The Stack Overflow Podcast

Alex graduated from NYU with a degree in computer science and worked as a developer and engineer at several startups in New York City, eventually assuming senior roles like engineering team lead and director of technology. 

Along the way, however, she found herself face with discrimination and harassment. In 2016, she dramatically altered her appearance, an experience she discusses in a humorous and poignant talk - Shaving My Head Made me a Better Developer. 

In 2016 she read the book The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and was inspired to  do more to help people impacted by the justice system. She began organizing donations of unused laptops, and then moved on to help found the Code Cooperative in October of 2016.  the group describes itself as a community of people who learn, use, and build technology to create life changing possibilities for individuals and communities impacted by incarceration.

If you want to get involved, you can donate a laptop or make a financial contribution here. If you would like to volunteer as a mentor, you can apply here.

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Three months ago, we interviewed Prashanth during his first week on the job. Now, with a full quarter of work under his belt, our new CEO reflects on what we accomplished over the last decade and lays out his vision for where Stack Overflow, as a company and community, will be heading over the next year and beyond.

Paul explains why engineers prefer to give blunt feedback, even in a public setting.

Sara drops some hints about our plans for the future of the Stack Exchange network. One of these big goals is to better integrate knowledge from these with the activity that happens on Stack Overflow, so that the knowledge being shared on Server Fault or Super User can easily be found by users on Stack Overflow, and vice versa. Stay tuned for more details and feel free to share your thoughts for what would work to improve the user experience.

Prashanth talks about the forces reshaping the developer landscape: cloud services, machine learning, container orchestration, and more. How can we help new developers, both hobbyists and professionals, find what they need on our sites, and empower them so they feel comfortable asking questions and providing answers.

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Software is eating the world, but what's on the menu for dessert?

This week we chat about the best way for engineers to give feedback to executives. Paul explains the Purple room method they use at Postlight. Sara references Zero to One and why engineers and marketers have so much trouble communicating.

As a member of a marketing department , it's true our job is to see the glass as half full. But sometimes the point of the exercise is to be aspirational. Police learn how to be suspicious, marketers learn how to sell, and engineers look for what's broken so they can fix it.

We chat about the ten thousand or so parking meters that went on the fritz in New York City. The company says it was the result of a fraud prevention protocol. Was this a Y2K style glitch or a logic bomb?

Sara finds the developer angle on the recent rift in the British Royal Family. New technologies always reshape the Monarchy's relationship to the public. From the first radio address to the televised coronation, to a Wordpress website and an Instagram post, each generation tries to use the modern medium to their advantage.

We discuss a fairly devious bit of brilliant parenting. If your young child wants to be a YouTube star, and you can build them their own private version of the platform, with randomly generated likes and none of the cyber-bullying, are you protecting them? Or, perhaps, crafting a Truman Show for the internet age that will have consequences down the road.

Last but not least, we check out the Blazor tag, one of the fastest growing areas of interest on Stack Overflow. It's a framework that extends the established Razor syntax. The goal is to enable developers to write client-side code in .NET, backed by WebAssembly.

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For many years Matt worked on defending the quality of Google's web search results, and you may know him as the creator of the first version of SafeSearch.As Paul noted on the show, he was seen as one of the few people  with whom ordinary folks could communicate about the often inscrutable world of Google search results and rankings.  You can read his blog here.

In 2016 Matt joined  USDS, initially at the Department of Defense. Since 2017, Matt has served as the USDS Administrator and is responsible for setting the overall direction and strategy for projects.  He has worked on everything from Healthcare.gov to online services for veterans to fraud prevention at the IRS. 

Topics discussed on this episode: 

The 1993 comedy film Dave, in which Kevin Kline plays a presidential body double who manages to fix government and melt the steely heart of Sigourney Weaver. 

Open source as an ever growing trend, even inside of big government. 

Which organization has more meeting and process, Google, or the US federal government?

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To kick things off, we talk about Yap, a fun new project from Paul’s company, Postlight. Employees get to partake in a Labs program where they can pursue side projects that interest them. Yap is "an ephemeral, real-time chat room with up to six participants. Your messages appear and disappear as quickly as you type them.” It was built with Elixir...ooooh.

For our interview this week we sat down with Jon Gottfried and Mary Siebert from Major League Hacking. Jon is the company’s co-founder and Mary is the Hackathon Community Manager. We discuss how this organization has become a global phenomenon over the past few years, reaching hundreds of thousands of developers. 
 

Things that happen these days at Major League Hackathons: 
 

• Painting succulents

• Cup stacking competitions

• Therapy dogs, lots of them

If you're interested in sponsoring a Major League Hackathon, check out the info here.

This is our last episode of the year. We’ll be back in 2020 with some more amazing guests and brilliant banter. Thanks for tuning in, see ya in the new year.
 

