Before there was a Stack Overflow, there was a Stack Overflow podcast. The founders of this community and company started spitballing ideas for how to build it on weekly calls while the site was still in private beta.
As Stack Overflow grew and changed over the last decade, the Podcast was a constant. That is, until May of last year, when it went on hiatus. Stack Overflow gives employees a sabbatical after five years of service, so I'm going to assume the podcast was just calling in a much needed vacation.
Since I joined as Director of Content earlier this year, community members and colleagues kept asking me if it would ever be possible to bring the podcast back. Even though a new episode hasn’t been published in over a year, over a thousand people were still listening to our SoundCloud each week. It seemed clear the audience and the appetite for this ongoing conversation was still strong.
So today, with a renewed energy, we’ve decided to bring it back. We’ve got three new hosts:
Ben Popper, the director of content here at Stack (that’s me)
Sara Chipps, the director of Public Q&A at Stack, a veteran developer, and Stack user number #4140
Paul Ford: a writer and technologist who serves as CEO of Postlight, a digital product studio
We’ll be chatting about what it’s like to work in software development, how folks can learn to code, and the way in which computer programming is influencing business, culture, and society.
You can find and subscribe to the show on all the big audio platforms out there and we'll be publishing a new episode each week. It went live early this morning, but it may take a little while to populate across various platforms. For now, you can find it on Spotify and Overcast. It should be everywhere soon. You can find the RSS feed here.
We plan to bring on lots of interesting guests. This week, for example, we got the chance to sit down with Prashanth Chandrasekar, Stack Overflow’s new CEO, to hear about how he got into computer science and his vision for this community and company.
Each week we'll publish show notes here on the blog with links to topics we discuss. If we're picking up where things left off, this would be episode #124. Hope you enjoy!
SHOW NOTES
Is it legal for source code containing undefined behavior to crash the compiler?
True, you’re the boss, and the compiler works for you. But that doesn’t mean it always behaves just as you instructed. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Understanding the "as if" rule.
What is Logo, you ask?
And what about NetLogo? More wolves vs zombies please.
William Chipps’ golden years - so close, and yet so far - the website.
Shoutout to all the fine folks who came before us - Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, Jay Hanlon, David Fullerton, Alex Miller, and Ilana Yitzhaki.