Essays, opinions, and advice on the act of computer programming from Stack Overflow.
Eira May
Eira May is a writer and editor at Stack Overflow. She has worked in content and product marketing at Auth0, Vacasa, and Jama Software, and once wrote a dissertation on alternate histories. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Ben and Cassidy compare notes on Plex.tv, the rapid collapse of Fast.co, and why rigorous adherence to personal security protocols can make the FBI suspicious.
The home team chats with Jon Chan, Stack Overflow’s Director of Engineering, Public Platform, about his path from self-taught developer to director of engineering, why his management mantra is “Delegate and elevate,” the profound value of a diverse and inclusive workplace, and the Neopets-to-frontend-development pipeline. Plus, Jon gives excellent advice to all the self-taught developers out there.
The home team discusses React’s major version upgrade, how women in software engineering are often shunted into marketing or project management roles, and the brilliant analogy Cassidy used to explain to her parents how software engineers still have jobs after they’re done building the app.
The home team sits down with Mattaniah Aytenfsu, a UX Engineer at YouTube, up-and-coming TikTok influencer, and creative technologist. They talk about our unfortunate tendency to divide kids into “science kids” and “art kids,” the difference between being a software engineer and a UX engineer, and why it’s important to be gracious with yourself when you lose focus on a project.
This week: what makes developers happy at work, how sharding a database can make it faster, and whether it’s a good idea to intentionally insert bugs into your code.
The home team talks with Guillermo Rauch, CEO and cofounder of Vercel and cocreator of Next.js, and Sam Lambert, formerly VP of Engineering at Github and now CEO of PlanetScale. They cover how Vercel and PlanetScale are making the web more accessible to developers, the future of web development for professional programmers, and why human laziness is the ultimate security threat.
The home team chats with Adam Lear, a staff software engineer on the public platform at Stack Overflow. They discuss GitHub’s move to put prebuilt Codespaces into public beta, the people paying millions for virtual real estate, and the downsides of microservices and CI/CD for developer productivity.