The Stack Overflow Podcast

You can learn more about Anthony here.

His favorite terminal tool at the moment is Warp, which describes itself as "a blazingly fast, Rust-based terminal reimagined from the ground up to work like a modern app." 

His personal website features a live chat function. Sometimes it's actually Tony, sometimes it's just a bot. 

No lifeboat badge today. We''ll be taking a break for the holidays and will resume episodes in 2023. Until then, enjoy the holidays. 

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Ben asks Matt to explain Mastodon to him like he’s five. Matt says the experience feels a lot like…LinkedIn?

Matt explains that he took social media apps off his phone for a while…just to chill out. (Ed. note, they're already back on.)

We cover the latest AI to emerge that can write essays, jokes, and yes, some code.

While everyone’s confused about the state of social media and AI chat, physicists have created a wormhole using a quantum computer. (Though it may have been a publicity stunt.)

Follow Ben and Matt.

Shout out to Lifeboat Badge winner ralf htp for their answer to the question ‘how to listen for and react to Ace Editor change events.’ Your answer has helped more than 20,000+ people, so rock on.

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Steve was working as an engineering manager at ShopStyle and found that an increasing amount of his team's time was spent working on custom requests from departments like marketing and sales. They tried moving to a headless CMS but the data and components couldn't keep up with ever evolving needs. They wanted a drag and drop system connected to their code, data, and components.

This pain point inspired him strike out on his own to create a new product. The vision was a tool that would allow colleagues from across a company to make changes to web pages without requesting dev time, but would also ensure that any changes made would be up to the standards of the design department and not introduce errors that engineering would then have to fix. 

Hence, the company's pitch for a plug & play system that integrates with your existing sites & apps. It relies on a few key ideas:

You can check it out for yourself over at Builder.io.

Follow Steve on Twitter and TikTok where he breaks down websites and effects he finds interesting.

Congrats to phoenisx for being awarded the Necromaner badge after answering the question: Property 'share' does not exist on type 'Navigator"? 

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SPONSORED BY COMMERCE LAYER

Around the world, billions of people can sell their wares online, in part thanks to solutions that handle the complexities of securely and reliably managing transactions. Businesses, large and small, can sell directly to customers. But a lot of these ecommerce services provide a heavier surface than many need by managing product catalogs and requiring inflexible interfaces. 

On this sponsored podcast episode, Ben and Ryan talk with Filippo Conforti, co-founder of Commerce Layer, an API-only ecommerce platform that focuses on the transaction engine. We talk about his early years building ecommerce at Italian luxury brands, the importance of front-ends (and micro-frontends) to ecom, and how milliseconds of page load speed can cost millions. 

Conforti was the first Gucci employee building out their ecommerce, so he got to experience life in a fast-moving startup within a big brand. When he left five years later, the team had grown to around 100 people. 

The ecommerce space is crowded—one of Commerce Layer’s recent clients evaluated around 40 other platforms—but Conforti thinks Commerce Layer stands out by making any web page a shoppable experience. 

Conforti thinks composable commerce back ends that neglect the front end neutralize the benefits. Commerce Layer provides micro-frontends—standard web components that you can inject into any web page to create shoppable experiences. 

Getting your ecommerce platform as close to your customer makes real monetary difference. A report from Deloitte finds that a 100ms response time increase on mobile translates to an 8% increase in the conversion rate. 

Thanks to Mitch, today’s Lifeboat badge winner, for their answer to the question, How to get all weekends within a date range in C#? 

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Webpack has been king for several years. Vercel wants folks to embrace Turbopack, but their claims about speed raised a lot of backlash after it was first announced. Lee explains why he thinks the Rust-based approach will ultimately be a big benefit to developers and how organizations who are deeply ingrained with existing tools can safely and incrementally migrate to what is, for now, a very Alpha and experimental release. 

We go over the routing and rendering updates in Next.JS 13, exploring where it might offer developers more flexibility and the ability to use React server components to ship less, maybe a lot less, JavaScript. As Lee says in the episode: 

“So to your point about wanting to ship less JavaScript, that was a kinda fundamental architectural decision of where we headed with the app directory. And the core of this is because it's built on React server components. 

