Alle afleveringen
998 afleveringen, van nieuw naar oud
-
What counts as art, anyway?
3 mei 2022 · 27 min
Stack Overflow’s 2019 Developer Survey found that respondents overwhelmingly considered Elon Musk to be the person with the greatest influence on technology. Now that Musk is taking over Twitter, it’s safe to say that influence will increase. Lees meer
James Stanier, engineering director at Shopify, has some thoughts on one of our perennial topics: transitioning from IC to manager. He’s proposed a 90-day trial period for IC engineers moving into management roles. Listen to Stanier on the Dev Interrupted podcast.
Ben talks up Samsung’s The Frame, which lets you display your favorite NFT or old-fashioned art when you’re not using it as a TV. Because who wants to look at a blank screen?
Cassidy recommends Adam Grant’s book Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know and Matt recommends an LG C1 TV for folks in the market for a stunning gaming experience.
Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Drew Reese for their answer to Deprecation notice: ReactDOM.render is no longer supported in React 18.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Would you trust an AI to be your eyes?
29 april 2022 · 33 min
The crew has complicated feelings about products like Apple’s augmented reality glasses and Google Glass. Ceora put it best: “I'm very cautious about any big tech company having any more access to my perception of reality.” Lees meer
On the other hand, products like Envision smart glasses that help visually-impaired people navigate their environments exemplify how AR technology can enable accessibility and empower users.
Speaking of different perceptions of reality, New York mayor Eric Adams dusts off that old chestnut about how remote workers “can’t stay home in your pajamas all day.” (Watch us.)
Matt recommends Oh My Git!, an open-source game that teaches Git. Ceora recommends Popsy, which allows you to turn your Notion pages into a website for free.
And some recommended reading: How to make the most out of a mentoring relationship from the GitHub blog and How to use the STAR method to ace your job interview from The Muse.
Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user metadept for their answer to Generate a two-digit positive random number in JavaScript.
Find Adam on LinkedIn here.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Meet the design system that lets us customize and theme Stack Overflow
26 april 2022 · 32 min
If you’re not familiar with Stacks, Stack Overflow’s design system, it’s a robust CSS and JavaScript Pattern library that helps users create coherent experiences in line with Stack Overflow’s best practices and design principles. Explore more on Netlify or GitHub. Lees meer
Missed our April Fool’s prank this year? Relive the hilarity and the pain.
Atomic CSS is a CSS architecture approach favoring single-purpose classes named based on visual function.
Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user ceejayoz for their answer to How do I do a database backup on Amazon RDS every hour?.
Connect with Ben Kelley.
Learn more about Aaron Shekey’s work.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
How a college extra-credit project became PHP3, still the bedrock of the web
22 april 2022 · 31 min
A high school class on Pascal launched Andi’s interest in programming (starting on an Apple IIc). Lees meer
Andi was bored with his university studies and took on an extra-credit programming project that turned into PHP3, the version that built a million websites.
PHP gets a lot of hate, and we have two theories about why. First, it’s primarily brownfield development, and we all know that hell is other people’s code. Second, it democratized development—a great thing in many ways - that nevertheless led to a lot of less than professional code making it’s way to production.
Andi cofounded Zend Technologies to oversee PHP advances and served as CEO from 2009 until the company’s acquisition in 2015. After Zend Technology, Andi became one of what he jokes was “five folks in a garage” building a new graph database for Amazon.
Now, at Google, Andi runs the operational database for Google Cloud Platform, including managed third parties and cloud-native databases Spanner, Bigtable, and Firestore.
His background in programming makes Andi sensitive to the importance of prioritizing developer experience: “the number-one person using our services are our developers. And so we need to make [our technology] super-productive and simple and easy and fun for developers to use.”
Connect with Andi on LinkedIn.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
What's the average tenure of a software developer at a big tech company?
19 april 2022 · 30 min
Average tenure at Google has been reported at 1.1 years, which stands in contrast to a broader average of 4.2 years for software developers across the board. Lees meer
Tech jobs at many so called titans and disrupters last less than two years, according to research from Dice.
Uber is forging an unlikely alliance with two taxi tech firms.
The ultimate chron job - ensuring users can access a chronological feed on their favorite social media without sacrificing your recommendation algorithm's potency or data.
Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to alkber, who explained how to convert seconds to minutes, hours and days in Java
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Warning signs that hot startup hiring engineers might not last
15 april 2022 · 22 min
Cassidy is co-organizing Devs for Ukraine, a free online engineering conference from April 25-26 to raise funds in support of Ukraine. Register today and donate if you can. Lees meer
Plex.tv is a hub for live TV, on-demand streaming content, and your own media library.
