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The Stack Overflow Podcast

Latest episodes

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May 5, 2023 • 24min

Building golden paths for developers

Luca currently heads up product at Humanitec, a platform orchestrator that provides self-service “golden paths” for developers.Get up to speed (or refresh your memory) on what platform engineering involves and what an internal developer platform is.Dynamic configuration management (DCM) is a methodology for configuring compute workloads.Stop by the Platform Engineering Slack channel.Hear from top DevOps and platform engineering leaders at PlatformCon 2023, a virtual event held June 8-9.Find Luca on LinkedIn and Twitter.Cheers to Lifeboat badge winner Devart for rescuing How can I show the table structure in SQL Server query? from the dustbin of history.
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May 2, 2023 • 23min

When AI meets IP: Can artists sue AI imitators?

Ben and Ceora talk through some thorny issues around AI-generated music and art, explain why creators are suing AI companies for copyright infringement, and compare notes on the most amusing/alarming AI-generated content making the rounds (Pope coat, anyone?).Episode notes:Getty Images is suing the company behind AI art generator Stable Diffusion for copyright infringement, accusing the company of copying 12 million images without permission or compensation to train its AI model.Meanwhile, a group of artists is suing the companies behind Midjourney, DreamUp, and Stable Diffusion for “scraping and collaging” their work to train AI models. One of those artists, Sarah Anderson, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about seeing her comics gobbled up by AI models and regurgitated as far-right memes.Speaking of copyright violations, did Vanilla Ice really steal that hook from David Bowie and Freddie Mercury? (Yes.)Check out the AI model trained on Kanye’s voice that sounds almost indistinguishable from Ye himself.Read The Verge’s deep dive into the intersection of AI-generated music and IP/copyright laws.Watch the AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti that’s been called “the natural end point for AI development.”ICYMI: The Pope coat was real in our hearts.Columbia University’s Data Science Institute recently wrote about how blockchain can give creators more control over their IP, now that AI-generated art is clearly here to stay.Congrats to today’s Lifeboat badge winner, herohuyongtao, for answering How can I add a prebuilt static library in a project using CMake?.
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Apr 28, 2023 • 24min

How a top-ranked engineering school reimagined CS curriculum

Olin College of Engineering has one of the top-ranked undergrad engineering programs in the US. Its computing curriculum is a concentration within the engineering major, not a standalone major. The upshot is a liberal arts-informed course of study with fewer math and theory requirements than a typical CS degree and a greater emphasis on practical, job-ready skills like code quality, testing, and documentation. To learn more about how software design is taught at Olin, explore the course.Andrew Mascillaro is a senior at Olin majoring in electrical and computer engineering. He’s currently a software engineering intern at Tableau. You can find him on LinkedIn.Steve Matsumoto is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Olin; his academic interests include crypto and cybersecurity. You can find him on GitHub or through his website.
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4 snips
Apr 25, 2023 • 36min

Is this the AI renaissance?

Prosus, one of the world’s largest tech investors, acquired Stack Overflow in 2021.Check out the annual State of AI Report from Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth.Read our CEO’s recent post on Stack Overflow’s approach to Generative AI.Connect with Paul on LinkedIn. Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is suvayu for their answer to How to put a big centered "Thank You" in a LaTeX slide.
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Apr 21, 2023 • 30min

When setting up monitoring, less data is better

Akita is a monitoring and observability platform that watches API traffic live and automatically infers endpoint structure.Jean, who comes from a family of computer scientists, earned a PhD from MIT and taught in the CS department at Carnegie Mellon University before founding Akita.Read Jean’s post on the Stack Overflow blog: Monitoring debt builds up faster than software teams can pay it off.Jean is on LinkedIn and Twitter.Congrats are in order for Stellar Question badge winner legendary_rob for asking Adding a favicon to a static HTML page.
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Apr 19, 2023 • 23min

Ops teams are pets, not cattle (ep. 556)

A common refrain you’ll hear these days is that servers should be scaled out, easy to replace, and interchangeable—cattle, not pets. But for the ops folks who run those servers the opposite is true. You can’t just throw any of them into an incident where they may not know the stack or system and expect everything to work out. Every operator has a set of skills that they’ve built up through research or experience, and teams should value them as such. They’re people, not pets, and certainly not cattle—you can’t just get a new one when you burn out your existing ones. On this episode of the podcast—sponsored by Chronosphere—we talk with Paige Cruz, Senior Developer Advocate at Chronosphere, about how teams can reduce the cognitive load on ops, the best ways to prepare for inevitable failures, and where the worst place to page Paige is. Episode notes:Chronosphere provides an observability platform for ops people, so naturally, the company has an interest in the happiness of those people. If you’re interested in the history of the pets vs. cattle concept , this covers it pretty well. Previously, we spoke with the CEO of Chronosphere about making incidents easier to manage. We’ve covered this topic on the blog before, and two articles came up during our conversation with Paige. You can connect with Paige on Twitter, where she has a pretty apropos handle. Congrats to Stellar Question badge winner Bruno Rocha for asking How can I read large text files line by line, without loading them into memory?, which at least 100 users liked enough to bookmark.  
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Apr 18, 2023 • 22min

We bought a university: how one coding school doubled down on brick and mortar

Alura is a Portuguese-language edtech platform where users can learn programming, backend and mobile development, data science, design and UX, DevOps, and more.They started small, grew into a bustling online program, then purchased a majority stake in FIAP, a private university in São Paulo, Brazil.  Paulo and Stack Overflow Director of Engineering Roberta Arcoverde cohost a popular Portuguese-language podcast about programming, design, startups, and technology.Paulo’s new open-source project is full of career resources for T-shaped developers.Connect with Alura CEO Paulo Silveira on LinkedIn.Connect with Alura Chief Education Officer Guilherme Silveira on LinkedIn.Connect with Roberta Arcoverde on LinkedIn.Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is netblognet for their answer to Get JSON object from URL.
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Apr 14, 2023 • 25min

The philosopher who believes in Web Assembly

Fermyon offers serverless cloud computing. Spin is their developer tool for building WebAssembly microservices and web applications; check it out on GitHub.Like past podcast guest David Hsu of Retool (and yours truly), Matt earned a degree in the humanities before deciding to prioritize his “side gig” in tech.Follow Fermyon on GitHub. Matt is on LinkedIn.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner keineahnung2345 for saving Hamming distance between two strings in Python from the dustbin of time.
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5 snips
Apr 11, 2023 • 22min

Going stateless with authorization-as-a-service

Cerbos is an open-source, scalable authorization-as-a-service that aims to make implementing roles and permissions a cinch. Explore their docs or see how their customers are using Cerbos. Stateless applications like Cerbos don’t retain data from previous activities, giving devs predictable plug-and-play functionality across cloud, hybrid, on-prem, and edge instances.Connect with Alex on LinkedIn and Twitter.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Hoopje for rescuing Print in bold on a terminal from the dustbin of history.
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15 snips
Apr 7, 2023 • 19min

Building an API is half the battle

If you prefer, you can read this as a Q&A article or watch the video.Kong is a cloud-native API platform. The first iteration of an API marketplace Marco and his colleagues built was Mashape.Developments like GraphQL and gRPC have become critical as the number of APIs increases over time.Find Marco on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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