The Stack Overflow Podcast

At some point, a lot of developers think about becoming entrepreneurs. Some end up taking the jump. So what happens when it turns out that nobody wants your product?

Cara Borenstein, co-founder at Stashpad, ended up in this exact situation. After a two year stint as a software engineer at Twilio, she saw an opportunity to create a notepad for developers to stay on top of context switching and manage knowledge-related tasks. V. 1 was a wiki that didn’t quite catch on.

Embracing this reality, Borenstein and her team decided to dig deeper by talking with target customers. That process catalyzed a transformation of the core product into something people need and love, a second brain for busy developers that helps them stay focused and retain those stray thoughts that can add up to something big later on.

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with Vin Sharma, VP of Engineering at Foursquare, about how they’re finding the atomic data that makes up their location data—their location data—and going from giving insight to individual app users about the locations around them to APIs that serve these location-based insights to developers at organizations like Uber, Nextdoor, and Redfin, who want to build location based insights and features into their own apps.

Being a technologist is more than a 9-5 job. It’s a lifestyle. That’s why so many of us, like the mad scientists we are, get into homelabbing.

What does this hobby/obsession entail? Build a home lab to help you level-up your tinkering game. Think: media servers, Raspberry Pis, data centers—turning your home into an IT paradise guaranteed to make you more productive, if only it wasn't so enticing to work on.

Today’s podcast episode is all about brainstorming fun ideas for homelabbing. Matt, Ceora, and Cassidy host a discussion with JJ Asghar, Developer Advocate at IBM.

Quantum computing has applications across communications, network building, financial modeling, cybersecurity, AI, and so much more. But getting involved with these projects has traditionally taken years of education at the most advanced academic levels. According to Helmut Katzgraber, Global Practice Lead at Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab, the scientific community could be doing a better job inviting more people to participate in discovering breakthroughs.

In today’s podcast episode, Ben, Matt, and Ryan reflect on Katzgraber’s experience in the field, along with the steps he is taking to broaden access to education on quantum computing.

On today's episode we chat about some of the fun announcements coming out of today's Next.JS conference. Vercel announced it acquired Splitbee to bring first-party analytics to it's platform. Next.JS 13 Introducing a redesigned approach to website layouts, data-fetching, and server-rendering. And last but not least, we were introduced to Turbopack, built by the creator of Webpack and Vercel. Turbopack is a Rust-based incremental bundler and Vercel claims that it shows updates 10x faster than Vite and 700x faster than Webpack.

On Freund was one of the minds behind the scenes of the now-iconic WeWork startup story. He held three roles at the company: VP of Engineering, VP of Product, and Global Head of Markets at WeWork Labs. The software his team built demonstrated rigor, engineering grit, and strong logic. It’s the reason why WeWork is, at its core, a tech company.

Now, Freund has entered into a new season of his career as co-founder and CEO of Wilco, which is a platform for developers of every skill level to advance in their talents and career journeys. Like a flight simulator, it offers challenges that are meant to prepare developers for the realities of what they will face on the job, moving beyond what they might learn in a classroom or boot camp to scenarios taken from real workplace experiences.

Human beings are easily excitable creatures. We pump ourselves full of sugar, and then we crash. The cycle repeats. Now, here we are at a unique moment in Internet consciousness where we’ve experienced multiple crypto winters in addition to the phenomenon known as Dogecoin. Satoshi, wherever he may be, must be #facepalm to the moon. So should we take this stuff seriously—especially those of us who quit our jobs for crypto vaporware?

On today’s podcast, we have an open source OG sharing his voice of reason—to show us what’s real in an avalanche of digital nonsense. John DeVadoss spent 18 years as a general manager at Microsoft where he helped build .NET and VSCode, among other things, during the early evolution of what are now widely adopted, even pivotal pieces of technology .

So what brought him to blockchain land?

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with Matthew Groves, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Couchbase, and Cory House, the founder of Reactjsconsulting.com and a Pluralsight course author, about how to increase velocity without increasing pressure on your engineers, whether cloud native technologies can help (or hurt), and how to design your toolchain so it improves velocity.

When some people hear the phrase “developer velocity,” they cringe and think about delivering an increasingly large number of story points during a sprint. Others push to tighten feedback loops for engineers in order to remove the roadblocks between writing code and getting it into production. But few will understand that much of the “feedback” in that loop is human, so giving them a little more slack lets them provide feedback faster. After all, if you want a fast highway, you should have fewer cars.

As the saying goes, ignorance is bliss. But if you work in tech as an engineer, you have the unfortunate perspective of knowing all of the tiny details that have the potential to go wrong. Even when everything is going right, those edge cases can still feel haunting.

In today’s podcast episode, the home team and Jon Chan get together to laugh at themselves as they reflect on their fears of self-driving cars and share horror stories of recruiters promising job offers that turned out to be scam artists.

If there’s one thing humanity needs right now, it’s robots. Our oceans need cleaning up, our roads need maintenance, and many restaurants and farms can’t find enough staff. We technologists better get building the benevolent robot custodians that are ultimately going to make our lives better by filling potholes and picking up our trash.

You’ve likely been hearing this same robotics keynote at conferences, promising useful automata that will walk among us, for the last 20 years or so. So how come we don’t see them anywhere in our everyday lives?

Today’s podcast episode explores why the barrier to entry for developers in the robotics industry is steep and what can be done to change that. Our guest, Eliot Horowitz, CEO & founder at Viam, shares his vision for a future in which it’s just as easy for developers to build robots as write code for a smart phone app.