Author: Loïc Houssier, Eira May, Ben Matthews

Check out the great post from Laura Nolan, a senior engineer at Slack, breaking down their outage. Paul wants some simple command line utilities for "fix-server" and "boot-it-all-up."

Clubhouse was known early on for being popular with Silicon Valley, but it's increasingly becoming a global phenomenon. You don't have to wait for it to go public to invest,  you can buy shares right now in Agora, the Chinese company powering its real time audio chat.

Got ideas for how we can version Q&A on Stack Overflow to ensure questions with accepted answers don't become outdated or obsolete? We're planning to work on this problem, so send suggestions our way.

This week's Lifeboat badge winner is Quinn, who answered the question: How to replace a string in a file using regular expressions?

 

Maybe you don't think GameStop is a tech story, but rest assured, the screenwriting duo behind The Social Network and  21 will inject plenty of nerdery into the Hollywood version.

Sara is eager to share the history of CSS, and all the ways it has let her down.

We dig into a wise act of self-prersevation from Ben B Johnson. As he writes:  

"Similar to SQLite, Litestream is open source but closed to contributions. This keeps the code base free of proprietary or licensed code but it also helps me continue to maintain and build Litestream.

As the author of BoltDB, I found that accepting and maintaining third party patches contributed to my burn out and I eventually archived the project. Writing databases & low-level replication tools involves nuance and simple one line changes can have profound and unexpected changes in correctness and performance. Small contributions typically required hours of my time to properly test and validate them.

I am grateful for community involvement, bug reports, & feature requests. I do not wish to come off as anything but welcoming, however, I've made the decision to keep this project closed to contributions for my own mental health and long term viability of the project."

Hurray for new approaches that don't ignore personal wellbeing. 

Today's lifeboat badge winner is Quinn, who explained: How to replace a string in a file using regular expressions

You can follow Brian on Twitter. and check out the Cloudcast here. 

If you're just getting started, he has a cloud basics podcast that covers a new topic each month. 

And if you are just really, really into containers, well he's got you covered. 

Paul was talking with someone who mentors a lot of young coders. What are they all into these days? Typescript? Web Assembly? Nope, they're all getting AWS certified.

A certification for AWS , Azure, and GCP has become an efficient way to break into the job market. Companies like Cloud Guru make it simple to understand what you need. We discuss what this new on-ramp to the world of software means for the rising generation of coders, or those looking to become programmers down the line.

Today's conversation was inspired by a great blog post from Charity Majors.

We also discuss the Chrome team's decision to migrate Puppeteer to Typescript, and the way in which large tech organizations are increasingly interconnected by a set of open source tools and platforms. 

Lastly, we discuss the impact expanded funding for community colleges could have on the pipeline of software engineers entering the job market.

Today's lifeboat badge winner is Abdul Saboor, who answered the question: How do you convert negative data into positive data in SQL Server?

Joe Biden just wants to ride his Peleton, but equipment connected to WiFi  with a camera and microphone can pose a real security risk.

If you've got a chicken coop or greenhouse that needs a little warmth this winter, maybe team it up with your gaming PC or bitcoin mining rig, which tend to give off a lot of heat.

Speaking of heat, we dive into datacenters that were sunk under the ocean in an effort to create more economically efficient and environmentally friendly computing.

Our favorite meme of the week, a Heroku app that puts a chilly Bernie Sanders anywhere in the world.

Our lifeboat badge winner is Lukas Kalbertodt, who answered the question: What's the most efficient way to insert an element into a sorted vector?

 

 

Joocelyn hosts the Git Cute podcast, which you can find here.

She's working on a book about seniority in the software industry, which you can pre-order here.

You can follow her on Twitter at javavvitch.

Our lifeboat badge goes to LMc for explaining how one can: Count the Letter Frequency in a String with Python

The title of this week's episode comes from a Hacker News thread where Guillermo argued that the complexity of front end performance goes beyond simplifying your stack to bare web primitives.

You can find out more about Vercel, which  recently raised a $40 million round, on Guillermo's blog, where he details what the company has planned for the future.

You can find more info on Next.JS here. It's a very active tag on Stack Overflow with dozens of new questions a day.

Our lifeboat badge for this episode goes to paxdiablo for answering the question: What does .split() return if the string has no match?

How could you not love a team with a bio like this: "We’re a young and dynamic team of messy data-scientists who have failed at being employed on the real market. Our experience in losing data and throwing files away is more than amazing! Over the years, we have managed to get rid of so much important data at home and even at work." Find out how you pay other people to throw your data away here.

The New York Times reports on the rising prices of old computers and their parts. Retro-computing is fun, especially when you're stuck at home for...feels like a while now.

Stack Overflow memes have made it to Tik Tok, and it is joyous.

To round things out we chat about our love of e-ink, the desire to buy a reMarkable 2, and this amazing piece of digital wall art.

This week's lifeboat badge winner is Gordon Larrigan, who answered the question:  How can you sort an array of arrays in JavaScript?

The starting point for today's conversation was an argument made by Guillermo Rauch in this blog post. "And each time, your frontend has an opportunity to impress, delight, perform, be accessible and memorable. What's more, frontend is an area of technological and artistic differentiation, while backend becomes increasingly commoditized, turnkey and undifferentiated."

Sure, programming in PowerPoint isn't very practical. That doesn't mean it can't be lots of fun, and teach you a few things.

Speaking of learning things, we chat a bit about Alan Kay, who has a wonderful talk on the ways we can use computers to illustrate complex concepts to children.

If you're interested in learning a bit of BBC Basic, there is a fun introduction here. You can tweet at this bot, and it will run the contents as code and reply with a video of the results.

If you are interested in life-logging and want to see it done with a lot of very pretty graphs, check out this post, My Year in Data.

Last but not least we chat about Svelte, which lets you create "cybernetically enhanced web apps." Shout to Murali, a listener who suggested this topic.

Our lifeboat of the week goes to koekenbakker for answering the question:  R plots: Is there a way to draw a border, shadow or buffer around text labels?