The Stack Overflow Podcast

While Mauricio and team had to get back to bare metal, most programmers are headed in the opposite direction. It?s why MIT switched from Scheme to Python. 

At Stack Overflow, we?re familiar with what happens to websites during physical failures, like hurricanes. 

Connect with Mauricio on LinkedIn. 

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner 

The Nail

, who pinned a solid answer on the question, 

if->return vs. if->else efficiency

.

Visit Dagna?s website, theMindfulDev.com, to learn more about her coaching process, which is built around understanding what fulfillment looks like for each client. 

Dagna is on LinkedIn.

You can also connect with Ceora on Twitter or her website.

Ryan is also on Twitter, especially when there?s a good AI joke to be shared.

Gold star for Lifeboat badge winner JasonHorsleyTech for rescuing the question Installing PHP 7.3 on a new MacBook Pro with the new A1 chip (Apple silicon).

Simon is the founder and longtime project lead of OWASP ZAP, an integrated penetration testing tool that helps uncover vulnerabilities in web apps, including compromised authentication, sensitive data exposure, and SQL injection. ZAP is OWASP?s most active project and the world?s most popular web app scanner. 

Check out other OWASP projects here or explore ZAP?s docs.

Check out our blog post on how you can mitigate the ten most-found OWASP vulnerabilities in Stack Overflow C++ snippets.

Jit, where Simon is a distinguished engineer, is a DevSecOps platform that allows high-velocity engineering teams to embed security requirements throughout the DevOps workflow. You can explore Jit?s docs here.

Today we?re shouting out the question CSP Alerts by OWASP even though CSP header is added, definitively answered by one Simon Bennetts.

Simon is on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Learn more about Forrest on his website and check out his newsletter. 

You can follow Paige on Twitter or her LinkedIn.

Get on the list to try out some of the new stuff released today here.

Cloudflare offers zero-trust security and performance tools for web and SaaS apps.

Cloudflare Workers allows devs to deploy serverless code globally to over 285 data centers around the world.

Astro is an open-source web framework built for speed. Houston is a bot that lets you chat with their docs.

Check out Confbrew, a conference session Q&A bot from Markprompt and Contenda (where Cassidy is CTO). 

Connect with Brendan on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.

Connect with Michael on Twitter.

Connect with Fred on LinkedIn.

While you?re at it, follow Ceora and Cassidy on Twitter. 

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner The Nail for saving if->return vs. if->else efficiency from oblivion.

Luca currently heads up product at Humanitec, a platform orchestrator that provides self-service ?golden paths? for developers.

Get up to speed (or refresh your memory) on what platform engineering involves and what an internal developer platform is.

Dynamic configuration management (DCM) is a methodology for configuring compute workloads.

Stop by the Platform Engineering Slack channel.

Hear from top DevOps and platform engineering leaders at PlatformCon 2023, a virtual event held June 8-9.

Find Luca on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Cheers to Lifeboat badge winner Devart for rescuing How can I show the table structure in SQL Server query? from the dustbin of history.

Ben and Ceora talk through some thorny issues around AI-generated music and art, explain why creators are suing AI companies for copyright infringement, and compare notes on the most amusing/alarming AI-generated content making the rounds (Pope coat, anyone?).

Episode notes:

Getty Images is suing the company behind AI art generator Stable Diffusion for copyright infringement, accusing the company of copying 12 million images without permission or compensation to train its AI model.

Meanwhile, a group of artists is suing the companies behind Midjourney, DreamUp, and Stable Diffusion for ?scraping and collaging? their work to train AI models. 

One of those artists, Sarah Anderson, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about seeing her comics gobbled up by AI models and regurgitated as far-right memes.

Speaking of copyright violations, did Vanilla Ice really steal that hook from David Bowie and Freddie Mercury? (Yes.)

Check out the AI model trained on Kanye?s voice that sounds almost indistinguishable from Ye himself.

Read The Verge?s deep dive into the intersection of AI-generated music and IP/copyright laws.

Watch the AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti that?s been called ?the natural end point for AI development.?

ICYMI: The Pope coat was real in our hearts.

Columbia University?s Data Science Institute recently wrote about how blockchain can give creators more control over their IP, now that AI-generated art is clearly here to stay.

Congrats to today?s Lifeboat badge winner, herohuyongtao, for answering How can I add a prebuilt static library in a project using CMake?.

