Author: Loïc Houssier, Eira May, Ben Matthews

Our recent Pulse Survey showed how technologists visiting Stack Overflow feel about emergent technologies. The consensus is clear: AI assistants will soon be everywhere, and developers aren’t sure how they feel about that. Check out the podcast here or dive into the blog.

Learn more about the emergent abilities of large language models (LLMs). 

For more on the intersection of AI and academia, listen to our episode with computer science professor Emery Berger or read his essay on how academics are coping with AI that can ace exams and do everyone’s homework.

Catch up on the adventures of the worst coder in the world.

Congrats to user d1337, whose question How to assign a name to the size() column? won a Stellar Question badge.

With so many companies offering API products, it can be hard to get your particular APIs discovered and used by the developers who need them most. You might have the best, most useful solutions out there, but if you’re relying on the digital equivalent of foot traffic for discoverability, it might as well not exist. And if an API solution can’t be found, then someone else is going to reinvent it. 

On this sponsored episode, we chat with SmartBear API Technical Evangelist Frank Kilcommins about the growing challenges of API visibility and how to outsmart the invisibility trap with the right development strategies and tools. 

Episode notes:

Kilcommins suggests you can get better visibility for your APIs with SmartBear's new free API exploration tool. 

Open specifications like the Open API Initiative help make your endpoints easier to understand—both by humans and computers. 

Connect with Frank Kilcommins on Twitter and LinkedIn. 

Congrats to Stack Overflow user WorstCase, who asked five well-received questions on five separate days and earned themselves a shiny new Curious badge.

You can dive deeper into the research, including some lovely matrix charts, on our blog.

Erin has also explored tag trends among our most loved languages and job insights from our community.

Learn more about Joy on her LinkedIn.

Thanks to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, russbishop, for helping to answer the question: Where is the app content folder in the simulator of Xcode?

 

Per one count, more than 280,000 people were laid off from tech jobs in 2022 and the first two months of 2023.

What do layoffs have in common with farting at a party? Both are a bad look if you’re the only one doing it.

ICYMI: On a recent episode, we talked about how these layoffs are reshaping the job market and where to find software engineering roles outside of tech.

Just laid off, or worried you might be? Cohost Ryan Donovan has some advice.

Connect with Wesley on LinkedIn.

Writing code that runs without errors—and without all the bugs that only show up when the program runs—is hard enough. But teaching others to write code and understand the underlying concepts takes a deeper understanding. Now imagine doing that for 37 courses. 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with Bharath Thippireddy, a VIP instructor at Udemy who has taught more than half a million students. We talk about how he went from a humble Java developer to one of Udemy’s top instructors (and a budding movie star!). Along the way, we discuss whether Java or Python is better for beginners and how to balance theory with syntax. 

Episode notes:

Like a lot of today’s content creators, Bharath got his start posting videos on his Youtube channel in 2012.

Today, you can find all of Bharath’s courses on his Udemy page.

You can find out more about Bharath from his website or connect with him on LinkedIn. 

Udemy is one of our launch partners for our online course recommendations. 

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner desertnaut for their answer to 

What is the meaning of exclamation and question marks in Jupyter Notebook?

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Flourish is a fintech platform for registered investment advisers (RIAs) that was recently acquired by MassMutual.

After studying computer science at Carnegie Mellon, Christine spent almost 12 years at Goldman Sachs, where she was VP of fixed systematic marketing making, responsible for automating electronic trades of interest-rate products like US Treasury bonds and interest rate swaps.

Christine’s time at the world’s second-largest investment bank gave her a healthy wariness of Frankencode, the scourge of legacy stacks everywhere.

Find Christine on LinkedIn.

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner amirali for their answer to I can't set up JDK on Visual Studio Code.

A chemist by training, Jamie serves as Senior Research Manager of Quantum Applications and Software at IBM Quantum, which offers cloud access to advanced quantum computers capable of solving highly complex, highly interconnective, and dynamic problems.

Learn about the superconducting qubits IBM Quantum uses to program quantum computers. (Need to back up a bit? Learn what a qubit is.)

Jamie explains how a heavy hex architecture allows IBM to limit crosstalk between qubits to ensure coherence times long enough to complete practical calculations within hours, not years.

IBM Quantum’s Qiskit Runtime allows users to optimize workloads and efficiently execute them on quantum systems at scale. 

As you might expect, Jamie and her colleagues are already thinking hard about the intersection of quantum and AI. Learn about System Two, IBM’s next-generation quantum system.

Connect with Jamie on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Congrats are in order for Stellar Question badge winner Dmitry z for asking How can I use environment variables in docker-compose?.

W4 Games is dedicated to strengthening the open-source Godot Engine, a cross-platform game engine for 2D and 3D games. Their mission is “to help the video game industry reclaim their control of the technology powering their games and reverse a dramatic trend where they have to rely on proprietary solutions from an ever-shrinking number of vendors.”

To start learning more about Godot, explore some of the best games made with Godot or join the community.

Connect with Juan on Twitter, GitHub, or LinkedIn.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is Martijn Pieters for their answer to 'While' loop one-liner.

Tribe is a distributed community of AI industry leaders, including ML engineers and data scientists, dedicated to helping companies apply machine learning to their business operations. Explore their case studies to see Tribe’s expertise in action.

Founder and CEO Jaclyn Rice Nelson formerly worked at Google, partnering with enterprise companies and incubating new ventures. As an early employee at CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth equity firm, she advised companies including Airbnb on scaling technical infrastructure, ensuring data security, and boosting growth with machine learning.

As we explored on our blog last year, the generative AI space has been expanding rapidly. Many of Tribe’s specialists have opted out of full-time employment, but are willing to provide companies without internal AI expertise with the skills they need to leverage this rapidly evolving technology inside their business.   

Connect with Jackie on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is PM 2Ring for their answer to Sort a list to form the largest possible number.

Modern networked applications generate a lot of data, and every business wants to make the most of that data. Most of the time, that means moving production data through some transformation process to get it ready for the analytics process. But what if you could have in-app analytics? What if you could generate insights directly from production data?

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Stanimira Vlaeva, Developer Advocate at MongoDB, and Fredric Favelin, Technical Director, Partner Presales at MongoDB, about how a serverless database can minimize the distance between producing data and understanding it.

Episode notes:

Stanimira talked a lot about using BigQuery with MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud Run. If you need to skill up on these three tools, check out this tutorial. 

Once you’ve got the hang of it, get your data connected with Confluent Connetors. 

With Atlas, you can transform your data in JavaScript. 

Connect with Stanimira on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

Connect with Fredric on LinkedIn. 

Congrats to Stellar Question winner SubniC  for  Get name of current script in Python.