The Stack Overflow Podcast

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

26 Elo 202227min

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

23 Elo 202219min

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

19 Elo 202220min

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

17 Elo 202224min

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

16 Elo 202232min

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

12 Elo 202230min

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

9 Elo 202219min

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

5 Elo 202224min