The Stack Overflow Podcast

While blockchains are huge right now, finding one to build on that doesn’t use a ton of energy, has good privacy protections, and operates efficiently is harder than it looks. The original breakout blockchain, Bitcoin, was slow to adopt any innovations coming out of research. Other blockchains use the electricity of a small country to play elaborate gambling games. For someone looking to build the future of Web3, what are your options?On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk to Tezos co-founder Arthur Breitman. After finding out that the Bitcoin blockchain wouldn’t incorporate all the good ideas generated around it—proof of stake, privacy improvements, and smart contracts to name a few—he decided to build his own. Arthur has a background in machine learning and statistics but spent his early 20s teaching self-driving cars how to turn left and working in quantitative finance for high-frequency trading. High-frequency trading was data-driven, but there was so much noise that machine learning didn’t do very well. Self-driving cars, meanwhile, presented a more structured problem, so neural networks could yield good results. Around that time, Arthur got bit by the crypto bug. It lived at the intersection of a lot of his interests: Cryptography touched on computer science and math, but his time in finance got him wondering about banks and money work. The idea of individual sovereignty scratched a personal philosophical itch. Naturally, Arthur decided to try some mining software. It took all of his computer’s resources, so he uninstalled it. But after seeing the price of Bitcoin break a dollar and other news items about it, he looked closer. He started to think about what a company could do if it didn’t have to maintain banking relationships. He thought about possible applications, like decentralized poker. When Bitcoin refused to adopt the improvements developed by competing alt coins, Arthur started thinking about a new blockchain that would respond to new developments and focus on efficient processing, security, and a good smart contract system. Forking the code wasn’t enough; he needed a new ledger. That’s when Tezos was born. It was initially built by a small team of OCaml programmers using that language’s functional subset. Arthur was inspired by the example of WhatsApp, which was built by a small team of senior Erlang engineers. While OCaml would limit the talent he could hire, it would be a very efficient way to build an error-free transaction system. He could have built the whole thing in Java, sure, but Arthur estimates that it would have cost a whole lot more. If you’re interested in learning more about what an engineer’s blockchain ecosystem looks like, check out the Tezos home page. Discover building on Tezos: https://tezos.com/build/

Jason is now a managing director at Redpoint Ventures and has led one investment so far, backing a company called Alchemy that is focused on infrastructure and dev tools for web3.He describes himself as a "very average" programmer, but an excellent engineer, and explains how he parlayed his unique skill set into key roles at Heroku and GitHub.Our lifeboat for the week goes to dfrib for suggesting a solution to: Error "nil requires a contextual type" using Swift

Following the success of the Mac Mini, Windows is getting into the tiny computer business. Oh, and it’s running on ARM chips. Oh, and Visual Studio and VS Code will now offer native ARM support.Video games got a lot of us into programming thanks to their openness to mods. It’s what made The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind such a hit 20 years ago. Minecraft may live forever thanks to its modding community and parent-friendly tools. Just don’t be surprised when you have to ban local kids for virtual arson and murder. The old security exploit hits are still out there: cross-site scripting, SQL injection, and cross-site request forgery. Could be because 86% of developers do not view application security as a top priority.Two great questions today: Is it illegal to ride a drunk horse? and a Lifeboat-worthy response from Markus Meskanen on Checking if a number is not in range in Python

Companies like Meta, Twitter, and Netflix are enacting hiring freezes and layoffs, a situation that’s not great for anybody but is likely to have outsize effects on people of color in tech.Gen Z may not understand file structures, but they sure understand Twitter toxicity. MegaBlock from Gen Z Mafia allows users to block bad tweets, their authors, and every single account that liked the offending tweet. There, doesn’t that feel better?Apple’s WWDC 2022 is just around the corner. What are you most excited about?Machine-learning start-up Inflection AI raises $225 million in equity financing to use AI to improve human-computer communication. Another reminder that building sophisticated AI systems isn’t cheap: who could forget that Open AI paid its top researcher just shy of $2 million in 2016?Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Patricia Shanahan for their answer to Difference between int and double.

