Category: 3-SometimeTechTalk

If you follow community issues on the Stack network, you may be familiar with Aaron Hall. He took the time to respond to a post from our CEO and subsequently came by Stack Overflow to engage more deeply with our leadership and community teams.  You can find his summary of events here. Most days, you can find him streaming on Twitch here.

Nitsua60 is a moderator over on our RPG Stack Exchange, which is one of the 25 largest communities  our users have created. He's there to help guide curious role players through the important questions in life, like: How Can a Unicorn Establish a Foreign Location as its own Lair When its Already The Lair of a Lich? Answer --> here.

We chat a little about the new Instagram account Stack Overflow just launched. We created fun animations that bring to life some of the best questions and answers from across the Stack network. 

Chatrooms are one of the less well known features of Stack communities. Nitsua60 said that not only has he seen more conversation in  the RPG chat, but a new room has been created for folks from across the family of Stack networks to chat about issues and emotions relating to the global pandemic we are all dealing with. It made him think of the recent op-ed from Stanley McChrystal about the importance of "digital leadership" and communication in modern crises. 

A great example of that is what's happening over at the Academia Stack Exchange. This community has seen a massive influx of activity as schools from kindergarten through university have shut down. In response, they put together an incredible set of resources for folks who are trying to adapt their workflow to the reality of shuttered schools , remote learning, and social distancing. 

We hope you're staying safe, and thanks as always to the brave folks working on the front lines to keep essential services running and medical care available.

Ozow Co-founder & Head of R&D, Mitchan Adams, joins Andile Masuku and guest co-host & Lettuce Co-founder Simon Dingle for this beefy flagship episode to discuss the current state-of-play in South Africa's digital payments processing scene. Mitch reveals why Ozow is actively recruiting and onboarding new hires right now and explains why the startup is seeing a sharp spike in revenue even as the global COVID-19 crisis continues to unfold. Listen in for actionable insight about South Africa's competitive financial services landscape, and learn why both Mitch and Simon hope that the country and some of its neighbours in the region will adopt open banking regulation a la Europe's PSD2 dispensation sooner rather than later. Mitch is a software engineer who, prior to co-founding Ozow (formerly i-Pay) in 2014, worked at a stockbroking firm— developing and maintaining software which interfaced with Johannesburg Stock Exchange's futures, stocks and bond markets. He also served a stint at Setcom, where his knack for online and card-based payment streams properly took root. To skip all the introductory niceties, head straight to [12:52]. Questions discussed in this episode include: 1) How is Ozow coping with the mandatory national COVID-19 shutdown ordered by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa? [12:52] 2) How might payments processors like Ozow position for long-term success in what is a highly-competitive and increasingly-commoditised digital payments landscape? [23:47] 3) Can open banking-led fintech innovation offer the kind of platform integrity, financial inclusion and system efficiency decentralised cryptocurrency proponents insist blockchain-based platforms like Bitcoin are best positioned to deliver on? [30:57] 4) Is the obsession with building and maintaining walled gardens a prevalent dynamic within the South African banking industry? [44:30] 5) How are mobile telcos shaping fintech innovation in South Africa? [47:28] 6) What unique challenges and opportunities are presented by open banking regulatory frameworks? [53:04] 7) Is fintech startup success possible in South Africa without subscribing to VC-backed hyper-scale, hyper-growth strategy? [1:08:44] 8) In what ways do Mitch and Simon anticipate the world will never be the same again once we recover from COVID-19 crisis? [1:21:05] Resources referenced in this episode: Coronavirus Stimulus Offered By House Financial Services Committee Creates New Digital Dollar by Jason Brett for Forbes Image credit: Ruxipen

Ben is now the full time IT department for his two sons, one of whom is in kindergarten and one in first grade. The children have transitioned from public school to Zoom, Google Classroom, Konstella, FaceTime, and five million other services. 

Paul's neighbors in his apartment building are digging old laptops out of storage and leaving them in front of his door. They bleach them first, so that they are 100% disinfected. Then Paul slaps on a little Ubuntu/Lubuntu and those old machines are suddenly zippy netbooks that help adults and kids work and study from home. 

Sara reveals she has an amazing "resting interested face" - a skill that makes her the most popular person at any live talk in front of an audience. 

That box of old cables finally came in handy! We shout out our lifeboat badge winners, as we near the major milestone of 1000 lifeboats. Keep them coming.

 

Topics covered in this episode:

• * Quick chat about COVID 19.*
• Documentation as a way to build Community
• The Django Speed Handbook: making a Django app faster
• dacite: simplifies creation of data classes from dictionaries
• How we retired Python 2 and improved developer happiness
• The Troublesome Active Record Pattern
• Types at the edges in Python
• Extras
• Joke

See the full show notes for this episode on the website at pythonbytes.fm/174

Early on in his life, Ryan Graciano aspired to be many things – law, writing… and eventually coding, of course. Fun fact, he is an accomplished dog trainer. focusing on animal behavior modification – and more recently, has gotten into powerlifting. Despite his love of analog activities, he got started coding right after college, and tried to avoid joining IBM… yet, still did, through an acquisition. After a few years of growth, he met a group of entrepreneurs who had an idea to provide credit scores to millions of users… for free. This idea would eventually become Credit Karma.

Today’s Sponsors:

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Links

• https://www.creditkarma.com/ourstory/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/graciano/

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Many countries around the world have now ordered citizens to work from home, exempting only those in essential industries. We have some tips on our blog about how to make remote work the best it can be, and a new piece up on how to handle remote hiring if your company is trying to fill positions during these unusual circumstances. 

Sara is nervous about working from home with her husband, who is also a software engineer. There can only be so many commits in a committed relationship. But she has double the space per person of Paul, who shares a 1200 square foot Brooklyn abode with a wife and two kids.  Ben, meanwhile, has decamped for upstate New York. 

Buzzfeed asks, if this sudden experiment in mass remote work goes well for certain companies, will they simply opt to transition to full remote forever after the pandemic ends. 

Stack Overflow was born remote, an idea that germinated across blogs and Skype calls. The very first episode of the Stack Overflow podcast tells the tale. 

Our community saved us from major egg on our face, warning us about a Let's Encrypt bug that would have left Stack Overflow with expired certificates. You can hear a more detailed explanation of how this works here.

If you're cracking out an old computer to use for home schooling you children or lending to a neighbor, Paul asks you to consider that now, in this wild moment of uncertainty, an Ubuntu Linux machine might be just the solution you need.

This week Eric, John, and Thomas talk Githubs purchase of NPM, working remote, Laravel release cycle, and much more.