Podcast appearances and mentions of ben popper

Startups can be a ton of fun. Also, it is sometimes very stressful and ultimately a very different experience than working at a company like Google, Meta Apple and so on. Benjamin Popper is the Senior Director of Content at Stack Overflow and is our guest on the show today. The background on today's episode is that both Ben and Sean have worked for startups as well as in Big Tech, and they have lots of friends and former colleagues who have struggled with navigating and thinking through the transition from big tech to startups, particularly for engineering roles. In today's show, we walk through the choices faced while making such a transition. We focus on what are the options you have and how can you align these options with the ultimate goal of becoming the best software engineer you could be. Follow Ben: https://twitter.com/benpopper Follow Sean: https://twitter.com/seanfalconer Software Huddle ⤵︎ X: https://twitter.com/SoftwareHuddle LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/softwarehuddle/ Substack: https://softwarehuddle.substack.com/

In this supper club episode of Syntax, Wes and Scott talk with Kristi Perreault of Liberty Mutual about why they're using serverless functions, what languages they write in, managing security and montoring, and Kristi's journey into tech as a career. Hasura - Sponsor With Hasura, you can get a fully managed, production-ready GraphQL API as a service to help you build modern apps faster. You can get started for free in 30 seconds, or if you want to try out the Standard tier for zero cost, use the code “TryHasura” at this link: hasura.info. We've also got an amazing selection of GraphQL tutorials at hasura.io/learn. Stack Overflow Podcast - Sponsor For over a dozen years, the Stack Overflow Podcast has been exploring what it means to be a developer, and how the art and practice of software programming is changing our world. Hosted by Ben Popper, Cassidy Williams, and Ceora Ford, the Stack Overflow Podcast is your home for all things code. Listen to new episodes twice a week, wherever you get your podcasts. Lightstep Incident Response - Sponsor Streamline on-call, collaboration, incident management, and automation with a free 30-day trial of Lightstep Incident Response, built on ServiceNow. Usage-based pricing on active services promotes collaboration across your entire team to build a culture of service ownership. Listeners of Syntax will also receive a free Lightstep Incident Response T-shirt after firing an alert or incident. Pay for the services you use, not the number of people on your team with Lightstep Incident Response, built on ServiceNow. Streamline on-call, collaboration, incident management, and automation with a free 30-day trial. Fire an alert or incident today and receive a free Lightstep Incident Response t-shirt. Show Notes 00:33 Welcome 03:24 Guest introduction @kperreault95 Kristi Perreault on Dev.to Kristi Perreault AWS Hero Liberty Mutual 04:55 Developers at Mutual Liberty 07:05 What did you do before serverless functions? 08:36 Why are you using serverless functions? 12:39 What languages are you writing for serverless functions? 15:53 Sponsor: Hasura 17:22 Where does all the code live? 20:58 AWS CDK AWS CDK CDK Workshop 25:55 Sponsor: Lightstep Incident Response 27:07 How did you get into tech? 31:44 How do you organize all the functions? 33:51 How important is security? 35:23 What are IM roles? 36:16 How do you deal with spiking and monitoring? Datadog Splunk 41:20 Sponsor: Stackoverflow Podcast 42:02 Have you used Edge functions? 42:50 Supper Club Questions Off by None newsletter Ready Set Cloud ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Loki on Disney+ Shameless Plugs Real World Serverless Podcast Serverless Denver Group AWS Summits @ServerlessCO Kristi Perreault on Medium Tweet us your tasty treats Scott's Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes' Instagram Wes' Twitter Wes' Facebook Scott's Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets

