A history of open-source licensing from a lawyer who helped blaze the trail
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 Aug 202232min
A conversation with Spencer Kimball, creator of GIMP and CockroachDB
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 Aug 202230min
The internet’s Robin Hood uses robo-lawyers to fight parking tickets and spam calls
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 Aug 202219min
Satellite internet: More useful than sending a car into space
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 Aug 202224min
Monitoring data quality with Bigeye
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.overflowSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
2 Aug 202234min
San Francisco? More like San Francisgo
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?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
29 Jul 202224min
Team analytics: Less creepy, more empowering
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.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
26 Jul 202225min
Game Boy emulators, PowerPoint developers, and the enduring appeal of Pokémon GO
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'".See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
22 Jul 202224min