Read the full story of Fast’s speedy shutdown.
Following the ultimate personal security checklist will protect your digital security and privacy—but it might also raise eyebrows at the FBI.
Today’s tech recs: Ben recommends TENS therapy, an electrical alternative to acupuncture (it’s tech, technically). Cassidy recommends Covatar for unique, personalized digital art like NFT avatars.
Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Joseph Silber for their answer to What’s a regex that matches all numbers except 1, 2 and 25?.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
“Your salary shouldn’t be dictated by how good a negotiator you are.”
12 april 2022 · 32 min
Read about how New Relic achieved pay equity—and what, exactly, that means. Lees meer
Last month, hacker group Lapsus$ released screenshots showing it had successfully breached Okta’s internal systems using compromised credentials. What does it all mean? Read about it here and here.
Matt recounts a harrowing example of a man-in-the-middle attack that nearly emptied a friend’s bank account
Today’s recommendations: Cassidy recs Midjourney, an AI art-making tool currently in beta. (Learn more about Midjourney here.) Matt recommends Elden Ring to folks who want a more “adult” version of the Ceora-approved Breath of the Wild.
Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Subhajit for their answer to Send HTML in email via PHP.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Words of wisdom for self-taught developers
8 april 2022 · 30 min
Quizzes and games like Roblox are a good way to build your knowledge, whether you’re learning to code or becoming a K-pop expert. Lees meer
ICYMI: Listen to our conversation with HashiCorp cofounder Mitchell Hashimoto, who recently returned to an IC role after serving as CEO and CTO.
Connect with Jon on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.
Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Roko C. Buljan for their answer to Pure CSS 3 image slider—without JavaScript or radio inputs.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
The new version of React, great tools for learning CSS, and the double standard for female engineers
5 april 2022 · 38 min
React 18 is the latest major version of React. Cassidy also provides an excellent summary of React history. Lees meer
Ceora is working on some CSS art (inspired by K-pop, natch) using CodePen.
Cassidy explains why Tanya Reilly’s talk-turned-blog-post Being Glue, which Ceora shouted out in Episode 425, was pivotal in shaping her career decisions.
Why do women in software engineering have to worry about being seen as “not technical enough”?
Today’s tech recs: Ceora recommends the Nintendo Switch™, Matt recommends Flexbox Froggy for people who want to learn CSS flexbox, and Cassidy recommends Loom.
Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user JosefZ for their answer to Start Windows Terminal from the CLI and pass in an executable command to run.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Embracing ambiguity in software with one of YouTube’s UX engineers
1 april 2022 · 33 min
Read a profile of Mattaniah on People of Color in Tech (POCIT) here. Lees meer
Connect with Mattaniah on LinkedIn or follow her on TikTok.
Who remembers Vine??
This week’s tech recs: Cassidy recommends her Hifiman headphones. Ben recommends his hybrid RAV4 (42 miles on the battery alone). Matt recommends Spline, a design app for 3D web experiences. Ceora’s recommendation is a clear phone case from Five Below, perfect for displaying a photo of your favorite K-pop idol (or, you know, your dog).
Plus, Mattaniah and the team get gushy about “incredible,” “joyful,” “super accessible” creative code educator Daniel Shiffman.
This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Maulik Hirani for their answer to New Google Places Autocomplete and its pricing.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Give us 23 minutes, we’ll give you some flow state
29 maart 2022 · 23 min
Why has this empty NPM package been installed 700,000 times? We’ve got the answer for ya. Lees meer
A nice article and podcast on flow state, including the claim that 23 minutes is the magic number of minutes it takes to find your flow.
Thanks to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, Manjusha, for explaining how to:
Parse a pipe-delimited file in Python
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Human laziness is the ultimate security threat
25 maart 2022 · 37 min
Vercel is a developer-first, frontend-focused platform. Together with Google and Meta, Vercel built Next.js, an open-source React framework that helps developers build high-performance web experiences with ease. Lees meer
PlanetScale is a MySQL-compatible serverless database platform that enables infinite SQL horizontal scale.
Tools like Webflow and Squarespace have made web development accessible for casual programmers, but what does this mean for professional developers?
This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Michael Thelin for their answer to How can I play a Spotify audio track with Python?.
Find Guillermo on LinkedIn here.