In this supper club episode of Syntax, Wes and Scott talk with Pokey Rule about using his voice to code, and the current state of voice coding software. Stackoverflow Podcast - Sponsor For over a dozen years, the Stack Overflow Podcast has been exploring what it means to be a developer, and how the art and practice of software programming is changing our world. Hosted by Ben Popper, Cassidy Williams, and Ceora Ford, the Stack Overflow Podcast is your home for all things code. Listen to new episodes twice a week, wherever you get your podcasts. directus - Sponsor Directus is an open-source data platform that instantly layers on top of any SQL database. Our Data Engine empowers engineers with dynamic REST+GraphQL APIs, workflow automation, built-in auth, caching, and asset transformations. And the included Data Studio democratizes your database, allowing even non-technical users to browse, manage, and visualize database content through a no-code data collaboration app. Get started in minutes with a free Directus Community Cloud project. Show Notes 00:33 Welcome 01:35 Guest introduction Con 2021 - Cursorless: keyboards and mice are sooo last year!! by Pokey Rule Emily Shea 05:12 How does coding with your voice work? Talon Voice Cursorless Talon 09:45 How do you handle triggering wrong words? 11:41 Sponsor: The Stack Overflow Podcast 12:26 Example of voice coding Parrot 14:21 What are the noises you make for? 24:29 Working on multiple lines at the same time 27:37 How do you decide where the hats go? 31:18 Sponsor: directus 32:59 What is the community of users like for this? Tree Sitter “Incremental, zero-config Code Nav using stack graphs” by Douglas Creager 35:20 Does eye tracking work? 36:48 What kind of mic do you use? DPA Microphone The Voice Book 39:25 Supper Club questions Dark Abyss VS Code theme Kinesis Freestyle 2 Charybdis Nano keyboard Nexstand Arxiv Sanity Subvocal Recognition Imagen Research Midjourney 54:11 ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Git Imerge Shameless Plugs Scott: LevelUp Tutorials Wes: Wes Bos Tutorials Pokey: YouTube channel, Sponsor Pokey on GitHub Tweet us your tasty treats Scott's Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes' Instagram Wes' Twitter Wes' Facebook Scott's Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets

Will no one think of the maintainers? As The New Stack points out, watching millions of projects fail because of a bug in an open source library has become common enough that  we shrug and reply, "Told you so." It's gotten so bad, big tech companies are visiting the White House to discuss the issue as a matter of national security.There is a great post up on the Stack Overflow blog examining  this issue, but it's not about color.js, it's about Log4J.  Traffic to questions on this logging library grew more than 1000% percent after the recent revelations about a new vulnerability. Also discussed in this episode: cryptographer and Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike stepped down from his role as CEO of the encrypted messaging service.  That's news, but he actually made bigger waves in tech circles with an unrelated blog post detailing  his first experience with Web3. Spoiler alert: it's not as decentralized or divorced from Web2 as you might have thought.You can find Cassidy Williams on Twitter and her website.Ben Popper can be found on Twitter here.Ryan Donovan can be found on Twitter, or writing for the Stack Overflow blog. 

Will no one think of the maintainers? As The New Stack points out, watching millions of projects fail because of a bug in an open source library has become common enough that  we shrug and reply, "Told you so." It's gotten so bad, big tech companies are visiting the White House to discuss the issue as a matter of national security.There is a great post up on the Stack Overflow blog examining  this issue, but it's not about color.js, it's about Log4J.  Traffic to questions on this logging library grew more than 1000% percent after the recent revelations about a new vulnerability. Also discussed in this episode: cryptographer and Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike stepped down from his role as CEO of the encrypted messaging service.  That's news, but he actually made bigger waves in tech circles with an unrelated blog post detailing  his first experience with Web3. Spoiler alert: it's not as decentralized or divorced from Web2 as you might have thought.You can find Cassidy Williams on Twitter and her website.Ben Popper can be found on Twitter here.Ryan Donovan can be found on Twitter, or writing for the Stack Overflow blog. 

This episode was inspired by Joma Tech's review of his first ten years in coding. Ben Popper shared  a fair amount of his coding journey through the series Ben Popper is the Worst Coder in the World. Should you actually write out code on paper as some of us had to do? Maybe.Modding games gets people into programming. For Ryan, Freedom Force got him into Python. Today, it's Minecraft and Roblox. Want to jump start your career? Find a community on Discord or Twitter and make some contacts. The software industry is made of people. Hackathons helped Cassidy find a deeper love for coding, oh and her husband too.

