The Stack Overflow Podcast

Freund reflects on his early days at Applied Materials, where he worked on a machine that inspected silicon wafers.

It was in this early role that Freund gained an appreciation for rigorous software testing protocols in the manufacturing process.

At WeWork, Freund was fascinated by the idea of a full stack business, which is a business building itself.

While Freund officially launched Wilco in 2021, the origin story for the company dates back to 2013 when he was hiring and managing a team of engineers—he saw a need in the market to help developers build critical skills to problems-solve in real-time.

You can think of Wilco as the equivalent of a flight simulator for engineers.

Shoutout to Lifeboat Badge winner Zico for their awesome answer to the question, “Hiding sensitive information in response”

Follow On and Ben.

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John explains that Web3 is about the convergence of technology, economics, and social trends.

He elaborates that foundations begin with service-based architecture (SOA), the notion of how to design loosely coupled systems that consist of economic services and components.

He goes on to explain how DeFi represents this thinking of a loose composition of services.

With all of this, blockchain brings together technology and economic incentives into a holistic equation—people contribute because they want to contribute.

Nonsense it is not, says baby Yoda.

Crypto isn’t the end game. It’s a segue along the way.

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Learn more about the Global Blockchain Business Council and John’s company, ngEnterprise.

Speaking of awesomeness, we’d like to give a shout out to Stellar Question Badge winner GateKiller for asking a question “How can I get the DateTime for the start of the week?” that has been bookmarked by a hundred people.

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Having trouble with understanding your team’s productivity outside of frameworks and tooling? Create a backlog and work through it: Instant Agile! How much of that backlog you work through is a good baseline measure. 

The Stack Overflow blog recently featured an article from Stack Overflow’s Director of Engineering, Ben Matthews: Does high velocity lead to burnout? That may be the wrong question to ask

If you're interested in seeing how Couchbase’s SQL database solutions can help improve your team’s velocity, check out Capella.  

Cory House helps teams deliver successful React projects through his consulting business, ReactJS Consulting.  

If you want to learn more about Matt, check out his LinkedIn.

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, 

Alohci

, who threw a great answer to rescue the question, 

Display button with  inline CSS

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Before jumping into driverless car talk, Ben shares a heads up about fake jobs at credible companies that are actually phishing scams meant to steal your identity and hijack your bank accounts. Beware the job offer that seems too good to be true!

Jon, Cassidy, Ceora, Matt, and Ben reflect on whether they trust software to operate a vehicle.

Cassidy tells us that she once sat in a car that parked itself and screamed the entire time.

Matt brings us back to reality, reminding us that airplane flights have been automated for a while now.

Matt and Ben point out that in the medical technology space, robotic surgeons are so advanced that they have become more precise than human hands.

Shoutout to lifeboat badge winner GKG4 for a great answer to the question “how can I check if an array index is out of range?” which has been viewed 67,000 times.

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Despite our hope for the power of robotics, the technology is still far from mainstream. That’s because the amount of effort needed to get hardware to do useful things at scale is…well…hard.

When Eliot started Viam, his goal was to address this challenge by creating software that supports a range of hardware builds right out of the box. As the company explains - “we’re addressing these issues by building a novel robotics platform that relies on standardized building blocks rather than custom code to create, configure and control robots intuitively and quickly. We’re empowering engineers – aspiring and experienced – across industries to solve complicated automation problems with our innovative software tools.” The company announced the opening of its public beta earlier this week.

While Eliot elaborates on his vision for Viam, Ben reflects on his time covering drones for The Verge and working on robotics at DJI.

Inquisitive badge winner, Neeta, gets props for asking well-received questions on 30 separate days.

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Ceora and Cassidy talk about why engineers are so good at job hopping — and why it can pay to upgrade roles every year or two.

Ceora speaks openly about the privileges of working in tech compared to other industries.

Apparently, in some places, it’s a thing for engineers to leave their teams and then rejoin the organization with a promotion to get ahead. Do you boomerang?

Cassidy’s husband’s favorite interview question to ask is, “If you had a magic wand and could change one thing about this company, what would you change?”

Ben poses a question about whether LinkedIn AB tests are disadvantageous to some career seekers over others.

Matt introduces us to the world of AI generated Pokémon.

Ceora, our resident voice of Gen Z, tells us why she thinks millennials are the only true generation to understand tech.

High fives to Unique Username for answering the question “how can I print to the console using JavaScript?” You get a Lifeboat Badge for helping 140,000 people.

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Matt takes us back to the origins of his open source days and the spark that inspired his love for engineering — including the point at which he discovered Linux.

He shares how he began learning from the code itself, which was ultimately a different style of learning than what was available to him at university. Then, it was to the stacks, but not Stack Overflow. Think Barnes and Noble, not YouTube videos.

Imagine trying to  navigate getting your first engineering job during the dot-com crash of the late 90s and early 2000s.

We reflect on Matt's experience building projects with his daughter, including an AI-powered doorbell he built himself.

Speaking of insatiable curiousity, we’d like to give a big high five to Wonton, who received the Inquisitive Badge. Thanks for coming on 30 separate days to maintain a positive question track record.

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Our guests have done most of their ML work on AWS offerings, from AWS Personalize for their initial recommendation engine to SageMaker for model training and deployment pipeline. Now they’re building models from scratch in TensorFlow. 

Want to see these recommendations in action? Check out the offerings at Discovery+ and HBOMax. 

If you’re a ML/AL data scientist looking to shape the future of automated curation, check out their open roles. 

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Mariann shares how she and her UX research team at Stack Overflow are taking steps to create a more inclusive product experience, while reflecting on her experiences as a mother to a neurodiverse daughter.

Wesley talks about what it’s like to be a developer with dyslexia and why self-empathy and self-compassion have been important to his evolution as a senior leader.

Ceora explains why it’s important to be on a psychologically safe team from her perspective as a Black woman who is also neurodivergent.

We talk about giving people the space necessary to do their best work, implementing more inclusive hiring practices, and everyday routines that help us stay our happiest and most productive.

We conclude with a note about why supporting neurodiversity is good for everyone of all walks of life.

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Ceora shares her experience representing Auth0 at REFACTR TECH, reflecting on what it was like being back in-person after years of virtual events.

Cassidy announces her move to CTO and how her current leadership role at Contenda fits into her career journey and future aspirations as a technologist.

Ben talks about Stack Overflow’s Flow State, the first IRL event he’s attended since 2019 and Stack’s first ever customer conference. 

In case Cassidy pulled you down a rabbit hole of wondering how eels reproduce, check out this piece in the New Yorker from 2020.

Be sure to follow Ceora and Cassidy on Twitter. 

Speaking of the power of curiosity, today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user448810 for answering the question, Feasible implementation of a prime-counting function. Thanks for helping 6,000 people gain valuable knowledge.

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