Olin College of Engineering has one of the top-ranked undergrad engineering programs in the US. Its computing curriculum is a concentration within the engineering major, not a standalone major. The upshot is a liberal arts-informed course of study with fewer math and theory requirements than a typical CS degree and a greater emphasis on practical, job-ready skills like code quality, testing, and documentation. To learn more about how software design is taught at Olin, explore the course.

Andrew Mascillaro is a senior at Olin majoring in electrical and computer engineering. He?s currently a software engineering intern at Tableau. You can find him on LinkedIn.

Steve Matsumoto is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Olin; his academic interests include crypto and cybersecurity. You can find him on GitHub or through his website.

Prosus, one of the world?s largest tech investors, acquired Stack Overflow in 2021.

Check out the annual State of AI Report from Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth.

Read our CEO?s recent post on Stack Overflow?s approach to Generative AI.

Connect with Paul on LinkedIn. 

Today?s Lifeboat badge winner is suvayu for their answer to How to put a big centered "Thank You" in a LaTeX slide.

Akita is a monitoring and observability platform that watches API traffic live and automatically infers endpoint structure.

Jean, who comes from a family of computer scientists, earned a PhD from MIT and taught in the CS department at Carnegie Mellon University before founding Akita.

Read Jean?s post on the Stack Overflow blog: Monitoring debt builds up faster than software teams can pay it off.

Jean is on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Congrats are in order for Stellar Question badge winner legendary_rob for asking Adding a favicon to a static HTML page.

A common refrain you?ll hear these days is that servers should be scaled out, easy to replace, and interchangeable?cattle, not pets. But for the ops folks who run those servers the opposite is true. You can?t just throw any of them into an incident where they may not know the stack or system and expect everything to work out. Every operator has a set of skills that they?ve built up through research or experience, and teams should value them as such. They?re people, not pets, and certainly not cattle?you can?t just get a new one when you burn out your existing ones. 

On this episode of the podcast?sponsored by Chronosphere?we talk with Paige Cruz, Senior Developer Advocate at Chronosphere, about how teams can reduce the cognitive load on ops, the best ways to prepare for inevitable failures, and where the worst place to page Paige is. 

Episode notes:

Chronosphere provides an observability platform for ops people, so naturally, the company has an interest in the happiness of those people. 

If you?re interested in the history of the pets vs. cattle concept , this covers it pretty well. 

Previously, we spoke with the CEO of Chronosphere about making incidents easier to manage. 

We?ve covered this topic on the blog before, and two articles came up during our conversation with Paige. 

You can connect with Paige on Twitter, where she has a pretty apropos handle. 

Congrats to Stellar Question badge winner Bruno Rocha for asking How can I read large text files line by line, without loading them into memory?, which at least 100 users liked enough to bookmark.  

Alura is a Portuguese-language edtech platform where users can learn programming, backend and mobile development, data science, design and UX, DevOps, and more.

They started small, grew into a bustling online program, then purchased a majority stake in FIAP, a private university in São Paulo, Brazil.  

Paulo and Stack Overflow Director of Engineering Roberta Arcoverde cohost a popular Portuguese-language podcast about programming, design, startups, and technology.

Paulo?s new open-source project is full of career resources for T-shaped developers.

Connect with Alura CEO Paulo Silveira on LinkedIn.

Connect with Alura Chief Education Officer Guilherme Silveira on LinkedIn.

Connect with Roberta Arcoverde on LinkedIn.

Today?s Lifeboat badge winner is netblognet for their answer to Get JSON object from URL.

Fermyon offers serverless cloud computing. Spin is their developer tool for building WebAssembly microservices and web applications; check it out on GitHub.

Like past podcast guest David Hsu of Retool (and yours truly), Matt earned a degree in the humanities before deciding to prioritize his ?side gig? in tech.

Follow Fermyon on GitHub. Matt is on LinkedIn.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner keineahnung2345 for saving Hamming distance between two strings in Python from the dustbin of time.

Cerbos is an open-source, scalable authorization-as-a-service that aims to make implementing roles and permissions a cinch. Explore their docs or see how their customers are using Cerbos. 

Stateless applications like Cerbos don?t retain data from previous activities, giving devs predictable plug-and-play functionality across cloud, hybrid, on-prem, and edge instances.

Connect with Alex on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Hoopje for rescuing Print in bold on a terminal from the dustbin of history.