This episode was inspired by Joma Tech's review of his first ten years in coding. Ben Popper shared  a fair amount of his coding journey through the series Ben Popper is the Worst Coder in the World. Should you actually write out code on paper as some of us had to do? Maybe.Modding games gets people into programming. For Ryan, Freedom Force got him into Python. Today, it's Minecraft and Roblox. Want to jump start your career? Find a community on Discord or Twitter and make some contacts. The software industry is made of people. Hackathons helped Cassidy find a deeper love for coding, oh and her husband too.

Listen to more on the StackOverflow Podcast: https://stackoverflow.blog/2021/08/06/podcast-364-mark-porter-mongodb-database/Transcriptmarkporter  [00:00:00] swyx: This is Mark Porter, the CTO of Mongo DB on his personal journey from relational databases to Mongo DB.   [00:00:06] Mark Porter: I am a relentless tech geek. I've loved tech my whole life. In fact, my Twitter handle is MarkLovesTech. I have used databases since I was 14 with some really ancient technologies started out on a 4k TRS 80 model one computer. We had to program it in assembly language because there wasn't enough memory to use the local basic copy. And I very quickly got into databases and I was talking to someone the other day and he pointed out something I'd never noticed, which is I've oscillated between using databases and building database. So I started out at Caltech and NASA using databases for space, data, and chip data. And then I built databases at Oracle versions, 5 6, 7, 8 for about 13 years. And then I used databases at NewsCorp for huge student data systems. And then I built databases at Amazon with Amazon RDS. Then I moved to Grab taxi, which is the Uber of Southeast Asia and use databases to deliver 15 million rides and meals a day, and then came back to Mongo DB. And here I am building databases again. I frankly can't get away from this thing.  [00:01:20] Ben Popper: I love that story. I wonder. Does that mean. You know, at each point you had some sort of frustration or saw some sort of like opportunity for innovation, you know, you kind of would build something, then you'd be the user of it. Then you'd realize that like the next sort of turn of the wheel was coming. As you move between those jobs where new paradigms and databases and murders.  [00:01:38] Mark Porter: Yeah. I mean, it's been really interesting. Half of my career. I've been the Bo and half my career. I've been the target. And I got to tell you that sometimes as a customer, you're not really happy being the target of what has been produced. Look, the reality is, is relational databases have been the modus operandi since 1970, when Cod first did his paper. And then Oracle was the first company that released them in 1979. They were actually known as relational technology back then and then changed their name later to Oracle. So the mission criticality of databases has never been in doubt. What has changed is the amount of data, the way we process that data. And what's really, really important. And it used to be duplication of data was important and things like that. And while that's still important, what's really important. Now is developer product. Bar none. That is job one for any mission critical software company is developer productivity and innovation  [00:02:35] Ben Popper: makes a lot of sense. It does seem like data has become almost this, uh, overwhelming force for some companies. Ryan. I know if you have experience with this, but I've been getting a lot of pitches and, and talking with folks on the podcast and you know, it's gone from, we're using data to, we have data lakes and there's a data iceberg. And, you know, we're only sort of scratching the surface of what we might be able to do with this. Endless flow of unstructured data that we're collecting. And as you mentioned, yeah, a lot of times what they're looking to do is understand it in a way that allows them to enhance productivity or automate certain processes, which right now are very time labor intensive. Yeah. Yeah. At my previous job, I worked out on an article about data pipelines and, you know, ETL processes and that yeah. There's a becoming a separation, I think, between your production database and the database you use to gain insights, right? Then the production database has to be fast. But the insight database, it can be a little more flexible in how it produces data, right? [00:03:34] Mark Porter: Yeah. So we think about systems of record. We think about systems of insight and yeah. I mean, definitely different people want to do different things with the databases. And so what we do is we think about personas. Are you an analyst? Are you a developer? Are you an AI ML engineer? Are you a PhD data scientist? We always try to come at it from the customer and what they want to accomplish. Yeah,  [00:03:56] Ben Popper: I think that's so interesting because as you said, obviously, databases have always been part of working in the world of software and computers, but increasingly there are these specialties that are very important in which are producing these really interesting results that themselves are devoted to data, as opposed to it being something that, you know, needs to be part of the larger process. Um, so mark, I wanted to touch on something, which is that you had a part of your career at AWS, which now, you know, has grown into. Quite a behemoth. Um, yeah. Just wondering if you can talk to us a little bit about what you learned there and maybe how some of that applies to the role you have at, at Mongo DB. [00:04:26] Mark Porter: Yeah. So I joined AWS as the general manager of AWS RDS, which at that time was probably the largest fleet of databases in the world. And that