midjourney here.) Matt recommends Elden Ring to folks who want a more “adult” version of the Ceora-approved Breath of the Wild.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Subhajit for their answer to Send HTML in email via PHP.

Quizzes and games like Roblox are a good way to build your knowledge, whether you’re learning to code or becoming a K-pop expert.

ICYMI: Listen to our conversation with HashiCorp cofounder Mitchell Hashimoto, who recently returned to an IC role after serving as CEO and CTO.

Connect with Jon on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Roko C. Buljan for their answer to Pure CSS 3 image slider—without JavaScript or radio inputs.

React 18 is the latest major version of React. Cassidy also provides an excellent summary of React history.

Ceora is working on some CSS art (inspired by K-pop, natch) using CodePen.

Cassidy explains why Tanya Reilly’s talk-turned-blog-post Being Glue, which Ceora shouted out in Episode 425, was pivotal in shaping her career decisions.

Why do women in software engineering have to worry about being seen as “not technical enough”?

Today’s tech recs: Ceora recommends the Nintendo Switch™, Matt recommends Flexbox Froggy for people who want to learn CSS flexbox, and Cassidy recommends Loom.

Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user JosefZ for their answer to Start Windows Terminal from the CLI and pass in an executable command to run.

Read a profile of Mattaniah on People of Color in Tech (POCIT) here.

Connect with Mattaniah on LinkedIn or follow her on TikTok.

Who remembers Vine??

This week’s tech recs: Cassidy recommends her Hifiman headphones. Ben recommends his hybrid RAV4 (42 miles on the battery alone). Matt recommends Spline, a design app for 3D web experiences. Ceora’s recommendation is a clear phone case from Five Below, perfect for displaying a photo of your favorite K-pop idol (or, you know, your dog).

Plus, Mattaniah and the team get gushy about “incredible,” “joyful,” “super accessible” creative code educator Daniel Shiffman.

This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Maulik Hirani for their answer to New Google Places Autocomplete and its pricing.

Why has this empty NPM package been installed 700,000 times? We’ve got the answer for ya.

A nice article and podcast on flow state, including the claim that 23 minutes is the magic number of minutes it takes to find your flow.

Thanks to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, Manjusha, for explaining how to: 

Parse a pipe-delimited file in Python

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.

Once a company reaches a certain size, their customers might start asking for proof that it has good security and data habits. They want to know if there’s a business continuity plan in place in case disaster strikes. For many companies, formalizing this proof means submitting to an auditing process known as SOC 2. If you’re a developer at one of these companies, particularly if you provide or use SaaS applications, you’ll end up having to implement the controls these audits require. 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with James Ciesielski, CTO and co-founder, and Megan Dean, information security and risk compliance manager, both of Rewind. We talk about how you can prep for and successfully get through a SOC 2 audit, how backing up your SaaS data can provide business continuity, and the benefits of establishing a relationship with your auditor. 

A SOC 2 report shows your customers the level of security controls that you have in place. It’s based on the auditing standards set by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. You tell them what controls you have in place and they verify it. Once a company starts attracting enterprise-level customers, a SOC 2 becomes a must-have. 

Companies perform SOC 2 audits using a variety of tools: sometimes it’s purpose-built SaaS tools; sometimes it’s a cascade of spreadsheets. Ultimately, what’s important is providing an audit trail for your controls, a record that proves that your security does what you claim it does. Trust, but verify. 

The process can grow complicated, as companies can have 100 to as many as 300 SaaS applications running in their business. That’s a lot of important business data on someone else’s cloud. Many of these SaaS applications operate data on the shared responsibility model: they ensure the service is available and secure, and you ensure that your data is accurate and secure. 

A key part of these security controls is disaster recovery and business continuity. Imagine that you’re using a SaaS application to track your audit process. What happens if a disgruntled employee wrecks your data, or your cat walks over your keyboard, hitting just the right combination of keys to delete something important? Or what if you unwittingly get flagged on a T&C violation and get deplatformed? Your audit trail could be lost if you haven’t upheld your end of the shared responsibility model and backed up your data. 

Ultimately, having experts who know the process can help. Your auditor, too, can be a resource, so get to know them. They want you to succeed. They want to help you improve your audit process because it makes their lives easier.

Geriatric millennials unite.

Learn more about GitHub’s move to put prebuilt Codespaces into public beta, plus check out CodeSandbox, home of self-proclaimed lazy developers.

Meanwhile, in blockchain: Polygon, a solution designed to expand transaction efficiency and output for Ethereum, raised $450 million “to consolidate its lead in the race to scale Ethereum.”

Is Decentraland the most annoying blockchain project? The competition is fierce.

The 2022 Java Developer Productivity Report found that microservices and CI/CD are decreasing developers’ productivity, not increasing it. The team talks through what that means.

This week, Ben recommends the book Appleseed by Matt Bell, Cassidy recommends the productivity app Centered, Adam points listeners to Unix-like operating system SerenityOS, and Ceora shouts out Tanya Reilly’s talk-turned-blog-post Being Glue.

Find Adam on LinkedIn here.

Danielle’s path to software engineering began when she was accepted into MIT’s Women’s Technology Program, an education and mentorship opportunity for high schoolers interested in engineering or computer science. She later earned her CS degree from MIT.

Danielle’s first role out of college was a junior developer working on Meteor, a full-stack JavaScript framework that was just starting a GraphQL project they called Apollo. She tells the team how Meteor started looking at GraphQL and how that became Apollo.

If McDonald’s is a REST API, then Chipotle is GraphQL. Think about it!

Find Danielle on LinkedIn here.

This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user torek for their answer to Why doesn’t Git natively support UTF-16?.

The team pays tribute to Microsoft’s Visual Studio, an IDE and source code editor that turns 25 this month.

Read Simon Willison’s article on how companies can financially support the open-source contributors they rely on. 

Learn more about open source’s diversity problem, and how to address it, here and here.

Why are K-pop NFTs so unpopular with fans? The Atlantic digs in.

ICYMI: Listen to our conversation with HashiCorp cofounder Mitchell Hashimoto: Moving from CEO back to IC.

David is a CS major who worked in Apple’s music group in the 90s and went on to become CEO of eMusic in the aughts. 

At Venrock, David invested in early-stage crypto, consumer, and enterprise tech companies. He was early to crypto as a node maintainer on the Bitcoin blockchain and an Ethereum miner, setting up a rig in his basement several years ago.

At CoinFund, he focuses on early- and growth-stage crypto and blockchain companies and technologies like Upshot, a platform for crowdsourced NFT appraisals, and Rarible, a digital art NFT platform.

ICYMI: Listen to our episode Web3 won’t save us.

This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user M-M for their answer to Find the area of an n-interesting polygon.

Learn more about GitHub’s ​​machine learning-based code scanning, which finds security issues before they make it to production.

Google invests $100 million in a skills training program for low-income Americans. Is there a catch?

Take2 is a New Zealand program that teaches incarcerated people to code: building marketable skills, opening up employment opportunities, and dramatically reducing recidivism. At the time of writing, Take2 has a 100% success rate in preventing recidivism.

We have two Lifeboat badges this week: Varad Mondkar, for answering How does the app:layout_goneMarginLeft and its variants affect the view arrangements in constraintlayout?, and Eugene Sh., for answering What is this “a.out” file and what makes it disappear?.

Expensify is an expense management solution that integrates with your travel, ERP, and finance/accounting software. Check out their full list of integrations.

Expensify engineers rely on Stack Overflow for Teams to make knowledge accessible and shareable, rather than wading through swathes of documentation. Read the case study.

