The Stack Overflow Podcast

In this week's episode, our hosts talk about a few recent blog posts concerning the declining quality of Stack Overflow including what they got right, what they got very wrong, and what we can learn. Also listen to hear "Grandpa Joel" tell stories about the Xerox Alto.

Welcome to The Stack Overflow (yes Overflow, listen to last week!) Podcast #89, recorded September 27 at Stack Overflow headquarters in NYC. This week's installment is brought to you by Inuktitut, the premiere language of the arctic and one of Nunavut's three official languages (Umiaryuap Publimaaqpaga tattaurniq ammayaq!) as well as National Voter Registration Day. Go to www.voteplz.org for the easiest way to register! "Every individual regardless of wealth or heritage has the same opportunity to vote and create real honest change."

In this episode, Joel complains about things. How is that different from the other podcasts, you say? This time there's singing.

Our hosts also talk about a few recent blog posts concerning the declining quality of Stack Overflow while trying very hard, and failing, to not quote the first U.S. presidential debate. Jay and Joel break down what these posts got right, what they got really wrong, and what we can learn from them in our mission to make Stack Overflow a better resource for the world's developers. (Disclaimer: no Kewpie dolls were harmed in the making of this podcast.)

Speaking of the debate: Both candidates had something to say about tech, and we can't let that go without at least discussing the yuge problem of using "cyber" as a noun. Check out this week's “In The News” for this and much more, including hearing David ask "Grandpa Joel" to tell him more about the Xerox Alto.

Also, it's the second week of our new feature (not a bug!): the Stack Overflow Constitution. Vote on this week's amendment: Should programming languages count toward your college language requirement? Listen to the podcast to see where our hosts stand and tweet at us to weigh in yourself. Use the hashtag #StackOverflowPodcast and give us your Pro or Con with a brief explanation. The best answer will be read on the air next week, and by best, we mean which one made us laugh.

Last week’s winner, commenting on whether socks should go on before pants or pants before socks, was Bryan Bedard, who said

"Con. I tried to put socks on before pants but got an InvalidOperationException #StackOverflowPodcast" - Bryan Bedard, 3:53 PM - 26 Sep 2016

See you next week!

Notable links:

Twitter: @stackpodcast

Facebook: The Stack Overflow Podcast

Our website is now live: http://stackoverflow.com/podcast

Fascinating Xerox Alto restoration information

Check out Esperanto on Stack Exchange and Lindsay Does Languages segment on Esperanto.

In this week's episode, our hosts give updates on what's happening with Stack Overflow Documentation and the new Stack Overflow Constitution. They also argue about what to do with a time machine.

Welcome to The Stack Overflow Podcast, recorded September 20 at our headquarters in NYC. This week’s episode is brought to you by adorable otters, who hold hands at night so they don’t float away from each other. The episode is also brought to you by Compose, an IBM company. Compose is a production-ready, cloud hosted platform for building enterprise applications on open source database technologies.

Before you listen, please note that this is episode #88, not to be confused with what should have been episode #73 since we last left off at episode #72. That episode was for The Stack Exchange Podcast, and this is The Stack Overflow Podcast. Confused? You’re literally the only one who is. Bury your feelings of embarrassment and don’t let anyone know.

This week, our usual hosts Joel, Jay and David are joined by Documentation team lead Kevin Montrose and product creative director Kurtis Beavers to talk about all the updates to Stack Overflow Documentation including the REPOCALYPSE (i.e. reputation apocalypse). Also joining this week is Ilana Yitzhaki, the show’s new News Editor.

A big change to pay close attention to: We’re writing the Stack Overflow Constitution, and we’re asking you, our listeners, to vote on the various elements of this new pivotal document. This week’s extremely important amendment says that one must put pants on before socks and NOT socks before pants. Listen to the podcast to hear the pros and cons of this amendment, then head to Twitter and submit your vote - with commentary - using the hashtag #StackOverflowPodcast.

Also be sure to listen if you want to hear the gang talk about, but not in, Esperanto (or you could check out the new Stack Exchange Esperanto site instead). By listening to this week’s show, you’ll learn what you should never say to a designer as well as what flight simulators have to do with Excel. You’ll also find out what the gang would do if they had access to a time machine (spoiler: They really, really need to revisit their priorities here). Finally, in a great show of kindness, Jay compliments David on his correct use of the phrase “for which.”

In this week's edition of the Stack Exchange podcast, our hosts talk about salary transparency for developers, Joel's One-Minute Tech Review, and why we're banning a particular insult from Stack Overflow.

Welcome to the Stack Exchange Podcast, recorded Tuesday, August 2 at our headquarters in NYC. This week’s episode is brought to you by peanut butter, the tasty legume paste Americans spend $800 million on each year, as well as by our actual sponsor, IBM. Try the new IBM Cloud Tools for Swift.

This week, our usual hosts Joel, Jay, and David are joined by Stack Overflow engineering manager Matt Sherman, who recently led the launch of our salary calculator. If you’re interested in working at Stack Overflow, or you just want to know how much our engineering, design, and product roles make according to years of experience and skill level, the salary calculator offers transparency into our compensation methodology.

Comments about the calculator were split on Reddit and Hacker News between us paying too much and us paying too little so… we’re doing it right? The gang goes deep on developers’ problems with salary negotiations, and they share an epiphany about the meaning of the classic board game, Monopoly, that they probably should have realized years ago.

