The Stack Overflow Podcast

Before jumping into driverless car talk, Ben shares a heads up about fake jobs at credible companies that are actually phishing scams meant to steal your identity and hijack your bank accounts. Beware the job offer that seems too good to be true!Jon, Cassidy, Ceora, Matt, and Ben reflect on whether they trust software to operate a vehicle.Cassidy tells us that she once sat in a car that parked itself and screamed the entire time.Matt brings us back to reality, reminding us that airplane flights have been automated for a while now.Matt and Ben point out that in the medical technology space, robotic surgeons are so advanced that they have become more precise than human hands.Shoutout to lifeboat badge winner GKG4 for a great answer to the question “how can I check if an array index is out of range?” which has been viewed 67,000 times.Follow Jon, Ben, Ceora, Matt, and Cassidy.

Despite our hope for the power of robotics, the technology is still far from mainstream. That’s because the amount of effort needed to get hardware to do useful things at scale is…well…hard.When Eliot started Viam, his goal was to address this challenge by creating software that supports a range of hardware builds right out of the box. As the company explains - “we’re addressing these issues by building a novel robotics platform that relies on standardized building blocks rather than custom code to create, configure and control robots intuitively and quickly. We’re empowering engineers – aspiring and experienced – across industries to solve complicated automation problems with our innovative software tools.” The company announced the opening of its public beta earlier this week.While Eliot elaborates on his vision for Viam, Ben reflects on his time covering drones for The Verge and working on robotics at DJI.Inquisitive badge winner, Neeta, gets props for asking well-received questions on 30 separate days.Follow Ben and Eliot on Twitter.

Ceora and Cassidy talk about why engineers are so good at job hopping — and why it can pay to upgrade roles every year or two.Ceora speaks openly about the privileges of working in tech compared to other industries.Apparently, in some places, it’s a thing for engineers to leave their teams and then rejoin the organization with a promotion to get ahead. Do you boomerang?Cassidy’s husband’s favorite interview question to ask is, “If you had a magic wand and could change one thing about this company, what would you change?”Ben poses a question about whether LinkedIn AB tests are disadvantageous to some career seekers over others.Matt introduces us to the world of AI generated Pokémon.Ceora, our resident voice of Gen Z, tells us why she thinks millennials are the only true generation to understand tech.High fives to Unique Username for answering the question “how can I print to the console using JavaScript?” You get a Lifeboat Badge for helping 140,000 people.Follow Ben, Ceora, Matt, and Cassidy.

Matt takes us back to the origins of his open source days and the spark that inspired his love for engineering — including the point at which he discovered Linux.He shares how he began learning from the code itself, which was ultimately a different style of learning than what was available to him at university. Then, it was to the stacks, but not Stack Overflow. Think Barnes and Noble, not YouTube videos.Imagine trying to  navigate getting your first engineering job during the dot-com crash of the late 90s and early 2000s.We reflect on Matt's experience building projects with his daughter, including an AI-powered doorbell he built himself.Speaking of insatiable curiousity, we’d like to give a big high five to Wonton, who received the Inquisitive Badge. Thanks for coming on 30 separate days to maintain a positive question track record.Follow Matt, Ben, and Cassidy.

Our guests have done most of their ML work on AWS offerings, from AWS Personalize for their initial recommendation engine to SageMaker for model training and deployment pipeline. Now they’re building models from scratch in TensorFlow. Want to see these recommendations in action? Check out the offerings at Discovery+ and HBOMax. If you’re a ML/AL data scientist looking to shape the future of automated curation, check out their open roles. Follow our guests on LinkedIn:Shrikant DesaiSowmya Subramanian

Mariann shares how she and her UX research team at Stack Overflow are taking steps to create a more inclusive product experience, while reflecting on her experiences as a mother to a neurodiverse daughter.Wesley talks about what it’s like to be a developer with dyslexia and why self-empathy and self-compassion have been important to his evolution as a senior leader.Ceora explains why it’s important to be on a psychologically safe team from her perspective as a Black woman who is also neurodivergent.We talk about giving people the space necessary to do their best work, implementing more inclusive hiring practices, and everyday routines that help us stay our happiest and most productive.We conclude with a note about why supporting neurodiversity is good for everyone of all walks of life.Follow Ceora, Wesley, and Marianne.

Ceora shares her experience representing Auth0 at REFACTR TECH, reflecting on what it was like being back in-person after years of virtual events.Cassidy announces her move to CTO and how her current leadership role at Contenda fits into her career journey and future aspirations as a technologist.Ben talks about Stack Overflow’s Flow State, the first IRL event he’s attended since 2019 and Stack’s first ever customer conference. In case Cassidy pulled you down a rabbit hole of wondering how eels reproduce, check out this piece in the New Yorker from 2020.Be sure to follow Ceora and Cassidy on Twitter. Speaking of the power of curiosity, today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user448810 for answering the question, Feasible implementation of a prime-counting function. Thanks for helping 6,000 people gain valuable knowledge.

Guilo gives building UI components as an example of where software innovation has given him time back: he started building them as static images in Photoshop, then Sketch brought connected, interactive components, and Finally, Figma let you collaborate and build an entire system together.  If you missed any of the previous episodes, you can find them waiting for you here. Connect with Paolo Passeri on LinkedIn. Connect with Giulio Barresi on LinkedIn. Check out more mechanical keyboard products from Logitech. Congrats to KnutKnutsen for their answer to How can I specify a one-argument constructor using Lombok?, saving the question and picking up a Lifeboat badge. 

It finally happened. In the words of the Ethereum Foundation, ETH is now “ready for its interstellar voyage,” having transitioned from proof of work to proof of stake. With no centralized authority insisting on a ship date, we’re witnessing a feat. We’re all wondering what comes next. The Great Debate about hybrid and remote work continues. Is the decentralized talent movement winning? What can we do to prevent cabin fever? What do government workers do with their laptops if they need to cross the border?The semiconductor chip shortage hasn’t ended yet, but some companies seem to be hurting more than others. What gives?We conclude with a reflection on the new Apple Watch—and whether it can actually save our lives.Be sure to follow @mattkander and @benpopper on Twitter to keep the convo going.Big thanks to Androidian who is our latest Inquisitive badge recipient for coming to Stack Overflow for 30 separate days, maintaining a positive question record.Catch you all later.

About three years ago, when our public platform engineering team at Stack started growing, we realized that we needed a more robust formal project management system that could scale with all the creativity coming on board. That’s when we started looking at formal, by-the-book frameworks to empower and coach our teams to their fullest potential. We landed on Agile and Scrum. Admittedly, our development team was nervous about implementing Scrum and Agile at first. So we focused on the goals of introspection and accountability rather than the rigidness of enforcement.Agile and Scrum get a lot of hate. But is that their fault or are you doing it wrong?We talked about this on the podcast a few years ago, when Ben, Paul, and Sara wondered, “Is Scrum making you a worse engineer?” It’s about providing support—not punishing people. Done right, Agile and Scrum can be a force of freedom and autonomy when they start with trust.Connect with Shanda and Jon on LinkedIn.We conclude with a big high five to Lifeboat badge winner jminkler for their answer to how to create an Instagram share link in PHP (thank you).‘Til next time.