The Stack Overflow Podcast3 Maalis 2020

How to Find Your Next Stop

Echeruo's new venture is called Love and Magic, a startup studio that helps companies of all sizes maximize their ability to innovate.

For anyone that has an idea they have been hoping to turn into a startup, Echeruo and his collaborators just introduced the Startup School of Alchemy. It's being taught at WeWork and Princeton University. It offers a six-week curriculum designed to help aspiring entrepreneurs find product-market fit.Apply with the code "stackoverflow" and you get $1000 off the course, a 40% discount.

Echeruo says his time working in finance and with Microsoft Excel was what gave him the ability to think of how data from maps could be optimized by an algorithm and built into a useful mobile app.

For those who don't know, our co-founder and Chairmam, Joel Spolsky, was part of the team at Microsoft that built Excel. Here is legendary 2015 talk, You Suck at Excel, where he organizes a spreadsheet to keep track of what he pays his Pokemon, ahem,I mean, uh, employees.

You can take a deeper dive into the backstory of how Chinedu built HopStop below, related in his own words.

I've always had difficulty with directions. When I grew up in Nigeria, I remember getting lost in my own house. It wasn’t like it was a mansion, it was a four-bedroom house.

So you can imagine how I felt when I got to NYC and had to get around with the subway and bus system! I remember walking up once to one of those blown up maps in the subway station. My nose was a feet away from the dust laden map. The subway lines looked like tangled noodles. Complexity galore!

New Yorkers used to walk around with these pocket guides—Hagstrom maps. I was going on a date in the Lower East Side. It doesn’t have the grid like the rest of the city. I got lost and was very late getting to the bar.I can't remember how, the date went but I remember what I did first thing next morning. I walked over to the subway station, grabbed a subway MAP and laid it on the floor and tried to figure it out. There’s driving directions. But there weren’t subway directions. So I was solving my own problems.

I was looking for the complete directions—leave your house, turn left, go into this particular entrance, get on this train, get off at this station, use this exit. Because I was, in a lot of ways, the ultimate user, we ended up building a product that solved the complete problem—get me from where I am now to where I need to be.

I was non-technical, I worked for a hedge fund. I may have been thinking algorithmically, I knew that this was computationally possible. But I didn’t know how to make it a reality. In conceiving the problem, I threw all the data into spreadsheets. I interned at this company when I was in college, where I learned about spreadsheets. I found the work very tedious, but I learned how to think about data, to think in tables. It allowed me to conceptualize complexity.

To conceptualize the first subway data as a spreadsheet, I started by staring at the subway map laid on the wood floor of my apartment. The most obvious features were colors, lines, and stops. So those are the tables I typed into Excel first. Then I realized the lines also represented two train directions so I redid the spreadsheet. Then I realized the stops served multiple subway lines, so I redid the spreadsheet. Then I realized some of the stops would only be active during certain periods, so I redid the spreadsheet. We kept on learning and adjusting. It took us a long time before we had a data model that robustly described NYC's subway system. We even figured out how to automatically account for the frequent weekend NYC subway diversions.

To build the first version of the app, I went to eLance, described to these computer scientists the data set in Excel, routes, stops, exits, entrances, and I sent it in. This developer in Siberia, Russia, emailed me, came up with a solution. But he turned out to be a complete genius, he built the core of the first version of Hopstop. Here I was, a Nigerian, sitting in my apartment using messenger, email, on a laptop. And I never met Alex for four years. We built Hopstop over four years without ever meeting each other.

We ran very lean. Alex did all the coding. I did the subway data and user experience. I'd have to ride to different subway stations to note each subway entrance and exit, etc. When we added the bus system, Rajeev and his data team in India helped input the bus stops and schedules. And four years later, we were purchased by Apple, so quite the ride.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Kokeile Premiumia

Nauti 14 päivää ilmaiseksi

Tilaa Premium

Jaksot(894)

Vibe coding needs a spec, too

Ryan talks with Deepak Singh, VP of Developer Agents and Experiences at AWS and lead at Kiro, about spec-driven development in a vibe coding world. They explore how AI tools have evolved from autocomplete to sophisticated agents that can write code based off of just specs, and how AWS has pioneered spec-driven development through their Kiro agent. Episode notes:Kiro is AWS’ AI IDE that brings structure to AI coding with spec-driven development. Connect with Deepak on the Kiro Discord server and read more about spec-driven development on The New Stack. We last spoke to Deepak Singh in March about how enterprise-ready agents are.Congratulations to user Whymarrh for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Git commits are duplicated in the same branch after doing a rebase. Learn more about the future of software engineering in the AI age on November 3rd, when our CEO, Prashanth Chandrasekar, speaks at a virtual OpenAI Forum.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

31 Loka 26min

Craft and quality beat speed and scale, with or without agents

Ryan welcomes Tom Moor, head of engineering at Linear, to discuss AI agents’ mixed results for productivity in the development lifecycle, the importance of context for maximizing agents’ effectiveness, and the role that junior developers need to take in a world increasingly driven by AI.Episode notes:Linear is a tool for planning and building products that streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.Connect with Tom on Twitter. This episode’s shoutout goes to user ozz, who won a Populist badge for their answer to Column width not working in DataTables bootstrap.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

