The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Overflow and Elastic are collaborating to improve the search experience using vector search and generative AI. Learn more about the new AI features for Stack Overflow for Teams, including Enhanced Search.

Learn more about the Elastic platform, including vector search. Developers can start building here.

Connect with Paul, Steffi, and Gregor on LinkedIn.

Stack Overflow user chepner won a Lifeboat badge for answering How do I use __repr__ with multiple arguments?.

Carol is an applied clinical and intervention scientist: she develops and tests cognitive, behavioral, and social interventions that activate key mechanisms to elicit change. Learn more about understanding and mitigating code review anxiety (the full version of her article is here).

You can also check out the code review anxiety workbook.

Pluralsight’s Developer Success Lab is a team of scientists studying how developers work, learn, and innovate. 

Explore more of Carol’s work on code review anxiety, her bio, or her other work, from developer productivity and stress management to coding with GenAI. 

Connect with Carol on LinkedIn or Mastodon.

Still thinking about developer happiness and productivity? Read Eira’s article about the real 10x developers among us.

Connect with Ben Borra through his website or LinkedIn.

Asked and answered: Stack Overflow user Jian earned a Great Question badge with How do I close a frozen SSH session?. 

Before Medplum, Reshma founded and exited two startups in the healthcare space – MedXT (managing medical images online acquired by Box) and Droplet (at-home diagnostics company acquired by Ro). Reshma has a B.S. in computer science and a Masters of Engineering from MIT.

You can learn more about Medplum here and check out their Github, which has over 1,200 stars, here.

You can learn more about Khilnani on her website, GitHub, and on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Stack Overflow user Kvam for earning a Lifeboat Badge with an answer to the question: 

What is the advantage of using a Bitarray when you can store your bool values in a bool[]?

Cassidy reflect on her time as a CTO of a startup and how the shifting environment for funding has created new pressures and incentives for founders, developers, and venture capitalists.

Ben tries to get a bead on a new Moore’s law for the GenAI era: when will we start to see diminishing returns and fewer step factor jumps? 

Ben and Cassidy remember the time they made a viral joke of a keyboard!

Ryan sees how things goes in cycles. A Stack Overflow job board is back! And what do we make of the trend of AI assisted job interviews where cover letters and even technical interviews have a bot in the background helping out.

Congrats to Erwin Brandstetter for winning a lifeboat badge with an answer to this question:  How do I convert a simple select query like select * from customers into a stored procedure / function in pg?

How would all this work in practice? Of course, any metric you set out can easily become a target that developers look to game. With Snapshot Reviews, the goal is to get a high level overview of a software team’s total activity and then use AI to measure the complexity of the tasks and output.

If a pull request attached to a Jira ticket is evaluated as simple by the system, for example, and a programmer takes weeks to finish it, then their productivity would be scored poorly. If a coder pushes code changes only once or twice a week, but the system rates them as complex and useful, then a high score would be awarded. 

You can learn more about Snapshot Reviews here.

You can learn more about Flatiron Software here.

Connect with Kirim on LinkedIn here.

Congrats to Stack Overflow user Cherry who earned a great question badge for asking: Is it safe to use ALGORITHM=INPLACE for MySQL?

RelationalAI’s first big partner is Snowflake, meaning customers can now start using their data with GenAI without worrying about the privacy, security, and governance hassle that would come with porting their data to a new cloud provider. The company promises it can also add metadata and a knowledge graph to existing data without pushing it through an ETL pipeline.

You can learn more about the company’s services here.

You can catch up with Cassie on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Stack Overflow user antimirov for earning a lifeboat badge by providing a great answer to the question: 

How do you efficiently compare two sets in Python?

Palmer says that a huge percentage of today’s top websites, including apps like ChartGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, were built with Vercel’s Next.JS. 

For the second goal, you can see what Vercel is up to with its v0 project, which lets developers use text prompts and images to generate code. 

Third, the Vercel AI SDK, which aims to to help developers build conversational, streaming, and chat user interfaces in JavaScript and TypeScript. You can learn more here.

If you want to catch Jared posting memes, check him out on Twitter. If you want to learn more abiout the AI SDK, check it out 

here.

A big thanks to Pierce Darragh for providing a great answer and earning a lifeboat badge by saving a question from the dustinbin of history. Pierce explained: How you can split documents into training set and test set

You can learn more about these three features on our Overflow AI site.

If you want to connect with Tiago, you can find him on LinkedIn. The same goes for Alexa.

A shoutout to Stack Overflow user Mahozad for earning a LifeBoat badge with their answer to the question: 

How can I add Jetpack Compose & xml in the same activity?

You can learn more about Squire AI here

Connect with Patel on his LinkedIn

Congrats to Bharath Pabba for earning a Great Question badge and helping 129,000 people with a similar question by asking: 

How to disable source maps for React JS Application?

You can find Narayan on LinkedIn.

Learn more about SnapLogic here.

Congrats to our user of the week, Ethan Heilman, for earning a Great Question badge by showing some curiosity and asking: How do I deal with garbage collection logs in Java?

This question has been viewed over 175,000 times and helped lots of folks gain some new knowledge :)

You can find Shestakofsky on his website or check him out on X.

Grab a copy of his new book: Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality. 

As he writes on his website, the book:

Draws on 19 months of participant-observation research to examine how investors’ demand for rapid growth created organizational problems that managers solved by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. The book shows how the burdens imposed on startups by venture capital—as well as the benefits and costs of “moving fast and breaking things”—are unevenly distributed across a company’s workforce and customers. With its focus on the financialization of innovation, Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by tech startups are funneled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. To promote innovation that benefits the many rather than the few, Shestakofsky argues that we should focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it.

A big thanks to our user of the week, Parusnik, who was awarded a Great Question badge for asking: How to run a .NET Core console application on Linux?

Temporal is an open-source implementation of durable execution, a development paradigm that preserves complete application state so that upon host or software failure it can seamlessly migrate execution to another machine. Learn how it works or dive into the docs. 

Temporal’s SaaS offering is Temporal Cloud.

Replay is a three-day conference focused on durable execution. Replay 2024 is September 18-20 in Seattle, Washington, USA. Get your early bird tickets or submit a talk proposal!

Connect with Maxim on LinkedIn.

User Honda hoda earned a Famous Question badge for SQLSTATE[01000]: Warning: 1265 Data truncated for column.

Robin is the author of a practical handbook for Selenium test automation.

Connect with Robin on LinkedIn, Twitter, or via his website. 

Shoutout to user2651084, who earned a Great Question badge by asking How do I reset the Jupyter/IPython input prompt numbering?. 

Galileo is an end-to-end platform for GenAI evaluation, experimentation, and observability. Learn more by exploring their docs.

Galileo’s Hallucination Index is a ranking and evaluation framework for LLM hallucinations (it includes a blooper reel).

Connect with Vikram on LinkedIn.

Stack Overflow user Petr Janeček won a Lifeboat badge for answering Null array to empty list, a question that’s helped more than 47,000 other curious folks.

Are you a software developer? Take Stack Overflow’s annual survey about how you learn and level up, which tools you’re using, and which ones you want most. You can check out the results of previous surveys here.

OverflowAI is a GenAI-powered add-on for Stack Overflow for Teams that does the heavy lifting of discovering and distilling information into a coherent answer. It encompasses three modules: Enhanced Search, an upgraded search experience; Stack Overflow for Visual Studio Code, an IDE extension; and Auto-Answer App for Slack, which automates access to essential team knowledge. 

Read about why OverflowAI is a big step toward integrating GenAI offerings into knowledge communities and dig into what’s launching and why it’s valuable.

Connect with Ash on LinkedIn.

Big props to Stack Overflow user Jennifer M., who earned both a Great Question badge and a Famous Question badge by wondering How to combine the sequence of objects in jq into one object?.

Al Sweigert is the author of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python and many other books about programming. You can read them all for free here.

His scroll art project introduces beginners to programming by letting them turn loops and print() into animated ASCII art.

Al joined us from a retreat at the Brooklyn, NY-based Recurse Center, which offers free, self-directed retreats for programmers. Learn how to apply here.

PyCon US 2024 is May 15-23, 2024, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Connect with Al through his website.

Shoutout to user Alex. S., who asked Stack Overflow’s most popular Python question ever: What does the "yield" keyword do in Python?. It’s helped 3.3 million people and counting.

Read Eira’s two-part series about developers with ADHD here and here.

Chris recommends that devs with ADHD employ a “second brain” to help them track and remember information. Read Eira’s article on what second brains reveal about how we work.

A few years back Chris joined us to talk about the most lightweight web “framework” around: VanillaJS. Listen to the episode.

Chris offers classes and workshops for front-end developers, plus daily advice for developers with ADHD.

Connect with Chris through his website or social media.

Kong is a cloud-native API gateway. Find them on GitHub.

We last spoke with Marco in 2023. inf

Connect with Marco on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Famous Question badge winner mjbradford7 on How to re-render one component from another in React.

If you’ve been laid off or you’re just sweating the possibility, here’s what to do. 

Check out the results of our last job market survey. 

Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn.

Shoutout to stevenkucera, who earned a Stellar Question badge with How do I create a global, mutable singleton?.

