The Stack Overflow Podcast

Joe Biden just wants to ride his Peleton, but equipment connected to WiFi  with a camera and microphone can pose a real security risk.If you've got a chicken coop or greenhouse that needs a little warmth this winter, maybe team it up with your gaming PC or bitcoin mining rig, which tend to give off a lot of heat.Speaking of heat, we dive into datacenters that were sunk under the ocean in an effort to create more economically efficient and environmentally friendly computing.Our favorite meme of the week, a Heroku app that puts a chilly Bernie Sanders anywhere in the world.Our lifeboat badge winner is Lukas Kalbertodt, who answered the question: What's the most efficient way to insert an element into a sorted vector?  

Joocelyn hosts the Git Cute podcast, which you can find here.She's working on a book about seniority in the software industry, which you can pre-order here.You can follow her on Twitter at javavvitch.Our lifeboat badge goes to LMc for explaining how one can: Count the Letter Frequency in a String with Python

The title of this week's episode comes from a Hacker News thread where Guillermo argued that the complexity of front end performance goes beyond simplifying your stack to bare web primitives.You can find out more about Vercel, which  recently raised a $40 million round, on Guillermo's blog, where he details what the company has planned for the future.You can find more info on Next.JS here. It's a very active tag on Stack Overflow with dozens of new questions a day.Our lifeboat badge for this episode goes to paxdiablo for answering the question: What does .split() return if the string has no match?

How could you not love a team with a bio like this: "We’re a young and dynamic team of messy data-scientists who have failed at being employed on the real market. Our experience in losing data and throwing files away is more than amazing! Over the years, we have managed to get rid of so much important data at home and even at work." Find out how you pay other people to throw your data away here.The New York Times reports on the rising prices of old computers and their parts. Retro-computing is fun, especially when you're stuck at home for...feels like a while now.Stack Overflow memes have made it to Tik Tok, and it is joyous.To round things out we chat about our love of e-ink, the desire to buy a reMarkable 2, and this amazing piece of digital wall art.This week's lifeboat badge winner is Gordon Larrigan, who answered the question:  How can you sort an array of arrays in JavaScript?

The starting point for today's conversation was an argument made by Guillermo Rauch in this blog post. "And each time, your frontend has an opportunity to impress, delight, perform, be accessible and memorable. What's more, frontend is an area of technological and artistic differentiation, while backend becomes increasingly commoditized, turnkey and undifferentiated."Sure, programming in PowerPoint isn't very practical. That doesn't mean it can't be lots of fun, and teach you a few things.Speaking of learning things, we chat a bit about Alan Kay, who has a wonderful talk on the ways we can use computers to illustrate complex concepts to children.

If you're interested in learning a bit of BBC Basic, there is a fun introduction here. You can tweet at this bot, and it will run the contents as code and reply with a video of the results.If you are interested in life-logging and want to see it done with a lot of very pretty graphs, check out this post, My Year in Data.Last but not least we chat about Svelte, which lets you create "cybernetically enhanced web apps." Shout to Murali, a listener who suggested this topic.Our lifeboat of the week goes to koekenbakker for answering the question:  R plots: Is there a way to draw a border, shadow or buffer around text labels?  

You can find the first episode of the SO podcast here. It was conducted over Asterix, open source telephony software that allowed for fancy operations like voice messaging and recording calls! What would social software look like if we designed them to remove commerce and popularity? Are services like Mightybell an interesting example of where we might be headed?If you want to build a model of something - say traffic patterns in your town or a hypothetical zombie invasion - you should check out a new project Joel is involved in, Hash.ai.  

There is a nice breakdown of the Solarigate attack here, but the most important thing to know is that just seeing the words BusinessLayer.dll is enough to make our eyes glaze over and our defenses go down.One interesting second order effect of this intrusion is that it will be difficult to know when all malicious code and access has really been removed. It brought to mind the classic Turing Award Lecture, Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson. If you're trying to entertain kids over the holidays, Ben will be messing around with Roblox, which lets you create your own mini-games and has several hooks to deeper programming capabilities.Our Lifeboat badge winner this week is Chinito, who answered the question of how you can: Set style using pure JavaScript

With Bitcoin hitting all time highs, there has been a lot of speculation about what will happen next in the market crypto market.Meanwhile, regulators are targeting Ripple with a lawsuit and arguing that crypto isn't really a currency after all. You have until Jan, 4, 2021 to participate in our annual Winter Bash. By answering questions on Stack Overflow and across Stack Exchange, you can unlock some unique digital flair for your avatar.Don't forget to tune in the first day of the new year for episode 300 of the podcast, we booked a very special guest. Check out this episode to learn more.. 

There is a lot to think about when designing trading algorithms, especially in the world of cryptocurrency, where prices can be extremely volatile and limited liquidity means a single trader moving big volume can have a hefty influence on price.Bitcoin is at a record breaking price these days, but investing in it is not for the faint of heart. To learn more, we chat with Li, who is a software engineer at Coinbase. You can find her on Twitter here.If you're interested in learning more about Bitcoin, we would have to recommend Bitcoin Developer. After all, they were kind enough to recommend our Bitcoin Stack Exchange as a key resource.