The Stack Overflow Podcast

You can find the podcast and article that inspired our chat here. It's the second of Kelsey Hightower's "Unpopular Opinions" series. We have heard the requests for full episodes transcripts and we know accessibility is important, so we're working on a solution. Stay tuned. The recipients of the lifeboat badges this episode were for questions that were between three and six years old. It's a testament to the ongoing value of the knowledge shared on our network and to the contributions of our community to help others through questions and answers. Last but not least, our 2020 Developer Survey is open. It takes about 15-20 minutes to complete, and we want to hear from as many coders as possible, regardless of age, experience, or occupation. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

11 Feb 202025min

What happens when millions of minimum byte packets start pinging off your network every few seconds? Bandwidth is a restriction most network engineers are familiar with. It's less often they have to think about packets per second. Teresa shares an awesome story of how a new feature for AOL Instant Messenger, AIM for you 90s nerds, turned up the heat on AOL's servers.After regaling us with war stories from the days of dial-up internet, we chat about what the job of a chief product officer is today. At a place like Stack Overflow, how do you unite functional departments across the company - from marketing to sales to engineering? How do you figure out the right incentives, so that the data you're measuring against is aligned with the long term health of the company and the community?"I don't focus on shipping, I focus on impact," Teresa told us. "That's where product management, engineering, and design come together. Product management is focused on value. Engineering is focused on quality, and design is focused on usability. If you think of that as Venn diagram, impact is where those three things overlap and happen."Lastly, we chat about the incredible velocity with which new coding languages and development frameworks emerge in the tech industry. Teresa shares her philosophy for encouraging an engineering team to level up and learn new skills while ensuring that this kind of continuous evolution doesn't create a lot of friction for the overall organization."That which we measure, we incentivize towards," is one of her favorite sayings, and Teresa applies it to scoping an overall product roadmap for a company, including what tools, new and old, to use along the way.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

4 Feb 202023min

Alex graduated from NYU with a degree in computer science and worked as a developer and engineer at several startups in New York City, eventually assuming senior roles like engineering team lead and director of technology. Along the way, however, she found herself face with discrimination and harassment. In 2016, she dramatically altered her appearance, an experience she discusses in a humorous and poignant talk - Shaving My Head Made me a Better Developer. In 2016 she read the book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and was inspired to  do more to help people impacted by the justice system. She began organizing donations of unused laptops, and then moved on to help found the Code Cooperative in October of 2016.  the group describes itself as a community of people who learn, use, and build technology to create life changing possibilities for individuals and communities impacted by incarceration.If you want to get involved, you can donate a laptop or make a financial contribution here. If you would like to volunteer as a mentor, you can apply here.   See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

28 Jan 202022min

Three months ago, we interviewed Prashanth during his first week on the job. Now, with a full quarter of work under his belt, our new CEO reflects on what we accomplished over the last decade and lays out his vision for where Stack Overflow, as a company and community, will be heading over the next year and beyond.Paul explains why engineers prefer to give blunt feedback, even in a public setting.Sara drops some hints about our plans for the future of the Stack Exchange network. One of these big goals is to better integrate knowledge from these with the activity that happens on Stack Overflow, so that the knowledge being shared on Server Fault or Super User can easily be found by users on Stack Overflow, and vice versa. Stay tuned for more details and feel free to share your thoughts for what would work to improve the user experience.Prashanth talks about the forces reshaping the developer landscape: cloud services, machine learning, container orchestration, and more. How can we help new developers, both hobbyists and professionals, find what they need on our sites, and empower them so they feel comfortable asking questions and providing answers.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

21 Jan 202015min

Software is eating the world, but what's on the menu for dessert?This week we chat about the best way for engineers to give feedback to executives. Paul explains the Purple room method they use at Postlight. Sara references Zero to One and why engineers and marketers have so much trouble communicating.As a member of a marketing department , it's true our job is to see the glass as half full. But sometimes the point of the exercise is to be aspirational. Police learn how to be suspicious, marketers learn how to sell, and engineers look for what's broken so they can fix it.We chat about the ten thousand or so parking meters that went on the fritz in New York City. The company says it was the result of a fraud prevention protocol. Was this a Y2K style glitch or a logic bomb?Sara finds the developer angle on the recent rift in the British Royal Family. New technologies always reshape the Monarchy's relationship to the public. From the first radio address to the televised coronation, to a Wordpress website and an Instagram post, each generation tries to use the modern medium to their advantage.We discuss a fairly devious bit of brilliant parenting. If your young child wants to be a YouTube star, and you can build them their own private version of the platform, with randomly generated likes and none of the cyber-bullying, are you protecting them? Or, perhaps, crafting a Truman Show for the internet age that will have consequences down the road.Last but not least, we check out the Blazor tag, one of the fastest growing areas of interest on Stack Overflow. It's a framework that extends the established Razor syntax. The goal is to enable developers to write client-side code in .NET, backed by WebAssembly.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

14 Jan 202018min

For many years Matt worked on defending the quality of Google's web search results, and you may know him as the creator of the first version of SafeSearch.As Paul noted on the show, he was seen as one of the few people  with whom ordinary folks could communicate about the often inscrutable world of Google search results and rankings.  You can read his blog here.In 2016 Matt joined  USDS, initially at the Department of Defense. Since 2017, Matt has served as the USDS Administrator and is responsible for setting the overall direction and strategy for projects.  He has worked on everything from Healthcare.gov to online services for veterans to fraud prevention at the IRS. Topics discussed on this episode: The 1993 comedy film Dave, in which Kevin Kline plays a presidential body double who manages to fix government and melt the steely heart of Sigourney Weaver. Open source as an ever growing trend, even inside of big government. Which organization has more meeting and process, Google, or the US federal government?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

7 Jan 202026min

To kick things off, we talk about Yap, a fun new project from Paul’s company, Postlight. Employees get to partake in a Labs program where they can pursue side projects that interest them. Yap is "an ephemeral, real-time chat room with up to six participants. Your messages appear and disappear as quickly as you type them.” It was built with Elixir...ooooh.For our interview this week we sat down with Jon Gottfried and Mary Siebert from Major League Hacking. Jon is the company’s co-founder and Mary is the Hackathon Community Manager. We discuss how this organization has become a global phenomenon over the past few years, reaching hundreds of thousands of developers.  Things that happen these days at Major League Hackathons:  Painting succulents Cup stacking competitions Therapy dogs, lots of them If you're interested in sponsoring a Major League Hackathon, check out the info here.This is our last episode of the year. We’ll be back in 2020 with some more amazing guests and brilliant banter. Thanks for tuning in, see ya in the new year. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

17 Dec 201934min

You can check out the back story of Dixon’s first company, SiteAdvisor, here. It was built during a time when spyware was a booming business and browsers had few systems in place to combat bad actors. The company was acquired by McAfee in 2006. It's a great trip through the history of web security at the time. Dixon next turned his attention to machine learning. He and his co-founders created Hunch, which worked to learn users’ tastes and recommend items they might enjoy. It was an early attempt to build the taste graph, a parallel to the social graph. It was acquired by eBay in 2011. Many of these techniques are now widely used across the biggest social networks in the world.Dixon then moved into the world of venture capital. You can read more about the Crypto Fund he helps to lead and the new startup school a16Zz is launching to help educate a new generation of programmers and founders. Application are still open.If you're interested in learning more about the background of Hashcash, which foreshadowed a lot of the ideas found in Bitcoin, there is some good info here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

10 Dec 201940min