The Stack Overflow Podcast

The crew discusses the pros and cons fo remote learning, and Sara reflects on her childhood growing up homeschooled. We examine an excellent XKCD comic about the tiny open-source projects that somehow become lynchpins in massive pieces of internet infrastructure, and what is the best way to ensure they keep working. We try to come up with our best translation for the Portuguese phrase, "software pesado," which refers to a big, honking pile o' code. And last but not least, we examine the theory that lemon juice may be good for your breath, but will literally melt your bones.

Today's guest is Garry Becks, a programmer and entrepreneur who taught himself to code while serving time in prison. Recently, he has spoken out against a trend in which prison systems in states across the US have been banning books that teach software development, citing them as a "material that threatens." When Becks was incarcerated, his wife would hide programming material inside the cover of gangster fiction novels in order to get them through security screenings.

Once upon a time, almost all Stack employees were also users of the site, community members who interacted regularly with what they were building. As the company grew, this naturally became less true. Our first annual Community-athon was a chance for every employee to get a taste of what it's like to ask and answer questions on the site. And for veteran employees, it was a chance to relive the experience of being a brand new user on Stack. This episode, we dive into what happened and what we learned.

We talk about new content types on Stack Overflow, when its appropriate for managers to make technical decisions for their ICs, and Paul's experience getting a new tool online with Google's Cloud Run.

This week we chat with Juvoni Beckford, a software engineer at Google and founder of the Personal Development Nerds group. Juvoni talks about video games, and the escape they provided for him during the challenging circumstances of his childhood. From there, he moves into online guilds, hardware, coding, and eventually a life dedicated to engineering, both the programming and personal variety.

Sara and Ben chat about Tik Tok's regulatory issues, and whether its code is being critcized because it's malicious, sloppy, borrowed, or just broken. Later, we dip into the remote work trends reshaping Silicon Valley and potentially starting to shift the center of gravity for software in the United States.

Rachel Nabors is a veteran goose wrangler and one of the React community leads at Facebook. She got into web development as a way to share the comics and zines she was creating and to build a community for other women who loved manga and anime. Since then she has worked at tech companies large and small, with a passion for creating and nurturing digital communities always at the core of her efforts.

Paul explains why he secure-shelled in from his bed rather than walking the two feet to his computer. Sara digs into the history of the word software, which more than one person claims to have coined. Ben swears his allegiance to our AI overlords.

This week we sit down to chat with Rachel Troy, a Product Manager at Fullstack Academy working on their Cyber Security bootcamp program.

Welcome to part two of our special episodes, sponsored by Oracle, celebrating 25 years of the Java programming language. In this episode, we learn how Java moved from a technology used mostly with web clients to a major force in the world of server side technology and modern cloud computing.