The Stack Overflow Podcast

Our 400th episode! Stack Overflow founders Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky talk about how, in 2008, they started this very podcast by recording their weekly calls about a little product they wanted to build. Their conversations, which soon included Geoff Dalgas and Jarrod Dixon, are now an audit trail for the creation of Stack Overflow, a resource that’s almost as essential to programmers as the keyboard (we admit, we’re biased). To mark the 400th episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Jeff, Joel, Geoff, and Jarrod take us back to where it all began.

Ben and Ceora talk with Sam Lambert, former VP of Engineering at Github, now CEO of PlanetScale, a serverless database platform for developers. Sam tells Ben and Ceora how obsessing over the daily lives of developers helps PlanetScale deliver a product developers love to use.

The home team talks about developer-first application security, the benefits of security-as-a-service, and whether a TikTok trend is GDPR-compliant.

We sit down with journalist Ethan Lou, author of the book Once a Bitcoin Miner: Scandal and Turmoil in the Cryptocurrency Wild West, to talk about China’s digital currency, the fallout of speculative markets, and democratizing the metaverse.

In this episode, Ben and Ryan chat about the tools available to parents who want to keep tabs on their kids while they are playing games or using apps. What roles do developers play in determining the ethics of these situations, and how do software savvy adults manage child rearing in an era where life is increasingly lived online?

We chat with Gabe Monroy, the new chief product officer at DigitalOcean, about the customers big cloud companies are missing, how to get ready for the millions of new developers poised to enter the market, and the near-universal relevance of XKCD.

If your organization is running code on a production server 24/7, you’re going to need a process to handle when that code—or the infrastructure it runs on—fails. No code is bug free, so failures will happen. That means that your SREs and developers are going to have to spend some time on call and ready to respond to when the application breaks down. On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk to Eric Maxwell, a solution architect at xMatters, about automating, intelligent escalation chains.

Open source software makes it easier for anyone to contribute to the health and growth of a project's codebase. But how do you build a system where users and contributors can participate in the economic value being generated by an organization or platform? We chat with Bradley Miles and Sid Kalla, the co-founders of Roll, which is trying to create an API-first platform for creating tokens and markets that allow users to invest and share in the value of creators or communities they love.

The home team starts chatting about GitHub's CEO stepping down, then gets onto Cassidy's favorite topic—keyboards—before getting deeply sidetracked talking about how memory and brains work.

We chat with Rennie Clayton, Senior Director of Platform Engineering here at Stack Overflow, who grew up moving between multiple countries and learned programming by following along with his mother's college coursework.