The Stack Overflow Podcast

Huge thanks to the more than 73,000 devs from 180 countries who spent 15 minutes each completing our 2022 Developer Survey. This year’s survey was longer than usual, since we wanted to ask about new topics as well as provide a historical throughline to understand how your responses have changed over the years.Among the takeaways from the survey: 2022 saw a 10% jump in how many folks are learning to code online (versus through a conventional coding school or from textbooks). Nearly 85% of organizations represented in the survey have at least some remote workers, while the vast majority of developers are still working remotely at least part of the time. You can read more about the results here.Worth noting: Just because you’ve learned to code doesn’t mean you have to pursue a career as a programmer. Here are four different career paths coders can follow, including product manager and sales engineer.Wondering how Ikea’s Friheten or Fjӓdermoln would actually look in your living room? The company’s new virtual design tool lets you scan rooms in your home, delete your furniture, and replace it with shiny new stuff from Ikea. You can also fill virtual showrooms to your heart’s content.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Jarzon for their answer to Make a hidden field required.

GitHub Copilot is now available to all developers. There’s also the GitHub Copilot Labs extension for Visual Studio Code, which has some neat tricks up its sleeve. Yes, Copilot is impressive; no, it’s not gunning for your job. ICYMI, check out our blog post exploring whether AI is poised to steal our livelihoods: The robots are coming for (the boring parts of) your job.Mullvad VPN is removing the option to add new subscriptions because they want to know “as little as possible” about their users: “We are constantly looking for ways to reduce the amount of data we store while still providing a usable service.”Data scraping is both ubiquitous and seemingly unavoidable—but it raises serious privacy concerns, writes David Golumbia for Real Life.Tech recs: a ladder to bypass (almost) any paywall, the smartest way to learn a new language, how to explore the JavaScript universe, a great place to listen to longform journalism, and the email-free way to read your favorite newsletters.Thanks to Liam for emailing the podcast to share Physics Girl’s terrific explanation of quantum cryptography.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user martineau for their answer to How to start and stop a thread.

RIP Internet Explorer (1995-2022), “a good tool to download other browsers.” Bummer epitaph, but the meme stands.Netlify’s unified web development workflow has out-of-this-world benefits for developer experience. Learn more by watching A Tale of Web Development in Two Universes.Netlify recently announced Netlify Edge Functions, a fully serverless runtime environment. Here’s what that means and how it works.For more on “The Edge” (not this guy or this guy), check out this episode of the Remotely Interesting podcast, featuring Phil, Salma, and Cassidy.Jamstack makes developers’ lives “pretty peachy,” to borrow Salma’s phrase. Here, she explains what Jamstack is and how it makes the web (and developers) faster.Salma helps “developers build stuff, learn things, and love what they do.” She loves helping people get into tech, where she started working after a career as a music teacher and comedian. Active in the developer community, she’s a Microsoft MVP for Developer Technologies, a partnered Twitch streamer, and a relentless advocate for building a truly accessible web. Salma is the founder of Unbreak.tech, Women Who Stream Tech, and Women of Jamstack, projects that call for social change and equality in tech. Connect with her on Twitter or LinkedIn.Phil is passionate about browser technologies, the web’s empowering properties, and ingenuity and simplicity in the face of overengineering. He has built web apps for Google, Apple, Nike, R/GA, and The London Stock Exchange, and is a coauthor of Modern Web Development on the Jamstack (O’Reilly, 2019). Connect with Phil on Twitter or LinkedIn, or read his blog posts for Netlify.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Anton vBR for their answer to What’s the function of dedent() in Python?.

Docs for Devs: An Engineer’s Field Guide to Technical Writing can be found here.Jared worked as a technical writer at Google for more than 14 years and recently transitioned to Waymo, the self-driving car company spun out under the Alphabet umbrella. You can find him on Twitter and LinkedIn.Zachary has been a technical writer at GitHub and the Linux Foundation, and now works as a staff technical writer at Stripe. You can find all her online accounts at her website.Interested in exploring approaches for collaboration and knowledge management on engineering teams? Why not try a tool developers already turn to regularly? Check out Stack Overflow for Teams, used by Microsoft, Bloomberg, and many others.Tired of security bottlenecks? Today’s episode is sponsored by Snyk,  a developer security platform that automatically scans your code, dependencies, containers, and cloud configs — finding and fixing vulnerabilities in real time, from the tools and workflows you already use. Create your free account at snyk.co/stackoverflow.

WWDC22 was last week (check out Apple’s highlights here). Among the most exciting demonstrations: passkeys, a new approach to authentication with the potential to finally replace passwords altogether. Apple also announced enhancements to Swift, its programming language, and a new flagship processor, the M2 chip.Now that iMessage users will be able to edit or even unsend text messages after the fact, will your group chat (or your relationship) ever be the same?Multitaskers rejoice: A new iPadOS function called Stage Manager organizes apps in a tile formation that allows users to rapidly tap from workspace to workspace.And yes, you can finally check the weather on your iPhone lock screen.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Stephen Docy for their answer to Proving that a two-pointer approach works (pair sum).