The key thing with React server components is that as your application grows in size from one component to a hundred thousand components, the amount of client-side JavaScript you send can be exactly the same. It can be constant because you can render every single component on the server. 

And that's a lot different from the world of React applications today, where every new component you add for data fetching or just putting some HTML on the screen also adds additional client-side JavaScript.

So this is kind of inverting the default, back from the client to be server first. Now, of course, we still love client-side interactivity that React provides making really interactive and rich UI experiences, but the default for data fetching or just getting HTML to the browser happens from the server, and that's gonna help us reduce the amount of JavaScript.”

You can learn more about Lee on his website, LinkedIn, and Twitter. To diver deeper into his take on how Rust will impact the future of Javascript, check out a post he wrote here.

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You can learn more about Andrew, from building out a telco in Canada to cyber security at Deloitte, on his LinkedIn.

Validation Cloud bills itself as the world’s fastest node infrastructure and cites networks like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Binance as clients it supports. Learn more at the company’s website here.

The company announced the launch of it's latest product, Javelin, earlier today.

Shout out to this week’s lifeboat badge winner, Derek, for helping answer the question: How do you open  the file chooser in an Android app using Kotlin?

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Data show's Silicon Valley's share of new startup funding deals dropped below 20% for the first time.

What does it mean to experiment with big changes to an engineering org, in public and in real time?

SBF would like the chance to explain himself.

Today's lifeboat badge goes to CodeCaster for explaining: What is E in floating point?

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Srivastava reflects on his upbringing in India, learning to write Assembly, and going to Stanford University to complete his Ph.D in computer science.

He shares his early career experiences at big tech names like Yahoo!, Google, Twitter, and Google.

The group reflects on some of the engineering challenges at Patreon including technical debt, migrations to open source services, and troubleshooting bugs.

Srivastava walks us all through upcoming product features that his engineering team is working to implement.

Andy wins a Lifeboat Badge for answering this question about a list of all tags on Stack Overflow.

Follow Ben, Matt, Cassidy, and Utkarsh.

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Cami and Cassidy take us down memory lane, sharing how they got into computer science together, hosted a web series (and still podcast together sometimes), and overlapped at two jobs together.

We discuss the technologies being used to build in/for the Metaverse like  Horizon Workroom,  Presence Platform, Insights SDK, and of course, React. 

Cami shares how object and scene recognition work in VR.

Cami reveals a family secret — so listen up if you want to know how to beat Cassidy at board games.

Blackbishop wins the Illuminator Badge for answering and editing 500 different questions on Stack Overflow.

Follow Ben, Matt, Cassidy, and Cami.

We’re taking a break for the Thanksgiving holiday so no podcast this Friday…have a good one, and see you next week.

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SPONSORED BY PLURALSIGHT

Early in the days of high-traffic web pages and apps, any engineer operating the infrastructure would have a server room where one or more machines served that app to the world. They named their servers lovingly, took pictures, and watched them grow. The servers were pets. But since the rise of public cloud and infrastructure as code, servers have become cattle—you have as many as you need at any given time and don’t feel personally attached to any given one. And as more and more organizations find their way to the cloud, more and more engineers need to figure out how to herd cattle instead of feed pets. 

Gartner forecasts that around $500 billion will be spent worldwide on end user cloud computing during 2022. Firment says that’s only 25% of IT budgets today, but he expects it to grow to 65% by 2025.

Don’t doubt the power of your people. Gartner estimates that 50% of all cloud IT migration projects are delayed up to two years simply because of the lack of skills.

Pluralsight just published its State of the Cloud report. 75% of of all leaders want to build new products and services in the cloud, but only 8% of the technologists have the experience to actually work with cloud related tools. 

Today we’re highlighting a Great Question badge winner—a question with a score of 100 or more—awarded to Logan Besecker for their question: How do you cache an image in JavaScript?

Want to start earning your cloud certificates? Head over to Pluralsight.

Connect with Ben  or Ryan on Twitter. Find Drew on LinkedIn.

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