In a narrow vote, the US Federal Trade Commission banned almost all noncompete agreements, a staple of the tech industry for years.

Learn how a 2017 tax law is haunting startups in 2024.

Finnish hacker Aleksanteri Kivimäki exposed tens of thousands of confidential psychiatric records and tried to extort payment directly from the affected patients. Read more about it here or here. 

It happened: President Biden signed the TikTok “ban,” setting a deadline for the platform’s parent company, China-based ByteDance, to divest the app within a year. And TikTok faces yet more hurdles ahead.

Net neutrality is back, baby. Here’s what that means.

SQLite is the most used database engine in the world. 

Stop by the forum or explore the docs.

Devs have pledged to support SQLite through the year 2050. 

The developer with a team of three, all of them himself at different points in time, was Tarn Adams of Dwarf Fortress fame. 

On Stack Overflow, 1.2 million people have found the answer to How can I list the tables in a SQLite database file that was opened with ATTACH?. 

Meta’s open-source Llama 3 model puts Meta’s AI assistant head-to-head with ChatGPT.

Stability AI laid off 10% of its workforce, the first major AI foundation model to reduce its workforce since the advent of generative AI.

Is the dot-com bubble a cautionary tale for AI enthusiasts? Listen to the episode of Marketplace from NPR.

Do LLMs support Wittgenstein’s position that “meaning is use”? That depends whether you’re talking pre or post Tractatus, of course.

TikTok wouldn’t lie to you: you really can make friends with your local crows. Eira’s proven method for befriending crows: Feed them dry cat food on a consistent schedule, so they learn you’re reliable, and watch them eat, so they grok that you are feeding them intentionally.

Stack Overflow user Arman Ordookhani received a well-deserved Lifeboat badge for telling nearly 30,000 people How to free memory in go.

Why can’t configuration be made simple? 

Apple is making it easier for users to repair their iPhones with used parts.

Texas is swapping human graders for AI.

Automattic (owner of WordPress) is acquiring Beeper for $125M.

Silicon Valley or not, San Francisco’s train system still uses floppy disks. But don’t worry, an upgrade is coming—in 2030.

Shoutout to Bite code, who earned a Stellar Question badge with How do I change the URI (URL) for a remote Git repository?.

Get started with MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud today. 

Read more from the MongoDB DevRel team at the MongoDB Developer Center.

Learn more about Google’s Gemini models. 

Shout out to thitemple for their Lifeboat-worthy answer to In TypeScript, how do I declare a function that returns a string type array?.

Connect with Michael on LinkedIn. 

Shoutout to user1083266, who earned a Stellar Question badge with How to store image in SQLite database.

ICYMI: A backdoor in XZ, a popular open-source compression utility, highlights the risks of relying on open-source software maintained by small teams. Read more about the cyberattack here.

Apple’s new LLM, Ferret, could help Siri understand the user interfaces of mobile displays, potentially expanding the capabilities of Apple’s digital assistant. 

Shoutout to Stack Overflow user cheese1756, who earned a Great Question badge by asking How do I ensure that whitespace is preserved in Markdown?.

Learn more about the potential of AI inference with OpenVINO Notebooks.

Check out the previous podcast with Intel, where we talk with Raymond Lo about how hardware and software work together with AI.

Connect with Ria on LinkedIn or GitHub. 

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Kevin, who showed what they know about TypeError; Must use key word argument or key function in Python 3.x.

A developer discovered a backdoor in XZ, a popular open-source compression utility. Read more about the cyberattack here.

A Microsoft technical report pinpoints 54 attributes of great software engineers.

A new report from The Economist lays out how AI is changing drug development.

Are you sick of hearing about AI? What topics or technologies would you rather hear us talk about? Email us at [email protected] or DM Ben here.

You can find Jessica on LinkedIn.

We've published several posts, including this most recent one, about our attempt to shape an ethical approach to combining our community of knowledge and today's AI systems.

Check out this blog post that details some of the work we did to build our data platform. 

Congrats to macfij on your lifeboat badge for answering the question: How can I do a CTRL + A and a CTRL + C?

DBRX, an open, general-purpose LLM created by Databricks, reportedly outperforms GPT-3.5 and is competitive with Gemini 1.0 Pro.

Recent research found that large, complex LLMs use a simple mechanism to retrieve stored knowledge in response to a user prompt. These mechanisms can help researchers reveal what the model knows and potentially even correct false information it has stored.

FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried, whose downfall began in late 2022, was sentenced last week to 25 years in prison for conspiracy and fraud. 

Find Michael on LinkedIn.

Find Cassidy on her website.

Stack Overflow user Bucket received a well-deserved Lifeboat badge for rescuing How to calculate decimal(x, y) max value in SQL Server from an ocean of ignorance.

Chapters (please note that these timestamps may not be exact): 

00:00 Introduction and White Paper Discussion

02:01 Long Context Windows and Retrieval Augmented Generation

05:56 Models' Ability to Recall Relevant Information

07:18 Models' Creativity and Thinking Outside the Box

09:41 Advantages and Limitations of Models' Knowledge

15:09 Databricks' Open Language Model

22:25 Sam Bankman-Fried’s Sentence and the Effects on Crypto/Blockchain

31:28 Closing Remarks and Lifeboat Badge

Small nations like Anguilla (.ai) and Tuvalu (.tv) are benefiting from their coveted domain names.

The US government is suing Apple for violation of antitrust laws, which could have a huge impact on devs, end users, and the whole ecosystem. 

Reddit went public last week despite not being profitable since its launch in 2005.

How can you give feedback on a poorly reviewed PR? The Software Engineering Stack Exchange has ideas.

The four day work week is probably not the solution to our work-life balance problems.

AI-powered software development tools like Devon show promise, but their impact on code quality and maintainability remains an open question.

Shoutout to Robert, who earned a Lifeboat badge by explaining Square brackets in CSS.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

00:31 The Impact of Dot AI Domain Space

01:07 Antitrust Cases Against Apple

04:01 Vendor Lock-in and Apple's Ecosystem

05:08 Issues with Infotainment Systems and Apple Play

06:29 The Benefits and Challenges of a Four-Day Work Week

08:03 Providing Feedback on a Badly Reviewed PR

10:00 The Importance of Clear Expectations in Code Reviews

11:40 The Potential of AI Tools in Development

14:01 Reddit Going Public and the Future of Tech Companies

15:29 AI Tool Devon and the Challenges of Operationalizing AI Projects

21:22 Shoutout and Closing Remarks

To learn more about the signs that indicate you may be paying more for your cloud computing that you should, check out DoIT’s seven red flags guide. 

We’ve spoken with DoiT on the podcast before about LLM hallucinations and the security threats that LLMs open.

DoiT’s sales pitch is simple: they provide technology and expertise to clients who want to use the cloud, free of charge, with the big cloud providers paying the bills.

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner  Sravan K Ghantasala for their answer to How to sort file lines in Bash?

Find Joshua at joshuafox com.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Cloud Cost Control

01:08 Joshua Fox's Background

04:20 Understanding FinOps

06:17 The Importance of Good Architecture

08:18 Balancing Flexibility in Architecture

10:04 Surprise Costs and Dealing with Them

13:19 Bracing for Unexpected Cloud Costs

25:41 The Future of Cloud Cost Optimization

27:09 Closing Remarks

Cribl is a data management platform. Check out their sandbox or explore their products.

Cribl Stream is their vendor-agnostic observability pipeline.

If you’re new to the term, the observability pipeline is a crucial component of the cloud-native world.

Connect with Nick on LinkedIn.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background

03:23 The Data Landscape and Generative AI

06:08 Incumbents vs. Startups in the Data Space

07:46 Challenges of Data Storage and Exfiltration

09:38 Securing Large Warehouses of Data

12:21 Data Quality and ETL Pipelines

16:05 Measures of Data Quality for Gen AI

22:04 Cribl’s Role in the Data and Observability Space

26:20 The Pros and Cons of Richer Observability Monitoring

28:11 Closing Remarks and Shoutout

GitClear is a developer-friendly code review tool that aims to deliver higher developer satisfaction and faster releases. Check out their blog or find them on GitHub.

GitClear’s research focuses on how AI code-gen tools have impacted code quality (and not in a good way).

Find Bill on LinkedIn.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction 

00:30 Background of the Research

06:09 Business Model of GitClear

09:46 Copy Pasted Code

10:26 Churn Code

12:21 Code Readability

14:12 Code Suggestions and Auto-Completion

16:34 Drop in Moved Code

23:18 Larger Token Windows

26:31 Improving Gen AI

28:46 Conclusion

Node.js® is an open-source JavaScript runtime environment.

Deno is an open-source JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly runtime. Explore the quick start or check out Deno by example, a collection of annotated examples of how to use Deno.

JSR is an open-source package registry for JavaScript and TypeScript.

Keep up to date with Ryan on GitHub or his blog.

Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Squadrons, who earned a Great Question badge by asking for a Pure javascript method to wrap content in a div.

