The Stack Overflow Podcast

Graybeard conference alert! Eran and Ryan both started their technology journeys on the venerable Commodore 64. During his academic days, Eran helped to map all the BGP (background gateway protocol) gateways in the world. This got a fair bit of press recently during the six hour Facebook outage.Nexar provides smart dashcams and an app that help cars understand the roads around them. While networked cameras on every car could be a privacy nightmare, Nexar says that they have privacy as a foundational part of the SDLC.

HarperDB is a startup that focuses on highly scalable databases that handle real-time data. Harper is built on Node.js and Express with a little help from Fastify. They know where they excel and where they don't. High data throughput like  gaming and vision, great! High data resolution and transactional software like financial applications, not so great. It's speed over accuracy. Instead of a Lifeboat badge today, we shared a relevant question: Q: How to create HarperDB table with lambda.

Read more about the climate debate surrounding NFTs here.We really enjoyed this piece: You either die an MVP, or live long enough to build content moderation.You can find Ben on Twitter here.You can send ideas for blog posts to Ryan Donovan at our pitch box.You can find Cassidy on Twitter here and read the newsletter she helps us curate here.You can find Ceora on Twitter here and check out more about Apollo GraphQL here.

You can learn more about Paul here.You can read more about Physna here.Paul is excited about the Metaverse. So are we! 

Check out more about Microsoft's efforts to ditch passwords here.When  2FA just won't do, 3FA to the rescue. Just pray we aren't headed towards five factors. 

Right now, most development teams provide visibility into their overall process and lifecycle through standup meetings and spreadsheets. It can be a painfully manual process that uses up valuable engineering time. Value stream management aims to solve that by mapping out the entire software development life cycle and providing visibility into areas where things are breaking down or getting stuck. It borrows ideas from Agile and the automate-all-the-things attitude from DevOps to ensure engineering teams are moving fast with direction, avoiding bottlenecks, and reaching the the key objectives management planned weeks ago.In this episode, we chat with Nick Mathison and Sylvan Carbonell from HCL Software DevOps about value stream management and how their product, HCL Accelerate, brings visibility into the entire gamut of the SDLC, from the request coming in from a customer to deploying code to the production servers. At the foundation of this process is a good map of the company’s value stream. Think of it as bringing all your teams together to map out the entire workflow of your development cycle on a whiteboard, from receiving feature requests and bug reports, assigning out tickets, merging code, requesting code reviews, passing build tests, QA processes, and finally deploying to production. The value stream map brings that whiteboard to life. Once the process is mapped out and the data flows revealed, it is very easy to track where the work is at any given time and how fast it is flowing through the value stream. Every company has little idiosyncrasies that make their process unique: their specific slowdowns, time sinks, and manual approvals that grind development to a halt. Value stream management spots those and helps you eliminate them. In a value stream, you’re no longer watching individual devs; your best metrics cover the “two-pizza team,” a team small enough to be fed by two pizzas. This team’s interactions—working through epic tickets, code reviews, internal support, etc.—provides the best metrics to identify ways to increase the value that a team provides. With many technology companies working fully remotely during the pandemic, understanding each team’s process is critical. HCL offers a way to accomplish this without bringing lengthy standups back in the picture.Start benefiting from value stream management today with the forever-free Community Edition of HCL Accelerate. Try HCL Accelerate now.

Go get your copy of They Key here.Our frequent collaborator, Cassidy Williams of Netlify, helped design the key and joined this episode to share her love for all things mechanical keyboard. 

We talked about obscuring DNS traffic based on this article.Cassidy and Ben are pretty excited about all the new Apple stuff announced recently. Ryan, the curmudgeon, does not. There are several theories as to where the word dongle came from. The Conductor framework makes building web apps simpler in a  low-code/no-code  style. Did the pandemic worsen everyone else's guilt and self-loathing over decreased productivity or was it just us?Our only point of contact during the height of the pandemic was the Internet connection. Has the loosening of quarantine made us less likely to  live online? 

Tarn and his brother Zach are the brains behind Dwarf Fortress and the community that rose around it.Dr. Tarn Adams  received a math PhD, but left his post-doc because he was too busy making games. A bug created the statue Planepacked, a massive structure that contained the entire history of the world as well as 73 copies of the statue itself.Many people, including one of our hosts, found out about Dwarf Fortress through a Let's Play session in a fortress called Boatmurdered. If you want a more human readable  version of Dwarf Fortress, you can wishlist it on Steam or use one of the Lazy Newb packs.  

Former co-host Sara Chipps  now manages engineering teams at LinkedIn, but her best content is still on Twitter.Cassidy's former boss, Sarah Drasner, recently wrote a book to help engineers level up to management: Engineering Management for the Rest of Us. Cassidy's new favorite software tool is Astro, a single-site generator that looks to minimize the amount of client-side JavaScript in a site. The two books Ms. Chipps mention as the old standbys for new engineering managers are Peopleware and Smart and Gets Things Done.