The Stack Overflow Podcast

Taking a risk and moving to a new team

Episode Summary

We chat with Ian Allen and Kyle Pollard, two software developers at Stack Overflow, about what it takes to changes careers, learn new disciplines, and maintain a beginner's mindset. Ian started on internal development, moved to our talent product, and now works on the data team. Kyle was in retail, moved to help desk, became a webmaster, and is now working on our public platform team.

Episode Notes

Ian is Brooklyn bred a tech junkie, NBA stats nerd, hip hop connoisseur, and co-creator of GameFlo and Ujima Now. He graduated from Brown University and was a teaching fellow at FullStack Academy before coming to Stack Overflow. You can find him on Twitter and Github.

Kyle  Pollard graduated from the University of Northern British Columbia and worked as a computer technician and  programmer for the City of Prince George in Canada.  You can find him on Github, Twitter, and his website.

Our lifeboat this week goes to  Max Pevsner, who answered a question, but cautioned against taking his advice: Don't reuse cell in UITableView

Episode Transcription

Kyle Pollard I said 'blockers' to my wife the other day and she was very confused. [Paul laughs]

Paul Ford You cannot bring engineering culture into personal relationships, it's very dangerous. 

[INTRO MUSIC]

Ben Popper Your team needs the most talented developers to build the most innovative products. And fast. Toptal makes it easy by unlocking the top 3% of on demand talent worldwide in 48 hours or less. Scale your team for success at toptal.com/StackOverflow. 

BP Hello! Good morning, whenever you are. Welcome to the Stack Overflow Podcast. Hi, Paul. 

PF Hello! Hello, America. Hello, global Internet podcast consuming culture.

BP I've noticed that on other podcasts while they don't like just drop people in. So I'm going to say I'm Ben Popper, Director of Content here at Stack Overflow. And this is the Stack Overflow Podcast we talk about all things developer software, tech, and business.

PF And I'm Paul Ford, I'm a friend of Stack Overflow. And Ben, I think I'm a friend of you at this point.

BP One of my few at this point. [Ben & Paul laugh]

PF We're all just faces, right? And of a friend of Sara Chipps, who isn't here. So we're gonna have to do the best we can.

BP Paul, let's talk about managing through change, because I noticed that the syringe emoji has come up often when I type in vaccine, and it has like two scary droplets of blood next to it, which I always thought was a bit like aggressive. So Apple is going to change that, they're going to take away the blood and have a more benign looking needle when you when you say "I'm getting my vaccine."

PF I mean, personally not really part of the iOS ecosystem. So you know, I'll take your word for it. I'm not really sure what Google has, it's probably a little blob, it's probably money coming out of the vaccine.

BP Yeah, it's a little like slime blob with a holding a needle.

PF So we have a good subject today. And I think you and I will actually have something to ad for once, right, which is you used to be in media, and now you work for a tech company. Is that true? Is that true? Did I get that right?

BP Yeah, I made that transition. I was a journalist for 13 years. And then I started working at a drone company because I had become the drone beat reporter. So that was a pretty big change. 

PF You know, this is key there is always--and I used to be a journalist and kind of like literary essayist, and NPR commentator, and now I run a software company, right. But this is the thing like those transitions, when you say them, they sound really big. But there are always steps along the way, like you went to the drone company. And now you understood kind of the culture of technology a little bit better. And now you're at Stack, right? Like, for me, I was, I did a lot of consulting. And then I started to do more and more software development. And so you can really look back and see step along the way how it goes. So you have brought two guests from inside of Stack who are going to, we're going to talk about career transitions and how you make them inside of orgs. And from one place to another. Who have you brought along to this Google Meet that we are in instead of actually being in a place?

BP Today, we have two great guests, we have Ian Allen and Kyle Pollard. Ian, you work on our data science team, started here as a software engineer, and now on the data science team. And Kyle, you used to work in local government. And now you work here at Stack Overflow. So welcome to both of you. 

KP Hey, thank you.

Ian Allen Thanks.

BP So Ian, let's start with you. I know there's a good story here, because I remember we discussed at once. I think your career in software started with fantasy basketball, you wanted to win at fantasy basketball? You wanted to win at fantasy basketball?

IA Yeah, that's exactly how it started. I was actually like doing data engineering before I even knew what it was. I started coding just because I was in a really competitive fantasy basketball League. And you know, some of the other people in league words, you know, part of ESPN and they're analysts, had access to all this advanced data. And I had a bunch of spreadsheets. So saw like a book on like programming, learning basic Python, started scraping a bunch of data, getting up into pros guides, sequels database, just do kind of my own analysis and and kind of career took off from there.

PF This is real, like so many programmers--we don't talk about these stories a lot, right? But so many programmers are like, I just wanted to get better at that one thing or do you know how many people started with like a Windows hotkey, like that like a lot of the best programmers I know started with Windows hotkey, they're like, I can script Windows. And then also, my first real programming experience was on a fantasy basketball game. I don't know anything. And I immediately wrecked 30,000 accounts like screwed up all the stats. I didn't understand Oracle. So we have that in common except yours was successful, whereas mine was a taste of total failure. So you've already you've already got us beat.

