The Stack Exchange Podcast

If you're interested in learning a bit of BBC Basic, there is a fun introduction here. You can tweet at this bot, and it will run the contents as code and reply with a video of the results. If you are interested in life-logging and want to see it done with a lot of very pretty graphs, check out this post, My Year in Data. Last but not least we chat about Svelte, which lets you create "cybernetically enhanced web apps." Shout to Murali, a listener who suggested this topic. Our lifeboat of the week goes to koekenbakker for answering the question:  R plots: Is there a way to draw a border, shadow or buffer around text labels?    

You can find the first episode of the SO podcast here. It was conducted over Asterix, open source telephony software that allowed for fancy operations like voice messaging and recording calls!  What would social software look like if we designed them to remove commerce and popularity? Are services like Mightybell an interesting example of where we might be headed? If you want to build a model of something - say traffic patterns in your town or a hypothetical zombie invasion - you should check out a new project Joel is involved in, Hash.ai.    

There is a nice breakdown of the Solarigate attack here, but the most important thing to know is that just seeing the words BusinessLayer.dll is enough to make our eyes glaze over and our defenses go down. One interesting second order effect of this intrusion is that it will be difficult to know when all malicious code and access has really been removed. It brought to mind the classic Turing Award Lecture, Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson.  If you're trying to entertain kids over the holidays, Ben will be messing around with Roblox, which lets you create your own mini-games and has several hooks to deeper programming capabilities. Our Lifeboat badge winner this week is Chinito, who answered the question of how you can: Set style using pure JavaScript

There is a nice breakdown of the Solarigate attack here, but the most important thing to know is that just seeing the words BusinessLayer.dll is enough to make our eyes glaze over and our defenses go down. One interesting second order effect of this intrusion is that it will be difficult to know when all malicious code and access has really been removed. It brought to mind the classic Turing Award Lecture, Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson.  If you're trying to entertain kids over the holidays, Ben will be messing around with Roblox, which lets you create your own mini-games and has several hooks to deeper programming capabilities. Our Lifeboat badge winner this week is Chinito, who answered the question of how you can: Set style using pure JavaScript

With Bitcoin hitting all time highs, there has been a lot of speculation about what will happen next in the market crypto market. Meanwhile, regulators are targeting Ripple with a lawsuit and arguing that crypto isn't really a currency after all.  You have until Jan, 4, 2021 to participate in our annual Winter Bash. By answering questions on Stack Overflow and across Stack Exchange, you can unlock some unique digital flair for your avatar. Don't forget to tune in the first day of the new year for episode 300 of the podcast, we booked a very special guest. Check out this episode to learn more..  

There is a lot to think about when designing trading algorithms, especially in the world of cryptocurrency, where prices can be extremely volatile and limited liquidity means a single trader moving big volume can have a hefty influence on price. Bitcoin is at a record breaking price these days, but investing in it is not for the faint of heart. To learn more, we chat with Li, who is a software engineer at Coinbase. You can find her on Twitter here. If you're interested in learning more about Bitcoin, we would have to recommend Bitcoin Developer. After all, they were kind enough to recommend our Bitcoin Stack Exchange as a key resource. 

You can read more about Javascriptlandia here. It is part of larger conversation happening on Google's Open Source Blog and through initiatives like Github allowing corporations into their Sponsors program. For a delightfully old school and interactive website about Myles, click here. For his Twitter, go here. You can find Jory's website here and her Twitter presence here. This week's lifeboat badge goes to Marijn van Vliet for answering the question: How do I return a char array from a function?

You can find the original tweet here. AWS will work with them on publicity and open source their version so that there can be a flow of value in both directions.  You can learn more about Tim's company, Checkly.hq, which works on active monitoring for developers.  The team there also works on  Headless Recorder, a Chrome extension that records your browser interactions and generates a Playwright or Puppeteer script.  They also operate The Headless Dev, which helps coders learn Playwright and Puppeteer.  This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Ravindra Bagale for answering the question:  How to Convert Integer to Character Array using C

As promised, here is the grass hat. You can find out more about Earthly here. We spend a little time talking about Nix OS the operating system you can roll back if you don't like a patch. Raise your hand if you remember learning computer science with Turbo Pascal. Maybe you didn't know, but discs aren't as slow as people think. Adam's recent episode is about upending common assumptions on IO performance.  Shoutout to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, Josh Smift, for answering the question: How to delete *.web files only if they exist.  

You can read about GraphQL here and Apollo here.  Cassidy Williams, who curates our newsletter, wrote about her experience as an early adopter of the technology last summer. You can find more on Meteor here.  Schmidt also helped  create Monument,  which he describes as "an affordable live/work art event space in downtown San Francisco. The upstairs is 24 private bedrooms and studio spaces and the downstairs is a 200+ capacity person event venue and makerspace. Our goal is to connect creative people across different fields, and in particular build bridges between art and technology."  