Flat organizations like Expensify have minimal or no middle management, meaning there’s no management layer between staff and executives. A similar model for decentralized management is Holacracy.

Find David Barrett on LinkedIn here.

Ceora shouts out Mermaid, a JavaScript-based diagramming and charting tool that creates diagrams dynamically based on Markdown-inspired text definitions. 

Coinbase’s bouncing QR code ad proved so popular it crashed the app. Considered passé pre-pandemic, QR codes have obvious value now: they’re touch-free, easy to scan, and ubiquitous. (Just don’t call it a comeback.)

In preparation for his move from New Zealand to Canada, Matt is overhauling his hardware and transitioning to an M1 MacBook Pro for performance and efficiency.

Speaking of hardware, Intel is buying Israeli chipmaking company Tower Semiconductor for $5.4 billion to build out its Intel Foundry Service division, launched last year to build chips for other companies.

This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Basile Starynkevitch for their answer to the question Can you make a computed goto in C++?

Here’s a useful primer on functional programming with JavaScript.

This tutorial will guide you in exploring the fundamentals of functional programming with React.

If you’re looking for more info on functional programming in React, we’d like to tell you why hooks are the best thing to happen to React.

Functional not your thing? Learn why object-oriented programming (OOP) has become such a dominant paradigm.

Learn more about AlphaCode here.

Check out an amazing video essay critiquing the NFT market, The Line Goes Up.

Read up on Josh Wardle, the developer who built Wordle for his partner to help pass the time during the pandemic, then sold it to the NY Times for a sweet seven figures.

You can learn more about Clement's career on his LinkedIn and on Twitter (assuming you speak French).

You can learn more about Dailymotion here and check out the roles they are hiring for here.

You can find Cassidy Williams on Twitter and at her website. 

You can find Ceora Ford on Twitter and at her website.

Our Lifeboat badge winner of the week is Swati Kiran, who helped solve an error causing permission problems in an angular app.

These days, every company looking at analyzing their data for insights has a data pipeline setup. Many companies have a fast production database, often a NoSQL or key-value store, that goes through a data pipeline.The pipeline process performs some sort of extract-transform-load process on it, then routes it to a larger data store that the analytics tools can access. But what if you could skip some steps and speed up the process with a database purpose-built for analytics?

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Rohit (Ro) Amarnath, the CTO at Vertica, to find out how your analytics engine can speed up your workflow. After a humble beginning with a ZX Spectrum 128, he’s now in charge of Vertica Accelerator, a SaaS version of the Vertica database. 

Vertica was founded by database researcher Dr. Michael Stonebreaker and Andrew Palmer. Dr. Stonebreaker helped develop several databases, including Postgres, Streambase, and VoltDB. Vertica was born out of research into purpose-built databases. Stonebreaker’s research found that columnar database storage was faster for data warehouses because there were fewer read/writes per request. 

Here’s a quick example that shows how columnar databases work. Suppose that you want all the records from a specific US state or territory. There are 52 possible values here (depending on how you count territories). To find all instances of a single state in a row-based DB, the search must check every row for the value of the state column. However, searching by column is faster by an order of magnitude: it just runs down the column to find matching values, then retrieves row data for the matches. 

The Vertica database was designed specifically for analytics as opposed to transactional databases. Ro spent some time at a Wall Street firm building reports—P&L, performance, profitability, etc. Transactions were important to day-to-day operations, but the real value of data came from analyses that showed where to cut costs or increase investments in a particular business. Analytics help with overall strategy, which tends to be more far-reaching and effective. 

For most of its life, Vertica has been an on-premises database managing a data warehouse. But with the ease of cloud storage, Vertica Accelerator is looking to give you a data lake as a service. If you’re unfamiliar, data lakes take the data warehouse concept—central storage for all your data—and remove limits. You can have “rivers” of data flowing into your stores; if you go from a terabyte to a petabyte overnight, your cloud provider will handle it for you. 

Vertica has worked with plenty of industries that push massive amounts of data: healthcare, aviation, online games. They’ve built a lot of functionality into the database itself to speed up all manner of applications. One of their prospective customers had a machine learning model with thousands of lines of code that was reduced to about ten lines because so much was being done in the database itself. 

In the future, Vertica plans to offer more powerful management of data warehouses and lakes, including handling the metadata that comes with them. To learn more about Vertica’s analytics databases, check out our conversation or visit their website.

It’s not news that, as Cassidy says, “remote has grown wildly fast”—but Remote has gone from about 25 employees in March 2020 to 900 now (a 3,500% increase).

Ceora explains to Matt (oh, sweet summer’s child) what it means to get ratioed on Twitter.

Inspired by a great read, the team discusses how Gen Z, having grown up without floppy disks, file folders, or directories, thinks about information.

This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user 1983 for their answer to the question Why can I not use `new` with an arrow function in JavaScript/ES6?.

SphereEX builds distributed data systems, making it easier for organizations to load balance massive data stores across multiple servers. 

Now that open-source software has taken over Western software, it’s China’s turn. Even big companies like Baidu and Bytedance are opening up their projects. 

Trista is the only female Apache member in China, which is both an honor and a demonstration of how much work needs to be done to support women in STEM. 

This episode’s Lifeboat badge shoutout goes to swati kiran for her answer to 

Error: EACCES: permission denied, mkdir '/usr/local/lib/node_modules/node-sass/build'

.

Ceora has her second brain stored in Notion, complete with GIFs and pretty color to get that aesthetic.

Ancient history in blog years: Cassidy talks about the perils of being bleeding-edge instead of cutting-edge: Apollo Mission: The pros and cons of being an early adopter of new technology 

Everybody is aboard the VS Code train, which has the hottest TikTok around. Cassidy recommends the MonoLisa font helping viewers read your code during a livestream.

Today’s lifeboat goes to Bill the Lizard for Using IFF in Python.

Neopets: A little-known gateway into a software career. (Nineties kids will remember.)

Among the products Mitchell helped build at Hashicorp: Terraform, Vagrant, and Vault.

Not many C-level execs return to IC roles, but you might be surprised how many managers move back to being individual contributors.

Follow Mitchell on Twitter here.

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. 

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 learn more about Gretel here. The company is hiring for numerous positions. 

Think your commits are anonymous? Think again: DefCon researchers figured out how to de-anonymize code creators by their style. 

We published an article about the importance of including privacy in your SDLC: Privacy is an afterthought in the software lifecycle. That needs to change.

Our Lifeboat badge shoutout goes to 1983 (the year Ben was born) for their answer to Why can I not use `new` with an arrow function in JavaScript/ES6?

The inspiration for today's episode was a terrific article from The Guardian about the many ways in which the modern world, specifically the software we use every day, was designed to steal our attention. 

During the episode, we discuss Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor know as the "father of flow" for his  pioneering research on flow states. Sadly, Prof. Csikszentmihalyi passed away in 2021, but you can find a terrific  tribute to him and his work here.

In the second half of the episode, we discuss "The California Ideology" and the ways in which hustle culture and libertarian ideals helped to shape Silicon Valley and the world of technology more broadly.

Congrats to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, UrbanoJVR, who answered the question: What is the difference between 'mvn verify' vs 'mvn test'?

Will no one think of the maintainers? As The New Stack points out, watching millions of projects fail because of a bug in an open source library has become common enough that  we shrug and reply, "Told you so." It's gotten so bad, big tech companies are visiting the White House to discuss the issue as a matter of national security.

There is a great post up on the Stack Overflow blog examining  this issue, but it's not about color.js, it's about Log4J.  Traffic to questions on this logging library grew more than 1000% percent after the recent revelations about a new vulnerability. 

