Smart contracts aren’t actually new. Computer scientist, legal scholar, and cryptographer Nick Szabo coined the term in 1994 (possibly earlier, depending on who you ask).
Old problems seem to keep coming back. Bret Victor gave a talk in 2013 called “The Future of Programming,” where he talked about problems from 1973 that were still relevant.
To learn more about the Agoric blockchain, check out their homepage.
A Principal Engineer at GitHib, Kris is president of the Nivenly Foundation and an admin at Hachyderm, an instance of the decentralized social network powered by Mastodon.
The ongoing changes at Twitter have fueled interest in alternative, decentralized platforms like Mastodon and Discord.
Read Leaving the Basement, Kris’s post about scaling and migrating Hachyderm out of her basement.
Watch Kris’s conversation with DigitalOcean Chief Product Officer Gabe Monroy about building decentralized IT platforms.
The history of computing has been a story of moving up levels of abstraction: from hard-coding algorithms and directly manipulating memory addresses with assembly languages to using more natural language constructs in high-level general purpose languages to abstracting the hardware of the computer in cloud compute. Now serverless functions take that abstraction even further. We’ve made the algorithms that process data simple and natural; MongoDB wants to do the same for how we persist data.
On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Andrew Davidson, SVP Products at MongoDB, about how they’re turning a database into a fully-managed service that developers can use in a more natural way. Along the way, we discuss how the cost bottleneck has moved from the storage media to developers’ minds, how greater abstractions can enable developers, and how to get insights from production data faster.
Longtime Stacker Yaakov Ellis is also on LinkedIn.
Congrats to user HelloCW on receiving a Socratic Badge for asking a well-received question on 100 separate days and maintaining a positive question record.
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.
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.
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.
Congrats to Stack Overflow user WorstCase, who asked five well-received questions on five separate days and earned themselves a shiny new Curious badge.
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.