If you prefer, you can read this as a Q&A article or watch the video.

Kong is a cloud-native API platform. The first iteration of an API marketplace Marco and his colleagues built was Mashape.

Developments like GraphQL and gRPC have become critical as the number of APIs increases over time.

Find Marco on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Right now, plenty of people are building businesses on social media platforms, on streaming platforms, and on market platforms that they don?t control. That platform can make the rules in any way they want and remove access at any time. That means founders are potentially one step away from losing their livelihood. The same goes for consumers buying from these platforms: if you lose access to your account, there goes all your purchases. As it turns out, you were licensing everything, not buying it. 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Ripple CTO David Schwartz about the promise that decentralized trust and distributed consensus has for software development ? and for more transparency in ownership. 

Episode notes:

Cross-border payments, while they might not be the sexiest app, are one of the best product-market fits for blockchains. 

Learn more about Ripple at their home page. 

Check out the documentation to learn more about building on the XRP Ledger. 

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, asmeurer, for their answer to What does `S` signify in SymPy?

Smart contracts aren?t actually new. Computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer Nick Szabo coined the term in 1994 (possibly earlier, depending on who you ask). 

Old problems seem to keep coming back. Bret Victor gave a talk in 2013 called ?The Future of Programming,? where he talked about problems from 1973 that were still relevant. 

To learn more about the Agoric blockchain, check out their homepage. 

If you?d rather shape how the blockchain itself operates, much of Agoric?s code is open source. 

Connect with Dean on Twitter or Telegram

A Principal Engineer at GitHib, Kris is president of the Nivenly Foundation and an admin at Hachyderm, an instance of the decentralized social network powered by Mastodon. 

The ongoing changes at Twitter have fueled interest in alternative, decentralized platforms like Mastodon and Discord.

Read Leaving the Basement, Kris?s post about scaling and migrating Hachyderm out of her basement.

Watch Kris?s conversation with DigitalOcean Chief Product Officer Gabe Monroy about building decentralized IT platforms.

Find Kris on Twitter, GitHub, Twitch, or YouTube.

Congrats to 

Lifeboat badge

 winner 

metakeule

 for answering 

How can I get an error message in a string in Go?

Today?s guests from Browser Co. are software engineer Victoria Kirst and design lead Dustin Senos of The Browser Company

The Browser Company is building a new kind of browser designed to keep users ?focused, organized and in control.? Arc, their browser, is ?full of big new ideas about how we should interact with the web? and has been called ?the best web browser to come out in the last decade.? 

For an introduction to and first look at Arc, start with this video. You can also join the waiting list or subscribe to the Substack.

Follow The Browser Company on Twitter.

Connect with Victoria on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Connect with Dustin on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Special thanks to Ellis Hamburger, owner of the best username, for facilitating this terrific conversation with Victoria and Dustin.

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Todd for answering How can I name a @Service with multiple names in Spring?.

In his role at SwissOne Capital, Kenny champions investments in Web3 and the metaverse. A writer on all things crypto since 2013, he?s a regular contributor to the US Chamber of Commerce.

The collapse of Three Arrows Capital and FTX eroded investor trust in crypto, but Kenny remains ?cautiously optimistic? about the market?s future.

Connect with Kenny on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Congratulations are in order for Lifeboat badge winner xray1986 for their answer to Unicode symbol that represents "download".

The history of computing has been a story of moving up levels of abstraction: from hard-coding algorithms and directly manipulating memory addresses with assembly languages to using more natural language constructs in high-level general purpose languages to abstracting the hardware of the computer in cloud compute. Now serverless functions take that abstraction even further. We?ve made the algorithms that process data simple and natural; MongoDB wants to do the same for how we persist data. 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Andrew Davidson, SVP Products at MongoDB, about how they?re turning a database into a fully-managed service that developers can use in a more natural way. Along the way, we discuss how the cost bottleneck has moved from the storage media to developers? minds, how greater abstractions can enable developers, and how to get insights from production data faster. 

Episode notes

Try MongoDB Atlas on AWS for free.

You can get started with MongoDB Atlas directly from the AWS Marketplace. 

If you?re at a startup, you can take advantage of their special offer for startups. 

The community edition of their classic database is available to download as well. 

If you?re looking to learn a thing or two before diving in, check out MongoDB University. 

