Right now, plenty of people are building businesses on social media platforms, on streaming platforms, and on market platforms that they don’t control. That platform can make the rules in any way they want and remove access at any time. That means founders are potentially one step away from losing their livelihood. The same goes for consumers buying from these platforms: if you lose access to your account, there goes all your purchases. As it turns out, you were licensing everything, not buying it. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Ripple CTO David Schwartz about the promise that decentralized trust and distributed consensus has for software development — and for more transparency in ownership. Episode notes:Cross-border payments, while they might not be the sexiest app, are one of the best product-market fits for blockchains. Learn more about Ripple at their home page. Check out the documentation to learn more about building on the XRP Ledger. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, asmeurer, for their answer to What does `S` signify in SymPy? 

Smart contracts aren’t actually new. Computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer Nick Szabo coined the term in 1994 (possibly earlier, depending on who you ask). Old problems seem to keep coming back. Bret Victor gave a talk in 2013 called “The Future of Programming,” where he talked about problems from 1973 that were still relevant. To learn more about the Agoric blockchain, check out their homepage. If you’d rather shape how the blockchain itself operates, much of Agoric’s code is open source. Connect with Dean on Twitter or Telegram

A Principal Engineer at GitHib, Kris is president of the Nivenly Foundation and an admin at Hachyderm, an instance of the decentralized social network powered by Mastodon. The ongoing changes at Twitter have fueled interest in alternative, decentralized platforms like Mastodon and Discord.Read Leaving the Basement, Kris’s post about scaling and migrating Hachyderm out of her basement.Watch Kris’s conversation with DigitalOcean Chief Product Officer Gabe Monroy about building decentralized IT platforms.Find Kris on Twitter, GitHub, Twitch, or YouTube.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner metakeule for answering How can I get an error message in a string in Go?

Today’s guests from Browser Co. are software engineer Victoria Kirst and design lead Dustin Senos of The Browser CompanyThe Browser Company is building a new kind of browser designed to keep users “focused, organized and in control.” Arc, their browser, is “full of big new ideas about how we should interact with the web” and has been called “the best web browser to come out in the last decade.” For an introduction to and first look at Arc, start with this video. You can also join the waiting list or subscribe to the Substack.Follow The Browser Company on Twitter.Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn or Twitter.Connect with Dustin on LinkedIn or Twitter.Special thanks to Ellis Hamburger, owner of the best username, for facilitating this terrific conversation with Victoria and Dustin.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Todd for answering How can I name a @Service with multiple names in Spring?.

In his role at SwissOne Capital, Kenny champions investments in Web3 and the metaverse. A writer on all things crypto since 2013, he’s a regular contributor to the US Chamber of Commerce.The collapse of Three Arrows Capital and FTX eroded investor trust in crypto, but Kenny remains “cautiously optimistic” about the market’s future.Connect with Kenny on LinkedIn or Twitter.Congratulations are in order for Lifeboat badge winner xray1986 for their answer to Unicode symbol that represents "download".

The history of computing has been a story of moving up levels of abstraction: from hard-coding algorithms and directly manipulating memory addresses with assembly languages to using more natural language constructs in high-level general purpose languages to abstracting the hardware of the computer in cloud compute. Now serverless functions take that abstraction even further. We’ve made the algorithms that process data simple and natural; MongoDB wants to do the same for how we persist data. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Andrew Davidson, SVP Products at MongoDB, about how they’re turning a database into a fully-managed service that developers can use in a more natural way. Along the way, we discuss how the cost bottleneck has moved from the storage media to developers’ minds, how greater abstractions can enable developers, and how to get insights from production data faster. Episode notesTry MongoDB Atlas on AWS for free.You can get started with MongoDB Atlas directly from the AWS Marketplace. If you’re at a startup, you can take advantage of their special offer for startups. The community edition of their classic database is available to download as well. If you’re looking to learn a thing or two before diving in, check out MongoDB University. Our thanks to Great Question badge winner Derek 朕會功夫 for asking How can I reverse an array in JavaScript without using libraries? You know the rarest kung fu of all: asking great questions.

The inbox improvements were Radek’s graduation project. Not bad for a newbie. Not everyone likes change, and the inbox change was no exception. So we looked into fixing that.Read about what our engineering team learned building and scaling Stack Overflow to support millions of users.Connect with Radek on LinkedIn. Find Cobih on LinkedIn and Twitter.Longtime Stacker Yaakov Ellis is also on LinkedIn.Congrats to user HelloCW on receiving a Socratic Badge for asking a well-received question on 100 separate days and maintaining a positive question record.

Our recent Pulse Survey showed how technologists visiting Stack Overflow feel about emergent technologies. The consensus is clear: AI assistants will soon be everywhere, and developers aren’t sure how they feel about that. Check out the podcast here or dive into the blog.Learn more about the emergent abilities of large language models (LLMs). For more on the intersection of AI and academia, listen to our episode with computer science professor Emery Berger or read his essay on how academics are coping with AI that can ace exams and do everyone’s homework.Catch up on the adventures of the worst coder in the world.Congrats to user d1337, whose question How to assign a name to the size() column? won a Stellar Question badge.

With so many companies offering API products, it can be hard to get your particular APIs discovered and used by the developers who need them most. You might have the best, most useful solutions out there, but if you’re relying on the digital equivalent of foot traffic for discoverability, it might as well not exist. And if an API solution can’t be found, then someone else is going to reinvent it. On this sponsored episode, we chat with SmartBear API Technical Evangelist Frank Kilcommins about the growing challenges of API visibility and how to outsmart the invisibility trap with the right development strategies and tools. Episode notes:Kilcommins suggests you can get better visibility for your APIs with SmartBear's new free API exploration tool. Open specifications like the Open API Initiative help make your endpoints easier to understand—both by humans and computers. Connect with Frank Kilcommins on Twitter and LinkedIn. Congrats to Stack Overflow user WorstCase, who asked five well-received questions on five separate days and earned themselves a shiny new Curious badge.

You can dive deeper into the research, including some lovely matrix charts, on our blog.Erin has also explored tag trends among our most loved languages and job insights from our community.Learn more about Joy on her LinkedIn.Thanks to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, russbishop, for helping to answer the question: Where is the app content folder in the simulator of Xcode?