Also discussed in this episode: cryptographer and Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike stepped down from his role as CEO of the encrypted messaging service.  That's news, but he actually made bigger waves in tech circles with an unrelated blog post detailing  his first experience with Web3. Spoiler alert: it's not as decentralized or divorced from Web2 as you might have thought.

You can find Cassidy Williams on Twitter and her website.

Ben Popper can be found on Twitter here.

Ryan Donovan can be found on Twitter, or writing for the Stack Overflow blog.

You can find Maureen here. 

You can find Scott here.

There is a wealth of free courses available through the AWS training website, including Operations, Advanced Networking, Machine Learning, and Data Science. 

You can find Philippe on Twitter here and learn more about CrowdSec here.

They recently put together a list of the IP addresses trying to exploit the new Log4j vulnerability.

For a prescient view of today's cybersecurity challenges, Humeau recommends John Brunner's classic 1975 sci-fi novel, The Shockwave Rider.

Data scientists and engineers don’t always play well together. Data scientists will plan out a solution, carefully build models, test them in notebooks, then throw that solution over the wall to engineering. Implementing that solution can take months.

Historically, the data science team has been purely science-driven. Work on methodologies, prove out something that they wanted to achieve, and then hand it over to the engineering organization. That could take many months.

Over the past three to five years, they’ve been moving their engineering and data science operations onto the cloud as part of an overall Agile transformation and a move from being sales-led to being product-led. With most of their solutions migrated over, they decided that along with modernizing their infrastructure, they wanted to modernize their legacy systems, add new functions and scientific techniques, and take advantage of new technologies to scale and meet the demand coming their way. 

While all of the rituals and the rigor of Agile didn't always facilitate the more open-ended nature of the data science work at 84.51°, having both data science and engineering operating in a similar tech stack has been a breath of fresh air. Working cross-functionally has shortened the implementation delay. At the same time, being closer to the engineering side of the house has given the data science team a better sense of how to fit their work into the pipeline. 

Getting everyone on the same tech stack had a side effect. Between the increasing complexity of the projects, geographic diversity of the folks on these projects, a rise in remote work, and continued growth, locating experts became harder. But with everyone working in the same tech, more people could answer questions and become SMEs. 

Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t tell you that 84.51° was asking and answering questions on Stack Overflow for Teams. It was helpful when Chris and Michael no longer had to call on the SMEs they knew by name but could suddenly draw more experts out of the woodwork by asking a question. Check out this episode for insights on data science, agile, and building a great knowledge base for a large, increasingly distributed engineering org.

Esther and Matt are graduate students in computer science at the University of Washington, where they study community networks.

Esther explains how open-source, community-owned and -operated LTE networks are a good solution for expanding public internet access and ensuring digital equity.

Matt walks the team through Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), a shared wireless spectrum that allows users to build their own LTE networks.

Chris Webb of the Black Brilliance Research Project lays out how a digital stewardship program in Detroit helped inspire his work.

Developers are leading the Great Resignation, according to some reports. Others feel developers aren't resigning, so much as seizing the moment to find better opportunities. 

You can find out hosts online at the links below

Cassidy

Ceora

Ryan

Ben

Have an experience with the Great Resignation you want to share with our podcast and blog? Hit us up by email:

Podcast

Pitches for the blog

Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Umer, for explaining how to: align an anchor to the right

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.

What exactly is VanillaJS? Tongue-in-cheek, it's the most lightweight JavaScript framework out there and used by pretty much every website on the internet. Seriously though, it's just JavaScript…without a framework. 

If you're interested in reading and learning more about JavaScript, Chris has a bevy of courses and eBooks over at vanillajsguides.com. 

Like Chris's ideas so much you want to subscribe to his newsletter? Right over this way!

Since you are a connoisseur of podcasts, check out Chris's own at vanillajspodcast.com.

Chris has kindly put together a collection of resources for listeners like you at gomakethings.com/overflow. 

This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to prograils for their answer to How can I read the number of lines in Fortran 90 from a text file?

Bill gives an  overview of edge computing and why it matters.

His team wants to enable developers by democratizing access to AI. OpenVINO is an open-source toolkit for high-performing AI inference.

DevCloud lets developers prototype, test, and run their workloads for free on Intel hardware and software. For more on OpenVINO, check out this example we shared that increases image resolution. 

Of course, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention another way Intel is bringing its technology to developers: joining Collectives™ on Stack Overflow.

The pathway to a software developer job has shifted over the years. It used to be that you had to go through a college computer science program before you could get a developer job. But as online education became better and programming jobs became more specialized, people were getting hired on the strength of their bootcamp or certification experience. Our 2021 Developer Survey found that almost 60% of respondents learned to code using online resources. 

Mike spent most of his time in the worlds of programmer education and publishing, including a 14 year stint at O’Reilly Media. He worked with numerous great technologists, people who wrote popular languages, and other luminaries in the software world. Much of his focus was on analyzing the signals that come from the data he saw and the conversations with people around the world. 

What those signals told him was the focus for recruiters was on skills instead of educational background. A computer science education used to be the thing that proved you had the skills. But not everyone has the four years to spend getting a degree. In today’s tech industry, many people turn to Skillsoft and other companies for certifications and classes that provide a quick boost in skills to prepare them for a changing job market. 

It’s not just people who want to break into programming who can benefit from online courses and certifications; working developers who want to continue to succeed need to make learning a habit. That can be hard to manage with a full-time job, so their organizations need to make learning a cultural norm. Setting time aside every day for learning pays dividends, not just for the individual, but for that organization. 

With the incredible growth of cloud adoption in the past couple of years, one of the hottest skills in demand right now is cloud engineering. Skillsoft offers an AWS certification course that prepares you for the certification exam. Like many of their other courses, it caters to different learning styles and modalities, while also letting you get comfortable and assess your readiness by taking practice exams. 

With a little bit of intent and planning, you can build a skill path that gets you hired or lets you make the next leap in your career. The world of software is always changing and you as a developer need change with it. With course completions and certifications, you’ll have the skills and the evidence to show employers. 

If you’re interested in learning more about Skillsoft’s offerings, check out http://www.globalknowledge.com/aws30. 

Find Joel Spolsky on Twitter here.

Jeff Atwood is on Twitter here.

Geoff Dalgas is on Twitter here.

Follow Jarrod Dixon on Twitter here.

PlanetScale is built on Vitess, the open-source database clustering system that runs at colossal scale hosting YouTube, Slack, and GitHub.

A familiar theme: Big cloud companies aren’t set up for independent developers. Sam and Ceora discuss how serverless can get projects—even businesses—up and running quickly.

Choosing the stack for a new business? Tools like Netlify can scale with your product, so you don’t have to change your architecture as you evolve.

Staging environments should be a thing of the past. That’s why PlanetScale enables database branching.

And finally, a question from Law Stack Exchange: Can satellite images be copyrighted?

This “Trojan source” bug (get it?) could threaten the security of all code.

In its annual report on its user community, GitHub found that developers appreciate automation, reusing code, and remote work. (No surprises there.) 

Ceora explains how automation and code reuse are game changers for independent developers and how this logic is spreading to big tech companies, too.

GitHub’s first Chief Security Officer has the company focused on keeping your repo secure.

GDPR  makes you legally responsible for data someone else shares with you. That’s just one of the reasons it’s not a good idea to solicit personal information through a form and then read those secrets on TikTok.

Ethan's book, Once a Bitcoin Miner: Scandal and Turmoil in the Cryptocurrency Wild West, is available now.

The metaverse isn’t just inevitable; it’s already here (and it has a booming real estate market).

As we move more of our lives online onto platforms controlled by increasingly powerful digital giants, Ethan explains the democratizing power of cryptocurrency and blockchain. 