Our thanks to Great Question badge winner Derek ???? for asking How can I reverse an array in JavaScript without using libraries? You know the rarest kung fu of all: asking great questions.

The inbox improvements were Radek?s graduation project. Not bad for a newbie. 

Not everyone likes change, and the inbox change was no exception. So we looked into fixing that.

Read about what our engineering team learned building and scaling Stack Overflow to support millions of users.

Connect with Radek on LinkedIn. 

Find Cobih on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Longtime Stacker Yaakov Ellis is also on LinkedIn.

Congrats to user HelloCW on receiving a Socratic Badge for asking a well-received question on 100 separate days and maintaining a positive question record.

Our recent Pulse Survey showed how technologists visiting Stack Overflow feel about emergent technologies. The consensus is clear: AI assistants will soon be everywhere, and developers aren?t sure how they feel about that. Check out the podcast here or dive into the blog.

Learn more about the emergent abilities of large language models (LLMs). 

For more on the intersection of AI and academia, listen to our episode with computer science professor Emery Berger or read his essay on how academics are coping with AI that can ace exams and do everyone?s homework.

Catch up on the adventures of the worst coder in the world.

Congrats to user d1337, whose question How to assign a name to the size() column? won a Stellar Question badge.

With so many companies offering API products, it can be hard to get your particular APIs discovered and used by the developers who need them most. You might have the best, most useful solutions out there, but if you?re relying on the digital equivalent of foot traffic for discoverability, it might as well not exist. And if an API solution can?t be found, then someone else is going to reinvent it. 

On this sponsored episode, we chat with SmartBear API Technical Evangelist Frank Kilcommins about the growing challenges of API visibility and how to outsmart the invisibility trap with the right development strategies and tools. 

Episode notes:

Kilcommins suggests you can get better visibility for your APIs with SmartBear's new free API exploration tool. 

Open specifications like the Open API Initiative help make your endpoints easier to understand?both by humans and computers. 

Connect with Frank Kilcommins on Twitter and LinkedIn. 

Congrats to Stack Overflow user WorstCase, who asked five well-received questions on five separate days and earned themselves a shiny new Curious badge.

You can dive deeper into the research, including some lovely matrix charts, on our blog.

Erin has also explored tag trends among our most loved languages and job insights from our community.

Learn more about Joy on her LinkedIn.

Thanks to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, russbishop, for helping to answer the question: Where is the app content folder in the simulator of Xcode?

Per one count, more than 280,000 people were laid off from tech jobs in 2022 and the first two months of 2023.

What do layoffs have in common with farting at a party? Both are a bad look if you?re the only one doing it.

ICYMI: On a recent episode, we talked about how these layoffs are reshaping the job market and where to find software engineering roles outside of tech.

Just laid off, or worried you might be? Cohost Ryan Donovan has some advice.

Connect with Wesley on LinkedIn.

Writing code that runs without errors?and without all the bugs that only show up when the program runs?is hard enough. But teaching others to write code and understand the underlying concepts takes a deeper understanding. Now imagine doing that for 37 courses. 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with Bharath Thippireddy, a VIP instructor at Udemy who has taught more than half a million students. We talk about how he went from a humble Java developer to one of Udemy?s top instructors (and a budding movie star!). Along the way, we discuss whether Java or Python is better for beginners and how to balance theory with syntax. 

Episode notes:

Like a lot of today?s content creators, Bharath got his start posting videos on his Youtube channel in 2012.

Today, you can find all of Bharath?s courses on his Udemy page.

You can find out more about Bharath from his website or connect with him on LinkedIn. 

Udemy is one of our launch partners for our online course recommendations. 

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner desertnaut for their answer to 

What is the meaning of exclamation and question marks in Jupyter Notebook?

.

Flourish is a fintech platform for registered investment advisers (RIAs) that was recently acquired by MassMutual.

After studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon, Christine spent almost 12 years at Goldman Sachs, where she was VP of fixed systematic marketing making, responsible for automating electronic trades of interest-rate products like US Treasury bonds and interest rate swaps.

Christine?s time at the world?s second-largest investment bank gave her a healthy wariness of Frankencode, the scourge of legacy stacks everywhere.

Find Christine on LinkedIn.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner amirali for their answer to I can't set up JDK on Visual Studio Code.