Gone in a Flash. Actually it took quite a while. Adobe explains its decision to stop supporting Flash here. You can learn more about Ruffle, the Flash emulator written in Rust, here. Here are some tips on writing a developer resume from a hiring manager who's written an entire book on the topic. You can read more about the Supreme Court case considering the limits of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act here and here Our Lifeboat badge of the week goes to a user named simply 4386427, who answered the most basic and frustrating question: why does “printf” not work?

You can find more about Resner here.  Learn more about the topics we discussed by following some of Resner's suggested links below:  People to follow on Twitter: Safyia Noble, Ruha Benjamin, and Kamal Sinclair. Ellen Pao and Project Include. Eli Pariser and New Public by Civic Signals.

You can read more about the operating systems and business principles schools are adopting from their corporate sponsors here. You can read about the latest version of Tailwind and what it has to offer here.   

You can find Ferdinandi's post and video here. 12 years ago, back when Stack Overflow was a brand new site with just a few thousand users, someone asked a basic question: What is the difference between a framework and a library? FreeCodeCamp has its own take on this question with a pretty interesting answer. "When you use a library, you are in charge of the flow of the application. You are choosing when and where to call the library. When you use a framework, the framework is in charge of the flow. It provides some places for you to plug in your code, but it calls the code you plugged in as needed." There was no Lifeboat badge to call out this week, so we honored a Lifejacket winner instead. Shout out to Andreas for answering the queston: Are byte arrays initialised to zero in Java?

You can find out more about Sir Berners-Lee's work on Solid here. Other topics discussed in this episode:  Docker puts a limit on free containers. That has to be good for the environment. But is it also good for Docker and the future of its products? Sometimes, forcing yourself to make something worth purchasing  helps drive innovation.  The Tao of Programming isn't new, and some of its technical references are a bit out of date. But it's still good for a laugh and little bit of enlightenment-lite. Are you interested in putting on your own drone light show? Intel offers options to fit a range of budgets.  This week's lifeboat badge goes to JCL for answering the question: C# compiler: CS0121: The call is ambiguous between the following methods or properties.

You can learn more about the Power of 10 here.  TIOBE's latest index can be found here. Our lifeboat of the week goes to lealceldeiro for answering the question: What does the multi: true attribute of HTTP_INTERCEPTORS mean?

Paul spent the weekend building a parser, cause who doesn't? He needed a Regex, found one on Stack Overflow, looked over the characters, and realized this is not the way to get folks interested or excited about code. "You come across a problem and you think to yourself, I know I'll use a regular expression. Now you have two problems."  This sets Sara off on a tangent about CSS. What's wrong with CSS in her opinion. Well, all of it. She shares a few thoughts on how it could have been built right.  Ben dives into the endless annoyances Bluetooth has been bringing to his life recently. When you have four people in a family sharing six mobile devices and five sets of headphones, audio signals are constantly getting piped to the wrong ears. Now his car wants to connect. When Bluetooth tells you it's forgetting a device, how come it never keeps it promise? Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Zero Piraeus for answering the question: Why must dictionary keys be immutable? He provided his answer in the form an elegant short essay, and it's definitely worth checking out.

You can find Sai's videos here. Come for the deep dives on Docker, stay for the live lightboard  magic. Yes, I know what the comments say, but no, he isn't writing backwards.  Sai also does a lot of work around OpenShift, the containerization software products created by Red Hat. He talks about what the tie up between IBM and Red Hat has been like and how the enterprise is increasingly learning to work with open source.  Our lifeboat badge of the week goes to Alex for explaining why you're Getting this as undefined when using arrow function. If you want to find more from Sai, you can follow him on Twitter here.      

Pawel Skolski wrote this definition of the SPA in 2016. "A single-page application is an app that works inside a browser and does not require page reloading during use. You are using these type of applications every day. These are, for instance: Gmail, Google Maps, Facebook or GitHub. SPAs are all about serving an outstanding UX by trying to imitate a “natural” environment in the browser — no page reloads, no extra wait time. It is just one web page that you visit which then loads all other content using JavaScript — which they heavily depend on." Tom McWright recently sparked some good discussion in the developer world with his article, If Not SPAs, What? He had written before about his belief that SPAs had done little to reduce the complexity of web development, but hadn't really given readers other options. In his latest post, he tried to offer some possible alternatives.  Our lifeboat of the week of the week goes to Glortho for explaining how to add http:// to url if no protocol is defined in javascript?      

You can find some more of Holly's work and bio here.  She gave a great talk at KubeCon 2020, How to Love K8s and Not Wreck the Planet, which you can watch on YouTube here. And here's a lovely presentation, Containers Will Not Fix Your Broken DevOps Cultures, drawing on her long history of programming and consulting.