Before there was Stack Overflow, there was the Stack Overflow podcast. In a scratchy, lossy audio track recorded 13 years ago as a VOIP call, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood discussed the idea they had for a new website. They wanted to build a better way for users to ask and answer coding questions online.
Stack Overflow has come a long way since then, establishing itself as the world’s largest free, open, and trusted source of technical knowledge. Six hundred episodes later, the podcast is thriving too.
There have been many different variations of the Stack Overflow podcast, with configurations of hosts shifting over the years. I rebooted the show in 2019 when I joined as director of content, bringing on Paul Ford and Sara Chipps to help us reestablish a weekly cadence and produce over 200 episodes. Both have since moved on to new adventures, so today we’re thrilled to announce the next evolution of Stack Overflow Podcast—with some great new design and a brand new crew of hosts.
Matt Kiernander recently joined Stack Overflow as our first technical advocate and has quickly made a home for himself on the podcast. He spent the last few years working as a front-end software developer in his native New Zealand before transitioning into a content-creator focused on crafting videos that teach others about coding and technology. He has a broad range of passions, from programming to video editing, motion graphics, and the hardware needed to handle serious PC games.
Cassidy Williams, who helped us launch The Overflow newsletter back in the fall of 2019 and has been a frequent podcast guest and blog contributor, is joining us as a full-time host. She has held roles at Netlify, CodePen, Amazon, Clarifai, and Venmo, and she helped design The Key in 2020. Today she is the Head of Developer Experience and Education at Remote, a fast-growing company focused on helping employers to hire and support a completely remote, distributed, international workforce. She also advises several startups and runs her own weekly newsletter.
Ceora Ford has been with the podcast for the last few months and is coming onboard as a full-time host. Like so many people, Ceora’s job, centered on in-person events, evaporated at the beginning of the pandemic. Stuck at home, she seized the opportunity to dive into the software industry. She educated herself through online courses and earned an AWS Cloud certification, one of the fastest growing onramps to a career in tech. She evolved quickly, moving from a contract role at Digital Ocean to her current gig as a developer advocate at Apollo GraphQL. She balances her love for backend systems with a passion for Twitter and K-pop. Just don’t ask for her opinion on mac and cheese toppings.
Oh, and of course there’s me, Ben Popper, journalist turned director of content, who spent 12 years writing about the world of software and technology before going in-house at tech companies to help them create editorial content. April will be my three-year anniversary at Stack Overflow, and it’s been an amazing and rewarding journey. I was able to build out the blog so that we publish interesting articles multiple times a week, launch a newsletter that reaches 2.6 million developers, and craft this podcast, which gives me the opportunity to chat with fascinating people and learn new things each and every week.
There is a wide range of experience across our group. I’m a dilettante coder at best, the worst coder in the world according to some. Some of us are fluent in multiple languages, some prefer frontend or backend, some are crypto bulls, some are NFT haters. We want all these perspectives on the show, because it represents the depth and breadth of Stack Overflow’s audience and the community we serve. We aim to provide value to tenured individual contributors starting out in their career, to engineering managers and directors trying to understand the industry as a whole, but also to those new to their own coding journeys. After all, an enormous number of folks visiting Stack Overflow are students, hobbyists, or simply code-curious individuals learning a new craft.
Going forward we’ll have two episodes a week: Tuesdays will be home team episodes featuring just our hosts. We’ll discuss news relevant to folks in software or tech, pick a topic or two for a deeper discussion, and offer some recommendations for things our audience might enjoy. We’ll try to focus on topics related to the art and practice of programming, tips for learning to code or growing your career, tools and tricks that provide value to working developers, and a few larger issues related to how technology is shaping our world. If you’re interested in these topics, check out some examples of recent episodes:
We’ll air a second episode each Friday where we interview a guest. These are folks who are making an impact in software or whose careers in tech have been interesting, influential, or inspiring. We're especially excited to tell stories about software built as a net positive on society. Check out some examples below to get a sense for what guest episodes are like:
As always, we welcome questions and suggestions. If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating and a review on your favorite podcast platform – it really helps others interested in software and technology to discover our programming. Thanks for listening, and we’ll talk to you soon.