A chemist by training, Jamie serves as Senior Research Manager of Quantum Applications and Software at IBM Quantum, which offers cloud access to advanced quantum computers capable of solving highly complex, highly interconnective, and dynamic problems.

Learn about the superconducting qubits IBM Quantum uses to program quantum computers. (Need to back up a bit? Learn what a qubit is.)

Jamie explains how a heavy hex architecture allows IBM to limit crosstalk between qubits to ensure coherence times long enough to complete practical calculations within hours, not years.

IBM Quantum?s Qiskit Runtime allows users to optimize workloads and efficiently execute them on quantum systems at scale. 

As you might expect, Jamie and her colleagues are already thinking hard about the intersection of quantum and AI. Learn about System Two, IBM?s next-generation quantum system.

Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Congrats are in order for Stellar Question badge winner Dmitry z for asking How can I use environment variables in docker-compose?.

W4 Games is dedicated to strengthening the open-source Godot Engine, a cross-platform game engine for 2D and 3D games. Their mission is ?to help the video game industry reclaim their control of the technology powering their games and reverse a dramatic trend where they have to rely on proprietary solutions from an ever-shrinking number of vendors.?

To start learning more about Godot, explore some of the best games made with Godot or join the community.

Connect with Juan on Twitter, GitHub, or LinkedIn.

Today?s Lifeboat badge winner is Martijn Pieters for their answer to 'While' loop one-liner.

Tribe is a distributed community of AI industry leaders, including ML engineers and data scientists, dedicated to helping companies apply machine learning to their business operations. Explore their case studies to see Tribe?s expertise in action.

Founder and CEO Jaclyn Rice Nelson formerly worked at Google, partnering with enterprise companies and incubating new ventures. As an early employee at CapitalG, Alphabet?s growth equity firm, she advised companies including Airbnb on scaling technical infrastructure, ensuring data security, and boosting growth with machine learning.

As we explored on our blog last year, the generative AI space has been expanding rapidly. Many of Tribe?s specialists have opted out of full-time employment, but are willing to provide companies without internal AI expertise with the skills they need to leverage this rapidly evolving technology inside their business.   

Connect with Jackie on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Today?s Lifeboat badge winner is PM 2Ring for their answer to Sort a list to form the largest possible number.

Modern networked applications generate a lot of data, and every business wants to make the most of that data. Most of the time, that means moving production data through some transformation process to get it ready for the analytics process. But what if you could have in-app analytics? What if you could generate insights directly from production data?

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Stanimira Vlaeva, Developer Advocate at MongoDB, and Fredric Favelin, Technical Director, Partner Presales at MongoDB, about how a serverless database can minimize the distance between producing data and understanding it.

Episode notes:

Stanimira talked a lot about using BigQuery with MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud Run. If you need to skill up on these three tools, check out this tutorial. 

Once you?ve got the hang of it, get your data connected with Confluent Connetors. 

With Atlas, you can transform your data in JavaScript. 

Connect with Stanimira on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

Connect with Fredric on LinkedIn. 

Congrats to Stellar Question winner SubniC  for  Get name of current script in Python. 

Oso is authorization as a service. Check out the docs or explore use cases.

Sam?s post ?Why Authorization is Hard? covered what makes authorization challenging, some approaches to solving it, and their associated tradeoffs. You can also watch Sam?s talk at PyCon US 2022. Since it?s impossible to address everything that makes authorization hard in just 5,000 words, Sam is currently at work on a follow-up article called ?Why Authorization is Hard Part II.?

Sam first learned web development via Rails for Zombies, a beginner-level Rails course. In creating Oso, he tasked himself with ?putting rails on authorization.?

ICYMI: Read Sam?s post about best practices for securing REST APIs or listen to his previous podcast appearance, where we talked about how Oso makes security easier for developers.

Find Sam on LinkedIn or GitHub.

Today?s Lifeboat badge winner is OscarRyz for their answer to I am trying to solve '15 puzzle', but I get 'OutOfMemoryError'.

Retool is a development platform that lets users?95% of whom are engineers?build internal tools quickly with a drag-and-drop interface.

Read David?s account of how Retool won early sales deals in the company?s Operator Playbook series.

Connect with David on LinkedIn.

Today we?re shouting out Stellar Question badge winner ahajib for asking How to convert a list to a dictionary with indexes as values?.