Chapters:

00:00: Introduction and Background

01:08: Creating Node.js

05:00: JavaScript on the Server Side

07:23: Impact of Node.js

09:18: Edge Function System

12:13: Protecting Against Malicious Use

16:02: JSR: Alternative to NPM

31:01: JSR and its Stage

34:20: Future of JavaScript

36:19: Closing and Shoutouts

AI shops are now releasing LLMs optimized for RAG. 

Turn a repo into a prompt for a long-context LLM.

Perplexity AI is an AI-powered search and discovery tool.

Good news for developers: Apple will not remove progressive web app support on iOS in the EU.

Basil Bourque earned a Lifeboat badge by explaining How to get full name of month from date in Java 8 while formatting.

Stack Overflow has teamed up with Google Cloud to develop an API—Overflow API—to give Gemini, Google’s AI model, access to Stack Overflow knowledge communities. 

Learn how Ryan’s team is working toward socially responsible AI.

Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn.

Stack Overflow user verygoodsoftwarenotvirus earned a Great Question badge by asking something at least 87,000 people have also wondered: How can I get all keys from a JSON column in Postgres?.

Check out Maxime’s three-part LLM course. 

Part 1 “covers essential knowledge about mathematics, Python, and neural networks.

Part 2 “focuses on building the best possible LLMs using the latest techniques."

Part 3 “focuses on creating LLM-based applications and deploying them.” 

Read Maxime’s blog.

Follow Maxime on GitHub or LinkedIn.

Nikhil Wagh earned a Lifeboat badge by explaining how to Efficiently compare two sets in Python.

Intuit shares more about their generative AI operating system (GenOS) in this Medium blog. 

If you want to try out generative AI in MailChimp, sign up here. 

Learn more about Intuit technology here.

Many thanks (and a Lifeboat badge) to Dherik for dropping an answer on cURL: how can I return 0 if status is 200?

Connect with Shivang on LinkedIn.

Build GenAI applications faster and cheaper with a vector database like Pinecone.

New to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and other GenAI topics? Our guide is a good place to start.

Learn more about RAG and Pinecone.

Connect with Roie on GitHub or LinkedIn.

Pinecone is a vector database that lets companies build GenAI applications faster for less cost.

Read our primer on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or explore RAG and Pinecone.

Follow Roie on GitHub or LinkedIn.

If you need a handy guide to what’s what in the AI space, check out Stack Overflow’s Industry Guide to AI.

SPONSORED BY INTEL

Ryan and Ben chat with Raymond Lo, AI software evangelist at Intel, about the AI PC, the software that powers AI breakthroughs, and optimizing hardware and software in unison to improve generative AI performance. Bonus: what’s the difference between a GPU optimized for graphics and a VPU or NPU optimized for AI?

Episode notes

If you’re interested in trying any of the demos that Raymond talked about, check out Intel’s OpenVINO notebooks.

Learn more about Intel’s Edge AI resources here.

Raymond previously wrote about enhancing image and video resolution using OpenVINO.

You can reach out to Raymond Lo on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, Andrey Korneyev, for saving the question, How can I delete specific nodes from an XElement?

Sema’s AI code monitor helps companies manage the risks and capture the benefits of AI in the software development lifecycle. Learn how it works here.

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.

Erstwhile podcast cohost Cassidy Williams is the CTO of Contenda. 

Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Jim, who earned a Stellar Question badge with Docker cannot start on Windows, a question (well, more of a statement) that’s helped 1.1 million people and counting.

Discussions are now taking place across all tags on Stack Overflow. Check out this one about why people keep proclaiming the death of PHP or this one on whether Jenkins is still the dominant player in the CI/CD space.

What would happen if you suddenly lost consciousness? The Philosophy Stack Exchange has thoughts.

Did knights wear glasses? Historical records don’t really answer this question, but the History Stack Exchange does.

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has deemed AI-generated robocalls illegal.

Andrew has worked in many roles, including as Executive Manager at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, where he established and grew a platform engineering function that supported 7,000 engineers.

You can find him on LinkedIn here.

You can learn more about Compass, a developer experience platform, here.

Shout to Amelio for earning a stellar question badge and helping over six hundred thousand people with this gem: Getting the name of a variable as a string

Mobb offers AI-powered technology that automates vulnerability remediations with a goal of helping development teams significantly reduce their security backlogs and free up more time for innovation. 

Check out their blog or dive into their docs.

Connect with Eitan on LinkedIn.

Shoutout to Konrad, who won a Stellar Question badge for What is the difference between private and protected members of C++ classes?.

Find out why others have joined Shell.

If you want to experience what being a developer at one of the world’s largest energy companies looks like, they’re hiring.

Great question, Alexander Myshov! This badge was awarded for Are arrow functions faster (more performant, lighter) than ordinary standalone function declaration in v8?

Reach out to Maya on LinkedIn.

William is the CEO of Lightning AI and the creator of PyTorch Lightning, the lightweight PyTorch wrapper for high-performance AI research.

Dive into their docs or explore the developer community.

ICYMI: Across tech, layoffs are boosting share prices.

Follow William on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Shoutout to Brian61354270, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils' in Python 3.12.

Is it possible to make a PDF bigger than Germany? Here’s one larger than the known universe. As its creator says, “it’s mostly empty space, but so is the universe.”

Massachusetts is leading the way in the skills-based hiring revolution by eliminating degree requirements for state jobs.

Did you miss these deeply uncanny AI-generated food images, from the conjoined chickens to the macaroni and cheese rendered in shapes formerly unknown to geometry? Never fear; you can still see some here.

You may have forgotten about crypto (or at least tried), but more than 2% of the United States’s electricity generation goes to large-scale crypto mining.

Stack Overflow user Jeff Allen earned a Great Question badge for Create a Vector of All Days Between Two Dates, which has helped 85,000 R users.

AI-generated code is “not equivalent to reliable and robust code, especially in the context of real-world software development,” according to a new study whose title got our attention.

Tech layoffs continue in the wake of the pandemic hiring boom, sending some share prices into the sky.

Take a look at how AI coding assistants are already changing the way code is made.

Shoutout to Stack Overflow user nonopolarity, who earned a Great Question badge by asking Can someone explain SSH tunnel in a simple way?.

A theory explores how to play DOOM inside a human cell. Fair warning, you'll need about 600 years to complete the game.

Looking for a good prompt builder to help you get the most out of your LLM? Try this one or explore this huge collection of prompts.

Startup Twin Labs wants to build a product that automates repetitive tasks by letting AI take over your cursor.

Harvard Medical School researchers published a study showing that the CRISPR system can encode information in living cells “as complex as a digitized image of a human hand.” Read more.

Three cheers for Max Lybbert, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering Python faster than C++? How does this happen?.

Intuit shares more about their generative AI operating system (GenOS) in this Medium blog. 

Learn more about Intuit technology here.

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Mohsin Naeem for answering the question How can I extract metadata from an MP3 file?

Connect with Merrin on LinkedIn or X. 

Connect with Shivang on LinkedIn.

The estate of the late comedian George Carlin is suing the creators of an hour-long AI-generated comedy special that mimics Carlin’s distinctive delivery and material. [Ed. note: not actually AI, still lawsuit.]

Prefer your AI more Freudo-Marxist? Here’s a never-ending, AI-generated conversation between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. You’re welcome.

Google’s Bard surpassed GPT-4 to claim the second spot on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard.

Agile development is faltering at big companies, and a recent report cites developer burnout as a factor. But maybe the problem lies in companies’ (mis)understanding of agile.

Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Emil Laine, who earned a Lifeboat badge with their answer to How can I include all of the C++ Standard Library at once?.

Find out what’s new with ML in production.

Machine learning models must learn to unlearn.

Open-source game engine Godot now has a free Nintendo Switch port for game developers.

We’ve previously hosted Godot cofounder and lead developer Juan Linietsky on the podcast.

Stack Overflow user areller earned a Lifeboat badge with their answer to How to call a destructor.

A white-hat hacker uncovered security vulnerabilities in an AI-powered hiring system used by fast-food chains and hourly employees around the world. Read the blog post or watch this explainer.

Mariposa is a programming language with time travel.

Want to be an individual contributor (IC) who still amplifies the performance of everyone around you? Be a radiating programmer.

Congratulations to onmyway133, winner of a Stellar Question badge for What does the suspend function mean in a Kotlin Coroutine?.

Mariposa is a toy programming language that has time travel as a primary feature. Bugs are a thing of the past (literally)!

Miss having a physical keyboard when thumb-typing on your phone? Well, you’re in luck. 

Over at CES, LG Electronics wants your devices to have “affectionate intelligence.” Whatever it takes to make AI more human-centric and empathetic.

Omar used to work on the Backstage project at Spotify, so we quoted him in our article on it. 

Now he works on personalization, including Discover Weekly, which drops a new mixtape on you every Monday like a hipster with a crush.

Rabbit R1 is an AI-powered assistant you can keep in your pocket (but it’s not a phone).

How will AI impact scientific research? A new collaboration between Microsoft and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is focused on energy storage solutions.

A US Senate hearing questions whether tech companies should be allowed to train their AI models on content produced by journalists without paying licensing fees.

Learn how to build a mechanical computer from Legos.

Now you know: The human body can serve as a resonance chamber for remote car keys, effectively extending their range.