Highly-touted cryptocurrencies like TARA don’t always solve the problems they’re supposed to, as Bloomberg reports.If you’re looking for a compelling deep-dive into a crypto scammer, Cassidy recommends BBC podcast The Missing Cryptoqueen.Ceora is working to improve the quality of her commit messages in order to turn what’s now a personal project into an open-source project that others can contribute to. One great resource she’s found: Zen and the art of writing good commit messages.Attention devs: if you have tips for basic project maintenance and hacks for improving commit messages, Ceora wants to hear from you.Read up on the benefits of test-driven development.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Nina Scholz for their answer to What’s the difference between Object.entries and Object.keys?.

You may be running your code in containers. You might even have taken the plunge and orchestrated it all with YAML code through Kubernetes. But infrastructure as code becomes a whole new level of complicated when setting up a managed Kubernetes service. On this sponsored episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with David Dymko and Walt Ribeiro of Vultr about what they went through to build their managed Kubernetes service as a cloud offering. It was a journey that ended not just with a managed K8s service, but also with a wealth of additional tooling, upgrades, and open sourcing. When building out a Kubernetes implementation, you can abstract away some of the complexity, especially if you use some of the more popular tools like Kubeadm or Kubespray. But when using a managed service, you want to be able to focus on your workloads and only your workloads, which means taking away the control plane. The user doesn’t need to care about the underlying infrastructure, but for those designing it, the missing control plane opens a whole heap of trouble. Once you remove this abstraction, your cloud cluster is treated as a single solid compute. But then how do you do upgrades? How do you maintain x509 certifications for HTTPS calls? How do you get metrics? Without the control plane, Vultr needed to communicate to their Kubernetes worker nodes through the API. And wouldn’t you know it: the API isn’t all that well-documented. They took it back to bare necessities, the MVP feature set of their K8s cloud service. They’d need the Cloud Controller Manager (CCM) and the Container Storage Interface (CSI) as core components to have Vultr be a first-class citizen on a Kubernetes cluster. They built a Go client to interface using those components and figured, hey, why not open-source this? That led to a few other open-source projects, like a Terraform integration and a command-line interface. This was the start of a two-year journey connecting all the dots that this project required. They needed a managed load balancer that could work without the control plane or any of the tools that interfaced with it. They built it. They needed a quality-of-life update to their API to catch up with everything that today’s developer expects: modern CRUD actions, REST best practices, and pagination. All the while, they kept listening to their customers to make sure they didn’t stray too far from the original product. To see the results of their journey, listen to the podcast and check out Vultr.com for all of their cloud offerings, available in 25 locations worldwide.

Supabase, the open-source database-as-a-service company, raised $80 million in Series B funding in a round led by Felicis Ventures. In case you were wondering: YYes, the company is named for the Nicki Minaj song!.Today in tech recs: Cassidy recommends budgeting app Lunch Money for everything from crypto to cash. Matt recommends Magnet for window management.Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user dfrib for their answer to Error "nil requires a contextual type" using Swift.

Ian and Corey met at Microsoft, where they built Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 (which boasted its own CD-ROM).They went on to found Mattermost in 2016 to give developers one platform for collaborating across tools and teams.Ian, who previously founded the game company SpinPunch, calls Mattermost “yet another of those video game companies turned B2B software companies,” like Slack and Discord. Says Ian: “Games are all the risk of a movie plus all the complexity of a B2B SaaS product.”Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Diogo for their answer to How can I call functions from one .cpp file in another .cpp file?.Connect with Ian on LinkedIn.Connect with Corey on LinkedIn.

Check out a manager’s toolkit for preventing burnout put together by Gitlab Cassidy once asked Stephen Colbert for his favorite website. His answer may surprise you.Today in tech recs: Pokémon GO (for extra motivation to get outside) and the Apple Watch activity tracker (to track activity and remind you to move around). Jon recommends that you not get a treadmill desk. Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user JLRishe for their answer to Error "TypeError: $(...).children is not a function".Follow Jon on LinkedIn or Twitter.

You can check out Michael’s bio here and tune in to his podcast Cloud Unfiltered.If you're interested in some of open source work Michael and his colleagues are doing, check out API Clarity.