We talk about how Next is bringing image components, server components, and in-house analytics via split bee?and bundling them all together with Turbopack, powered by Rust, our Developer Survey most loved language of 2022.

Guillermo Rauch is the CEO and cofounder of Vercel and cocreator of Next.js, an open-source React framework that helps developers build fast, lightweight web applications. The most recent version is Next.js 13. You can find Guillermo on LinkedIn.

We previously talked with Guillermo about the security risks of laziness, how Next.js mixes static site and SPA functions, and the front-end trends that get him excited. 

Kelsey Hightower is the Principal Developer Advocate at Google Cloud. Find him on Twitter or GitHub, or read about his very personal history with Kubernetes.

Kelsey has also distinguished himself on our podcast before. 

Kyle Mitofsky is a Senior Software Engineer at Stack Overflow. Find him on Twitter or GitHub.

Emery Berger, Professor of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, joins Ben for a conversation about the impact of AI on academia. As a young sci-fi fan, he was fascinated by computers that could spit out solutions (a fascination that survived exposure to BASIC and COBOL). Now his CS students are using Copilot to do the same thing. How can educators (and students) adapt?

Episode notes:

Professor Emery Berger is a systems builder who studies ?programming languages, runtime systems, and operating systems, with a particular focus on systems that transparently improve reliability, security, and performance.?

AI giveth and AI taketh away: an incredible tool for developers is creating new challenges for CS educators and students. Read Emery?s 2022 essay ?Coping with Copilot.?

You can also find Emery on GitHub or Twitter.

Today?s Lifeboat badge winner is mbcrump for their answer to How do I generate a random integer in C#?.

With companies taking a long look at developer experience, it?s time to turn that attention on the humble pull request. The folks at LinearB took a look at a million PRs ? four million review cycles involving around 25,000 developers ? and found that it takes about five days to get through a review and merge the code. CI/CD has done wonders getting deployments down to a day or less; maybe it?s time for continuous merge next. 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with COO Dan Lines and CEO Ori Keren, co-founders of LinearB, about why PRs are the chokepoint in the software development lifecycle, uncovering and automating the hidden rules of review requests, and their free tool, gitStream, that?ll find the right reviewer for your PR right now. 

Episode notes: 

So why do reviews take so long? Context switches, team leads who review everything, and the bystander effect are top contenders.

Dan and Ori hope their gitStream tool can reduce the time PRs take by automating a lot of the hidden rules for reviews. Check it out at gitstream.cm or linearb.io/dev.

Dan Lines hosts his own podcast: Dev Interrupted. Check out this episode with Stack Overflow?s very own Ben Matthews.  

Connect with Dan Lines and Ori Keren on LinkedIn. 

Shoutout to Rudy Velthuis for throwing a Lifeboat to the question Why should EDX be 0 before using the DIV instruction?

It?s not just you: We all need subtitles now.

Google introduces MusicLM, a model that generates music from text. The examples are pretty-mind blowing and raise big questions about licensing and copyrights for non-AI creators.

Taking the uncanny valley to a new low? Nvidia?s streaming software now includes a feature that deepfakes eye contact.

Beware the potentially dangerous intersection of AI and stan Twitter.

Thanks to Siavash Kayal, a fan of the show and data engineer at Cleo, who sent along a great list of open-source data engineering projects folks can work on.

Today we?re shouting out Stellar Question badge winner Paragon for asking how to Open two instances of a file in a single Visual Studio session.

John spent 25 years at Oracle before joining Google Cloud?s Office of the CTO (OCTO), a team that?s been called the company?s ?secret weapon? in collaborating with major customers to solve their tech problems and drive long-term deals.

For more on his approach to tech and business, you can read this article he wrote on the seven points of driving lasting innovation

Learn more about OCTO from Business Insider.

Settle down for a good read: the full story of how the BBC?s microcomputer changed history.

Connect with John on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Today?s 

Lifeboat badge

 winner is 

vscjones

 for their answer to 

How can I find the number of business days in the current month with JavaScript?

.

Naturally, tech layoffs are top-of-mind for many of us. Despite comparisons to the dot-com bubble, what we?re seeing right now is different. Here?s what the tech and media layoffs really tell us about the economy.

In praise of analog technology: why Millennials and Gen Z are springing for paper maps.

Make Time, a way of ?rethinking the defaults of constant busyness and distraction so you can focus on what matters every day,? was developed in response to always-on Silicon Valley culture.

