The Stack Overflow Podcast

Serial entrepreneur Arpit Mohan, cofounder and CTO of Appsmith, tells Ben and Cassidy about his path to building Appsmith, an open-source project that makes it easy for engineers to build, ship, and maintain internal tools. They cover the “stigma” of low-code and no-code tools, why Appsmith is investing more time and effort in design, and why open-source advocates are excited for Hacktoberfest. Also: Another computing career launched by Tamagotchi.

When a company hits a period of hypergrowth, developers are in for a thrill ride. They need to start scaling their systems, moving to service architectures and clouds, and looking to solve problems others haven’t. But hypergrowth brings headaches, too, and chief among them is how to keep everyone aware of what’s going on with teams that they aren’t a part of.

When Spotify ran into this hypergrowth problem, they created Backstage, an open-source framework for building developer portals. Ben and Ryan talked with Helen Gruel and Tim Hansen about the genesis of the project, keeping docs with service information, and how Backstage’s plugin ecosystem keeps engineers from getting lost among dozens of tools.

We feel our best and do our best work when we can completely focus on what we’re doing and apply our full abilities to a task. That feeling is called the flow state, and it requires both a task worthy of your skills and the focus to apply them well. For software developers, accessing the flow state can be the difference between quality software and buggy code.

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Marcel Twohig, Head of Design for the MX Series at Logitech, and Thomas Fritz, Associate Professor of Human Aspects of Software Engineering at the University of Zurich. This episode is the second in our four- part series presented by Logitech. We cover the research that Professor Fritz has done on flow states, the design work that Marcel and team have done to incorporate that research, and the tools that you can use to maximize your daily flow.

Ben, fresh from launching Stack Overflow’s new Student Ambassador Program, tells Matt about partnering with Major League Hacking, the young programmers eager to get back to in-person events, and the powerful allure of free pizza. Plus: Why you don’t have to create an account to engage with our public platform.

Ben talks with Dylan Fox, founder and CEO of rapid-growth startup AssemblyAI, about how he became interested in AI and machine learning, why he left a steady job at a tech giant to create something new, and what AI can offer creators like writers and visual artists. Plus: Why Ben threw out $20,000 worth of Magic cards in middle school.

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with two keyboard specialists from Logitech, Giulio Barresi, Lead UX Designer on the MX Series and Olivia Hildebrand, Global Product Manager on the MX Series. We brought along our own mechanical keyboard expert, Cassidy Williams, for a discussion about the impact a keyboard's hardware, software, and design can make on developer productivity.

The home team talks students using AI pair programmers to complete their assignments, how the Godot game engine may be monetized through W4 Games, and whether paid tiers and subscriptions provide a healthy option for social networking apps.

Tommy McClung, cofounder and CEO of ReleaseHub, sits down with the home team to talk about environments-as-a-service, what it’s like to work with the same cofounders for more than 20 years, and the role of karma in professional networking.

The home team gathers for a conversation about workplace productivity monitoring: Does it motivate employees to get more done or lead to stress that takes away from deep, focused work and replaces it with busywork instead? Plus, the benefits of remote work for neurodivergent people, the nations moving to protect data sovereignty, and the crypto “geniuses” who filed for bankruptcy and disappeared, leaving a 171-foot yacht in their wake.

Serial entrepreneur Varun Ganapathi joins the home team for a conversation about the intersection of physics, machine learning, and AI. He offers some recommendations for developers looking to get started in the ML/AI space and shares his own path from academia to entrepreneurship. Plus: How an early lack of Nintendo motivated Varun to learn to program.