fleet grew just tremendously while I was there. It was, it was amazing, you know, just showing. That it's not just databases. It was managed databases that mattered. So RDS did not build any of its own databases, RDS vended. By the time I left over a million significantly more than a million Postgres, my SQL Maria DB, Oracle, and SQL server databases. And so the product that we produced was managing those databases and people love it when their database stays up. When the backups and restores work, when you can change parameters when fail over works and all those things. However, over time, as much as I loved running those databases, I became frustrated with how they were shackles almost on customer innovation and customer operability. And so we developed this system called Amazon Aurora, which changed out the storage system underneath Postgres in my SQL. Obviously we couldn't do that for the commercial databases and we made those databases so much more resilient, so much more durable, so much more available, but we kept running into the fundamental limit. Of a rigid architecture of high fail over times and a single primary architecture, which meant that the blast rate. Of a system going down or play in changing in Oracle database. I mean, it takes down a whole company and I can talk more about availability. In fact, you'll have trouble stopping. When you talk to you about availability, if you get me started  [00:06:09] Ben Popper: well, I mean, that's, that's the, uh, the big thing about a no SQL is, is availability, right? The replicability, the speed of access. Yeah, for folks who don't know, let let's lay out the value prop here. Like what is sort of the difference between the two and why would you prefer one over the other? You know, you mentioned shackles. I love that word, but yeah. You know, what are the limitations that it allows you to avoid when you, when you move to a new SQL and I guess, you know, to the degree that it makes sense. Yeah. Talk a little bit about availability or I guess, you know what I would say, it's almost like how robust your system can.  [00:06:41] Mark Porter: So I do think availability is really important, but from, just from a value prop point of view, the main reason that no SQL was started was multiple things. Number one, was this platform availability. I actually think you guys had a podcast with Elliot about a year and a half ago where he talked about the founding of Mongo DB. And I will give a shameless plug for one of your other podcasts, which, which is a great podcast that Elliot did. And. You know, in it, he talked about the fact that they want to do 400,000 transactions per second, and there was no way they could do it, but along the way, they did something even more important, which is they developed the document model. And the document model is just a natural way to program. When you want to add a field to a no SQL application that you're writing. You just added in your code and your structure in your, in your structure in Java or go or rust or whatever. And the database automatically starts having that field. So it's not just about availability. Now to get to your point about availability, Mongo DB uses what's called a sharding architecture or a replica set architecture where you can't actually configure a Mongo DB that doesn't have three nodes and those nodes automatically do elections and they automatically start up. And as opposed to relational databases where fail over is measured in 30 seconds, 60 seconds, 90 minutes, 10 seconds. Fail-over in Mongo. DB is measured in single digit seconds, RP 99.9 election time. And our outlet service is less than seven seconds. And why is that important? Because when an app is down for three to five to seven seconds, people go, huh? What happened? What's going on? On my phone. When it's down for 60 seconds, they've already visited another website to complete their purchase. And so there's a fundamental difference. So the ability to stay up and the ability to, to be available is thing one, the second ability is the ability to scale without limit. We have customers running a petabyte. In Mongo, DB clusters. And with over a thousand nodes, you just can't do that with the relational, even Aurora, which I just got to tell you, I love deeply because I helped architect it. You have one writeable master or primary and up to 15 read replicas. And if you run out of the ability of that master or primary to take right. You're done. You got now split your database and do crazy stuff. So those were the fundamental premises of databases. So, but the thing that's really missing there is that developers love databases, but developers do so much more than just store and retrieve data developers want to do graphs. Developers won't do analytics. Developers want to have a connection to their mobile device. They want to do all this. So what we're doing at Mongo DB and sorry for the brand plug, but I I'm pretty passionate. Yes, we're building an application data platform where the. Correspondence between what we produce and our main persona, the developer we're trying to get to a hundred percent. [00:09:44] swyx: I think this conversation was exceptional, not just because one of the key criticisms of Mongo DB is always from the SQL folks who just say that in the Mongo DB script, kiddies don't really know SQL one now. So they picked Mongo DB. This is a guy who definitely know SQL and is still in love with Mongo DB, but also this is a CTO who's clearly in love with the technology his company represents. And I think there's just not enough of those. I see so many resting investing CTOs were basically completely checked out and not really inspirational leaders or the company. And I think there should be more CTOs that are exactly like my Porter.