On the other hand, China’s new digital currency (government-issued but crypto-inspired) raises questions about privacy and surveillance. And why did China declare all cryptocurrency transactions illegal?

Is crypto the new oil—an environmental disaster burning all this energy in the face of climate change? Bitcoin was using  as much energy as Finland or Pakistan

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The conversation was inspired by Epic's decision to make it's Kid's Web Service's parent verification free to all developers.

Ben has been grappling with these questions since 2013, when he wrote about allowing screen time into his young son's life. 

One thing that old article does remind us; how incredibly indestructible the original iPad was. A true tank of a tablet!

Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, javimuu, for explaining: How to get a Thumbail / Preview image from Server Video Url in Swift 3.0

We kick things off by weighing the merits of two gender-neutral regional pronouns: the familiar y’all and the under appreciated yinz. Now that’s covered...

The global population of developers will hit 45 million by 2030, up from 26.9 million in 2021 (EDC). What platforms will they want to build on?

Did Kubernetes solve all your problems? Did it create new ones?

It seems there’s always an XKCD relevant to our conversation. Today, it’s How standards proliferate.

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. 

You can learn more about Roll, which describes itself as blockchain infrastructure for social money, here.

If you want to follow them on social, check out @tryrollhq as well as their personal socials: @bradley_miles_ and @sidkal. 

If you are interested in this kind of tech, check out previous conversations on Web3 and our chat with Chris Dixon on blockchain.

Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Notnooop, who explained how you can :Make An Emoji Enabling App

GitHub's CEO, Nat Friedman, stepped down recently to focus on his startup roots. Chief product officer, Thomas Dohmke, will be moving to CEO. 

The Verge reviewed our no-longer-a-joke April Fool's keyboard. 

How many keyboard layouts are there anyway? Including non-English layouts, there's lots. 

Do you have a mind's eye? How about an inner monologue? We explore why some people have a voice in their head when they think and some don't. 

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.

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.

What is Web3? The Decentralized Internet of the Future

Cassidy

Ceora

Ryan

Ben

Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Tadeck, for showing us how to design a : Function for Factorial in Python

We start out the show talking about this article: I Don't Know How To Count That Low.

Is Apple normalizing surveillance?

Toyota trucks and Land Cruisers were very popular with ISIS. 

Instead of a lifeboat, we shoutout this fun question: How do I stop annoyed wizards from killing people all the time? A common problem for us muggles. 

Alex comes up with better ways to interact with technology and writes about it on his website. 

Is there a link between playing music and writing code? A previous article of ours covered the merger of the two in the music programming language, Sonic PI. 

If you're curious about the weird extremes of operating system development, check out TempleOS. 

Cassidy and Alex both take copious notes through Obsidian. Alex has a plugin that may help you organize notes automatically. 

The infrastructure that networked applications lives on is getting more and more complicated. There was a time when you could serve an application from a single machine on premises. But now, with cloud computing offering painless scaling to meet your demand, your infrastructure becomes abstracted and not really something you have contact with directly. Compound that problem with with architecture spread across dozens, even hundreds of microservices, replicated across multiple data centers in an ever changing cloud, and tracking down the source of system failures becomes something like a murder mystery. Who shot our uptime in the foot? 

A good observability system helps with that. On this sponsored episode of the Stack Overflow Podcast, we talk with Greg Leffler of Splunk about the keys to instrumenting an observable system and how the OpenTelemetry standard makes observability easier, even if you aren’t using Splunk’s product. 

Observability is really an outgrowth of traditional monitoring. You expect that some service or system could break, so you keep an eye on it. But observability applies that monitoring to an entire system and gives you the ability to answer the unexpected questions that come up. It uses three principal ways of viewing system data: logs, traces, and metrics.

Metrics are a number and a timestamp that tell you particular details. Traces follow a request through a system. And logs are the causes and effects recorded from a system in motion. Splunk wants to add a fourth one—events—that would track specific user events and browser failures. 

Observing all that data first means you have to be able to track and extract that data by instrumenting your system to produce it. Greg and his colleagues at Splunk are huge fans of OpenTelemetry. It’s an open standard that can extract data for any observability platform. You instrument your application once and never have to worry about it again, even if you need to change your observability platform. 

Why use an approach that makes it easy for a client to switch vendors? Leffler and Splunk argue that it’s not only better for customers, but for Splunk and the observability industry as a whole. If you’ve instrumented your system with a vendor locked solution, then you may not switch, you may just let your observability program fall by the wayside. That helps exactly no one. 

As we’ve seen, people are moving to the cloud at an ever faster pace. That’s no surprise; it offers automatic scaling for arbitrary traffic volumes, high availability, and worry-free infrastructure failure recovery. But moving to the cloud can be expensive, and you have to do some work with your application to be able to see everything that’s going on inside it. Plenty of people just throw everything into the cloud and let the provider handle it, which is fine until they see the bill.

Observability based on an open standard makes it easier for everyone to build a more efficient and robust service in the cloud. Give the episode a listen and let us know what you think in the comments.

This episode was inspired by Joma Tech's review of his first ten years in coding. 

Ben Popper shared  a fair amount of his coding journey through the series Ben Popper is the Worst Coder in the World. 

Should you actually write out code on paper as some of us had to do? Maybe.

Modding games gets people into programming. For Ryan, Freedom Force got him into Python. Today, it's Minecraft and Roblox. 

Want to jump start your career? Find a community on Discord or Twitter and make some contacts. The software industry is made of people. 

Hackathons helped Cassidy find a deeper love for coding, oh and her husband too.

Isaac's piece, Code quality: a concern for businesses, bottom lines, and empathetic programmers, ran recently on the Stack Overflow blog. 

A simple metric for code quality code be how easy is it to delete any given piece of code. 

There's no algorithmic way to judge quality code, but experienced engineers know it when they see it. 

Jeff Atwood's Performance is a Feature blog post gets a lot of mileage with our writers. But code quality isn't on the same axis; it's not a feature you can prioritize. It's part of the development process. 

At LinkedIn scale, it pays to save your developers a few minutes or even seconds on repeat tasks. Sara walks us through her experience managing senior engineers, and trying to improve developer experience and tooling, on a massive, global platform with over a billion user interactions a month.

Paul  shares some of his firm's latest work, helping to visualize the impact of climate change at Probable Futures. Interested in doing work in software focused on climate change? Paul recommends you learn a bit about NetCDF files.

Follow Sara on Twitter here.

Follow Paul on Twitter here.

Enjoy our brain teaser of the week: a new way to cut pizza.

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.

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.

Read more about the climate debate surrounding NFTs here.

We really enjoyed this piece: You either die an MVP, or live long enough to build content moderation.

You can find Ben on Twitter here.

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.

You can learn more about Paul here.

You can read more about Physna here.

Paul is excited about the Metaverse. So are we! 

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.

Right now, most development teams provide visibility into their overall process and lifecycle through standup meetings and spreadsheets. It can be a painfully manual process that uses up valuable engineering time. 

Value stream management aims to solve that by mapping out the entire software development life cycle and providing visibility into areas where things are breaking down or getting stuck. It borrows ideas from Agile and the automate-all-the-things attitude from DevOps to ensure engineering teams are moving fast with direction, avoiding bottlenecks, and reaching the the key objectives management planned weeks ago.

In this episode, we chat with Nick Mathison and Sylvan Carbonell from HCL Software DevOps about value stream management and how their product, HCL Accelerate, brings visibility into the entire gamut of the SDLC, from the request coming in from a customer to deploying code to the production servers. 

