
The Stack Overflow Podcast
For more than a dozen years, the Stack Overflow Podcast has been exploring what it means to be a software developer and how the art and practice of programming is changing our world. From Rails to React, from Java to Node.js, join the Stack home team for conversations with fascinating guests to help you understand how technology is made and where it’s headed.
Latest episodes

Jul 29, 2022 • 25min
San Francisco? More like San Francisgo
San Francisco’s Mayor London Breed says a seismic shift (definitely not an exodus) is underway as tech workers continue working from home and companies like Salesforce (the city’s largest private employer) reduce office space. Breed says San Francisco lost $400 million in tax revenue in 2021, as companies shuttered offices or moved to other cities. San Francisco offices haven’t been this empty since 2009.The Wall Street Journal reports that 71 cities (and counting) are offering cash grants and other incentives to lure remote workers from Silicon Valley to, say, Tulsa, Oklahoma.If you’re a member in good standing of the Hellfire Club (or any D&D group), check out the free AI image generator from AI Dungeon.Customizable open search platform You.com debuts YouCode, a specialized search engine intended to increase developer efficiency. You.com allows users to deploy AI to customize the sources they want to see, the order in which results appear, and how private results are, reports VentureBeat.Matt is the proud owner of a new tongue scraper (TMI?), and Ben is 3D-printing him a customized holder. What are friends for?Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user LuLuGaGa for their answer to the question Is there a way to create BottomBar using SwiftUI?

Jul 26, 2022 • 25min
Team analytics: Less creepy, more empowering
Multitudes helps managers and CTOs create happier, higher-performing teams, using data they already have. Multitudes is focused on software development teams to start, but their bigger vision is to make it easier for any manager to understand and improve their teams’ culture and performance.“Developers in our audience have expressed skepticism or dismay in the past about software that tracks performance or output,” Lauren explains. Multitudes’ approach is to break down an organization’s approach to ethical team analytics in order to balance delivering value to management with respect and support for the individual developers whose work is being measured. How does that work? Read Lauren’s blog post about data ethics.Lauren founded Multitudes based on insights she acquired running Ally Skills NZ, which supports organizations in building equitable, inclusive teams. Before that, she worked with high-performance, fast-growth companies in Silicon Valley, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and New Zealand. A Stanford grad, Lauren is passionate about making equity the default both at work and in the wider world.Check out Multitudes’ success stories or explore their blog.Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Jul 22, 2022 • 25min
Game Boy emulators, PowerPoint developers, and the enduring appeal of Pokémon GO
Pokémon GO is six years old (it makes us feel old, too). Check out NoobBoy, the Game Boy emulator. Need more nineties nostalgia? You can still play DOOM on almost anything.What kind of game could you build with PowerPoint? Two game developers go head-to-head over 24 hours to show you: Watch the video.Did you know a moose can dive 20 feet deep and swim faster than Michael Phelps? It’s true.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user zvone for their answer to Error message "TypeError: descriptor 'append' requires a 'list' object but received a 'dict'".

Jul 20, 2022 • 24min
How APIs can take the pain out of legacy system headaches
Today's episode is sponsored by Opentext. You can learn more about their information management solutions here.You can find out more about Claire and here career on her LinkedIn.Opentext has a fascinating history. It began as an academic project at the University of Waterloo. The researchers were looking to digitize the Oxford English Dictionary, and created an early search engine, similar to Project Gutenberg. The private company spun out of that work.No lifeboat badge today, so we'll shout out SDK, who claimed the benefactor badge for placing a bounty on his question: How to make a dynamic slide up transition? Seems like it worked, as the question now has an accepted answer :)

Jul 19, 2022 • 31min
Code completion isn’t magic; it just feels that way
Anvil is an open-source web framework for building full-stack applications entirely in Python.Ready to dig deeper into code completion? Check out Meredydd’s talk at PyCon 2022 (he even built a code completion engine live on stage). ICYMI: Listen to our previous episode with Meredydd about countering the complexity of web programming: Full-stack web programming with nothing but Python. Connect with Meredydd on LinkedIn or Twitter.The Lifeboat badge shoutout is back. Today’s badge goes to user Tomasz Nurkiewicz for their answer to Best performance for string-to-Boolean conversion.

Jul 15, 2022 • 29min
At your next job interview, you ask the questions
The GPU shortage is (allegedly) over! Read about it at The Verge.Learn how low code demands more creativity from developers.On the job market? Don’t be afraid to turn the tables on your interviewer.This week’s tech recs: Help foster more equitable compensation conversations by taking Devocate’s Developer Relations Compensation Survey.Cal.com offers scheduling infrastructure for anyone and everyone—and it’s open-source.Appsmith is an open-source, low-code platform for building, shipping, and maintaining CRUD apps.Finally, if you’re wondering how to get that startup idea from back-of-napkin to exit, start with Kernal.

Jul 12, 2022 • 27min
Money that moves at the speed of information
Devraj Varadhan, SVP of Engineering at Ripple, discusses career progression, weathering the storm in the crypto industry, leadership principles, and pursuing global innovations at Ripple.

Jul 8, 2022 • 29min
A conversation with Stack Overflow's new CTO, Jody Bailey
Episode notesBefore joining Stack, Jody spent time at Pluralsight and AWS Training, two roles that helped him to understand the growing market for online educational self-taught developers. We interviewed his former colleagues at AWS training in this episode.Enjoy the frustration of debugging your own code. Maybe you it brings you eustress? Ben does not experience this, nor does he like the classic video game Myst. But it takes all kinds.Interested in learning more about the changing trends in Developer education? Check out data from our latest Dev Survey and research from the teams at Skillsoft, another member of the Prosus Ed-tech portfolio.Today’s lifeboat badge goes to Anton VBR for explaining: What's the function of dedent() in Python?

Jul 7, 2022 • 30min
Skills that pay the bills for software developers
If you want to dive deeper on lucrative skills, you can read a blog post Mike wrote for us last month.If you want to learn more about Mike's background and career, check out his LinkedIn.Mike was previously on the blog and podcast discussing Skillsoft research about the certifications that are most in demand for top paying roles. You can read up on that and listen to his earlier interview here.As always, we want to shout out the winner of a Lifeboat badge. Today's hero is Philip, who answered the question: Substring is not working as expected if length is greater than length of String

Jul 5, 2022 • 30min
Developers vs the difficulty bomb
Episode notesAn interesting podcast episode on the multiple delays that have kept Ethereum from its long-anticipated merge and kicked the difficulty bomb down the road.Since we recorded, more news broke about delaying the boom.How to Find Open Source Projects to Contributehttps://www.codetriage.com/https://www.coss.community/https://goodfirstissue.dev/A pretty cool write up on the creation of spring animations by a few Figma engineers.Looking to build your own image search engine? Check out APIs from Clarifai and Roboflow that make it easy to train your own ML model.A creative and interesting Codepen from a newly minted Figma engineer. And for those who enjoy the CSS art of yummy snacks, Cassidy’s Codepen has a few treats.Yet another rumor about Apple’s upcoming AR/VR headset. Will it ever arrive, and how would its demands for GPU-intensive work mesh with Apple’s hardware ecosystem?