Find Sam on LinkedIn here.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Getting through a SOC 2 audit with your nerves intact
23 maart 2022 · 26 min
Once a company reaches a certain size, their customers might start asking for proof that it has good security and data habits. They want to know if there’s a business continuity plan in place in case disaster strikes. For many companies, formalizing this proof means submitting to an auditing process known as SOC 2. If you’re a developer at one of these companies, particularly if you provide or use SaaS applications, you’ll end up having to implement the controls these audits require. Lees meer
On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with James Ciesielski, CTO and co-founder, and Megan Dean, information security and risk compliance manager, both of Rewind. We talk about how you can prep for and successfully get through a SOC 2 audit, how backing up your SaaS data can provide business continuity, and the benefits of establishing a relationship with your auditor.
A SOC 2 report shows your customers the level of security controls that you have in place. It’s based on the auditing standards set by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. You tell them what controls you have in place and they verify it. Once a company starts attracting enterprise-level customers, a SOC 2 becomes a must-have.
Companies perform SOC 2 audits using a variety of tools: sometimes it’s purpose-built SaaS tools; sometimes it’s a cascade of spreadsheets. Ultimately, what’s important is providing an audit trail for your controls, a record that proves that your security does what you claim it does. Trust, but verify.
The process can grow complicated, as companies can have 100 to as many as 300 SaaS applications running in their business. That’s a lot of important business data on someone else’s cloud. Many of these SaaS applications operate data on the shared responsibility model: they ensure the service is available and secure, and you ensure that your data is accurate and secure.
A key part of these security controls is disaster recovery and business continuity. Imag…
-
Codespaces moves into public beta, the virtual real estate worth millions, and how microservices and CI/CD can hurt productivity
22 maart 2022 · 35 min
Geriatric millennials unite. Lees meer
Learn more about GitHub’s move to put prebuilt Codespaces into public beta, plus check out CodeSandbox, home of self-proclaimed lazy developers.
Meanwhile, in blockchain: Polygon, a solution designed to expand transaction efficiency and output for Ethereum, raised $450 million “to consolidate its lead in the race to scale Ethereum.”
Is Decentraland the most annoying blockchain project? The competition is fierce.
The 2022 Java Developer Productivity Report found that microservices and CI/CD are decreasing developers’ productivity, not increasing it. The team talks through what that means.
This week, Ben recommends the book Appleseed by Matt Bell, Cassidy recommends the productivity app Centered, Adam points listeners to Unix-like operating system SerenityOS, and Ceora shouts out Tanya Reilly’s talk-turned-blog-post Being Glue.
Find Adam on LinkedIn here.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
McDonald’s is to Chipotle what REST APIs are to GraphQL
18 maart 2022 · 37 min
Danielle’s path to software engineering began when she was accepted into MIT’s Women’s Technology Program, an education and mentorship opportunity for high schoolers interested in engineering or computer science. She later earned her CS degree from MIT. Lees meer
Danielle’s first role out of college was a junior developer working on Meteor, a full-stack JavaScript framework that was just starting a GraphQL project they called Apollo. She tells the team how Meteor started looking at GraphQL and how that became Apollo.
If McDonald’s is a REST API, then Chipotle is GraphQL. Think about it!
Find Danielle on LinkedIn here.
This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user torek for their answer to Why doesn’t Git natively support UTF-16?.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Visual Studio turns 25, new ideas for supporting open source, and of course…NFTs
15 maart 2022 · 29 min
The team pays tribute to Microsoft’s Visual Studio, an IDE and source code editor that turns 25 this month. Lees meer
Read Simon Willison’s article on how companies can financially support the open-source contributors they rely on.
Learn more about open source’s diversity problem, and how to address it, here and here.
Why are K-pop NFTs so unpopular with fans? The Atlantic digs in.
ICYMI: Listen to our conversation with HashiCorp cofounder Mitchell Hashimoto: Moving from CEO back to IC.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Crypto feels broken. That’s because it’s the internet circa 1996.
11 maart 2022 · 20 min
David is a CS major who worked in Apple’s music group in the 90s and went on to become CEO of eMusic in the aughts. Lees meer
At Venrock, David invested in early-stage crypto, consumer, and enterprise tech companies. He was early to crypto as a node maintainer on the Bitcoin blockchain and an Ethereum miner, setting up a rig in his basement several years ago.
At CoinFund, he focuses on early- and growth-stage crypto and blockchain companies and technologies like Upshot, a platform for crowdsourced NFT appraisals, and Rarible, a digital art NFT platform.
ICYMI: Listen to our episode Web3 won’t save us.
This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user M-M for their answer to Find the area of an n-interesting polygon.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Who says HTML and CSS aren't real programming?
8 maart 2022 · 31 min
Learn more about GitHub’s machine learning-based code scanning, which finds security issues before they make it to production. Lees meer
Google invests $100 million in a skills training program for low-income Americans. Is there a catch?
