Hey folks! I'm very pleased to be hosting Jeff Atwood as our guest this week. Jeff was co-creator of Stack Overflow, which is by far one of the most successful Q&A sites ever created, and is every programmer's best friend. Jeff and I talked about all sorts of stuff.  I didn't have a fixed agenda and just let the conversation roll.  Jeff talks about quite a few topics near and dear to his heart, especially hardware and colocation.  He also talks about his $10k bet with John Carmack over the near future of self-driving cars. We also talk about Discourse, which is Jeff's new ..read more

Today I talk about how (and why) after 2 years of really enjoying retirement, I've decided to go back into the industry. Feel free to give this one a pass if you are looking for something more like one of my usual "tech talks".  This is basically a status update that was suggested by next week's guest, while we were recording ..read more

Hey folks!  This was an overly-ambitious attempt to do a mini-lecture on the Farmer, Dog, Chicken, Grain puzzle and its programming solutions. This was one of the homework questions I had in my Intro to Programming Languages course in the University of Washington's undergraduate Computer Science program, taught at the time by Linda Shapiro. She had us solve this problem in Lisp, Smalltalk, and Prolog. So this is a fairly in-depth technical discussion that might seem a BIT on the boring side, compared to some of my other episodes. But it's 100% something you could find in a computer scie ..read more

Hey folks!  Sorry this one is a day late.  I had to redact some confidential information and it took a little extra time. Today we talk about the Lisp family of languages, and how coooool they are, and how cool yoooouuu would be if you learned one or more of them. http://paulgraham.com has the essays I mentioned in the talk.  Enjoy ..read more

Hey folks, A commenter asked if I could talk about whether you need a CS degree to be in Big Tech and make it as a software engineer.  So that's the topic for today! In this episode, I talk about what you would actually need to study in order to get the equivalent of a CS degree, and I also call our the most core fundamental stuff, which would be:   * discrete math, linear algebra, and statistics   * theory of computation, algorithms, data structures   * compilers, operating systems, networking So basically 9 courses at the very core,  plus a few nice-to-haves like ..read more

Hi folks, Given that my Emacs tour from 2 weeks ago is in 2nd place overall on views, I'm gonna see how far I can push my luck, and do another one about Emacs. Apologies to the podcast listeners. I narrate everything but this probably isn't that fun to listen to without seeing what I'm doing. Let me know. This episode is a bit more disjointed than usual because I actually had about 90 minutes of material and I had to edit heavily.  I can always redo the parts I edited out in a future episode, if this content is what people would like to see more of. Today I spend less time on fancy pa ..read more

In this week's episode I talk about reorgs!   How and why to do them, when and why to avoid them, and how to make sure they go as smoothly as possible when you really do have to do one. I also tell some war stories about particular reorgs I experienced at Amazon and Google. If you like this content, please go over to my YouTube channel and subscribe. It improves my placement with the YT algorithm and helps the channel grow.  Thank you ..read more

Hey folks, This week I did a guided walkthrough of Emacs, on my computer, while narrating what I was typing out. It went pretty smoothly and I _think_ I did an OK job of narrating what we were looking at, as well as speaking aloud almost all the operations I performed during the tour.  So I'm hoping that it still works as a podcast, because honestly Emacs is pretty plain and it's not hard to imagine what I'm describing. :)  You're probably imagining something fancier than what was actually onscreen. If you'd like to enjoy it with visual, please head over to my Stevey's Tech Talk Y ..read more

Grigory Javadyan, the commenter who inspired episode 37, has graciously agreed to be a guest on today's show. In this episode we talk about all sorts of interesting things, including:   * Zynga and the game industry   * Interviewing at big tech companies   * Being an SRE vs being a SWE   * Google infrastructure and database migrations   * Android emulators   * Command line vs IDEs (last week's episode)   * The future of programming I really enjoyed this chat, and I hope you do too! If you like this content, please like the YouTube video and subscribe to t ..read more

In this episode I dig in my heels and defend my position that you have to know command-line interfaces and shell scripting (or equivalent) in order to be a great programmer and a great generalist. I didn't say it explicitly, but the bottom line is that sometimes you need to do custom batch (and/or streaming) tasks that are not handled by your IDE or your favorite tools.  So what do you do?  Scripting to the rescue ..read more