A hackathon team used GenAI can create a fully playable D&D-style game in just one day.

Skybox AI from Blockade Labs allows users to generate 360° skybox experiences from text prompts.

A significant advancement in the brain-computer interfaces (BCI) space: a novel framework called DeWave integrates “discrete encoding sequences into open-vocabulary EEG-to-text translation tasks” without the need for “eye-tracking fixations or event markers to segment brain dynamics into word-level features.”

Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Vineeth Chitteti, who earned a Favorite Question badge with Is it possible to hit multiple pods with a single request in Kubernetes cluster?.

Willis Gibson, 13, closed out 2023 by becoming the first person to officially beat the original Nintendo version of Tetris. Here’s how he did it.

Want to understand the code that caused the ultimate killscreen? Watch this great explainer from HydrantDude.

The 2023 film Tetris is based on the true story of the legal battle to license the game.

Is the era of the robot butler upon us? Mobile ALOHA is a low-cost and whole-body teleoperation system for data collection. Check out some of what it can do.

Explore the questions and answers on the Mathematics Stack Exchange.

Will AI fundamentally change software development or just add some efficiencies around the edges?  Surveys from Stack Overflow and Github find north of 70% have probably already tried using it and many incorporate it into their daily work through a helper in the IDE. 

It's also worth reflecting a bit on the technology sectors that didn't have as great a 2023: crypto, VR, and quantum computing still seem far from mainstream adoption. 

We dive a little into the half-life of skills, which seem to be shrinking, especially in IT. Got any resolutions to learn something new this year?

And what about the data we use for training? We highlight a comment from Kian Katanforoosh, a lecturer who helped create Stanford's Deep Learning course with Andrew Ng, who says we'll run out of high quality data as soon as 2030.

A big thanks and congrats to Stack Overflow user  Corn3lius for helping to answer a question and being awarded a life boat badge: How can I create spoiler text?

Along with his work at Stanford, Katanforoosh is a founding member of deeplearning.ai and co-created the Deep Learning Specialization on Coursera. 

He believes the rapidly expanding capabilities of AI will mean that humans, and especially programmers, will need to learn new skills faster than ever. This doesn't mean machines are going to take our jobs. Rather, with the assistance of AI, humans will become far more capable, learning faster and mastering more domains. 

Not surprisingly, Katanforoosh has built his business with the goal of addressing this issue. Workera aims to help companies identify where their employees lack skills and provide them with personalized instruction that can quickly bring them up to the next level.

You can find Kian on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Stanford's website. 

Thanks to Stack Overflow user PaxDiablo, who was awarded a Life Boat badge for providing a great answer to the question: Given  a month in numeric form, how do you find the first month of its respective quarter? 

Biilmann says we can't ignore the impact GenAI is having on developer productivity.  One of their engineers created a  GPT that automatically generates stories for React + TypeScript components, and after seeing how successful it was internally, Netlify made it open source for the public.

We also chat over the results of their recent State of Web Development survey. The key takeaway is below: 

The 80% of developers that have integrated AI into their workflow are quickly reaping the benefits. Seventy percent report using AI to automate manual and repetitive tasks and 42% are using it to improve internal knowledge sharing and increase productivity, freeing up more time for impactful work and enabling faster launch times. Over 50% of developers also realized new opportunities that AI created, such as generating new web projects with a single prompt or reading API documentation.

However, AI experimentation is not without its own unique challenges. Developers are concerned about receiving incorrect answers and information (65%), security issues and leaking confidential information (52%), a lack of regulation (48%), and a decrease in code quality (45%).

So much opportunity, but plenty of risk as well. 

Last but not least, Biilmann tells us what he's looking forward to in the near future, specifically apps that can reformat their UI on the fly to be more customized to each user. He calls this UI 2.0, and it sounds a bit like what Google showed off in its recent Gemini demo. 

Congrats to our lifeboat winner of the week, Petrus Theron, who answered the question: How can I make a public struct where all fields are public without repeating `pub` for every field?

SPONSORED BY DOIT

The broken nose in jail scam is on the rise. With AI improvements, it’ll get harder to spot. 

OWASP, a non-profit dedicated to software security, tracks the top ten security risks for LLMs.

We’ve spoken with DoiT on the podcast before about LLM hallucinations. 

DoiT’s sales pitch is simple: they provide technology and expertise to clients who want to use the cloud, free of charge, with the big cloud providers paying the bills.

On today’s home team episode, Ben and Ryan discuss the implications of a lapse in section 174 of the tax code. Here’s a great explainer on how it’s affecting startups and software firms, threatening jobs and potentially bankrupting some struggling companies. 

Video game employees are exploring a union and Microsoft recently announced it will stay neutral in the process. 

What’s the difference between a bad game, a low effort developer, and shovelware? Our game development Stack Exchange has some thoughts.

Today’s lifeboat badge winner is “that_other_guy”, who explained: What is the difference between kill and kill -9? Hint, you want to terminate your process, not brutally murder it, ok! 

Does ChatGPT have seasonal depression?

AIs aren’t building apps on their own, at least not yet—but they are helping developers build them. Read Isaac Lyman’s article about the three types of AI-assisted programmers.

ICYMI: Listen to our interview with linguist Gašper Beguš, director of the Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, about how LLMs and humans acquire language. 

Shoutout to Stack Overflow user nhgrif, who earned a Lifeboat badge by rescuing Store only date without time in a database from the ash heap of history.

SPONSORED BY FIREHYDRANT

While FireHydrant is mostly known for their incident management software, they’re introducing Signals to modernize alerting and consolidate it with incident management. 

FireHydrant was born out of an incident where a database was dropped at 5:30pm on a Friday right before network maintenance started. It also led to Robert’s social media handle, Bobby Tables. 

This one time…at band camp…Robert got paged in the middle of trumpet practice…on his sabbatical.

Congrats to Great Question badge winner timdim for asking How can I flush GPU memory using CUDA (physical reset is unavailable)?. 100 people thought it was worth voting for.

Gemini, Google’s new AI model, is great at competitive programming, among other things.

AI Explained is a YouTube channel that covers the latest developments in AI.

One problem with regulating AI is that the technology evolves (much) faster than regulators can.

Wikifunctions is an open repository of code that anyone can use or contribute to.

Did we need another study to tell us that longer commutes are bad for mental health? Probably not, but here’s one anyway.

Are governments spying on you through push notifications? Sounds like it! In fact, push notifications are a privacy nightmare.

CommandBar is a user assistance platform (UAP). Their flagship product, Copilot, is an embedded user assistant agent that companies can configure to help their users with on-demand help, including interactive walkthroughs and personalized responses. 

Read James’s article about why CommandBar built Copilot, then get started with their docs.

Follow James on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Follow CommandBar on LinkedIn and Twitter.

If you’ve ever wondered Why "Yarn 2" is Yarn 3.0.1, Lifeboat badge winner Ilias Karim has your answer.

Do LLMs herald the end of computer programming (as we know it)? A Harvard lecture weighs in on this contentious topic.

An epic hardware bug story.

Question from the academic trenches: How bad will it look to prospective employers if you refuse to defend your PhD? (Answer: Pretty bad.)

Another intriguing question: Were postal pneumatic tubes in Berlin really cleaned with wine?

The Jetsons misled us about many aspects of the future, from flying cars to the role of pneumatics, but they were onto something with the series of tubes.

Before influencers and social media algorithms, there were coolhunters.

Congrats to Stack Overflow user tjati, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering What does 'HTML is escaping' mean?.

As the year winds to a close, some big employers are facing lower-than-expected attrition rates—in other words, fewer people than expected are quitting. What a difference a year or two makes.

People have strong opinions on the return-to-office conversation. Read Eira’s article and let us know how you feel.

We are just beginning to explore the effects of prompting on the capabilities and performance of LLMs.

The Humane AI pin can be described as a cross between two of humanity’s most beloved technologies: Google Glass and the pager.

People are using low-cost drones, 3D printers, and private satellites to preserve irreplaceable cultural heritage sites before they are destroyed or lost to time. (Stay tuned while Eira figures out how to apply this tech as a cemetery tour guide.)

Stack Overflow user FlipperPA earned a Lifeboat badge with their answer to The 'Black' formatter - Python.

Bito AI is an AI coding tool that helps developers work more productively with features like code completion within the IDE and personalized answers drawn from your codebase. Get started with their docs here.

ICYMI: Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is a way of addressing LLM hallucinations and outdated training data.

Listen to our recent episode about how an original architect of Jira is rethinking meaningful engineering metrics.

Connect with Anand on LinkedIn or Twitter.com. 

Shoutout to Stack Overflow user 

Jan Kardaš, whose answer to Go: Retrieve a string from between two characters or other strings earned them a Lifeboat badge.

Cloudflare is a cloud provider used by almost 20% of all websites. Developers new to Cloudflare can get started here.

Cloudflare recently launched Workers AI, an open, pay-as-you-go AI inference-as-a-service platform that lets developers run machine learning models on the Cloudflare network from their own code. Developers can get started here.

On a related note, read Ryan’s article exploring the infrastructure and code behind edge functions or check out his conversation with Vercel CTO Malte Ubl.

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is a strategy that helps address both LLM hallucinations and out-of-date training data.