Wifi routers can now be used to detect the physical positions of humans and map their bodies in 3D. Terrifyingly dystopian or interestingly practical? Why not both?

In recent accessibility news, a brain-computer interface (BCI) that converts speech-related neural activity into text allows a person with paralysis due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) to communicate at 62 words per minute, nearly 3.5 times faster than before. From the abstract: ?These results show a feasible path forward for using intracortical speech BCIs to restore rapid communication to people with paralysis who can no longer speak.? 

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Holger for their answer to Sort an array containing numbers using a 'for' loop.

Astro is a site builder that lets you use the frontend tools you already love (React, Vue, Svelte, and more) to build content-rich, performant websites. 

Astro extracts your UI into smaller, isolated components (?islands?) and replaces unused JavaScript with lightweight HTML for faster loads and time-to-interactive (TTI).

Ben and Nate explain why Astro?s compiler was written in Go (?seemed like fun?).

To learn more about Astro, start with their docs or see what people are doing with the framework.

Connect with Ben on LinkedIn, GitHub, or via his website.

Connect with Nate on GitHub.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Aurand for their answer to How to convert list to queue to achieve FIFO.

In complex service-oriented architectures, failure can happen in individual servers and containers, then cascade through your system. Good engineering takes into account possible failures. But how do you test whether a solution actually mitigates failures without risking the ire of your customers? That?s where chaos engineering comes in, injecting failures and uncertainty into complex systems so your team can see where your architecture breaks. 

On this sponsored episode, our fourth in the series with Intuit, Ben and Ryan chat with Deepthi Panthula, Senior Product Manager, and Shan Anwar, Principal Software Engineer, both of Intuit about how use self-serve chaos engineering tools to control the blast radius of failures, how game day tests and drills keep their systems resilient, and how their investment in open-source software powers their program. 

Episode notes: 

Sometimes old practices work in new environments. The Intuit team uses Failure Mode Effect Analysis, (FMEA), a procedure developed by the US military in 1949, to ensure that their developers understand possible points of failure before code makes it to production. 

The team uses Litmus Chaos to inject failures into their Kubernetes-based system and power their chaos engineering efforts. It?s open source and maintained by Intuit and others. 

If you?ve been following this series, you?d know that Intuit is a big fan of open-source software. Special shout out to Argo Workflow, which makes their compute-intensive Kubernetes jobs work much smoother. 

Connect on LinkedIn with Deepthi Panthula and Zeeshan (Shan) Anwar.

If you want to see what Stack Overflow users are saying about chaos engineering, check out 

Chaos engineering best practice

, asked by 

User NingLee

 two years ago.

In a win for accessibility, GitHub Copilot now responds to voice commands, allowing developers to code using their voices.

Speaking of accessibility, learn how Santa Monica Studio worked with disabled gamers and the community to build accessibility into God of War Ragnarök.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has determined that lab-grown meat is safe to eat.

Looking for some high-quality entertainment content? Look no further than Simone Giertz?s YouTube channel, where she builds robots to (among other things) wash her hair and wake her up with a slap in the face.

Blast from the past: Listen to our episode with MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner ralf htp for their answer to How to listen for and react to Ace Editor change events.

First, some self-administered back-patting for the Stack Overflow editorial team: great engineering blogs give tech companies an edge (The New York Times says so). 

Hiring aside, engineering blogs are fresh sources of knowledge, insight, and entertainment for anyone working in tech. You can learn a lot from, for instance, blog posts that break down an outage or security incident and detail how engineers got things up and running again. One classic of the genre: Amazon?s explanation of how one engineer brought the internet to its knees. And here?s an example from our own blog. 

When you?ve finished catching up on the Stack Overflow blog, check out those from Netflix and Uber.

Good news for late-night impulse shoppers: Instagram is removing the shopping tag from the home feed, reports The Verge. Is this a response to widespread user pushback, and does this herald the end of New Instagram? We can hope.

Sony announces Project Leonardo, an accessibility controller kit for PS5.

Did you know? Using only Tetris, you can build a machine capable of universal computation.

Developer advocate Matt Kiernander is moving on to his next adventure. If you?re looking for a developer advocate or engineer, connect with him on LinkedIn or email him.

One of Matt?s favorite conversations on the podcast was 

our episode with Mitchell Hashimoto

, cofounder and CEO of HashiCorp. It?s worth a (re)listen.