BP Ian, before we jump to Kyle, I just wanna say and then when you started I think when I met you at Stack, were you on the data team or no?

IA Oh, no. Yeah, so I worked on a few teams since I've been a Stack. I was like on the internal development team for a while. Then for before moving to the data team of on talent, our talent product for about two years, but I always kind of been data adjacent since I joined Stack it was just kind of in always something into. So, you know, back when David Robinson, our old data scientists for their, you know, straight up with them about my interest in it. And they were very generous with the time, we had sessions like every Friday, well, they expose me to the world of R, and the tidy verse and things of that nature. So that's where I kind of got my feet wet to the point where on talent, just kind of games that go to person, they just need to some quick data work that a data team can handle at the moment.

BP That is one of the great things that I've felt about Stack since I've been here, is people are definitely willing to tutor you. I think that's part of the culture, like we have the Stack code for all new hires, can you know, join sort of like a semester. And then yeah, you know, like, whenever you're at a relatively small company, compared to a company that has 1000s of employees, somebody will say, "Can we just do this data thing? Could you just figure this, you know, could you just write--" it's like, well, we don't actually have it, and then somebody gets to raise their hand and step into that opportunity, which is kind of cool.

PF So Ian, you went from engineering to data science with R in the middle. Kyle, what was, you went from A to B? What were they? What was the A and B?

KP Yeah, well, I worked, I worked at my city hall for like, six years before coming to Stack.

PF Wait, where is the city hall?

KP In Prince George, British Columbia, Canada.

PF How many stories are in that city hall?

KP Four stories. 

PF A big building for BC! Okay, good. Good. Okay.

KP Yeah! Not bad. Not bad. We're the we're the northern capital of British Columbia, which is the weird subdivision we have to make. 

PF Oh, yeah, absolutely famous northern capital of British Columbia. [Kevin laughs] Okay. So what kind of work are you doing there?

KP It started with Help Desk, like a lot of people do jumping into tech. So I worked at Help Desk for a few years. And then I transitioned over to being the the web guy at our local city hall. So that's, I got to maintain all of our public websites and all of our internal websites, a lot of different fun stuff got to be a generalist for web.

BP Did they call a webmaster, because I still think that's one of the greatest titles in tech that you could have?

KP No, I mean, my title was programmer, but I wish so much I was considered a webwizard or webmaster.

PF Webmaster. Webmaster got uncool so fast. It lasted about 30 minutes in the industry. Okay, so you were in all but title, a webmaster?

KP Yes.

PF So it's a big jump. Right. So you went from there? Did you go from there straight to Stack? Or what were was there stuff in the middle?

KP Yeah, kind of unbelievable. I went straight from my local government job right into Stack Overflow. And I am still in disbelief that I get to work here.

PF The thing that's fascinating, listen to both of you. So Ian, the thing that you did is the thing I always tell people to do, which is when you are interested in something go stand as close to the person doing it as you possibly can. Right? Like, that's always--because then they go, "Oh, he's serious. Yeah, well, you know, if you want to, if you want to download R" and as you know, it's like, once you're on that side, once you've gotten R studio on your computer, I think your data science scientists, like i think that's that's like the actual first step, right? And then Kyle, your, your process is really different, which is like, "Alright, I think I got some skills here, I'm working in a four storey building, I'm going to go and apply to the world's largest platform and make a jump and figure I can I can figure it out along the way."

BP You know, one of the things I'm curious about is, when you two got started at Stack Overflow, were there things that you know, surprised you, or were there things that you didn't expect that you had to sort of, like, you know, get accustomed? Kyle, for you, this would be within the first couple weeks in you. And I have been through the process of working out of a New York City Office, which had, as you said, like kind of a culture. And now we've gone fully remote, which I think has been the big shift for me.

KP For me, some of the stuff I'm getting used to is kind of the autonomy of Stack Overflow You know, it really empower people to do their best work on their own. And I came from a background of government, which was a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of processes and a lot of the same so you know, the freedom and independence is uncomfortable for me, but I'm I am loving it so far. It is it is great to, you know, have that flexible work schedule, getting to work whenever it's works best for me, you know, I have a I have a toddler, and you know that I don't really get to pick when I'm most effective.

BP Yeah, that has, I was actually telling this the other day, I think one of the biggest challenges for me is that I liked about the office was it let me set the nine to five. And now it's completely project driven, like get the work done, you know, I guess be there for the meetings that are set. And I end up in this state where like, I do some work during the day, but I also do other things, childcare, chores, and then I feel guilty at night. And it's like, I can't, you know, I can't turn it off. Like, then it's like, I should have done more work during the day. Maybe I should catch up at night or whatever. Like, the time limiting for me was actually useful to be like, this is the work time. This is the off time.

