The Stack Overflow Podcast

Paul spent the weekend building a parser, cause who doesn't? He needed a Regex, found one on Stack Overflow, looked over the characters, and realized this is not the way to get folks interested or excited about code. "You come across a problem and you think to yourself, I know I'll use a regular expression. Now you have two problems." This sets Sara off on a tangent about CSS. What's wrong with CSS in her opinion. Well, all of it. She shares a few thoughts on how it could have been built right. Ben dives into the endless annoyances Bluetooth has been bringing to his life recently. When you have four people in a family sharing six mobile devices and five sets of headphones, audio signals are constantly getting piped to the wrong ears. Now his car wants to connect. When Bluetooth tells you it's forgetting a device, how come it never keeps it promise?Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Zero Piraeus for answering the question: Why must dictionary keys be immutable? He provided his answer in the form an elegant short essay, and it's definitely worth checking out.

You can find Sai's videos here. Come for the deep dives on Docker, stay for the live lightboard  magic. Yes, I know what the comments say, but no, he isn't writing backwards. Sai also does a lot of work around OpenShift, the containerization software products created by Red Hat. He talks about what the tie up between IBM and Red Hat has been like and how the enterprise is increasingly learning to work with open source. Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Alex for explaining why you're Getting this as undefined when using arrow function.If you want to find more from Sai, you can follow him on Twitter here.   

Pawel Skolski wrote this definition of the SPA in 2016. "A single-page application is an app that works inside a browser and does not require page reloading during use. You are using these type of applications every day. These are, for instance: Gmail, Google Maps, Facebook or GitHub.SPAs are all about serving an outstanding UX by trying to imitate a “natural” environment in the browser — no page reloads, no extra wait time. It is just one web page that you visit which then loads all other content using JavaScript — which they heavily depend on."Tom McWright recently sparked some good discussion in the developer world with his article, If Not SPAs, What? He had written before about his belief that SPAs had done little to reduce the complexity of web development, but hadn't really given readers other options. In his latest post, he tried to offer some possible alternatives. Our lifeboat of the week of the week goes to Glortho for explaining how to add http:// to url if no protocol is defined in javascript?   

You can find some more of Holly's work and bio here. She gave a great talk at KubeCon 2020, How to Love K8s and Not Wreck the Planet, which you can watch on YouTube here.And here's a lovely presentation, Containers Will Not Fix Your Broken DevOps Cultures, drawing on her long history of programming and consulting. 

You can find a more in depth discussion of these topics on our blog. Prashanth shares his ideas about the importance of community and what it means to be a product led company.

Nicolas will be the first to tell you that the version of Stack Overflow he helped to create began as a clone. It developed into a very popular site on RuNet and through persistent emails, Nic was able to find a way to make it an official part of the Stack family. Nic talks a bit about the unique culture of SO's Russian community and how each regional version of SO, from English to Spanish to Japanese, has developed its own etiquette and approach to moderation and Q&A. Nic and Sara also share some updates on their love of Jupyter Notebooks and how they make it easy to combine blogging with data analysis and presentation. Shout out to our life boat badge of the week, Aliaksandr Kavalenka , for answering the question: How to use DatePickerDialog in Kotlin? 

We break down some thoughts on this issue, which came to light after a tweet from Tim Nolet.Later in the episode we talk about the debate raging right now around elections and technology. What role should software play and where is regulation appropriate? Last but not least, we consider what the next US administration might do with regards to regulating big tech. Will they lean towards a European model or continue to be more hands off? Shout out to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Kin3Tix, for helping to identify good tutorials for SDL 2.0 for C (Not C++) programming.

You can find Kelsey on Twitter here. His Github is here. His personal journey with Kubernetes is detailed in a nice piece here.Kelsey has an interesting role at Google. He sits at the director level but is an independent contributor with no direct reports. Instead he works to help galvanize interest in particular tools and topics, driving adoption at a broad scale. 

That skit made it to the front page of Reddit, and was soon seen across the internet. It's nice to make people laugh, but following the surge of interest, Emily also had to deal with severe harassment and cyber stalking. She wrote a piece about the experience which you can find here.In this episode, we discuss how moderation can be improved and the work that remains to be done to make the software industry feel safe and inclusive for everyone.  

Has there ever been a gaming company that brought more joy to the world than Nintendo? They were making playing cards back in 1889 and continue to find ways to be different but fun with inventions like the Switch and Labo.Sara gives us some the scoop on Rimworld. Check out the trailer here and feel free to lend your skill to a new mod if you have ideas for how to improve it.A Excel sheet meltdown led to critical health data about the pandemic being lost in the UK.  Rows can go to millions, but they used columns.For those of us who need our reading glasses to see the tiny emoji people post in Slack, Paul has come to your rescue. He asked for the ability to zoom In on Twitter, the CEO of Slack co-signed, and boom, we got a new feature.We discuss what other new Slack features might take off: stories, push-to-talk, and sneakers.