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You can check out the back story of Dixon’s first company, SiteAdvisor, here. It was built during a time when spyware was a booming business and browsers had few systems in place to combat bad actors. The company was acquired by McAfee in 2006. It's a great trip through the history of web security at the time.
 

Dixon next turned his attention to machine learning. He and his co-founders created Hunch, which worked to learn users’ tastes and recommend items they might enjoy. It was an early attempt to build the taste graph, a parallel to the social graph. It was acquired by eBay in 2011. Many of these techniques are now widely used across the biggest social networks in the world.

Dixon then moved into the world of venture capital. You can read more about the Crypto Fund he helps to lead and the new startup school a16Zz is launching to help educate a new generation of programmers and founders. Application are still open.

If you're interested in learning more about the background of Hashcash, which foreshadowed a lot of the ideas found in Bitcoin, there is some good info here.

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We discuss how a demand for more diverse clip art helped lay the foundation for some of the first black owned and operated software companies in the United States, and the ways in which social media has helped to empower a new generation of voices to demand change in the tech industry and beyond. 

You can check out some of the pioneering work on building digital community at Afrolink, NetNoir, and UBP.

McIlwain also draws attention to the history of computer technology as a tool of police surveillance, going all the way back to the Police Beat algorithm in 1968.  

You can find out more about Prof McIlwain here. You can purchase his book here.

We also spend some time this week talking about our new community initiatives. 

Sara, along with Juan Garza from our community team, wrote a big post outlining all the work we’re hoping to do in 2020 and how we’re using data to inform the changes we are making. 

Keep an eye out for future posts in this series, The Loop,  and let us know what you want to see by lending your voice to our Through The Loop survey.

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Brian shares a delightful tale of the time one of his co-workers accidentally deleted the company's database, and how they recovered it through binary transaction logs. No better way to learn than a trial by fire.

Juan explains why typing is taking over frontend development. First off, we discovered unit tests, and learned types can take care of it.

Paul dreams of a day when object-oriented PHP runs in the browsers. Sara has had nightmares about similar scenarios.

Splice has lots of interesting products for musicians and technologists and they're hiring.

Brian helped to build the amazing Brooklyn JS, so if you're in the NYC area, be sure to check it out.

Juan helps to run an amazing community of developers in Colombia, as well as the Bogota JS meetup.

Dylan TallChief made a drum machine in Excel and it's something special.

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The crew chats about how Paul and Sara made the transition from individual contributors to managers overseeing teams of engineers. Sara used to see this transition as a form of selling out, but has a new perspective after having made the shift. Paul admits he still doesn’t feel like a “CEO” and how he approaches his role as the co-founder who focuses on creating signal instead of operations. OF course, we argue about Bitcoin, and finally we examine the role luck plays in life, especially for The Rock. 

Kent admits that when he first tried programming, he just couldn’t understand strings, and decided the career path wasn’t for him. He ended up on a track that would have made him an accountant or business intelligence analyst. From that perch, however, he began to find ways to automate and improve his workflows. Not only did this help him stand out at work, it reawakened his interest in coding, which is now his full time career. 

Sara talks about the difference between writing code for software applications, and writing firmware, which she got into while helping to launch and run Jewelbots. Paul and Sara recall what it was like working in tech during the 90s, when they had to constantly worry about how to conserve RAM. We also talk about the days before Git, when folks passed a hard drive around from hand to hand. The kids today have no idea how good they have it.

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Paul and Sara chat about what language is best to choose as your first when you're just getting started on your journey as a programmer. Probably not Mathmatica, but it's a neat one.

Jupyter Notebooks - an in-browser notebook for working with Python. You can write your words, have your code right next to it, and see how things play out. Or as Tom Butterworth put it on DEV.

"Jupyter Notebook is an interactive web application that interfaces with the iPython repl, allowing you to run structured but iterative Python scripts. It is the de facto choice for data scientists to rapidly prototype pipelines, visualise data, or perform ad hoc analysis."

Jess Lee had some great perspectives to share on what it means to balance being an entrepreneur and a coder.

Issac Lyman kicked off a community project on DEV to create a book that would help guide readers through their first year in code. 15 contributors ended up writing chapters for the book, which is available for free here.

DEV is open source, and they have decided it can be a software platform other organizations can use to build their own communities. As Ben Halpern writes, "The future of our company will be based on delivering the DEV open-source software to power new standalone communities. We will work with a network of partners both inside and outside of the software ecosystem."

We dig into D3.JS. Stack Overflow has a lot to teach folks on this subject.

What's the best way to make a d3.js visualization layout responsive?

Just don't ask about a good book for learning the subject!

And finally, what's the difference between d3.js and jQuery? It's a silly question with some interesting answers and a nice history of the web in the background.

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