Author: Loïc Houssier, Eira May, Ben Matthews

You can find the first episode of the SO podcast here. It was conducted over Asterix, open source telephony software that allowed for fancy operations like voice messaging and recording calls! 

What would social software look like if we designed them to remove commerce and popularity? Are services like Mightybell an interesting example of where we might be headed?

If you want to build a model of something - say traffic patterns in your town or a hypothetical zombie invasion - you should check out a new project Joel is involved in, Hash.ai.

 

 

There is a nice breakdown of the Solarigate attack here, but the most important thing to know is that just seeing the words BusinessLayer.dll is enough to make our eyes glaze over and our defenses go down.

One interesting second order effect of this intrusion is that it will be difficult to know when all malicious code and access has really been removed. It brought to mind the classic Turing Award Lecture, Reflections on Trusting Trust by Ken Thompson. 

If you're trying to entertain kids over the holidays, Ben will be messing around with Roblox, which lets you create your own mini-games and has several hooks to deeper programming capabilities.

Our Lifeboat badge winner this week is Chinito, who answered the question of how you can: Set style using pure JavaScript

With Bitcoin hitting all time highs, there has been a lot of speculation about what will happen next in the market crypto market.

Meanwhile, regulators are targeting Ripple with a lawsuit and arguing that crypto isn't really a currency after all. 

You have until Jan, 4, 2021 to participate in our annual Winter Bash. By answering questions on Stack Overflow and across Stack Exchange, you can unlock some unique digital flair for your avatar.

Don't forget to tune in the first day of the new year for episode 300 of the podcast, we booked a very special guest. Check out this episode to learn more..

 

There is a lot to think about when designing trading algorithms, especially in the world of cryptocurrency, where prices can be extremely volatile and limited liquidity means a single trader moving big volume can have a hefty influence on price.

Bitcoin is at a record breaking price these days, but investing in it is not for the faint of heart. To learn more, we chat with Li, who is a software engineer at Coinbase. You can find her on Twitter here.

If you're interested in learning more about Bitcoin, we would have to recommend Bitcoin Developer. After all, they were kind enough to recommend our Bitcoin Stack Exchange as a key resource. 

You can read more about Javascriptlandia here. It is part of larger conversation happening on Google's Open Source Blog and through initiatives like Github allowing corporations into their Sponsors program.

For a delightfully old school and interactive website about Myles, click here. For his Twitter, go here.

You can find Jory's website here and her Twitter presence here.

This week's lifeboat badge goes to Marijn van Vliet for answering the question: How do I return a char array from a function?

You can find the original tweet here. AWS will work with them on publicity and open source their version so that there can be a flow of value in both directions. 

You can learn more about Tim's company, Checkly.hq, which works on active monitoring for developers. 

The team there also works on  Headless Recorder, a Chrome extension that records your browser interactions and generates a Playwright or Puppeteer script. 

They also operate The Headless Dev, which helps coders learn Playwright and Puppeteer. 

This week's Lifeboat badge goes to Ravindra Bagale for answering the question:  How to Convert Integer to Character Array using C

As promised, here is the grass hat.

You can find out more about Earthly here.

We spend a little time talking about Nix OS the operating system you can roll back if you don't like a patch.

Raise your hand if you remember learning computer science with Turbo Pascal.

Maybe you didn't know, but discs aren't as slow as people think. Adam's recent episode is about upending common assumptions on IO performance. 

Shoutout to our Lifeboat badge winner of the week, Josh Smift, for answering the question: How to delete *.web files only if they exist.

 

You can read about GraphQL here and Apollo here. 

Cassidy Williams, who curates our newsletter, wrote about her experience as an early adopter of the technology last summer.

You can find more on Meteor here. 

Schmidt also helped create Monument,  which he describes as "an affordable live/work art event space in downtown San Francisco. The upstairs is 24 private bedrooms and studio spaces and the downstairs is a 200+ capacity person event venue and makerspace. Our goal is to connect creative people across different fields, and in particular build bridges between art and technology."

 

Gone in a Flash. Actually it took quite a while. Adobe explains its decision to stop supporting Flash here.

You can learn more about Ruffle, the Flash emulator written in Rust, here.

Here are some tips on writing a developer resume from a hiring manager who's written an entire book on the topic.

You can read more about the Supreme Court case considering the limits of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act here and here

Our Lifeboat badge of the week goes to a user named simply 4386427, who answered the most basic and frustrating question: why does “printf” not work?

You can find more about Resner here. 

Learn more about the topics we discussed by following some of Resner's suggested links below: 

People to follow on Twitter: Safyia Noble, Ruha Benjamin, and Kamal Sinclair.

Ellen Pao and Project Include.

Eli Pariser and New Public by Civic Signals.