As is now officially tradition — because there’s been two of them in a row — we have another One-Minute Tech Review from Joel for you. This week’s review is of Google Flights, where you can search for cheap flights in seconds. Will David throw shade on his review again? As is now also tradition, perhaps.

Finally, Jay talks about our recent decision to stamp out use of the term “rep-whore” in the community. From now on, “rep-whore” will be treated like any other term that’s inconsistent with Stack Overflow’s “be nice” policy: it will be removed.

If none of this is your cup of tea, make sure to listen anyway just to hear Joel tell a joke about the pluperfect tense. Memorize it and make sure to reuse at the next grammarian cocktail party you attend.

Welcome to the Stack Exchange Podcast, recorded Tuesday June 28th at Stack HQ! Today's podcast is brought to you by Eugene McCarthy for President, as well as by IBM. Try the new IBM Cloud Tools for Swift. New this week: one of those two sponsors is a real live sponsor. Bet you can't guess which one! Anyway, your hosts today are joined by Daniel X. Moore and Gareth Wilson from the HyperDev team at Fog Creek Software.

But before we talk to the guests, our esteemed hosts run through some interesting tech news. (Or maybe just tech news. -Ed.) First up: .NET Core! Microsoft is trying to turn a gigantic ship around toward open-sourciness and community-friendliness. (Said ship is apparently unrelated to the arm of Microsoft that forced you to upgrade to Windows 10.) Also: did Microsoft build their own version of Trello? You decide.

And now it's time for the first and possibly only but definitely first monthly One-Minute Tech Review with Joel Spolsky! This week's OMTR is Wallcat. It's free. You can install it. (If you know your Apple password.) It changes the background image on your computer every day! Amazing.

Let's turn from tech news to Stack news. What's shipped since our last podcast?

A new and improved Stack Overflow Enterprise! It's for big companies with lots of proprietary code who want to run private Q&A for their development teams. Companies with 1000+ developers who want this can get it by sending an email to [email protected].

We updated the sitewide Terms of Service. It forbids companies from going onto Stack Overflow to scrape profile data, which protects our users from spam.

Our guests have been waiting very patiently through all this, so let's turn to them! Daniel X. and Gareth work at Fog Creek Software, the first company Joel founded. They're currently working on HyperDev, the easiest and fastest way to get your idea developed and deployed on the internet. You can get an app up and running in less time than it takes to listen to this segment--without shaving any yaks. So go check it out! We talk about the story of the product for a long time before we remember to talk about how it actually works, but rest assured, we do eventually dig into that part.

So what's next for Stack Overflow?

Running some tests on the /ask page. This hasn't been touched since the dawn of time, more or less. The community has been discussing ideas here, so read up and weigh in!

Documentation. We'll cover this in more detail next podcast.

And that's it for this podcast. Thanks for tuning in!

Stack Exchange Podcast #71 - A Bunch of Bald Yaks by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Welcome to the Stack Exchange Podcast episode #70! Today's podcast is brought to you by the BB-8 droid. Today your hosts are joined by developer Jason Punyon, whom you may remember from way back in Podcast #21. Punyon works out of balmy Buffalo, NY. (Here's the Buffalo sentence they talk about for a weirdly long time.)

Punyon started working at Stack Overflow on the Careers team in June 2010 (back when Careers developers were devalued associates). His interview process involved a party and a change of pants. You should listen.

So why are we having Punyon on the podcast, anyway? Because of Jobs on Stack Overflow. (We talked about this last podcast, too, and Donna wrote a blog post as well.)

And now, a story about how David was wrong and Jason was right! Basically, we made a wrong decision a long long time ago and built Careers as a completely separate application. When at last we decided to fix this, we thought it was more or less insurmountable, or that it would take years. But then we had our annual company meetup at a hotel in San Diego with weird showers (take our word for it) and everything changed forever... because Dalgas and Punyon put their heads together. The summary: Careers is putting on a Stack Overflow outfit. (Jason does a better job of explaining it, don't worry.)

Then Punyon went home and crammed years worth of work into a week. At least that's how I think it happened. It's live for everyone now, and you can go look at it, and it probably won't break because we did a lot of work to make it perform better for Stack Overflow's scale. Anyway. It's here: http://stackoverflow.com/jobs.

Lest we make it sound like Jason singlehandedly shipped Jobs on SO, David made him recite the list of his co-conspirators from memory: Donna, Dalgas, Nick Craver, Dean Ward, Kirti Thorat, Nick Larsen, Roberta, Ana, Shog, Mike McGranahan... and if you worked on this but aren't listed here you should go yell at Jason and not me.

Anyway, this was a cool project for Jason, who spends most of his time interpreting whale songs (which is apparently what the data team does). It was also cool because he gets to ship it and immediately run away to parental leave - babby #2 arrives on January 8! Congratulations, Punyon family!

So! Is there anything else going on? There was some kind of bash going on at the time of this recording. A Winter Bash, you might say. Also, Stack Overflow en Español is in beta público, Stack Overflow на русском is graduating, and Stack Overflow スタック・オーバーフロー is continuing to flourish. And check out the new design on the Raspberry Pi site!

Thanks for joining us for Stack Exchange Podcast #70. See you next time!

Stack Exchange Podcast #70 - David Was Wrong And Jason Was Right by The Stack Overflow Podcast