Take2 is a New Zealand program that teaches incarcerated people to code: building marketable skills, opening up employment opportunities, and dramatically reducing recidivism. At the time of writing, Take2 has a 100% success rate in preventing recidivism.
We have two Lifeboat badges this week: Varad Mondkar, for answering How does the app:layout_goneMarginLeft and its variants affect the view arrangements in constraintlayout?, and Eugene Sh., for answering What is this “a.out” file and what makes it disappear?.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Why David Barrett, CEO of Expensify, still takes his turn on PagerDuty
4 maart 2022 · 38 min
Expensify is an expense management solution that integrates with your travel, ERP, and finance/accounting software. Check out their full list of integrations. Lees meer
Expensify engineers rely on Stack Overflow for Teams to make knowledge accessible and shareable, rather than wading through swathes of documentation. Read the case study.
Flat organizations like Expensify have minimal or no middle management, meaning there’s no management layer between staff and executives. A similar model for decentralized management is Holacracy.
Find David Barrett on LinkedIn here.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
The Great QR Code Comeback
1 maart 2022 · 25 min
Ceora shouts out Mermaid, a JavaScript-based diagramming and charting tool that creates diagrams dynamically based on Markdown-inspired text definitions. Lees meer
Coinbase’s bouncing QR code ad proved so popular it crashed the app. Considered passé pre-pandemic, QR codes have obvious value now: they’re touch-free, easy to scan, and ubiquitous. (Just don’t call it a comeback.)
In preparation for his move from New Zealand to Canada, Matt is overhauling his hardware and transitioning to an M1 MacBook Pro for performance and efficiency.
Speaking of hardware, Intel is buying Israeli chipmaking company Tower Semiconductor for $5.4 billion to build out its Intel Foundry Service division, launched last year to build chips for other companies.
This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Basile Starynkevitch for their answer to the question Can you make a computed goto in C++?
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Is functional programming the hipster programming paradigm?
25 februari 2022 · 28 min
Here’s a useful primer on functional programming with JavaScript. Lees meer
This tutorial will guide you in exploring the fundamentals of functional programming with React.
If you’re looking for more info on functional programming in React, we’d like to tell you why hooks are the best thing to happen to React.
Functional not your thing? Learn why object-oriented programming (OOP) has become such a dominant paradigm.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Finally, an AI bot that can ace technical interview questions
22 februari 2022 · 21 min
Learn more about AlphaCode here. Lees meer
Check out an amazing video essay critiquing the NFT market, The Line Goes Up.
Read up on Josh Wardle, the developer who built Wordle for his partner to help pass the time during the pandemic, then sold it to the NY Times for a sweet seven figures.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
An algorithm that optimizes for avoiding ennui
18 februari 2022 · 20 min
You can learn more about Clement's career on his LinkedIn and on Twitter (assuming you speak French). Lees meer
You can learn more about Dailymotion here and check out the roles they are hiring for here.
You can find Cassidy Williams on Twitter and at her website.
You can find Ceora Ford on Twitter and at her website.
Our Lifeboat badge winner of the week is Swati Kiran, who helped solve an error causing permission problems in an angular app.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Column by your name: The analytics database that skips the rows
16 februari 2022 · 25 min
These days, every company looking at analyzing their data for insights has a data pipeline setup. Many companies have a fast production database, often a NoSQL or key-value store, that goes through a data pipeline.The pipeline process performs some sort of extract-transform-load process on it, then routes it to a larger data store that the analytics tools can access. But what if you could skip some steps and speed up the process with a database purpose-built for analytics? Lees meer
On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Rohit (Ro) Amarnath, the CTO at Vertica, to find out how your analytics engine can speed up your workflow. After a humble beginning with a ZX Spectrum 128, he’s now in charge of Vertica Accelerator, a SaaS version of the Vertica database.
Vertica was founded by database researcher Dr. Michael Stonebreaker and Andrew Palmer. Dr. Stonebreaker helped develop several databases, including Postgres, Streambase, and VoltDB. Vertica was born out of research into purpose-built databases. Stonebreaker’s research found that columnar database storage was faster for data warehouses because there were fewer read/writes per request.
Here’s a quick example that shows how columnar databases work. Suppose that you want all the records from a specific US state or territory. There are 52 possible values here (depending on how you count territories). To find all instances of a single state in a row-based DB, the search must check every row for the value of the state column. However, searching by column is faster by an order of magnitude: it just runs down the column to find matching values, then retrieves row data for the matches.