Connect with Rita on LinkedIn.

Connect with Cassidy through her website.

Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Bamieh, whose answer to What does the function call app.use(cors()) do? earned them a Lifeboat badge.

Sana automates user enrollment, training reminders, and other manual/admin tasks associated with onboarding and learning. Sana AI, their AI assistant, is trained on a company’s data so employees can self-serve the knowledge they need.

On a related note, listen to our interview with Gašper Beguš, director of the Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, about his research into how LLMs and humans acquire language.

You can also read about how Stack Overflow implemented semantic search.

Connect with Joel on LinkedIn.

Stack Overflow user Donagh Hatton received a well-earned Lifeboat badge with their answer to Why is StringBuilder much faster than String?.

SPONSORED BY CHRONOSPHERE

Episode notes:

Chronosphere is introducing Lens, a cloud-native observability tool to view data flows between services. 

At Uber, Rob created M3, an open-source metrics engine compatible with Prometheus.  

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, ralf htp, for their answer to How to read an image in Python OpenCV. 

If you want to meet Rob and the Chronosphere team, they’ll be at AWS re:Invent  from Nov. 27 to Dec. 1.

ICYMI, listen to part one of this conversation.

Craig is the cofounder and CEO of Stacklok, which helps developers and open-source communities build safer software, secure the supply chain, and choose safer dependencies. Stacklok’s free-to-use service, Trusty, employs a statistical analysis of author/repo activity and a package’s source of origin to assess its trustworthiness.

Craig cofounded the Kubernetes project, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Craig is on LinkedIn.

Stack Overflow user mprivat earned a well-deserved Lifeboat badge by answering Abstract class extending concrete classes.

Stacklok helps developers and open-source communities build safer software, secure the supply chain, and choose safer dependencies. Trusty is their free-to-use service that employs a statistical analysis of author/repo activity and a package’s source of origin to assess its trustworthiness.

Craig cofounded the Kubernetes project, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

He is also the former VP of Research and Development at VMWare.

Follow Craig on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Stack Overflow user netcorefan, who earned a Lifeboat badge with their answer to Need a workaround to access ReadOnlySpan inside a function that returns an IEnumerable.

Sleuth helps engineering teams systematically improve efficiency by tracking speed and release quality, preventing slowdowns and bottlenecks, and removing toil and unnecessary friction. Try it for free or see how teams are using Sleuth. Interested in the automations they offer for teams, check out their public marketplace.

Dylan was an original architect on JIRA, so he’s not exactly new to issue- and project-tracking software.

DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) is a research program that tries to understand what drives successful software delivery and operations performance. 

According to Dylan, one thing the best development teams have in common is their culture of continuous learning.

Connect with Dylan on LinkedIn.

Tomasz is a general partner at Theory Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage software companies.

He coauthored the book Winning with Data, a deep dive into how big data has changed business best practices and organizational culture.

Find Tomasz’s writing here.

Follow Tomasz on LinkedIn or Twitter.com.

In honor of Tomasz’s early career, we’re shouting out Johnny Hujol’s answer to What exactly is a container in J2EE and how does it help?.

Giamir is the tech lead for Stacks, Stack Overflow’s design system.

Svelte is a tool for building web apps. Delve into their docs or, if you’re brand-new to Svelte, start with this interactive tutorial.

More than 90,000 devs responded to our 2023 Developer Survey where Svelte was ranked the second-most admired web framework.  

Connect with Giamir via his website or LinkedIn. 

Today we’re shouting out a topical question asked by Félix Paradis, who (like 73,000 others) wanted to know How to pass parameters to on:click in Svelte?.

Alex and cofounder/CTO Paul Querna started ConductorOne because they saw that traditional identity governance (IGA) and privileged access management (PAM) needed to be rethought for cloud-forward companies.

Before he cofounded Conductor One, Alev Bovee was a senior director of product management for zero trust and security at Okta.

Read Ben’s article about how Computers are learning to decode the language of our minds.

Would you trade an iris scan for some crypto? Sure, what could go wrong?

Connect with Alex on LinkedIn.

Stack Overflow user Matthew Watson earned a Lifeboat badge for helping more than 32,000 people by answering Checking if an array is null or empty.

Find out why others have joined Shell. 

Wondering what it’s like to be a developer at one of the world’s biggest energy companies? They’re hiring.

Behavior-driven development is a conceptual approach to software development that calls for collaboration and alignment between developers, testers, and domain experts.

One of the new technologies James and Tristan helped introduce at Shell is Kafka, an open-source distributed event streaming platform. Check out their docs here.

Engineering teams at Shell use Stack Overflow for Teams to capture and share information. Get started for free here.

Congratulations to David Snabel, winner of a Stellar Question badge for How do I see which version of Swift I’m using?.

At Netlify Compose 2023, Biilmann announced their new composable web platform. 

This isn’t Netlify’s first rodeo—we talked to them for episodes 588 and 456.

You can find Matt Biilmann on X or LinkedIn (and perhaps elsewhere). 

Today’s shoutout goes to Dick Lucas who asked a topical question, How to prevent Netlify from treating warnings as errors because process.env.CI = true?, viewed by over 84,000 people.

The company says v0 is intended to author the first draft of your site or app, then help you iterate quickly. It won't mean the end of junior web developers, says Lee, as a polished final draft still requires a human touch. And it's not a low code no code approach, as the system allows you to switch easily between the GenAI approach and the actual code.

You can learn more about v0 here and head over here to join the waitlist.

You can find Lee on LinkedIn or his website.

Congrats to Stack Overflow user Jonathon Reinhart, who earned a Lifeboat badge for answering the question: How can I import a static library in Python?

Listen to our previous episodes with Eliot here and here.

Viam is a software platform for building, monitoring, and managing data from smart machines, including industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, smart home appliances, and IoT devices. Get an overview of the Viam platform or dig into their docs.

Connect with Eliot on LinkedIn.

Three cheers for Stack Overflow user mattl, who won a Great Question badge with How to remove all contents of a directory using Golang?.

CodeWhisperer is an AI coding companion trained on Amazon and open-source code that gives you coding suggestions in real time. 

In addition to being general manager for CodeWhisperer, Doug is also the GM for Amazon CodeGuru Security, which uses machine learning to detect security policy violations and vulnerabilities. 

Connect with Doug on LinkedIn.

Asked and answered: user Manodnya B won a Lifeboat badge for answering Cannot find the Start Button under CodeWhisperer in AWS Toolkit.

Clockwise is a time orchestration platform that optimizes schedules to create more time in your day. Clockwise AI, their new GPT-powered scheduling assistant, is launching in beta. Join the waitlist here to get early access. (They’re also hiring!)

Ryan wrote a recent article about whether meetings are making developers less productive.

Cal Newport’s instant classic Deep Work is about learning to tune out distractions and focus on cognitively demanding tasks.

Speaking of classics, Paul Graham of Y Combinator wrote about maker’s vs. manager’s schedules back in 2009.

Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.

Kudos to Stack Overflow user Joe Caruso, who won a Great Question badge with Get current time in hours and minutes.

California is trying to transform how math is taught. How’s that going?

Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for work that allows scientists to see how electrons move by mapping their positions in an atom. Learn more here and here.

As Ben says, speaking of things that are difficult to observe and don’t make a lot of sense, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is on trial for a historically huge amount of fraud. Follow the live trial blog from Wired or check out their explainer.

Starting next year, Unity is charging developer fees. We explore the back and forth as they try to find a solution that works for the company and the community.

Shoutout to user vasco, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering How to test abstract class in Java with JUnit?.

If you want to hear more of her work, check out Alexandra’s Instagram. 

She uses Tidal Cycles and Supercollider to make algorithms that get people to dance. 

Interested in algoraves? You may be able to find one near you or run your own. 

Check out Alexandra in her ad for Logitech, then check out her favorite keyboard

. 

Ben is watching AI Explained, a YouTube channel that covers the latest AI developments and their implications. 

Read Ryan’s article ​​Do large language models know what they are talking about?.

Is language really unique to humans? New research suggests maybe not.

Not for the first time, Ryan recommends the work of Noam Chomsky: Why Only Us: Language and Evolution, an evolutionary account of language acquisition in humans written with Robert C. Berwick.

OverflowAI search is now available for alpha testing. Learn more here.

Good news for your cable clutter: Apple is switching to USB-C charging ports. Here’s when.

The WGA (Writers Guild of America) strike ended with an agreement that “allows for artificial intelligence as a tool, not a replacement,” but the arguments about creativity, copyright, and AI are far from over.

If you’re interested in working with PHP, head over to the PHP Collective and check out conversations like Most useful new PHP features for version 8?.

pgnanalyze helps users deliver consistent PostgreSQL performance and availability at any scale. Get started with a free trial or explore their docs. You can also find them on YouTube, where Lukas posts a weekly show called 5mins of Postgres.

Lukas was a founding engineer of Citus Data. Citus is an open-source extension to PostgreSQL that was eventually acquired by Microsoft. Find them on GitHub.

If you’re new to the topic, SQL (Structured Query Language) is a language for querying databases, introduced in the 1970s. 

Find Lukas on LinkedIn, Twitter, or GitHub.