At the foundation of this process is a good map of the company’s value stream. Think of it as bringing all your teams together to map out the entire workflow of your development cycle on a whiteboard, from receiving feature requests and bug reports, assigning out tickets, merging code, requesting code reviews, passing build tests, QA processes, and finally deploying to production. 

The value stream map brings that whiteboard to life. Once the process is mapped out and the data flows revealed, it is very easy to track where the work is at any given time and how fast it is flowing through the value stream. Every company has little idiosyncrasies that make their process unique: their specific slowdowns, time sinks, and manual approvals that grind development to a halt. Value stream management spots those and helps you eliminate them. 

In a value stream, you’re no longer watching individual devs; your best metrics cover the “two-pizza team,” a team small enough to be fed by two pizzas. This team’s interactions—working through epic tickets, code reviews, internal support, etc.—provides the best metrics to identify ways to increase the value that a team provides. 

With many technology companies working fully remotely during the pandemic, understanding each team’s process is critical. HCL offers a way to accomplish this without bringing lengthy standups back in the picture.

Start benefiting from value stream management today with the forever-free Community Edition of HCL Accelerate. Try HCL Accelerate now.

Go get your copy of They Key here.

Our frequent collaborator, Cassidy Williams of Netlify, helped design the key and joined this episode to share her love for all things mechanical keyboard.

We talked about obscuring DNS traffic based on this article.

Cassidy and Ben are pretty excited about all the new Apple stuff announced recently. Ryan, the curmudgeon, does not. 

There are several theories as to where the word dongle came from. 

The Conductor framework makes building web apps simpler in a  low-code/no-code  style. 

Did the pandemic worsen everyone else's guilt and self-loathing over decreased productivity or was it just us?

Our only point of contact during the height of the pandemic was the Internet connection. Has the loosening of quarantine made us less likely to  live online?

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. 

Former co-host Sara Chipps  now manages engineering teams at LinkedIn, but her best content is still on Twitter.

Cassidy's former boss, Sarah Drasner, recently wrote a book to help engineers level up to management: Engineering Management for the Rest of Us. 

Cassidy's new favorite software tool is Astro, a single-site generator that looks to minimize the amount of client-side JavaScript in a site. 

The two books Ms. Chipps mention as the old standbys for new engineering managers are Peopleware and Smart and Gets Things Done. 

While every developer loves a good story about discovering and fixing a gnarly bug, not everyone enjoys the work of finding those bugs. Most folks would prefer to be writing business logic and solving new problems. But those input validation errors and resource leaks won’t solve themselves. 

Or will they?

AWS Bug Bust is a global competition launched with the goal of finding and fixing one million bugs in codebases around the world. It takes the traditional bug bash and turns it into a competition that anyone can enter. Got a repo or two that you’ve been meaning to clean up? Enter the Bug Bust and start squashing. 

This competition awards points to organizations, as well as individuals within an organization, for every bug that they fix in their own repos. A little friendly competition can motivate developers to fix more bugs in order to move up the leaderboards. How do you think we built Stack Overflow? Fake internet points are very important around here. With the Bug Bust competition, it’s not just fake internet points and personal glory; top bug squashers—overall and within top organizations—can win all expense paid trips to re:Invent 2021. 

In a traditional bug bust, someone has to find the bugs, file tickets on all of them, then collect them for squashing. In the Bug Bust, Amazon has managed to automate that part of the process. That’s because the Bug Bust is built on their AI-powered code review and profiling tool, CodeGuru. 

CodeGuru uses static analysis and machine learning with some additional automated reasoning to find bugs in code; everything from best practices to concurrency issues, resource leaks, security problems, and more. AI isn’t here to take your jobs, it’s here to automated away the tedious stuff. Developers get to harness the power of artificial intelligence in their everyday lives.

Concurrency and resource leak issues tend to drain the soul out of the developers. You could spend all day trying to optimize and close those. CodeGuru includes a function profiler that looks for a codebase’s most expensive calls. It’s a lightweight agent actively running and looking for ways to reduce the cost of the running application. 

These bugs, along with security issues and AWS API calls, are the ones that earn the most points. But all bugs earn their bashers points; CodeGuru spots code inefficiencies, duplications, and general code quality detectors, and performs input validation. The model behind this is pretrained on years of Amazon bug hunting experience. The system does learn from you as to what is a good bug in your codebase, but it’s not training on your code. It’s your feedback that makes CodeGuru a better bug hunter.

If you have Java and Python code in a GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, Bitbucket, or AWS CodeCommit repository, you can jump into the competition. Sign up with your email and you get 30 days to run as many Bug Busts as you want for free. The top ten individual bug busters get VIP treatment at the 2021 re:Invent conference (and an all-expense-paid trip there), which is being held in person this year. Top participating organizations get  a ticket to give to one of their developers as well. For those bashers outside of the top ten, you can still earn some sweet swag by passing some point milestones. 

The contest to win the trip to re:Invent 2021 runs through September, but you can still automate your bug bashes and get swag anytime. Want to get started? Head over to the AWS Bug Bust site now.

Weaveworks helps DevOps folks manage their Kubernetes settings entirely 

Paul's first computer was a Sinclair ZX-80, which had a clock speed of 3.25 MHz, 1 KB of static RAM ,and 4 KB of read-only memory. Pretty good for 1980. 

Weaveworks based their project on Flux, an open source engine. If you're not a big corporation and you want to use it, it's free!

Before there was Kubernetes, Google created Borg, an internal cluster manager. It has yet to be assimilated by Kubernetes. 

Ben thinks that, if it gets too easy to manage Kubernetes clusters, we'll be out of a job talking about the pain of cluster manages. 

Today's lifeboat badge goes to Daniel Ribeiro for the answer to How can I run Go binary files?

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?

You can learn more about Sam on his LinkedIn here. You can find him on Twitter here.

Learn more about Oso, check out the code, and join their Slack community here.

Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Evgeny Lisin, who answered the question: How to find UIWebView in Project and replace it with WKWebView?

You can find Angie's blog here, catch her on Twitter here, and connect with her on LinkedIn here.

You can check out Applitools and  learn about the visual AI system it uses for testing here.

Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to  Alex Klyubin for explaining: What is the difference between Jar signer and Apk signer?

Nick is now Sourcery's CTO.  You can find him on Twitter here.

Brendan serves as Sourcery's CEO. You can find him on Twitter here.

You can try out Sourcery for free here and check out the company's open positions here.

Our lifeboat badge of the week, fittingly, goes to Martin Evans, for explaining how to parse an integer from a string in Python.

Paul is stepping away down as CEO of Postlight to focus more on understanding climate change and how we can address it. The science hurts his brain. 

Cassidy Williams, currently at Netlify, has published articles on our blog and provides links in our newsletter.

We dig into some of the results of the dev survey, including how kids today are learning to code on the internet. There's so much to learn from now!

Did everyone step back from working full time? Our survey data shows a decrease in full time employed respondents. Was there an existential moment for everyone during the pandemic where they thought that there must be something else?

Our surveyed devs love Svelte but get paid the most for Ruby on Rails. 

This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Suren Raj for his answer to Java convert bytes[] to File.

Every password can be compromised. Stych helps companies build authentication flows that don't need user passwords. 

Julianna grew up in Idaho, where she didn't even know what computer science was. After stints as a software engineer and product manager, she found a role where could figure out what the organization should be building: CTO and founder. 

Their first product was email magic links, which is more complicated than you think. Most importantly, how do you always avoid the spam folder? Copy changes in an email can make all the difference. 

Developer tooling is undergoing a renaissance now that smaller companies are getting into the game with API offerings. The big thing that differentiates good tools from bad is easy to understand  documentation. 