Chloe Condon has a great post about how she created her medication reminder app and an official endorsement from Smash Mouth. You can find some writing from Iheanyi Ekechukwu on our blog here and you can find his podcast here. Learn about the Great Molasses Flood of 1919. It's not funny so don't laugh.   Decades old code is putting millions of critical devices at risk. Should we be regulating software more closely? Ben Popper is the worst coder in the world

Chloe Condon has a great post about how she created her medication reminder app and an official endorsement from Smash Mouth. You can find some writing from Iheanyi Ekechukwu on our blog here and you can find his podcast here. Learn about the Great Molasses Flood of 1919. It’s not funny so don’t laugh.   Decades old code is putting millions of critical devices at risk. Should we be regulating software more closely? Ben Popper is the worst coder in the world

Is it legal for source code containing undefined behavior to crash the compiler?https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57652799/is-it-legal-for-source-code-containing-undefined-behavior-to-crash-the-compilerTrue, you're the boss, and the compiler works for you. But that doesn't mean it always behaves just as you instructed. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56802645/understanding-the-as-if-rule-the-program-was-executed-as-writtenWhat is Logo, you ask?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)And what about Netlogo? https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/docs/programming.htmlWilliam Chipps' golden years - so close, and yet so farhttp://wacretiring.com/

Is it legal for source code containing undefined behavior to crash the compiler?https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57652799/is-it-legal-for-source-code-containing-undefined-behavior-to-crash-the-compilerTrue, you’re the boss, and the compiler works for you. But that doesn’t mean it always behaves just as you instructed. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.https://stackoverflow.com/questions/56802645/understanding-the-as-if-rule-the-program-was-executed-as-writtenWhat is Logo, you ask?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)And what about Netlogo? https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/docs/programming.htmlWilliam Chipps’ golden years - so close, and yet so farhttp://wacretiring.com/

