Author: Loïc Houssier, Eira May, Ben Matthews

We break down some thoughts on this issue, which came to light after a tweet from Tim Nolet.

Later in the episode we talk about the debate raging right now around elections and technology. What role should software play and where is regulation appropriate? 

Last but not least, we consider what the next US administration might do with regards to regulating big tech. Will they lean towards a European model or continue to be more hands off? 

Shout out to our lifeboat badge winner of the week, Kin3Tix, for helping to identify good tutorials for SDL 2.0 for C (Not C++) programming.

You can find Kelsey on Twitter here. His Github is here. His personal journey with Kubernetes is detailed in a nice piece here.

Kelsey has an interesting role at Google. He sits at the director level but is an independent contributor with no direct reports. Instead he works to help galvanize interest in particular tools and topics, driving adoption at a broad scale. 

That skit made it to the front page of Reddit, and was soon seen across the internet. It's nice to make people laugh, but following the surge of interest, Emily also had to deal with severe harassment and cyber stalking. She wrote a piece about the experience which you can find here.

In this episode, we discuss how moderation can be improved and the work that remains to be done to make the software industry feel safe and inclusive for everyone.

 

 

Has there ever been a gaming company that brought more joy to the world than Nintendo? They were making playing cards back in 1889 and continue to find ways to be different but fun with inventions like the Switch and Labo.

Sara gives us some the scoop on Rimworld. Check out the trailer here and feel free to lend your skill to a new mod if you have ideas for how to improve it.

A Excel sheet meltdown led to critical health data about the pandemic being lost in the UK.  Rows can go to millions, but they used columns.

For those of us who need our reading glasses to see the tiny emoji people post in Slack, Paul has come to your rescue. He asked for the ability to zoom In on Twitter, the CEO of Slack co-signed, and boom, we got a new feature.

We discuss what other new Slack features might take off: stories, push-to-talk, and sneakers.

You can find some of Jack's art and other projects here.

Ben breaks through and answers his first SO question—by copy/pasting from the comments, of course. 

Sara finds the relevant XKCD.

Later, we check out Darling.hq, a MacOS translation layer for Linux 

If you are in the mood to learn programming with colors and shapes, check out the website that Jack built: Maria.cloud 

Sara shares the story of a developer conference that was smoke bombed by an Arduino bot gone haywire. It was this chaos that inspired her to dig deeper into Arduino, which would eventually play a big role in helping her to found her company, Jewelbots. 

Paul unravels the mystery of what's really inside the Goonie Box: a timepiece, puzzle, and mechanical wonder that Guido uses to test his house guests. 

This week's lifeboat goes to Terminator17, who helped solve a problem around object detection using a Tensorflow-gpu. 

 

 

 

Today's episode was inspired by a question on folks who postpone a merge for fear of being the one to resolve a conflict. Shout out to Candied Orange for the thoughtful answer.

Paul and Sara reminisce about the days before Git, when version control was very different from what it is today, and Paul accidentally left many a project in shambles. Do you remember the days of Subversion and CVS? 

Later, we dig into Sara's new adventure with Jupyter Notebooks. They are extremely useful for developers, but what would it take to make them a tool for any kind of knowledge worker? Default to a PowerPoint style, obviously.

Last but not least, we dig into the endless argument over the 10X developer, Reed Hastings' love for the 100X developer, and the true formula for attracting employees that will contribute their genius without wrecking the team.  Clive Thompson has a great piece on the myth, meritocracy, and messy reality of rockstar coders.

Chris is the author of the New York Times bestselling books The Long Tail and Free as well as Makers: The New Industrial Revolution.

He is lso the CEO of 3DR, founder of the Linux Foundation's Dronecode Project, and founder of the DIY Drones and DIY Robocars communities, including the ArduPilot autopilot project.

Not surprisingly, he also created something called GeekDad.

If you want to get involved, you can learn how to build your own Donkey Car racer here.

"Sorry I missed your comment of many months ago. I no longer build software; I now make furniture out of wood." Life is lived in stages.

Most people are working remotely these days, but offices may return, and even if they don't, these skills could come in handy. Teamwork, persuasion, communication, and leadership, just a few of the things you can learn in this Technion course.

Big thanks to TwilioQuest, which has gotten Ben, the worst coder in the world, practicing his Javascript skills again.

What gives you that special feeling: a nice, sharp recursive function or a deep, winding ternary statement?  Paul and Sara debate the finer points of feeling smugly satisfied with your own code.

You can check out more about the Github news here.

Here is the farewell to updates from Moment.js.

Would you take a nice bonus today for a pay cut in the future? Stripe is offering its employees that option, spurred by an exodus of developers from dense urban areas. 

A big thanks to Jim Mischel, who was our lifeboat badge winner of the week.