The right metaphor for API services isn't SaaS, it's eCommerce. Plug it in into your app without giving up design and user experience. 

In 1987, Anita Borg, AnitaB.org's namesake, saw how few women were at a "systems" conference. A few casual chats turned into the listserv, Systers, which continues to offer a place for women in engineering to meet and discuss. 

Grace Hopper—that's Navy Rear Admiral Hopper to you, civilian—was the first to devise a theory of programming languages that were machine-independent. She created the FLOW-MATIC programming language, which served as the basis for COBOL. 

Quincy started in electrical engineering and learned FORTRAN. That experience with how computers operate on hardware helped her teach C++. The difference is like listening to vinyl vs. mp3s. 

Should UX designers create technology that you need to adapt to or adapts to you? And will different generations create different interaction paradigms?

We're out of lifeboat badges, so we summoned a Necromancer winner! Congrats to stealth who was awarded the badge for their answer to the question, Adding multiple columns in MySQL with one statement.

We're officially part of the Prosus family now that the acquisition has closed. It’s a huge milestone and a big deal for our company and community.

Prosus has a global reach and will help us meet the needs of developers and technologists everywhere. 

Have no fear: there will not be a paywall on the community sites. We have separate free and paid products for a reason. 

We combined our Ads and Talent businesses into Reach & Relevance, which gives companies the opportunity to showcase their products and engineering organizations to software engineers around the world. 

Remote work is here to stay, and a lot of knowledge workers are starting to adapt the processes that software engineers have been using for years. 

Our lifeboat shoutout goes to Jordi Castilla for the answer to the question: Convert HH:MM:SS into minutes using JavaScript

Ethan started his career when the marquee tag was king and is bullish on its comeback. 

His focus as an investor is on developer tools & infrastructure, open source software, space, and emerging compute.

We talk about his time as a Product Group Leader at Facebook, and his strong feelings on the state of DevOps.

You can find his investor profile here, his blog here, and on Twitter here.

Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Denys Vuika, who answered the question: How do I configure Yarn as the default package manager for Angular CLI?

Mason began his career as a developer, went on to be a CEO, but also found time to produce 80s alt rock album full of advice on how to run your startup.

Slack began life as a video game company, eventually pivoting to make an internal chat tool it had built into its main business. Descript had a similar journey, taking  the editing software Mason and his team developed at Detour, and moving it to become the center of a new business after Detour was acquired by Bose.

Headquartered in Montreal, Lyrebird is the AI division of Descript . It was founded by PhD students studying under Yoshua Bengio, who won the Turing Prize in 2019 for his pioneering research into deep learning and neural networks.

Our lifeboat badge of the week goes Avinash, who explained what to do with a invalid syntax error that arises while running an AWS command

Mark started out on a 4k TRS-80. He had to program it in assembly language, as there wasn't enough memory to use the local Basic copy.

Throughout his career, he's oscillated between using databases and building databases. He started at Caltech and NASA, using databases to store and organize space data and chip data. Then he built databases at Oracle, including versions, 5 6, 7, and 8.

After that it was back to using databases at NewsCorp for huge student data systems. 

He built databases at AWS with Amazon RDS, then moved to Grab Taxi, the Uber of Southeast Asia, and finally back to MongoDB, where he is building again.

You can find Mark on Twitter here.

This week's lifeboat badge goes to Erik Kalkoken, who answered the question: In a Slack, is there a way to see all the members that is part of that channel? 

This year over 80,000 respondents took the time to share their feedback on the tools and trends that are shaping software development.

We learned a lot about the way developers learn. For the rising cohort of coders under the age of 18, online resources like videos and blogs are more popular than books and school combined, a statistic that doesn’t hold for any of our other age cohorts. 

Roughly a third of respondents responded to our question on mental health. This is twice the percentage that offered feedback in 2020 and may reflect a growing awareness of the importance of mental health’s and the impact of the ongoing pandemic.

Another trend that may be linked to the pandemic is work status. We see a greater percentage of respondents working part-time or in school, while those indicating full time employment decreased. This may reflect the effects of the pandemic, which saw workers from all industries stepping back and reevaluating their relationship to a five day work week and in-person employment.

Check out the full results of the 2021 Dev Survey here.

We chat discrete mathematics, differential privacy, and homomorphic encryption. But don't worry, we also break it down in laymen's terms.

Interested in working in security? Mahmoud will personally extend an offer to anyone who solves this puzzle.

Puzzles not your thing? You can still learn more about Very Good Security and its open positions here.

Mahmoud is on Twitter here.

You can read Max's full article on Kubernetes on our blog here.

You can find Max on Twitter here and his personal website here.

Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Mantas, who answered the question: Determine if all the values in a PHP array are null

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?

You can find Tara on  Twitter here. 

Sam is on Twitter here.

You can learn more about Loveshark's latest games and the roles they are hiring for here.

Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Elliott Frisch, for answering the question: Convert list of integer into comma separated string?

You can find some fun video of Cassidy putting Copilot to the test here.

If you want to take the Jamstack survey, check it out here.

Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Andomar, who answered the question: Will multiple calls to `now()` in a single postgres query always give same result?

We discuss how Simões learned to code and the feature set that allowed Poker Now to differentiate itself in a crowded space. 

Simões shares the tech stack he used to craft the first version of Poker Now, and how he rebuilt the service after it crashed under the weight of a massive wave of new users. During the peak of lockdown, his site went from an average of 100 concurrent users to more than 10,000 at a time.

Lastly, we chat about the allure of leaving a regular job behind to work on a passion project, and about the challenges of maintaining a service and earning a living as a solo developer.

Today we're celebrating Divakar, who was awarded a lifeboat badge for answering the question: Searching a sequence in a NumPy array.

If you want to catch up on the first half of the episode, you can find it here.

The massive shift to remote work that so many companies undertook over the last year has pushed many to adopt an asynchronous, merge driven workflow that has been pioneered and perfected by software developers. With tools like Airtable, and Coda, the boundary between programming and other forms of media and knowledge work is beginning to blur. 

What happened to Google Wave? Can products with passionate fans get pushed into the Commons after they are sunset?

Peek under the hood, and it's spreadsheets all the way down. Some companies are now turning a simple spreadsheet into an interactive web app. 

Spreadsheets on steroids, what could go wrong?

No Lifeboat badge this episode, but tune in tomorrow, we'll have Part 2 of our live episode from the Fishbowl.

You can learn more about Lightship, Niantic's AR SDK, here. They are hiring developers, and openings can be found here.

Richard can be found on LinkedIn here. 

Kelly can be found on LinkedIn here.

A big thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Karim, for answering the question: Check if value exists in Array object Javascript or Angular?

As explained in this piece, "A headless CMS is a back-end only content management system (CMS) built from the ground up as a content repository that makes content accessible via a RESTful API or GraphQL API for display on any device." Shopify has leaned hard into GraphQL and APIs in general. 

The goal, as Coates describes it, is to allow developers to bring their own stack to the front-end, but provide them with the benefits of Shopify's back-end, like edge data processing for improved speed  at global scale. Shopify also offers a wealth of DevOps tooling and logistical support when it comes to international commerce. 

We also discuss Liquid, the flexible template language Shopify uses for  building web apps.

Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to chunhunghan for answering the question: How to customize the switch button in a flutter?

If you're full up on technical content and just want funny retweets, follow Adam on Twitter here

If you're interested in learning more about tag pages, check out what the community created for Rust.

Thanks to Peter Cordes, our lifeboat badge winner of the week, for answering the question: How can I accurately benchmark unaligned access speed on x86_64?

You can check out all the details about Collectives in our launch post here.