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Dieter, and Paul call Ben Popper — former business editor at The Verge who now works with DJI — to answer some questions about the new drone the company announced this week, the Mavic Air. There is also a discussion about what’s happening at Apple this week. The HomePod was announced without some key features at launch in a few weeks. There’s also an update to iOS 11 that’s being publicly previewed on their website. There’s a whole lot more in between that — like Paul’s weekly segment “A Kin for your wrist” — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. Here are the articles discussed in this week’s episode: 02:45 - Apple previews iOS 11.3 13:37 - Apple will release its $349 HomePod speaker on February 9th 27:54 - DJI Mavic Air with Ben Popper 54:10 - Paul’s weekly segment “A Kin for your wrist” 57:43 - Amazon doesn’t care if you accidentally shoplift from its cashier-less store 1:01:17 - RED says its Hydrogen One smartphone will ship this summer 1:01:42 - Acer announces $349 Chromebook Spin 11 with 360-degree hinge and USB-C 1:03:25 - Samsung teases camera improvements for Galaxy S9 1:04:18 - Trump administration wants to end NASA funding for the International Space Station by 2025 1:05:07 - How the Apple Watch tries to change your behavior Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, it’s Apple’s turn to take over The Vergecast. Dieter and Jake have just come back from WWDC while Nilay and Paul watched from afar so the gang has a lot to talk about with the new products announced. We also have Ben Popper stop by the show to talk about DJI’s newest drone, the Spark. There’s a whole lot more in between that so listen to it all you get it all. 04:56 - Apple announces HomePod speaker to take on Sonos 32:14 - DJI Spark review with Ben Popper 47:22 - Apple announces new 10.5-inch iPad Pro 1:02:51 - Apple is launching an iOS ‘ARKit’ for augmented reality apps 1:06:05 - iMac Pro introduced / macOS High Sierra 1:18:37 - watchOS 4 brings new Siri watchface, fitness coaching, and a new app-browsing UI 1:21:32 - Paul’s weekly segment “Gates-all-around, all around” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I had never heard of Nextdoor when I lived in New York City. Social media services catering to individual neighborhoods weren’t useful in an apartment building where most tenants lasted a year, and longtime residents kept to themselves. In my first year in Texas, however, I’ve regularly relied on Nextdoor, along with my neighborhood’s private Facebook group and the handful of sites that provide hyper-local support. I’m not the first to say local online forums are the bulletin boards and community papers of our times. They allow neighbors to promote garage sales, find babysitters, or request help to find a lost dog. They’re far from perfect, but in my experience they have helped lower the barrier between me and my community. To talk about online neighborhood groups, I invited my colleague Ben Popper to the show. Popper is our business editor and has covered Nextdoor a few times, but he’s also a member of his own share of local online communities. Subscribe to What's Tech on iTunes, listen on SoundCloud or Spotify, orsubscribe via RSS. And be sure to follow us on Twitter. You can also find the entire collection of What's Tech stories right here on the The Verge Dot Com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For The Verge, Ben Popper has reviewed every one of the most important drones of the past few years. Ian and Ben dissect the latest news from the drone industry including 3DR's layoffs, DJI's dominance, the promise of Yuneec, Xiaomi's new drone, GoPro's moonshot, and the FAA's Part 107 rule.

This week on Vergecast, Nilay returns, bringing in business editor Ben Popper to unfold his feature on public schools’ initiative to bring Chromebooks into classrooms. Reporter Russell Brandom joins to discuss the timely debate on encryption in light of this week’s Apple news. Racked style editor Nicola Fumo reclaims the hype desk to introduce the "Fumo hype matrix." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We have a few cyborgs on staff. Ben Popper is arguably the reporter best known for peeling back his skin to insert a piece of technology, which he chronicled in his feature, Cyborg America. But others have gone under the knife. I wanted to know why. You know, because I have crippling FOMO. This week I invited my friend and co-worker Adi Robertson, a biohacker herself, to explain what biohacking is and how it works. With a little time and money, you can be ever so slightly more advanced than the human race. Just try not to get infection please. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Gary Schteyngart wrote about the äppärät, an iPhone-like device that could stream our thoughts and conversations while monitoring our popularity, the idea seemed like an extreme parody of real life. The gizmo plays a central role in his 2010 novel Super Sad True Love Story; at the time, I found it distracting, seemingly cynical and implausible. I never thought the iPhone would come so close to the äppärät, let alone so within half a decade, but with Meerkat and Periscope, it seems the truth is even stranger than fiction. I invite The Verge's live streaming expert Ben Popper to tell me about the origins of live streaming, and what our future looks like on and off camera. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Verge's Business Editor and drone expert Ben Popper explains drones, the flying unmanned aerial devices flying over battlefields, metropolises, and Popper's own backyard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The International Center for Journalists’ Joyce Barnathan and Small World News’ Brian Conley on the role of non-professional journalists. Then, BBC correspondent Philippa Thomas, and Ben Popper on the birth of Betabeat.com.