The Vertica database was designed specifically for analytics as opposed to transactional databases. Ro spent some time at a Wall Street firm building reports—P&L, performance, profitability, etc. Transactions were important to day-to-day operations, but the real value of data came from analyses that showed where to cut costs or incr…
-
Gen Z doesn’t understand file structures
15 februari 2022 · 22 min
It’s not news that, as Cassidy says, “remote has grown wildly fast”—but Remote has gone from about 25 employees in March 2020 to 900 now (a 3,500% increase). Lees meer
Ceora explains to Matt (oh, sweet summer’s child) what it means to get ratioed on Twitter.
Inspired by a great read, the team discusses how Gen Z, having grown up without floppy disks, file folders, or directories, thinks about information.
This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to user 1983 for their answer to the question Why can I not use `new` with an arrow function in JavaScript/ES6?.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
China’s only female Apache member on the rise of open source in China
11 februari 2022 · 27 min
SphereEX builds distributed data systems, making it easier for organizations to load balance massive data stores across multiple servers. Lees meer
Now that open-source software has taken over Western software, it’s China’s turn. Even big companies like Baidu and Bytedance are opening up their projects.
Trista is the only female Apache member in China, which is both an honor and a demonstration of how much work needs to be done to support women in STEM.
This episode’s Lifeboat badge shoutout goes to swati kiran for her answer to
Error: EACCES: permission denied, mkdir '/usr/local/lib/node_modules/node-sass/build'
.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
There’s no coding Oscars. Write software that works
8 februari 2022 · 28 min
Ceora has her second brain stored in Notion, complete with GIFs and pretty color to get that aesthetic. Lees meer
Ancient history in blog years: Cassidy talks about the perils of being bleeding-edge instead of cutting-edge: Apollo Mission: The pros and cons of being an early adopter of new technology
Everybody is aboard the VS Code train, which has the hottest TikTok around. Cassidy recommends the MonoLisa font helping viewers read your code during a livestream.
Today’s lifeboat goes to Bill the Lizard for Using IFF in Python.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Moving from CEO back to IC: A chat with Mitchell Hashimoto on his love for code
4 februari 2022 · 35 min
Neopets: A little-known gateway into a software career. (Nineties kids will remember.) Lees meer
Among the products Mitchell helped build at Hashicorp: Terraform, Vagrant, and Vault.
Not many C-level execs return to IC roles, but you might be surprised how many managers move back to being individual contributors.
Follow Mitchell on Twitter here.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
A collaborative hub for infrastructure as code
2 februari 2022 · 23 min
On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Marcin Wyszynski, founder and CEO at Spacelift. Marcin says Spacelift aims to be for infrastructure-as-code what GitHub is to git. It centralizes everything about your IaC system: it runs code, deploys within CI/CD pipelines, tracks the progress of your infrastructure, and gives you insight into who made what changes and why. Today it works with the IaC tools already out there: Terraform, Cloud Formation, and Pulumi, with plans to add support for services like Ansible and Kubernetes in the future. Lees meer
Like a lot of programmers, Marcin got into coding through games. Once he ran through the limited number of Commodore 64 games at his local shop in Poland, he learned to program his own. But he never thought of programming as a career, so when it came time to pick a college major, he followed a group of his peers into sociology. Sociology, with its heavy focus on statistics, brought him back to programming.
He landed his first job at Google reviewing copy for Ads, which lasted until he could automate himself out of it. Google gave him increasingly technical roles until he moved into an SRE position handling tape backups, a job that is mostly very boring until it becomes extremely exciting. After that, it was a stint at Facebook spinning up point-of-presence clusters around the world, then CTO at a startup that didn’t catch on as he’d hoped.
With this wealth of experience under his belt, he went into consulting. As a consultant, he had his bag of best practices, open-source tools, processes, and scripts that he brought with him, but he also built bespoke pieces of technology for every single one of his clients. One need his clients had in common was a way to manage the code that defined their infrastructure.
During Marcin’s career, there were many times when he built the thing he needed: games, automation, scripts. When his consulting clients would leave for a new organization, they would reach out to ask if he coul…
-
Next stop, Cryptoland?
1 februari 2022 · 37 min
The Twitter thread that brought Cryptoland to the team’s attention. Lees meer
Ceora wonders whether participants in a hypothetical, decentralized version of YouTube (a YouTube-like dApp) would need coding skills to contribute meaningfully.
Why is Ethereum so expensive and so congested?
Ben outlines how Solana has become the fastest-growing blockchain in the world by evolving the Ethereum concept to make it more scalable and less congested.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Using synthetic data to power machine learning while protecting user privacy
28 januari 2022 · 27 min
You can learn more about Gretel here. The company is hiring for numerous positions. Lees meer
Think your commits are anonymous? Think again: DefCon researchers figured out how to de-anonymize code creators by their style.