 Ever since personal information started flowing into applications on the web, securing that information has become more and more important. General security and privacy frameworks like ISO-27001 and PCI provide guidance in securing systems. Now the law has gotten involved with the European Union’s GDPR and California’s CPRA. More laws are on the way, and these laws (and the frameworks) are changing as they meet legal challenges. With the legal landscape for privacy shifting so much, every engineer must ask: How do I keep my application in compliance?On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Rob Picard and Matt Cooper of Vanta, who get that question every day. Their company makes security monitoring software that helps companies get into compliance quickly. We spoke about the shifting sands of privacy rules and regulations, tracking data flows through systems and across corporate borders, and how security automation can put up guardrails instead of gates. Many security frameworks are undergoing modernization to reflect the way that distributed applications function today. And more countries and US states are passing their own privacy regulations. The privacy space is surprisingly dynamic, forcing companies to keep track of these frequent changes to stay current and compliant. Not everyone has in-house legal experts to follow the daily developments and communicate those to the engineering team. For an engineering team just trying to understand the effort involved, it may be helpful to start figuring out where your data flows. Tracking it between internal services may be overkill; instead, track it across corporate boundaries, from one database, cloud provider, SaaS system, and dependency. Each of those should have their own data privacy agreement—plug into your procurement process to see what each piece of your stack promises on a privacy level. Your DevOps and DevSecOps teams will probably want to automate much of the security engineering process as possible. Unfortunately, automating security is hard. The best path may not be to automate the defenses on your system; it might be better to instead automate the context that you provide to engineers. If someone wants to add a dependency, pop up a reminder that these dependencies can be fickle. Automate the boring stuff—context, reminders, to-dos—and let humans do the complex problem solving we’re so good at. If you’re looking to add an in-house security expert as a service, check out Vanta.com. Their platform monitors connects to your systems and helps you prep for compliance with one or more security frameworks. If those frameworks change, you don’t need to do anything. Vanta changes for you. 

Temporal Technologies is a scalable open-source platform for developers to build and run reliable cloud applications.ICYMI, here’s a post we wrote with Ryland Goldstein, Head of Product at Temporal, discussing how software engineering has shifted from a monolithic to a microservices model—thereby introducing a whole new set of challenges for software engineers.Maxim, who grew up in Russia, is renowned in the microservices world. He spent decades architecting mission-critical systems at MSFT, Amazon, and Uber, where he designed Cadence and spun it out into Temporal. Netflix, Descript, Instacart, Datadog, Snap, and plenty more are all betting their critical systems on Temporal’s OSS technology, so Maxim has a dedicated following in the dev community.Dominik’s father is a nuclear physicist, so Dominik had early access to computers growing up in Germany. His professional path led him from SAP in Germany to SAP in Palo Alto, then to Cisco, and finally to Temporal.Replay, Temporal’s inaugural developer experience conference, is happening IRL from August 25-26, 2022 in Seattle. Check it out!Connect with Maxim on LinkedIn or Twitter.Connect with Dominik on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Medium.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Thanos for their answer to How to wrap text without regard to space and hyphen. (This makes up for the Snap, right?)

HASH, where Maggie works along with Stack Overflow cofounder Joel Spolsky, is an open-core platform for creating simulations that help people make better decisions.Explore Maggie’s writing on everything from digital anthropology to best practices for illustrating invisible programming concepts.Maggie recommends the Nielsen Norman Group website as the best resource for folks getting up to speed on research-based UX.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Sten for their answer to Detecting transparency in an image.

The first step in quantum computing? Quantum internet: a network capable of sending quantum information between far-distant computing machines (as in, one on Earth and one on Mars). Still have questions?In case it’s been a while since your last physics course: Schrödinger’s cat.Retool’s 2022 State of Engineering Time reveals how software engineers spend their time, what they want to do more (and less) of, and the most frustrating and satisfying parts of their jobs.A great resource from GitHub for folks working on open-source projects: Why creating a popular OSS library is a marathon, not a sprint.Cassidy recommends Centered again—the app that helps you stay in your flow state.Congrats to Ceora on her new role at Auth0!

The Web3 crime of the century? Seth Green’s Bored Ape NFT is kidnapped by dastardly phishing scammers, kiboshing the TV series Green was developing around the Bored Ape character. Read more.Ceora served as a resident emcee at this year’s Remix Conf. She and Cassidy offer advice for developers who want to give talks or host conferences. In tech industry news: Broadcom acquires VMWare for $61 billion, one of the largest tech acquisitions in history.Today in tech recs: Matt recommends Logitech’s MX Mechanical keyboard; Adam recommends roadmap.sh, a community dedicated to creating roadmaps, guides, and other resources to guide developers as they start their careers or upskill along the way.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user munk for their answer to Python path as a string.