At an SaaS company like Intuit that has hundreds of services spread out across multiple products, maintaining development velocity at scale means baking some of the features that every service needs into the architecture of their systems. That?s where a service mesh comes in. It automatically adds features like observability, traffic management, and security to every service in the network without adding any code. 

In this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Anil Attuluri, principal software engineer, and Yasen Simeonov, senior product manager, both of Intuit, about how their engineering organization uses a service mesh to solve problems, letting their engineers stay focused on writing business logic. Along the way, we discuss how the service mesh keeps all the financial data secure, how it moves network traffic to where it needs to go, and the open source software they?ve written on top of the mesh. 

Episode notes:

For those looking to get the same service mesh capabilities as Intuit, check out Istio, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project. 

In order to provide a better security posture for their products, each business case operates on a discrete network. But much of the Istio service mesh needs to discover services across all products. Enter Admiral, their open-sourced solution. 

When Intuit deploys a new service version, they can progressively scale the amount of traffic that hits it instead of the old version using Argo Rollouts. It?s better to find a bug in production on 1% of requests than 100%.

If you want to learn more about what Intuit engineering is doing, check out their blog. 

Congrats to Great Question badge winner, 

HelpMeStackOverflowMyOnlyHope

, for asking 

Detect whether input element is focused within ReactJS

There is a ton of great research to be found on Prof. Kapfhammer's website, including: 

We've written a bit about how Stack Overflow is upping its unit testing game and how you can evaluate multiple assertions in a single test.

Thanks to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Survivor, for answering the question: Is it possible to find out if a value exists twice in an arraylist?

Juri is currently Director of Developer Experience (Global) and Director of Engineering (Europe) at Nrwl, founded by former Googlers/Angular core team members Jeff Cross and Victor Savkin.

Nrwl has compiled everything you need to know about monorepos, plus the tools to build them, here.

Connect with Juri on LinkedIn or explore his website.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner penguin2718 for their answer to Storing loop output in a dataframe in R.

Any large organization with multiple products faces the challenge of keeping their brand identity unified without denying each product its own charisma. That?s where a design system can help developers avoid reinventing the wheel every time, say,  a new button gets created 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Demian Borba, Principal Product Manager, and Kelvin Nguyen, Senior Engineering Manager, both of Intuit. We chat about how their design system is evolving into a platform, how AI keeps their brand consistent, and why a design system doesn?t have to solve every use case. 

Treating a design system as a platform means providing a baseline of tokens?colors, typography, themes?and allowing developers to deviate so long as they use the right tokens. 

Alongside a company-wide push towards greater AI usage, Intuit?s design system team is beginning to leverage AI to help developers make better design decisions. As an example, they?re including typeahead functionality to suggest possible solutions to design decisions. 

The team is using a Figma plugin to manage a lot of the heavy lifting. Their presentation at Config 2022 built a lot of excitement for what?s possible. 

Congrats to RedVelvet, who won a great question badge for The most efficient way to remove first N elements in a list?

Find Kelvin  and Demian  on Linkedin.

LogRocket helps software teams create better experiences through a combination of session replay, error tracking, and product analytics.

LogRocket?s machine-learning layer, Galileo, cuts through the noise generated by conventional error monitoring and analytics tools to identify critical issues affecting users.

LogRocket is hiring, so check out their open roles or connect with Matt Arbesfeld on LinkedIn. You can also give LogRocket a free trial.

Adobe closed out 2022 and celebrated 40 years with an employee-only Katy Perry concert. Related: Ceora makes the case for virtual concerts.

DeepMind is teaching AI to play soccer, which naturally makes us think of QWOP.

ICYMI: Ghost calls out Substack and Substack responds.

BeReal is the iPhone app of the year. But not even Resident Youth Ceora knows anyone who actually uses it.

Some 2023 recommendations from the team: 

Ceora recommends Realworld (not to be confused with BeReal), an app that guides you through tasks and decisions big and small, from deciding on health insurance to improving your credit.

Cassidy recommends Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott.

Matt suggests fellow side hustlers check out The Freelance Manifesto: A Field Guide for the Modern Motion Designer by School of Motion founder Joey Korenman.

Ben recommends Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a terrific novel about a love triangle between indie video game creators, especially fun if you grew up with Oregon Trail, Myst, and Super Mario.