We detailed the user research that allowed our community to help shape this product in a Meta post here.

Teresa is on Twitter here and Jascha is on LinkedIn here.

We chatted with three guests:

Miguel Jetté: Head of AI R&D

Josh Dong: AI Engineering Manager

Jenny Drexler: Senior Speech Scientist

When Jette was studying mathematics in the early 2000s, his focus was on computational biology, and more specifically, phylogenetic trees, and DNA sequences. He wanted to understand the evolution of certain traits and the forces that explain why our bones are a certain length or our brains a certain size. As it turned out, the algorithms and techniques he learned in this field mapped very well to the emerging discipline of automatic speech recognition, or ASR. 

During this period, Montreal was emerging as a hotbed for artificial intelligence, and Jette found himself working for Nuance, the company behind the original implementation of Siri. That experience led him to several positions in the world of speech recognition, and he eventually landed at Rev, where he founded the company’s AI department. 

Jette describes Rev as an “Uber for Transcription.” Anyone can sign up for the platform and earn money by listening to audio submitted by clients and transcribing the speech into text. This means the company has a tremendous dataset of raw audio that has been annotated by human beings and, in many cases, assessed a second time by the client. For someone looking to build an AI system that mastered the domain of speech to text, this was a goldmine. 

Jette built the earliest version of Rev’s AI, but it was up to our second guest, Josh Dong, to productize and scale that system. He helped the department transition from older technologies like Perl to more popular languages like Python. He also focused on practical concerns like modularity and reusable components. To combine machine learning and DevOps, Dong added Docker containers and a testing pipeline. If you’re interested in the nuts and bolts of keeping a system like Rev’s running at tremendous scale, you’ll want to check out this part of the show. 

We also explore some of the fascinating future and promise this technology holds in our time with Jenny Drexler. She explains how Rev is moving from a hybrid model—one that combines Jette’s older statistical techniques with Dong’s newer machine learning approach—to a new system that will be ML from end-to-end. This will open up the door for powerful applications, like a single system that can convert speech text across multiple languages in a single piece of audio. 

“One of the things that's really cool about these end to end models is that basically, whatever data you have, it can learn to handle it. So a very similar architecture can do sequence to sequence learning with different kinds of sequences. The model architecture that you might use for speech recognition can actually look very similar to what you might use for translation. And you can use that same architecture, to say, feed in audio in lots of different languages and be able to do transcription for any of them within one model. It's much harder with the hybrid models to sort of put all the right pieces together to make that happen,” explains Drexler.

If you’re interested in learning more about the past, present, and future of artificial intelligence that can understand our spoken language and learn how to respond, check out the full episode. If you want to learn more about Rev or check out some of the positions they have open, you can find their careers page here.

Bligh explains her love for front end and the simple pleasure of bringing a designer’s vision to life

We also talk about making the transition from journalism and digital media to the world of software development. 

You can find her on Twitter here.

You can check out Contact here.

Learn more about Makers here.

Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Rami Amro Ahmed, who answered the question: What is the difference between Model Factory and a DB seeder in Laravel?

You can check out some more of Henley's work on his blog here. Recent pieces include: 

• A theory of how developers seek information
• All my career rejections
• Navigate your code like it's 2021 
• Why is it so hard to see code from 5 minutes ago?
• An inquisitive code editor: Overcome bugs before you know you have them

How much time does the average developer spend typing in their editor versus researching, exploring, and pondering? Henley believes half an hour of inputting actual code a day is realistic, despite what you've heard about the 10X developer in your area. 

You can find Jenn on Twitter here. She is the creator of the wonderful website, make8bitart.com. 

You can check out Glitch here and dig into some of its WebXR projects.

Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Ruberandinda Patience, who explained why you got a 404 Not Found, even though the route exist in Laravel.

Karl is interested in the use of low code tools to extend development work beyond the engineering department. He also believes this approach, when done properly, allows teams to release new iterations more rapidly.

Check out his company, draft.dev.

Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

This week's lifefboat badge goes to Günter Zöchbauer, who explained: How to use 2 mixins in State in Flutter? 

Innocent is  a research associate at the MIT Gov /Lab. You can find him on Twitter here.

Luke is the Founder and Executive Director of the civic technology organization Grassroot, as a practitioner-in-residence in 2021. You can follow him on Twitter here.

Our lifeboat of the week goes to John Rotenstein, who explained: Why some services are called “AWS XXX” and the others “Amazon XXX”.

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.

You can check out our piece how developers can be their own operations department here.

Our piece on preventing scope creep while working from home is here.

You can follow Mike on Twitter here and learn more about building apps for Slack here.

This week's lifeboat badge goes to averroes for helping us to : Check if integer == null

Chou, a  Stanford educated computer scientist and electrical engineer, cut her teeth in Silicon Valley with stints at Facebook, Quora, and Pinterest, where she advocated for a stronger focus on diversity. 

Block Party describes its mission as building "anti-harassment tools against online abuse, but more fundamentally we are building solutions for user control, protection, and safety."

As CEO and lead engineer, Chou gets to choose the company's tools. Block Party is built with technologies like Render, Flask, and Jinja. Paul is very jealous of this stack.

Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Bryan Oakley, who answered the question: How to redirect print statements to Tkinter text widget?

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.

David helps us understand where great designers fit on web companies these days, somewhere between front-of-the-front-end and back-of-the-front-end.

Right now a lot of projects have to be maintained in multiple places - one for marketing, one for design, one for development. David shares thoughts on how to combine workspaces and where design systems can be integrated with tools.

Congrats to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Jon, for helping unpack this riddle: Execution failed for task ':fluttertoast:compileDebugKotlin'

Ilya brought a host of good topics to the table. Bold Penguin went from one offshore developer, to one key dev, to one team, to multiple teams, multiple leaders, multiple external teams, to having a complete reboot only to go through it again. Ilya explains the lessons learned along the way.

If you’re trying to grow a software startup, you have to understand and adapt your business. Bold Penguin had to figure out if its focus was being a platform, a product, a SaaS company, an enterprise technology solution company, or all of the above. 

You can check out Bold Penguin here and find Ilya on LinkedIn here.

Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Gibin Ealias, who helped to solve the enternal conundrum: Flex align-items: center not centering.

Sara has been part of the open source community since 2001 and was formerly on the board of the .NET foundation. Recently she was elected to the board of the OpenJS foundation and was eager to get back in the trenches, helping people solve computer problems.

In this episode we talk about coding interviews and brushing up on your puzzle solving chops.

Later we dive into Ember.js, the framework Sara will be using with her new colleagues at LinkedIn.

We explore what it’s like to join a team when everyone is still remote and you never get the chance to onboard with your team in person.

This week’s lifeboat badge winner is Perfect28, who answered the question: Linq OrderBy custom order. Spoiler alert, there are char arrays involved. 

You can find Tommy on Twitter here and check out his NFT collection here.

Evan tweets his undying love for The Mets here.

Before you lay out your critique of NFTs, here's a great documentary on fraud and forgery in the fine art world. 

Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Oriol, who answered the question: What is the difference between 'remove' and 'removeChild' method in javascript?

You can check out the badge Github gave to folks for helping with the Mars flight here. You can learn more about F´, NASA’s open source flight software and embedded system framework, here.

Paul tells the story of a shady financial operator who offered to take his blog public during the dot com boom. Yes, Ftrain.com was once an IPO candidate.

Who copies and pastes from Stack Overflow? We dig into some of the data from our April Fools joke to get a sense of the scale and collaboration happening across our community.

Paul takes a tutorial on coding with Ethereum but decides decarbonizing is the real future for software.