Check out Luyang’s work at his website or in this Youtube playlist. 

To make these animations, Luyang uses Processing, a 20-year-old language that started out as a visual way to teach programming but evolved into a professional development tool. 

Logitech selected Luyang as one of the ambassadors to show off what you can do with their MX Keys S Combo. 

Shout out to George Profenza for dropping a top answer on Position of a vector in coordinate system (Processing/p5.js).

If you missed the first part of our conversation with Chris, listen to it here.

Modular’s new programming language, Mojo, is built for AI developers. Check out their docs or find them on GitHub.

Connect with Chris on LinkedIn. 

Shoutout to user DanielGibbs, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering what is the difference between getType() and getClass() in java?.

Modular built a new programming language, Mojo, for AI developers. Explore their docs or find them on GitHub.

Chris is on LinkedIn. 

Congratulations to user Shengyuan Lu, whose answer to Priority queue ordering of elements merited a Lifeboat badge.

If you missed the first part of this conversation, listen to it here.

Replit is a browser-based IDE (integrated development environment). Check out their blog or start coding.

ICYMI: Stack Overflow recently implemented semantic search, allowing users to search using natural language.

Explore Stack Overflow Labs to learn more about OverflowAI and other projects.

Amjad Masad is on LinkedIn, Twitter, and GitHub.

Congratulations to Stack Overflow user macxpat, whose answer to How to install Linux packages in Replit earned a Lifeboat badge.

Replit is a browser-based IDE (integrated development environment). See what they’re up to on their blog or just start coding.

RIP Google Wave, one of the greats.

Find Amjad on LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, or via his website.

After founding two companies, including StrongDM, a dynamic management access platform (explore their docs here), Elizabeth took a “break” by co-authoring a book. 

Founder vs Investor: The Honest Truth About Venture Capital from Startup to IPO is about what she learned as a founder and executive about the founder-investor relationship. Order it on Bookshop or Amazon.

Elizabeth’s co-author is investor and advisor Jerry Neumann, managing director of Neu Venture Capital.

One option for your next weekend outing: a ride and tie.

Connect with Elizabeth on LinkedIn.

Connect with Jerry Neumann on LinkedIn.

Nice work: User Reap’s answer to Get String Name from Enum in C# earned them a Lifeboat badge.

Gašper’s work combines machine learning, statistical modeling, neuroimaging, and behavioral experiments “to better understand how neural networks learn internal representations in speech and how humans learn to speak.”

One thing that surprised him about generative adversarial networks (GANs)? How innovative they are, capable of generating English words they’ve never heard before based on words they have.

Read about how AI is restoring a stroke survivor’s ability to speak.

Universal grammar proposes a hypothetical structure in the brain responsible for humans’ innate language abilities. The concept is credited to the famous linguist Noam Chomsky; read his take on GenAI.

AI expert Yoshua Bengio recently signed an open letter asking AI labs to pause the training of AI systems powerful enough to pass the Turing test. Read about his reasoning.

Find the Berkeley Speech and Communication Network here.

Find Gašper on his website, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Or dive into his research.

Congratulations to Lifeboat badge winner and self-proclaimed data nerd John Rotenstein, who saved How can I delete files older than seven days in Amazon S3? from the ignominy of ignorance.

Zapier is a no-code automation platform that allows users to create custom workflows for their critical work apps. Learn how it works, peruse the blog, or sign up to try beta AI features.

Check out Reid’s article about how to write more effective AI prompts.

Zapier built a natural language actions (NLA) API to enable AI models to independently use natural language to complete Zapier actions.

You know the doge, but do you know the dog? RIP Balltze.

Find Reid on LinkedIn and the social network formerly known as Twitter.

Find Kyle on LinkedIn, GitHub, and text-based social media.

Stack Overflow’s Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) focus on aspects of employees’ personhood, “who you are outside of your role, who you bring to every single room that you enter,” Joey explains. Among our ERGs are Black and Brown, LGBTQ+, MIND (mental illness and neurodiversity), and a group for caregivers and parents. Interested in learning more about our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, plus more about what it’s like to work at Stack Overflow? Start here.

Members of Stack’s MIND ERG contributed invaluable perspective, insights, and feedback that helped us write our two-parter on ADHD and neurodiversity: Developer with ADHD? You’re not alone and What developers with ADHD want you to know.

Joey is on LinkedIn.

Natasha is also on LinkedIn.

Kyle is on Linked, GitHub, and text-based social media.

Stack Overflow user apostofes earned a Great Question badge for their query How do I get the value of a tensor in PyTorch?, which has helped 175,000 people and counting.

Rockset is a real-time search and analytics database. Explore their docs and developer tools here.

We here at Stack Overflow recently implemented our own vector search. Here’s a technical deep dive into how we did it. 

Louis is on LinkedIn.

Three cheers for Lifeboat badge winner user7610, who rescued C++ application terminates with 143 exit code. What does it mean? with a solid answer.

Sorcero uses a mix of natural language processing, generative AI, and even more old school symbolic AI, where they craft their own ontologies, to try and ingest that river of new medical data and make it easier to search and comprehend. 

Less than 0.2% of the global population can read a medical paper! AI can help make these dense works up to 700x more readable. 

Medical Affairs Teams are the groups inside big pharmaceutical companies that helps surface the right information to health providers. It’s hard for them to keep up with the thousands of new articles and research papers being published each month, much less unpack that information. 

Connect with Dipanwita Das and Hellmut Adolphs on LinkedIn. 

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner John Carrell for saving the question Self join vs. inner join with an excellent answer. 

Last month, we announced the launch of OverflowAI from the stage of WeAreDevelopers. To learn more about AI-driven products and features in the works, check out Stack Overflow Labs. 

Among the projects Alex works on is a semantic search API and the new search experience on Stack Overflow for Teams.

LLMs can be vulnerable to jailbreak attacks like the napalm grandma exploit.

Kyle is on GitHub, Linked, and text-based social media.

Michael is on LinkedIn.

Alex is on LinkedIn.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Pushpendra, who scooped Error: Invalid postback or callback argument from a churning ocean of ignorance. 

SPONSORED BY DISCOVER FINANCIAL SERVICES

Go deeper into Technology at Discover. 

If your interested in working on an event-driven architecture that uses domain-driven design within a financial organization, check out jobs.discover.com.

Connect with Paul on LinkedIn.

. 

The mission of Night Shift Development is to democratize data analytics to help organizations and users of all skill levels understand their data. Their flagship product, ClearQuery, is a data intelligence and analytics platform designed for nontechnical users. 

ClearQuery has a free version that lets you try out the full array of features. Learn how it works and register here to get started, gratis.

Learn how Stack Overflow implemented semantic search to allow users to search using natural language.

Read about why self-healing code is the future of software development.

Tim is on LinkedIn. 

Thanks and congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Boann, whose answer to Sort four numbers without an array has been viewed 23,000 times and counting.

Vlad is Head of Research and Development at Siemens Healthineers, the healthcare arm of tech conglomerate Siemens. He wrote about SRE on our blog here.

His book, Establishing SRE Foundations: A Step-by-Step Guide to Introducing Site Reliability Engineering in Software Delivery Organizations, is available now. 

Site reliability engineering (SRE) applies a software engineering approach to IT operations and infrastructure, with the goal of building scalable, reliable systems capable of handling constant updates from dev teams. SRE is closely related to DevOps.

ICYMI, we talked with Chef cofounder Adam Jacob about how he’s creating a new-and-improved approach to infrastructure automation. Listen to that conversation here.

Connect with Vlad on LinkedIn, where you can also read snippets of his book on SRE.

Lifeboat badge winner Abbas Galiyakotwala’s answer to How do I split a comma-separated string? filled a void of ignorance with a little extra knowledge.

Twilio is a customer engagement platform whose communication APIs for voice, text, chat, email, and video are used by millions of developers. See what’s happening on their blog, dig into their docs, or check out their Stack Overflow Collective.

This summer, Twilio announced CustomerAI, which applies the power of LLMs to the rich troves of customer data that flows through Twilio’s platform. Learn more here.

ICYMI: From the stage of WeAreDevelopers, Stack Overflow announced a roadmap for integrating GenAI into our public platform and paid offerings. Check out Stack Overflow Labs to see what we’re working on.

Also ICYMI: Listen to our conversation with Jody about his path from physics to sales to programming and what drew him to working at Stack Overflow.

Register for SIGNAL 2023, Twilio’s customer and developer conference, happening virtually and for free on August 23, 2023. Attendees can expect a deep dive into AI and how it’s revolutionizing customer experience technology.

Connect with Kathryn on LinkedIn or the social network formerly known as Twitter.

Connect with Jody on LinkedIn. 

Three cheers for Lifeboat badge winner blackgreen, who swooped in to save How can I write a generic function that accepts any numerical type? from the howling void of ignorance.

Find out why others have joined Shell. 

If you want to experience being a developer at one of the world’s largest energy companies, they’re hiring.

Amber Webb is on LinkedIn.

Naresh Kumar is on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Tomasz Kula, today’s Lifeboat badge winner, for dropping some knowledge on Multiple components binding with the same reactive form control update issue and saving it from ruin. 

