The Stack Overflow Podcast

Before we can move on to business as usual, the crew has to recount each and every way in which our first live podcast went spectacularly wrong. Laggy video, overwhelming audio, and too many silly hats. But hey, DevAroundTheSun did raise over $60,000 to help folks impacted by the COVID-19 crisis.We chat about Patio 11's law, and the incredible percentage of successful software startups that never gain any recognition in the mainstream tech press, but manage to build and grow successful, profitable operations.  The debate rages on about how permanent this new world of completely remote work will be. Which companies will return to renting expensive officers and pampering employees with food and snacks and which companies will decide to start hiring across the globe and cutting back on IRL engagements. Lastly we chat about Typescript, why it's getting so popular, and how it reminds Jenn of her days as an academic teaching Java to aspiring computer science majors. To learn more about Jenn, check her out her website. And to see what her company has been working on, head over to Glitch and Glimmer.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode was recorded Thursday, May 9th, two days after Stack Overflow announced it was going to furlough 15% of its staff. We talk about how this process played out internally and the ways in which we are hoping to grow our business so we can bring these great people back. You can read more about it in a blog post from our CEO here.After that, we discuss Zoom's acquisition of Keybase. Usage and wider public awareness of Zoom have been growing by leaps and bounds as the world shifts to remote work and learning during this pandemic. This has exposed some security issues with Zoom's platform, and the acquisition of Keybase seems to be aimed at shoring up their cybersecurity and encryption capabilities. Sara, never one to miss an opportunity to plug Bitcoin, hips us to The Halvening. What does it all mean? Read more about it here.Finally, Paul walks us through Deno, which was created by Ryan Dahl, who also created Node.js. Deno is  "a brand new JavaScript runtime for the backend, but instead of being written in C++, it’s written in Rust, based on the Tokio platform (which provides the asynchronous runtime needed by JavaScript), still running Google’s V8 engine though." You can read more about it here.Our lifeboater of the week is Stack Overflow user James Kanze, who was awarded the badge for answering the question: C++: What is the difference between ostream and ostringstream?Thanks for listening :)See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In addition to her role as PM's on Microsoft's .NEt team, Claire is an Executive Director of the .NET Foundation. Jeff, meanwhile, is a Twitch Partner, technical educator and founder of @theLiveCoders. He can be found streaming live coding projects and challenges as CsharpFritz on Twitch. Both have been working with our own Sara Chipps to organize today's DevAroundTheSun event in order to raise money for those impacted by the COVID-19 crisis.In addition to this episode, you can tune in this morning at 9am Eastern Standard Time to catch a live episode of the Stack Overflow podcast on Twitch, where we'll be highlighting some of the fascinating talks and great speakers happing at DevAroundTheSun, and generally having a few laughs talking about software, tech, and life.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Sham Kakade is a professor of computer science, statistics, and data science at the University of Washington. A group from his university, along with volunteers from Microsoft, is creating a contact tracing app called Covid Safe. Sham explains how technology could make it possible for democratic nations to fight the pandemic while preserving civil liberties.You can read more about Sham’s app, Covid Safe, here.The app isn’t live in the iOS or Android app store yet, but you can download an Android demo here and help the team work out the bugs. You can also use that link to find their GitHub community.You can read Paul’s take on the contact tracing spec released by Apple and Google here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You can read more about Sham's app, Covid Safe, here. You can  find his university bio here.The app isn't live in the iOS or Android app store yet, but you can download an Android demo here and help the team work out the bugs. You can also use that link to find their GitHub community.You can read Paul's take on the contact tracing spec released by Apple and Google here.This is a two part episode, so tune in Friday for the second half.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

What happens when the grizzled captain decides they need to stop delegating and put their hands back on the helm? Sara is rewatching Star Trek and trying to find some wisdom in Picard's approach to crisis.Where did React come from? What's the line between a library, a framework, and a whole new language? You can learn lots more in this extensive video from the Women in React conference that happened remotely last weekend. One thing we didn't know about that conference was that they gave out original swag you can use while playing Animal Crossing. And just yesterday we noticed the Deserted Island DevOps conference, where the entire event is actually happening inside Animal Crossing. From there we got to talking about Second Life, Linden Bucks, and the amazing concert that Travis Scott put on in Fortnite recently. The longer this quarantine goes on, the closer we move to a truly virtual work world.  You can find the Fortnite concert here. It's just ten minutes long, but skip ahead to 2:10 if you want to see something really cool. Last but not least, Paul didn't take the easy way out. He finalyl sat down and did some parsing.  He is ready for you to make fun of him.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

JJ came to our attention when we saw a tweet about his work to get an ETL pipeline with COBOL running on Kubernetes. Elizabeth comes from the world of Linux Systems Administration, but more recently has been working on COBOL and mainframe computing. She tells us that there is actually a cohort of college students actively learning and using COBOL, both for competitions like Mastering the Mainframe, but also because it's a language that can attract a high paying job at a number of big banks, healthcare providers, and government institutions. You can find JJ on Twitter here and on Github here. Prior to IBM he was a partner architect at Chef Software. You can read more about Elizabeth on her website, princessleia.com, and yes, we are going to have her back on the podcast in the future to talk about how and when she got that domain name.If you're interested in learning COBOL, a ton of resources are available here.As always, don't forget about the upcoming charity event, DevAroundTheSun, which is bringing together a lot of cool developers for talks and activities, with proceeds going to support those impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode, we pay our respects to John Conway, a legendary mathematician known for the Game of Life and Surreal Numbers. Our math Stack Exchange paid respects to some of his lesser known results.Jon and Adam give us a rundown of some of their favorite April Fools projects from the past, many of which they helped build. Adam has a soft spot for Unikong, while Jon is more of a rubber duck man.Don't forget to check out DevAroundTheSun for ways tech folks can support those impacted by COVID-19. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Jon is the team lead for Public Q&A, which is what we call the platform that hosts the 172 community sites across Stack. Adam is a senior software developer on the community team and a former community manager. Jon describes his job these days as intercepting all the meetings, phone calls, and busy work that would keep the devs on his team from actually writing code. That, and to deliver product on time and to spec, with the hope that a predictable product pipeline is the best way to keep all stakeholders happy.Adam spends most days writing code, although his most productive days are the ones when he deletes more than he creates. He was part of the team that helped ship our recent Dark Mode feature. If you want to learn more about some of our plans for upcoming changes to Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, tune in Friday for part two of this episode.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Monday's big story on Bloomberg was that the US unemployment system was being slowed by problems with an "ancient" programming language. Well, yah heard it here first. Also, ancient seems a bit extreme for something that is 60-years-old, but perhaps in the world of software, that does qualify as nearly pre-historic. After that, we switch to the biggest news in tech, or perhaps in the world, over the last week. Apple and Google have released a spec for a contact tracing system. As countries around the world work to slowly reopen their economies, contact tracing is a powerful tool for preventing new surges in coronavirus outbreaks. The system the duo of tech giants devised includes specs for bluetooth, cryptography, and APIs. You can read Paul's deep dive take on it at the link above.Last but not least, if you're interested in donating to help those affected by COVID-19, Sara is working with the .NET foundation on a project called Dev Around The Sun. They are providing assistance and mentorship to folks impacted by this pandemic, and you can learn more about how to donate time or funding at the link above. Be safe, be well, and we'll talk to you again on Tuesday. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.