The Stack Overflow Podcast

In this week's episode, we catch you up what's been happing with the unemployment systems that were overwhelmed and need more COBOL coders. Then we dive deep into the spec released by Apple and Google for a unified system that would allow for contact tracing across billions of smartphone while attempting to protect individuals privacy and autonomy in the information sharing process.

We chat with Anna Lytical about flipping the (Java)Script and putting the camp into coding tutorials. Anna is a developer advocate at Google and a coding educator who teaches about computer programming as the drag queen Anna Lytical.

We talk about the history of COBOL, a "common business-oriented language", which is suddenly missions critical to government systems, like unemployment, overwhelmed by the pandemic. After that, we chat about the supply chain in China, which pivoted within weeks from pitching Ben electronic components to offering critical medical supplies.

We ponder whether programming prepares you in any way to understand the math and statistics underlying our current crisis. Later, we discuss the shut down of O'Reilly's conference business.

Earlier this week, we introduced dark mode on Stack Overflow. For this episode we chat with Aaron Shekey, our design systems lead, about how he built this new feature and why it took so darn long.

This week we sit down with Aaron Hall and Nitsua60, two moderators from our network. Aaron moderates on Stack Overflow and Nitsua60 is a mod on our RPG Stack Exchange. We chat about what moderation entails, what they are seeing in their communities, and some of their favorite questions from recent months.

Ben, Sara, and Paul are all working remote, hanging in their homes with family and loved ones. We decided to move the podcast from once a week to twice a week. Part of that is to help us keep in touch and fight cabin fever. The other imperative was to keep our conversations more attuned to current events, which change dramatically every 24 hours. We hope you and yours are safe and send our thoughts and prayers to the professionals battling the pandemic on the front lines.

This episode was recorded two weeks ago, just as Stack Overflow made the decision to go fully remote. Since then, a lot has changed. Life across the globe is scary, challenging, and changing fast. Our hearts go out to everyone affected and our hopes go out to the brave workers fighting this pandemic on the front lines. That said, if you need a break from the news and a chance to laugh, we got you covered. If you need a break from the news and a chance to laugh, we got you covered.

This week we discuss the many reasons "time" always trips up programmers. Plus, a deep dive into Docker, GUIDs, and Paul's patented approach to radical pander.

Note: this episode was recorded several weeks prior to publication and is free of any pandemic conversation.

We chat with Eliot Horowitz, co-founder and CTO of MongoDB, about the inspiration for building a new kind of database, what the chief technical officer of a mid-sized public corporation actually does all day, and how the company is evolving in the cloud services era.