Sean hosts Partially Redacted, a podcast about data privacy, security, and compliance.

He also hosts the podcast Software Engineering Daily, which features technical interviews on everything from the ethics of GPTs to cloud-native search and WebAssembly. Start with the recent episode Surviving ChatGPT with Christian Hubicki (of Survivor fame).

You can also read about how he crowdsourced a behavioral model for Survivor.

Sean spent four years working in developer relations (DevRel) at Google. Here’s a Software Engineering Daily episode about the role DevRel plays at Google.

Connect with Sean on LinkedIn or Twitter (I mean, X), or check out his website.

Kudos to Great Question badge winner Kai Sellgren for asking How to remove an element from a vector given the element?.

You can learn more about OverflowAI and sign up to be an alpha tester here.

You can check out Ellen and Jody on Linkedin. 

Congrats to Ben Lindsay, who was awarded a Lifeboat badge for his answer to: How can I divide each element in a tuple by a single integer?

Pablo is a Python core developer, Steering Council member, and release manager of Python 3.10 and 3.11. He’s currently a senior software engineer at Bloomberg.

Looking for a comprehensive guide to contributing to Python? The Python Developer’s Guide is the place to start.

The Zen of Python is a list of the language’s guiding principles, including, “There should be one—and preferably only one—obvious way to do it.”

Find Pablo on LinkedIn, Twitter, and GitHub.

Find Kyle, a senior software engineer on Stack Overflow’s public platform, on Linked, Twitter, and GitHub.

Pablo is a Python core developer, Steering Council member, and release manager of Python 3.10 and 3.11. He splits this work 50/50 with his day job as a senior software engineer at Bloomberg.

An astrophysicist by training, he did his PhD on rotating black holes.

Whether you’re a new contributor or a seasoned veteran, the Python Developer’s Guide is a comprehensive guide to contributing to Python.

Pablo is on LinkedIn, Twitter, and GitHub.

Kyle is also on Linked, Twitter, and GitHub.

Shoutout to Inquisitive Badge winner trever for asking well-received questions on 30 separate days.

DoIT’s sales pitch is simple: they provide technology and expertise to clients who want to use the cloud, free of charge, with the big cloud providers paying the bills.

You can check out Sascha’s writing on machine learning on his Medium blog.  

Connect with him on LinkedIn or subscribe to his YouTube channel

.

Cat’s research centers on the socio-cognitive factors and processes that help people learn and succeed. In her role as director of Pluralsight Flow’s Developer Success Lab, she studies what makes software teams thrive and shares that research with the community so teams can learn from her findings.

In a recent report, the Dev Success Lab explored how visibility can encourage higher-performing teams and better business outcomes.

Pluralsight is an education platform for software developers. Pluralsight Flow, their software delivery intelligence platform, is designed to eliminate developer friction and wasted time.

Cat is on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is Kent Kostelac, who gave a terrific answer to One-line if-else in C#.

ICYMI, listen to our episode with Agile pioneer Jim Highsmith: The meeting that changed how we build software (Ep. 579).

Explore Connell’s website or his talks.

Connell will be speaking at DDD East Midlands again this year: October 7, 2023 (with apologies to our British listeners for the date format). 

He’s also on GitHub, Twitter, and Stack Overflow (naturally).

Thanks to Connell for answering his own question: Why does this SelectMany perform several SQL queries instead of a single join?.

Netlify’s all-in-one development platform gives devs access to build, deploy, and backend services for websites and web apps. Get started with their docs.

Jamstack is a web development architecture based on JavaScript, APIs, and Markup (the JAM in Jamstack). Learn what Jamstack is and what benefits it offers.

Composable architecture has been called “the next big thing” in web development. Netlify defines it as “a development approach [that] provides the ability to more rapidly build technology stacks by making use of logically separated reusable and customizable components.”

Dana is on LinkedIn.

Warm congrats to Lifeboat badge winner hasectic saif, who rescued the question How can I print to standard error in C with 'printf'? from an answerless void.

VerseProp is a digital real estate platform where users can buy, sell, and rent virtual properties.

New to the concept of digital real estate? The Motley Fool has a useful primer for you.

If you need to brush up on your investment terms, a supercycle is “a sustained period of expansion, usually driven by robust growth in demand for products and services.”

Joel is on LinkedIn.

Will is on LinkedIn.

Follow VerseProp on Twitter, where the team welcomes questions.

Today’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to Omar, for helping 44,000 people and counting with their answer to Event handlers on Message box buttons.

Our 2023 Developer Survey explored AI’s benefits for developers. Read about the results here.

For more WWDC talk, listen to our episode from last month: Chatting with Apple at WWDC: Macros in Swift and the new visionOS (Ep. 578).

Squarespace is acquiring Google Domains.

Congratulations to Bruno Brant, who won a Lifeboat badge for answering Where can I view LINQ source code?.

While he’s been the dean of the School of Computer Science since 2019, Martial started his career at Carnegie Mellon University way back in 1984. 

Ben covered LIDAR inventor Velodyne while at the Verge, while Martial has LIDAR’s ancestor, the laser rangefinder, which was state of the art in 1986. 

Martial’s area of research is in computer vision and perception for autonomous systems. Since 1985, he’s been a part of 388 publications. 

Congrats to Lifeboat winner mx0 for their answer to the question “How to use a reserved keyword in pydantic model?”

Software might not be top of mind when you think of an energy company like Shell, but software engineering powers a lot of what they do. The tech stack includes React, Golang, Python, GraphQL, MongoDB, Kafka, and the list goes on. The experience their developers have at work is a priority for the organization and its leaders. 

Episode notes:

Find out why others have joined Shell. 

If you want to experience what being a developer at one of the world’s largest energy companies looks like, they’re hiring.

You can connect with Abhai on LinkedIn. 

Congrats to this episode’s lifeboat badge winner, CertainPerformance, for their answer to 

Convert different strings to snake_case in JavaScript

. You saved the question and got some shinies for your profile. 

Adam is the cofounder and former CTO of Chef, which provides DevOps automation tools that help configure, deploy, and manage application infrastructure, including security and compliance.

Adam’s new venture, System Initiative, reimagines infrastructure-as-code as collaborative, open-source software. See what they’re up to on their blog, starting with Adam’s article DevOps without papercuts.

If you’re interested in playing with a developer build of System Initiative, submit your information here. You can also join System Initiative on Discord (and keep an eye on their open positions).

Connect with Adam on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Sofy is a no-code test automation platform for mobile apps. SofySense is their OpenAI-powered AI assistant. See what they’re up to on their blog or check out their open roles.

One of the biggest challenges in testing is deciding whether to use mock or live data. 

Interested in reading about how Stack Overflow is building up our test coverage?

Syed is on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Todd A. Jacobs for interceding between the question How can I check whether a string is an integer in Ruby? and the relentless march of time.

CodiumAI plugs into your IDE and suggests meaningful test suites as you code. See what they’re up to on their blog or scope out their open roles. You can also follow them on Twitter.

Connect with Kyle on Linked, Twitter, or GitHub.

Connect with Itamar on LinkedIn.

Today’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to Héctor M. for answering Convert a string to a Boolean in C#. Thanks for spreading some knowledge.

Interested in trying Duet? You can get on the waitlist here.

You can learn more about tuning and deploying your own version of Google’s foundation models in their Generative AI studio.

If tuning your own model sounds overwhelming, you can head to Model Garden, where a wide selection of open-source and third-party models are available to try.

Marcos is on LinkedIn.

Jim is a pioneering software developer who was one of 17 original signatories to the Agile Manifesto. 

His first engineering job was on a little NASA program you may have heard of: Project Apollo.

His latest book is Wild West to Agile: Adventures in software development evolution and revolution; get your copy here.

Find Jim on LinkedIn or his website.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is nCod3d for answering How can I find how many useful digits are in any given a number N?. Thanks for spreading some knowledge.

Our guests today are Christopher Thielen, product manager for languages and frameworks at Apple, and Josh Shaffer, a Senior Director of Software at Apple with a focus on Swift frameworks. 

We discuss the introduction of Swift Macros, improving widgets with App Intents, and some of the new paradigms for crafting apps in visionOS.

If you want to get the full picture of all the updates Apple announced for software developers, you can watch this year’s State of the Union or dive into particulars with 175 different videos focused on key elements of the announcements.

MosaicML is a platform for training and deploying large AI models at scale. Explore their docs, check out their blog, and keep an eye on their open roles.

Jonathan Frankle is the Chief Scientist at MosaicML and an incoming Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvard.

Abhinav Venigalla is the NLP Architect at MosaicML.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is singmotor for rescuing How to remove columns with too many missing values in Python from the dustbin of history.

Rebuy is an AI-powered personalization platform. Check out their developer hub, explore case studies, or keep up with their blog.

Cameron is a PhD student in computer science and member of the OptimaLab at Rice University. 

Autonomous agents are AI-powered programs that can create tasks for themselves in response to a given objective. They “can create tasks for themselves, complete tasks, create new tasks, reprioritize their task list, complete the new top task, and loop until their objective is reached,” according to one beginner’s guide to autonomous agents.