We published an article about the importance of including privacy in your SDLC: Privacy is an afterthought in the software lifecycle. That needs to change.
Our Lifeboat badge shoutout goes to 1983 (the year Ben was born) for their answer to Why can I not use `new` with an arrow function in JavaScript/ES6?
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
How to defend your attention and find a flow state
25 januari 2022 · 23 min
The inspiration for today's episode was a terrific article from The Guardian about the many ways in which the modern world, specifically the software we use every day, was designed to steal our attention. Lees meer
During the episode, we discuss Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a professor know as the "father of flow" for his pioneering research on flow states. Sadly, Prof. Csikszentmihalyi passed away in 2021, but you can find a terrific tribute to him and his work here.
In the second half of the episode, we discuss "The California Ideology" and the ways in which hustle culture and libertarian ideals helped to shape Silicon Valley and the world of technology more broadly.
Congrats to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, UrbanoJVR, who answered the question: What is the difference between 'mvn verify' vs 'mvn test'?
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Who's going to pay to fix open source security?
21 januari 2022 · 21 min
Will no one think of the maintainers? As The New Stack points out, watching millions of projects fail because of a bug in an open source library has become common enough that we shrug and reply, "Told you so." It's gotten so bad, big tech companies are visiting the White House to discuss the issue as a matter of national security. Lees meer
There is a great post up on the Stack Overflow blog examining this issue, but it's not about color.js, it's about Log4J. Traffic to questions on this logging library grew more than 1000% percent after the recent revelations about a new vulnerability.
Also discussed in this episode: cryptographer and Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike stepped down from his role as CEO of the encrypted messaging service. That's news, but he actually made bigger waves in tech circles with an unrelated blog post detailing his first experience with Web3. Spoiler alert: it's not as decentralized or divorced from Web2 as you might have thought.
You can find Cassidy Williams on Twitter and her website.
Ben Popper can be found on Twitter here.
Ryan Donovan can be found on Twitter, or writing for the Stack Overflow blog.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
A chat with the folks who lead training and certification at AWS
18 januari 2022 · 33 min
You can find Maureen here. Lees meer
You can find Scott here.
There is a wealth of free courses available through the AWS training website, including Operations, Advanced Networking, Machine Learning, and Data Science.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Safety in numbers: crowdsourcing data on nefarious IP addresses
14 januari 2022 · 26 min
You can find Philippe on Twitter here and learn more about CrowdSec here. Lees meer
They recently put together a list of the IP addresses trying to exploit the new Log4j vulnerability.
For a prescient view of today's cybersecurity challenges, Humeau recommends John Brunner's classic 1975 sci-fi novel, The Shockwave Rider.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Making Agile work for data science
12 januari 2022 · 21 min
Data scientists and engineers don’t always play well together. Data scientists will plan out a solution, carefully build models, test them in notebooks, then throw that solution over the wall to engineering. Implementing that solution can take months. Lees meer
Historically, the data science team has been purely science-driven. Work on methodologies, prove out something that they wanted to achieve, and then hand it over to the engineering organization. That could take many months.
Over the past three to five years, they’ve been moving their engineering and data science operations onto the cloud as part of an overall Agile transformation and a move from being sales-led to being product-led. With most of their solutions migrated over, they decided that along with modernizing their infrastructure, they wanted to modernize their legacy systems, add new functions and scientific techniques, and take advantage of new technologies to scale and meet the demand coming their way.
While all of the rituals and the rigor of Agile didn't always facilitate the more open-ended nature of the data science work at 84.51°, having both data science and engineering operating in a similar tech stack has been a breath of fresh air. Working cross-functionally has shortened the implementation delay. At the same time, being closer to the engineering side of the house has given the data science team a better sense of how to fit their work into the pipeline.
Getting everyone on the same tech stack had a side effect. Between the increasing complexity of the projects, geographic diversity of the folks on these projects, a rise in remote work, and continued growth, locating experts became harder. But with everyone working in the same tech, more people could answer questions and become SMEs.
Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t tell you that 84.51° was asking and answering questions on Stack Overflow for Teams. It was helpful when Chris and Michael no longer had to call on the SMEs they knew by name b…
-
Helping communities build their own LTE networks
11 januari 2022 · 35 min
Esther and Matt are graduate students in computer science at the University of Washington, where they study community networks. Lees meer
Esther explains how open-source, community-owned and -operated LTE networks are a good solution for expanding public internet access and ensuring digital equity.
Matt walks the team through Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), a shared wireless spectrum that allows users to build their own LTE networks.
Chris Webb of the Black Brilliance Research Project lays out how a digital stewardship program in Detroit helped inspire his work.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Are developers helping to drive the Great Resignation?
