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Podcast 235: An emotional week, and the way forward

A conversation about the recent furloughs at Stack Overflow, Zoom's acquisition of Keybase, the upcoming Bitcoin halving, and the release of Deno v1.0.0.

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This episode was recorded Thursday, May 9th, two days after Stack Overflow announced headcount reductions (primarily in the form of furloughs) that affect 15% of its staff. We talk about how this process played out internally and the ways in which we are hoping to grow our business so we can bring those great people back. You can read more about it in a blog post from our CEO here.

After that, we discuss Zoom's acquisition of Keybase. Usage and wider public awareness of Zoom have been growing by leaps and bounds as the world shifts to remote work and learning during this pandemic. This has exposed some security issues with Zoom's platform, and the acquisition of Keybase seems to be aimed at shoring up their cybersecurity and encryption capabilities.

Sara, never one to miss an opportunity to plug Bitcoin, hips us to The Halvening. What does it all mean? Read more about it here.

Finally, Paul walks us through Deno, which was created by Ryan Dahl, who also created Node.js. Deno is "a brand new JavaScript runtime for the backend, but instead of being written in C++, it’s written in Rust, based on the Tokio platform (which provides the asynchronous runtime needed by JavaScript), still running Google’s V8 engine though." You can read more about it here.

Our lifeboater of the week is Stack Overflow user James Kanze, who was awarded the badge for answering the question: C++: What is the difference between ostream and ostringstream?

Thanks for listening :)

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