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(895)

Svelte was built on “slinging code for the sheer love of it”

Rich Harris, creator of Svelte and software engineer at Vercel, joins Ryan on the show to dive into the evolution and future of web frameworks. They discuss the birth and growth of Svelte during the rise of mobile, the challenges of building robust and efficient web applications, how companies can back more open-source community projects, and the dirty little secret about asynchronous operations and component frameworks. Episode notes:Svelte is a UI framework that uses a compiler to let you write components using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It’s ranked as one of developer’s most admired web frameworks in this year’s Developer Survey. Keep up with the Svelte community on the Svelte Society page. Find Rich on Blue Sky and GitHub.Congrats to Paul Pladijs, who won a Populist badge for answering the question How can one change the timestamp of an old commit in Git?.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

26 Elo 35min

Learning in the flow: Unlocking employee potential through continuous learning

In this episode of Leaders of Code, Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar and Christina Dacauaziliqua, Senior Learning Specialist at Morgan Stanley, talk about the importance of experiential learning in fast-paced environments. They emphasize the value of creating intentional learning environments where innovative tools meet collaborative communities to support growth for both individuals and organizations. The discussion also:Explores why leaders need to model continuous learning to inspire their teams.Explains three practical principles to embed a culture of ongoing learning into everyday operations successfully.Touches on Morgan Stanley's multi-year strategic initiatives centred on talent excellence and how they empower employees through an intentional learning framework and metric tracking. Notes:Connect with Christina Dacauaziliqua and Prashanth Chandrasekar.Learn how to empower learning within your organization with Stack Overflow for Teams.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

22 Elo 33min

Robots in the skies (and they use Transformer models)

Ryan welcomes Nathan Michael, CTO at Shield AI, to discuss what AI looks like in defense technologies, both technically and ethically. They cover how the Hivemind technology works in coordinating the autonomous decisions of drones in the field while keeping humans in the loop, whether Shield AI is building Terminators, and how software security works on an edge device that could fall into enemy hands. Episode notes:Shield AI produces Hivemind, a resilient autonomy platform intended to protect service members and civilians.Congrats to Great Answer badge winner tmdavison for dropping a 100 point plus answer on Set max value for color bar on seaborn heatmap.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

22 Elo 26min

The server-side rendering equivalent for LLM inference workloads

Ryan is joined by Tuhin Srivastava, CEO and co-founder of Baseten, to explore the evolving landscape of AI infrastructure and inference workloads, how the shift from traditional machine learning models to large-scale neural networks has made GPU usage challenging, and the potential future of hardware-specific optimizations in AI. Episode notes:Baseten is an AI infrastructure platform giving you the tooling, expertise, and hardware needed to bring AI products to market fast.Connect with Tuhin on LinkedIn or reach him at his email tuhin@baseten.co. Shoutout to user Hitesh for winning a Populist badge for their answer to Cannot drop database because it is currently in use. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

19 Elo 21min

The future of Vue is you (and You)

Ryan welcomes Evan You, the creator of Vue.js, to explore the origins of Vue.js, the challenges faced during its development, and the project’s growth over a decade. They dive into potential integrations for AI, future developments for Vue.js, and the sustainability of open-source projects. Episode notes: Vue.js is a progressive JavaScript framework that’s approachable, performant, and versatile for building web user interfaces.Check out what Evan and his team are doing to create the next generation of tooling at Void Zero. Vue was ranked as the eighth most-popular web framework in the 2025 Developer Survey. Congrats to Stellar Question badge winner Hari, who won for asking the question JavaScript - Track mouse position. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

15 Elo 29min

AI isn’t stealing your job, it’s helping you find it

Wenjing Zhang, VP of Engineering, and Caleb Johnson, Principal Engineer at LinkedIn, sit down with Ryan to discuss how semantic search and AI have transformed LinkedIn’s job search feature. They explore the engineering efforts behind transitioning from keyword-based search and the impact of AI models on LinkedIn’s job seekers and employers.Episode notes: LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with more than one billion members.Connect with Caleb on LinkedIn.Connect with Wenjing on LinkedIn.Congrats to Mattias Larsson, who won a Populist badge for answering Singleton Class which requires some async call.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

12 Elo 37min

Python: Come for the language, stay for the community

Ryan welcomes Paul Everitt, developer advocate at JetBrains and an early adopter of Python, to discuss the history, growth, and future of Python. They cover Python’s pivotal moments and rise alongside the internet, the increased adoption from transitions like Python 2 to Python 3, and the significant role Python plays in academia and data science today. Episode notes: JetBrains is improving the developer experience through a rich suite of tools. Connect with Paul on LinkedIn and X.Python is the fourth most-popular language in our 2025 Developer Survey. From the archives: Why is the migration to Python 3 taking so long? Today we’re shouting out a popular Python question, Fastest way to find the least amount of subsets that sum up to the total set in Python, asked by user Shaun Han. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

8 Elo 30min

Being unambiguous in what you want: the software engineer in a vibe coding world

Quinn Slack, CEO and co-founder of Sourcegraph, joins the show to dive into the implications of AI coding tools on the software engineering lifecycle. They explore how AI tools are transforming the work of developers from syntax-focused tasks to higher-level design and management roles, and how AI will integrate into enterprise environments. Episode notes:Sourcegraph is building AI-code agents for enterprises to accelerate how companies build software.Connect with Quinn on LinkedIn, X, and on his website. Today’s shoutout is for user sumek, who won a Populist badge for answering the question How do you search through Vim's command history?.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

5 Elo 30min

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