Today's lifeboat badge winner is Scott M., who answered the question: How to remove one line from a txt file?

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()?

You can follow David on Twitter here and read his blog here.

Check out more about Dapper Labs and it's work with the NBA and NFTs here.

David has written some influential pieces on the world of digital music and the role of software platforms. Check out a few of his pieces here.

Read about David's adventure's setting up a Minecraft server for his kids and using software for griefer detection. 

Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Keith Thompson, for answering the question: Go lang differentiate “\n” and line break

As Keith eloquently explains, "There is no distinction between a 'real' and an 'unreal' line break."

Want to try developing with Ethereum? Free Code Camp has you covered.

On the other hand, here are some thoughts on why it's not the greatest language for developers.

Interested in minting your own NFT? There are lots of options. Ethereum can be more expensive to use (those gas fees, ouch) but it also has the most active network of artists and collectors.

Thanks to Phlume, our lifeboat badge winner of the week, for answering the question: How do I remove the double border on this table?

You can check out our deep dive into the copy paste data here. We saw over 40 million copies in the two weeks worth of activity we analyzed.

Kyle  Pollard graduated from the University of Northern British Columbia and worked as a computer technician and  programmer for the City of Prince George in Canada.  You can find him on Github, Twitter, and his website.

There’s lots of info about Cassidy’s various projects at cassidoo.co.  You can catch her coding live at @cassidoo, Thursdays at 12:30 PT/2:30 Central/3:30 Eastern.

Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is TJ Crowder, who answered the question: How can I see the source of built-in JavaScript functions?

You can follow David on Twitter here. If you want to check out his new book, The Business of Belonging,  the first chapter is available here.

You can find out more about CMX here and learn more about Bevy here.

Cesar prefers to remain off social media, but you can find him on LinkedIn.

Dave Winer wrote a fun piece on the lost apps of the 80s. We explore the paradox of software that is "too good" to become popular among mainstream consumers. 

Microsoft has been releasing new versions of its flagship flight simulator each year for a whopping 38 years now. Now we know what makes it seem so very, very real. But just how big can that next patch be? 

Another day, another data breach. At this point, we've become numb to the notion that our identity is compromised.  Is acceptance better for your health than constantly being on guard? See for yourself.

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.

Lots of people who work outside of programming learn Python as part of their job. When folks from telecom, academia, or medical science want to build a web app to help with their job or share their findings with the world, they may feel they need to learn Javascript, CSS, HTML, and half a dozen frameworks to get started. 

Anvil is a platform that hopes to enable the creation of great web apps with nothing but Python code. You can drag and drop your user elements and rely on Anvil to handle your server and database. 

He also created Skulpt, which you can check out here. It's decscribed as follows, "Python. Client Side. Skulpt is an entirely in-browser implementation of Python. No preprocessing, plugins, or server-side support required, just write Python and reload. 

Want to go deeper? Check out his talk on Full Stack Web Development with nothing but Python here. 

You can follow him on Twitter here and Github here.

Despite its reputation, there is a Go To for every language. You can dive deeper with the Summer of Go To.

There is a lot you can learn from it as a beginner, even if it is worth avoiding as a professional.

Paul's children have learned to inspect the element and the document object model. Being deep into computers seems normal in an era of remote school and omnipresent devices. 

Who doesn't like making tree maps of memory usage or cropping and splicing footage on TikTok? 

If all kids are into computer hacking and AV Club activities like film editing and music producing...what does being a nerd mean anymore? 

Google has a whole slew of online certificates that allow you to find entry points into a career in  data analysis, UX design, or project management.

You can find Roberta on Twitter. For anyone who understands Portuguese, you can also check out her podcast. 

Check out Roberta's recent blog post on best practices, and when to ignore them.

If you're interested in Dapper, an open source project built by Stack Overflow folks that works as a simple object mapper .Net, you can check it out here.

Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Colonel Panic, for explaining: What the boolean literals in PowerShell are

Shay is a developer advocate building open source tools and writing education content. Outside of work she writes poetry, indulges fad hobbies, and reads whatever’s left out on the coffee table. 

Steve Gill a Developer Relations Manager, currently managing the SDK tools team at Slack. The tools teams develops all of our open sourced SDK, such as Bolt for JavaScript, Python, and Java. In his spare time, he enjoys playing ice hockey, woodworking and gaming.

You can find Shay on  LinkedIn and  Twitter

Learn more about Steve on LinkedIn and Twitter 

If you're interested in Bolt, there is lots to learn here.

No lifeboat this week, but thanks to Alex for emailing us to ask: "alternatives to more better element usage?" If you have ideas, we're all ears.

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?

You can check out more of Tom's work and some of his books on his website, Everything SysAdmin. 

Tom also wrote a great blog post for our site that explains his method for crafting a positive feedback loop between Dev and Ops using real-time documentation.

You can find Tom on Twitter and check out his books on Sys Admin and  Cloud System Administration.

Ian is Brooklyn bred a tech junkie, NBA stats nerd, hip hop connoisseur, and co-creator of GameFlo and Ujima Now. He graduated from Brown University and was a teaching fellow at FullStack Academy before coming to Stack Overflow. You can find him on Twitter and Github.

Kyle  Pollard graduated from the University of Northern British Columbia and worked as a computer technician and  programmer for the City of Prince George in Canada.  You can find him on Github, Twitter, and his website.

Our lifeboat this week goes to  Max Pevsner, who answered a question, but cautioned against taking his advice: Don't reuse cell in UITableView

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

Cleghorn works for Defense Digital Services. On Twitter, the group describes itself as  "a SWAT team of nerds on tours of duty."  

You can read more about the group's goals on their website. 

You can see some of his work over on Hacker One.

This week's discussion was inspired by an article from Sandi Metz, which you can find here. It begins with a terrific line, defining the half-life of software as, "the amount of time required for half of an application's code to change so much that it becomes unrecognizable."

This topic also connected to a post we ran on the Stack Overflow blog this week,  Sacrificial Architecture: learning from abandoned systems. The author, Mohamad Aladdin, suggest that one should "think of your code quality as if it will run forever, but adapt to change as if your code will be obsolete tomorrow."

Our lifeboat badge winner for this episode is Ishmael, who explained why JSON dumps your formatting and how to fix it.

You can find  the paper on MuZero here.

He blogs at Furidamu and can be found on Twitter here.

The story on drug discovery powered by AI can be found here.

If you’re a programmer working with npm, Sara has some basic advice on best practices that will keep your codebase safe.

Today’s discussion was inspired by a blog post from Michel Gorny which you can find here.

Need to simplify the address where people can send you bitcoins? Check out https://ens.domains/, which even offers .club for your TLD.

Thanks to Tagir Valeev for answering the question: How to Split odd and even numbers and sum of both in collection using Stream. You’re our lifeboat badge winner of the week.

Blake has a PhD in physics from Yale and is the quantum platform lead. You can find him on Twitter here and read some of his recent writing here.

Robert is VP of IBM Quantum Ecosystem Development, IBM Research. He's the author of Dancing with Qubits  and has put together a great list of tutorial videos on his website.

No Lifeboat badge winner today, but if you're a fan of Schrödinger's cat, be sure to check out this question from our Quantum Computing Stack Exchange.

Welcome to The Stack Overflow Podcast!

A nice story on how to avoid the Nomad Tax Trap.

Got a lot of employees moving to Texas? The state is notorious for the number of patent lawsuits filed there, and having employees living in the area may expose companies to great legal liability.

If the work from home boom is here to stay, get ready for a lot of "cost-of-living" adjustments to follow.

Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to kd12 for explaining: How to get an element by its data-id in jQuery