7 januari 2022 · 30 min
Developers are leading the Great Resignation, according to some reports. Others feel developers aren't resigning, so much as seizing the moment to find better opportunities. Lees meer
You can find out hosts online at the links below
Cassidy
Ceora
Ryan
Ben
Have an experience with the Great Resignation you want to share with our podcast and blog? Hit us up by email:
Podcast
Pitches for the blog
Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Umer, for explaining how to: align an anchor to the right
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Professional ethics and phantom braking
4 januari 2022 · 20 min
Hear why Ben thinks the Workplace Stack Exchange and the Academia Stack Exchange have the richest questions in the Stack Exchange network (or maybe just the most sitcom-worthy). Lees meer
ICYMI: Jack Dorsey stepped down from Twitter. Will he be back?
At Twitter, Tess Rinearson is leading a new team focused on crypto, blockchains, and decentralized tech. Follow her on Twitter here.
The team winces over a review of a Tesla Model Y hatchback that describes phantom braking so frequent and so dangerous that it’s “a complete deal-breaker.”
If you’re a fan of our show, consider leaving us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Teaching developers about the most lightweight web “framework” around, VanillaJS
21 december 2021 · 20 min
What exactly is VanillaJS? Tongue-in-cheek, it's the most lightweight JavaScript framework out there and used by pretty much every website on the internet. Seriously though, it's just JavaScript…without a framework. Lees meer
If you're interested in reading and learning more about JavaScript, Chris has a bevy of courses and eBooks over at vanillajsguides.com.
Like Chris's ideas so much you want to subscribe to his newsletter? Right over this way!
Since you are a connoisseur of podcasts, check out Chris's own at vanillajspodcast.com.
Chris has kindly put together a collection of resources for listeners like you at gomakethings.com/overflow.
This week’s Lifeboat badge goes to prograils for their answer to How can I read the number of lines in Fortran 90 from a text file?
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Bringing AI to the edge, from the comfort of your living room
17 december 2021 · 24 min
Bill gives an overview of edge computing and why it matters. Lees meer
His team wants to enable developers by democratizing access to AI. OpenVINO is an open-source toolkit for high-performing AI inference.
DevCloud lets developers prototype, test, and run their workloads for free on Intel hardware and software. For more on OpenVINO, check out this example we shared that increases image resolution.
Of course, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention another way Intel is bringing its technology to developers: joining Collectives™ on Stack Overflow.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Skills, not schools, are in demand among developers
16 december 2021 · 27 min
The pathway to a software developer job has shifted over the years. It used to be that you had to go through a college computer science program before you could get a developer job. But as online education became better and programming jobs became more specialized, people were getting hired on the strength of their bootcamp or certification experience. Our 2021 Developer Survey found that almost 60% of respondents learned to code using online resources. Lees meer
Mike spent most of his time in the worlds of programmer education and publishing, including a 14 year stint at O’Reilly Media. He worked with numerous great technologists, people who wrote popular languages, and other luminaries in the software world. Much of his focus was on analyzing the signals that come from the data he saw and the conversations with people around the world.
What those signals told him was the focus for recruiters was on skills instead of educational background. A computer science education used to be the thing that proved you had the skills. But not everyone has the four years to spend getting a degree. In today’s tech industry, many people turn to Skillsoft and other companies for certifications and classes that provide a quick boost in skills to prepare them for a changing job market.
It’s not just people who want to break into programming who can benefit from online courses and certifications; working developers who want to continue to succeed need to make learning a habit. That can be hard to manage with a full-time job, so their organizations need to make learning a cultural norm. Setting time aside every day for learning pays dividends, not just for the individual, but for that organization.
With the incredible growth of cloud adoption in the past couple of years, one of the hottest skills in demand right now is cloud engineering. Skillsoft offers an AWS certification course that prepares you for the certification exam. Like many of their other courses, it caters to different learning…
-
An oral history of Stack Overflow - told by its founding team
14 december 2021 · 28 min
Find Joel Spolsky on Twitter here. Lees meer
Jeff Atwood is on Twitter here.
Geoff Dalgas is on Twitter here.
Follow Jarrod Dixon on Twitter here.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Zero to MVP without provisioning a database
10 december 2021 · 22 min
PlanetScale is built on Vitess, the open-source database clustering system that runs at colossal scale hosting YouTube, Slack, and GitHub. Lees meer
A familiar theme: Big cloud companies aren’t set up for independent developers. Sam and Ceora discuss how serverless can get projects—even businesses—up and running quickly.
Choosing the stack for a new business? Tools like Netlify can scale with your product, so you don’t have to change your architecture as you evolve.