Follow Cameron’s work on Twitter or Substack, or his website. Read his publications here.

This week’s Lifeboat badge honoree is Mark Setchell for sharing their knowledge with the world: I need to convert a fixed-width file to 'comma-delimited' in Unix.

Joonko is an automated diversity recruiting layer named for Japanese mountain climber ​​Junko Tabei, the first woman to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. You can learn about their talent pool, keep up with their blog, or check out their open positions.

ICYMI, read our blog post about how the recent tech layoffs have had a disproportionate impact on women, people of color, and immigrants.

Connect with Ilit on LinkedIn.

This week’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to pppery for their answer to Why use positional-only parameters in Python 3.8+?.

Angular is an open-source web framework used by millions of developers. Explore the Angular community. 

Miško is currently CTO at Builder, an API-driven, drag-and-drop headless CMS with a visual editor. Explore their docs or see what they’re up to on their blog.

Builder’s full-stack web framework is Qwik, which just reached 1.0.

Let Miško walk you through why Hydration is Pure Overhead.

ICYMI, listen to our episode with Builder CEO Steve Stewell.

Connect with Miško on LinkedIn, Twitter, or GitHub. You can also check out his website.

This week’s Lifeboat badge is awarded to ORION for their answer to Unicode symbol that represents "download".

Pierre-Étienne’s interest in computing began with the functional programming language OCaml, created by Xavier Leroy. Before OCaml, Pierre-Étienne explains, “everyone thought functional programming was doomed to be extremely slow.”

Pijul is a free, open-source distributed version control system. You can get started here. Want a GitHub-like interface? Find it here.

Read the article that led to this conversation: Beyond Git: The other version control systems developers use. 

Pierre-Étienne is currently working on a new project with the creators of the open-source game engine Godot. We hosted Godot cofounder and lead developer Juan Linietsky on the podcast a few months back; listen here.

Nix is a package management and system configuration tool. Learn how it works or explore the NixOS community. 

Connect with Pierre-Étienne on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Rachit for answering Passing objects between fragments.

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 朕會功夫 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: 

• Flaky Tests: Finding and fixing unpredictable and harmful test cases
• Database Testing: Automatically testing relational database schemas
• Web Testing: Detecting and repairing poor responsive web page layout

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. 

Episode notes

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. 

Over the past five years, Intuit went through a total cloud transformation—they closed the data centers, built out a modern SaaS development environment, and got cloud native with foundational building blocks like containers and Kubernetes. Now they are looking to continue transforming into an AI-driven organization that leverages the data they have to make their customers’ lives easier. Along the way, they realized that their internal systems have the same requirements to leverage the data they have for AI-driven insights. 

Episode notes

Wadher notes that Intuit uses development velocity, not developer velocity. The thinking is that an engineering org should focus on shipping products and features faster, not making individual devs more productive. 

No, the robots aren’t coming for your jobs. Wadher says their AI strategy relies on helping experts make better insights. The goal is to arm those experts, not replace them. 

In terms of sheer volume, the AI/ML program at Intuit is massive. They make 58 billion ML predictions daily, enable 730 million AI-driven customer interactions every year, and maintain over two million personalized AI models. 

Intuit’s not here to hoard secrets. They’ve outsourced their DevOps pipeline tool, Argo. They found that a lot of companies used it for AI and data pipelines, and have recently launched Numaproj, which open sources a lot of the tools and capabilities that they use internally. 

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner Bill Karwin for their answer to Understanding MySQL licensing. 

If you want to read more about Jessica, you can check out the blog we worked on together for the launch of our Overflow Offline initiative. If you've ever wondered what it's like learning to code from an XML file of raw Stack Overflow data, be sure to check this episode out.

You can learn more about the Supreme Court case that led to Jessica's release here.

Her company's mission is to build a better justice system from the inside, specifically by educating incarcerated individuals so they can teach the next generation and have valuable skills upon release. Read more about Unlocked Labs here.

Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to mx0 for answering the question: How do you extract the 'src' attribute from an 'img' tag using Beautiful Soup?

Follow Ben on Twitter and if you enjoy the show, be sure to leave us a rating and review.

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. 

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.

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:

• API-based infrastructure that is native to your tech stack
• Works with any frontend or backend
• Build with your own data, like product catalogs or customer data platforms, to create rich, dynamic experiences

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"? 

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. 

Episode notes

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#? 

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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. 

Show notes

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.

Over the years Homebrew, an open source package manager, has emerged as the project with the greatest number of individual contributors. Despite all that, it’s creator Max Howell, couldn’t make a living off the occasional charity of the millions of people who used the software he built. This XKCD cartoon is probably the most frequently repeated joke on the podcast over the last three years.

While he is not a crypto bull, Max was inspired with a solution for the open source funding dilemma  by his efforts to buy and sell an NFT. A contract written in code and shared in public enforced a rule sending a portion of his proceeds to the digital objects original creator. What if the same funding mechanism could be applied to open source projects? 

In March of 2022, Max and his co-founder launched Tea, a sort of spirtual successor to Homebrew. It has a lot of new features Max wanted in a package manager, plus a blockchain based approach to ensuring that creators, maintainers, and contributors of open source software can all get paid for their efforts. 

You can read Max’s launch post on Tea here and yes, of course there is a white paper. Follow him on Twitter here.

Eric explains that great jobs are available for developers in Japan, but it can be tough to find these opportunities.

We talk about interesting startups that are gaining traction in the Japanese tech sector (like Visual Alpha, Treasure Data, and Exawizards, to name a few examples of companies on the Japan Dev platform).

Matt is impressed to learn Japan Dev generates an average of $60,000/month in revenue.

Eric reflects on starting Japan Dev as a side project while he was employed full-time as an engineer.

Eric elaborates on why he doesn’t think venture capital is a good fit for Japan Dev.

Night owls unite! Eric says that his most productive hours are between midnight to 4AM.

Follow Matt and Eric.

Episode notes:

The team questions whether a print out of 60-90 days worth of code is the right benchmark for whether to lay someone off. 

Ben gives our podcast  listeners a heads up to reports of repo jacking on GitHub (who got ahead of the issue quickly).

We reflect on whether or not we’re okay with generative AI—and question tradeoffs between copyright and the ability for more people to create stuff.

Ben discusses how his internet browser might be becoming his second brain.

Matt and Cassidy get props from Ben for their rising popularity on Stack Overflow’s YouTube channel.

Follow Ben, Matt, and Cassidy.

When most people talk about Web3 or cryptocurrencies and related technologies, they usually mean blockchains. But blockchain is only the first generation of distributed ledger technology (DLT). As with any new technology, once people see how it works, new generations come along rapidly to address the faults in the previous ones. 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan chat with Matt Woodward, head of developer relations at Swirlds Labs. Swirlds Labs created the Hedera ecosystem, a DLT built on a hashgraph, not a blockchain. We chat about what the difference is between a blockchain and a hashgraph, Hedera’s focus on environmental sustainability, and why the Web3 version of “Hello, World!” takes a little more effort. 

Show notes

Hedera’s hashgraph is a third-generation DLT: it’s an open-source consensus algorithm and a data structure that uses a direct acyclic graph and two novel inventions, the gossip about gossip protocol and virtual voting. 

Where Bitcoin can only handle between three and seven transactions per second, a hashgraph can support upwards of 10,000. 

There’s been a lot of talk about the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies. Woodward says that a single Bitcoin transaction uses 1000kW-hours—the equivalent of driving a Tesla Model S 5,500 km—while Hedera uses 160 MW-hours of energy per year, about 2.5 million times less.

Congrats to the winner of a Stellar Question badge, g.revolution, for their question What is an anti-pattern? 100 users saved it for later. 

Find out more about Hedera and hit the start button. 

Connect with Matt, Ben, or Ryan on Twitter.

Shoemaker spent his childhood in Silicon Valley and learned Assembly when he was just 16 years old.

In his early 20s, he applied to work at Apple and was continually rejected. So he went to work for seven startups instead.

Finally, in 2009, Shoemaker ended up at Apple overseeing the review process for the App Store.

After seven years at Apple, Phillip became interested in cryptocurrency after discovering his personal information on the dark web.

His interest grew in the topic of self sovereign identities, which led him to become CEO and co-founder of Identity.com.

Phillip and Ben reflect on the utility of Web3 in gaming.

Follow Ben and Phillip.

Thank you to lifeboat badge winner Marchingband for their answer to the question about running C or C++ code from Node.js in an efficient way.

In today’s podcast, Matt, Ceora, and Cassidy reflect on Cara’s founder journey.

Cara shares her experiences living in New York and San Francisco— and why she and her co-founder ultimately located Stashpad in North Carolina.

She elaborates on the exact steps that she took to pivot her startup following limited initial interest in V1 of the product.

Despite being in the Bay Area and working at Twilio, she was struggling to meet people because her full brain power was going to her products.

She shares what it was like for her and her co-founder to hire Stashpad’s first employees.

The group discusses Stashpad’s pathway to monetization in the context of developers wanting free tools.

Follow, Ceora, Matt, Cassidy, and Cara.

Marchingband gets today’s lifeboat badge for their answer to the question about running C or C++ code from Node.js in an efficient way.