28 Loka 27min

Your runbooks are obsolete in the age of agents

Ryan is joined by Spiros Xanthos, CEO and founder of Resolve AI, to talk about the future of AI agents in incident management and troubleshooting, the challenges of maintaining complex software systems with traditional runbooks, and the changing role of developers in an AI-driven world.Episode notes:Resolve AI is building agents to help you troubleshoot alerts, manage incidents, and run your production systems. Connect with Spiros on Linkedin or email him at spiros@resolve.ai. Congrats to user larsks for winning a Stellar Answer badge for their answer to How do I get into a Docker container's shell?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

24 Loka 24min

What leaders need to know from the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey

In this episode of Leaders of Code, Eira May, B2B Editor at Stack Overflow, and Natalie Rotnov, Senior Product Marketing Manager for the Enterprise Product Suite at Stack Overflow, unpack the key takeaways from the 2025 Developer Survey for tech and business leaders. The discussion focuses on the evolving developer relationship with AI, the continued struggle with tool sprawl, and actionable recommendations for leaders looking to deliver value and improve developer experience.The discussion covers critical findings for tech leaders:The decline in developer trust in AI is linked to two main frustrations: solutions that are "almost right, but not quite" and the time wasted debugging AI-generated code.Human connection and community validation remain vital: 80% of developers still visit Stack Overflow regularly, and the number of "advanced questions" on the public platform has doubled since 2023, underscoring AI’s limitations when it comes to complex, context-dependent questions.Tool sprawl continues, as most developers use 6–10 tools, suggesting that AI tends to complicate rather than simplify workflows.Notes:Explore key insights from the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, consolidated into an executive-ready summary. Connect with Natalie Rotnov on LinkedIn.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

23 Loka 31min

Open source is giving you choices with your agent systems

Ryan welcomes John Dickerson, CEO of Mozilla.ai, to talk about the evolving landscape of AI agents, the role of open source in keeping the tech ecosystem healthy, the challenges OS communities have faced with the rise of AI, and the implications of data privacy and user choice in the age of multi-agent AI systems. Episode notes:Mozilla.ai is building the agent platform that helps organizations safely automate real work with AI agents. Connect with John on Linkedin or email him at john@mozilla.ai. Congrats to Populist badge winner Philipp Merkle, who won it for their answer to How to set the -Xmx when start running a jar file?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

21 Loka 26min

Why rent a cloud when you can build one?

Andrei Kvapil, founder of Ænix and core developer of Cozystack, joins Ryan to dive into what it takes to build a cloud from scratch, the intricacies of Kubernetes and virtualization, and how open-source has made digital sovereignty possible. Episode notes:Cozystack is a Kubernetes-based framework for building a private cloud environment.Connect with Andrei on Linkedin. Today’s shoutout goes to user Adam for winning a Populist badge for their answer to Regex replace text but exclude when text is between specific tag. TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

17 Loka 29min

AI agents for your digital chores

Ryan welcomes Dhruv Batra, co-founder and chief scientist at Yutori, to explore the future of AI agents, how AI usage is changing the way people interact with advertisements and the web as a whole, and the challenges that proactive AI agents may face when being integrated into workflows and personal internet use. Episode notes:Yutori is building AI agents that can reliably handle everyday digital tasks on your behalf on the web.Connect with Dhruv via his website. Congrats to the winner of today’s Populist badge, user Don Kirkby, who earned it with their answer to Find all references to an object in python.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

14 Loka 34min

Vite is like the United Nations of JavaScript

Ryan welcomes back Evan You, the creator of Vite and Vue.js, to discuss the evolution of build tools in web development, the unique features of Vite from its plugins to its hot module capabilities, and the future of Vite, including its integration with Rust. Plus, they touch on Vite’s new documentary and the power of open-source communities.Episode notes:Vite is a frontend build tool powering the next generation of web applications. Check out all of the work Evan is doing at his company VoidZero. For more on the origins of Vite, watch the newly-released Cult.repo’s documentary. If you’d rather hear Evan talk about Vue.js, listen to the podcast we published with him earlier this summer. Today’s shoutout goes to user dbush for winning a Populist badge on their answer to How does printing a union itself and not its member work in C?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

10 Loka 27min

Kaikki yhdessä sovelluksessa

Kuuntele kaikki suosikkipodcastisi ja -äänikirjasi yhdessä paikassa.

Sinulle valikoitua sisältöä

Podme-sovelluksessa kokoat suosikkisi helposti omaan kirjastoosi. Saat meiltä myös kuuntelusuosituksia!

Jatka kuuntelua koska tahansa

Voit jatkaa siitä mihin jäit, myös offline-tilassa.

Premium

9,99 €/kk

Kaikki premium-podcastit
Ei mainoksia
Ei sitoutumista, peruuta koska tahansa

Aloita 14 päivän kokeilu

Premium

13,99 €/kk

Kaikki premium-podcastit
Ei mainoksia
Ei sitoutumista, peruuta koska tahansa
Yksi lisäkäyttäjä

Kokeile 14 päivää maksutta

Suosittua kategoriassa Liike-elämä ja talous

Tarinat ja äänet, joita rakastat kuunnella

Kuuntele kaikki suosikkipodcastisi ja -äänikirjasi

Lue lisää