Staging environments should be a thing of the past. That’s why PlanetScale enables database branching.
And finally, a question from Law Stack Exchange: Can satellite images be copyrighted?
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Feeling insecure about your code's security?
7 december 2021 · 17 min
This “Trojan source” bug (get it?) could threaten the security of all code. Lees meer
In its annual report on its user community, GitHub found that developers appreciate automation, reusing code, and remote work. (No surprises there.)
Ceora explains how automation and code reuse are game changers for independent developers and how this logic is spreading to big tech companies, too.
GitHub’s first Chief Security Officer has the company focused on keeping your repo secure.
GDPR makes you legally responsible for data someone else shares with you. That’s just one of the reasons it’s not a good idea to solicit personal information through a form and then read those secrets on TikTok.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Is crypto the key to a democratizing the metaverse?
3 december 2021 · 26 min
Ethan's book, Once a Bitcoin Miner: Scandal and Turmoil in the Cryptocurrency Wild West, is available now. Lees meer
The metaverse isn’t just inevitable; it’s already here (and it has a booming real estate market).
As we move more of our lives online onto platforms controlled by increasingly powerful digital giants, Ethan explains the democratizing power of cryptocurrency and blockchain.
On the other hand, China’s new digital currency (government-issued but crypto-inspired) raises questions about privacy and surveillance. And why did China declare all cryptocurrency transactions illegal?
Is crypto the new oil—an environmental disaster burning all this energy in the face of climate change? Bitcoin was using as much energy as Finland or Pakistan
.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Does modern parenting have to rely on spyware?
30 november 2021 · 20 min
The conversation was inspired by Epic's decision to make it's Kid's Web Service's parent verification free to all developers. Lees meer
Ben has been grappling with these questions since 2013, when he wrote about allowing screen time into his young son's life.
One thing that old article does remind us; how incredibly indestructible the original iPad was. A true tank of a tablet!
Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, javimuu, for explaining: How to get a Thumbail / Preview image from Server Video Url in Swift 3.0
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Who is building clouds for the independent developer?
23 november 2021 · 25 min
We kick things off by weighing the merits of two gender-neutral regional pronouns: the familiar y’all and the under appreciated yinz. Now that’s covered... Lees meer
The global population of developers will hit 45 million by 2030, up from 26.9 million in 2021 (EDC). What platforms will they want to build on?
Did Kubernetes solve all your problems? Did it create new ones?
It seems there’s always an XKCD relevant to our conversation. Today, it’s How standards proliferate.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
-
Who owns this outage? Building intelligent, automated escalation chains
22 november 2021 · 23 min
Maxwell, a solution architect at xMatters, took a winding road to get to where he is. After a computer engineering education, he held jobs as field support engineer, product manager, SRE, and finally his current role as a solutions architect, where he serves as something of an SRE for SREs, helping them solve incident management problems with the help of xMatters. Lees meer
When he moved to the SRE role, Maxwell wanted to get back to doing technical work. It was a lateral move within his company, which was migrating an on-prem solution into the cloud. It’s a journey that plenty of companies are making now: breaking an application into microservices, running processes in containers, and using Kubernetes to orchestrate the whole thing. Non-production environments would go down and waste SRE time, making it harder to address problems in the production pipeline.
At the heart of their issues was the incident response process. They had several bottlenecks that prevented them from delivering value to their customers quickly. Incidents would send emails to the relevant engineers, sometimes 20 on a single email, which made it easy for any one engineer to ignore the problem—someone else has got this. They had a bad silo problem, where escalating to the right person across groups became an issue of its own. And of course, most of this was manual. Their MTTR—mean time to resolve—was lagging.
Maxwell moved over to xMatters because they managed to solve these problems through clever automation. Their product automates the scheduling and notification process so that the right person knows about the incident as soon as possible. At the core of this process was a different MTTR—mean time to respond. Once an engineer started working to resolve a problem, it was all down to runbooks and skill. But the lag between the initial incident and that start was the real slowdown.
It’s not just the response from the first SRE on call. It’s the other escalations down the line—to data engineers, for e…
-
What if the value of software platforms ACTUALLY flowed to the users?
19 november 2021 · 30 min
You can learn more about Roll, which describes itself as blockchain infrastructure for social money, here. Lees meer
If you want to follow them on social, check out @tryrollhq as well as their personal socials: @bradley_miles_ and @sidkal.
If you are interested in this kind of tech, check out previous conversations on Web3 and our chat with Chris Dixon on blockchain.
Our lifeboat badge winner of the week is Notnooop, who explained how you can :Make An Emoji Enabling App
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.