KP Oh, totally. I struggle with that too. Like I work nine to five in my government job and I get to pick whenever I want. And I've personally been getting burnt out like, you know, trying to work more and more and more to almost prove myself. So I've had to I've had to rein myself in and make sure I'm only working you know, eight hours of work in a day and I'm not trying to work more than that to try to prove myself.

PF Kyle, you need to chill out, man. It's okay, you're doing good. You're on the podcast. They're not gonna put you on the podcast if you're not doing a good job.

KP I kind of figured this was the meeting where you told me like--

BP This is a candid camera.

PF Yeah, hey, this random guy from some other company and Ben, we're gonna, this is your performance review. No! You know what I think I was thinking the other day, like when this is all over, no one's gonna get back to work. We're all like everyone's just gonna, like show up at the office for like two hours and then get confused and like walk away again. This is gonna be like three months of utterly wrecked productivity right at the moment everybody thinks they're going to be productive again, like you think it's a disaster. Now wait until we're like limping back in with vaccines and some people are in the office. Kyle, you're going to be in the northernmost part of British Columbia. It's the Capital up there. Okay, so Ian, you're what were the big gaps that you had to jump over? Like, what were the things where you went, "Oh, no, this is going to suck for a couple months while I figure it out"?

IA Like so like, I'm a data engineer. So I'm still on the engineering side. But we do cover like kind of the game in terms of analysis and like all that stuff. But yeah, part of it is just kind of going back to that learner mindset kind of when I first started learning to code and just kind of understanding, you know, first setting expectations myself that you know, there's new things that I don't understand that I have no idea about. So just kind of being looking out for the unknown unknowns, I think just kind of optimizing for finding those. So yeah, just starting to ask shameless questions, as I call it, no dumb questions, shameless questions. Just because, you know, you never know even though like, it seems like a simple question. I just never know kind of what information that I know about. So just kind of having the humility just to ask literally anything, even things that like, you know, I quote unquote, knew, but just with this department, it's a whole different perspective and things like that.

PF How does Stack deal with those kind of transitions? Is it pretty normal for people to move from group to group? Is it really unusual? Like, I don't? I don't know.

IA Yeah, they're pretty open to it. I mean, yeah, obviously, you know, go through a process like interview with the team and kind of show you can do the work. But you kind of have that track record, and you show you can do the work. They're pretty open.

PF I mean, I'm sure you have your own HR database with roles and skills, you could kind of get in there and just, you know, you just tagged yourself slightly differently. Ben, you run engineering now.

BP Yeah, exactly. One thing I've noticed is that I start using like engineering lingo, and like project lingo that I never used in journalism. I'm like, well, we could just get an MVP of this, you know, running. And then we could maybe do like a quick sprint. It's like, what am I even talking about?

PF No, it's really bad. It really, yeah, no, I know, it doesn't matter. No, no, like the agile and all this gets into your brain, and you're not allowed to think another way.

KP I said blockers to my wife the other day, and she was very confused. [Paul laughs]

PF You cannot bring engineering culture, interpersonal relationships, it's very dangerous. My wife is a construction project manager. There's a healthy tension there, I just give in. I'm just like, oh, that's how we're doing it. Wonderful. Let's let's do it that way.

KP I had a professor from university that talked about you know, engineers have their like, their book of like, you know, you want to build a bridge, and there's a rock 10 meters in and there's, you know, the the levels is high, and your elevations is high. So here's exactly how you build a bridge. And it's like, you go to programming, and it's like, I want to build a website. It's like, here's a million different ways to build it. We have no idea what we're doing, like, have fun, go, just do whatever.

PF It is exactly right. And no, no, I mean, we get we get to work in very arbitrary ways without a lot of government oversight. Although, you know, think, how would Stack have grown? If the fire department had to walk through on a regular basis and be like, what are you doing? You can't have exchanges over here, that just isn't gonna work. When people make these moves, a lot of times, you do have to make a step back. I've made a few of these in my career. And I think they're really hard to do, because you've got, I see with a lot of people who are in journalism, Ben, you probably see this too. And they'd love to get closer to our world because journalism's always in trouble. But they don't want to lose all the credit and all the relationships that they built. And there's kind of no other way. Like when you make a jump like this, you're changing your whole power base. And sometimes you're even taking a step back in terms of title and comp, and so on. When is the right time to do that?

IA That's a good question. Yeah, I was pretty settled into my product teams, I'll see after being on it for a couple of years. And then we're hiring new people. So, you know, I came one of the more experienced people on a team. So definitely, it's kind of weird to kind of give that up. Because, you know, I felt like I was kind of growing there. But so I guess the biggest challenge is kind of, least just go out and a little leap from kind of, you know, being more experienced to being the new guy on the team and really not even know where to find something or something's broken. And my teammates out, it's like, Huh, what now? And it's kind of that panic that comes with, like, you know, scrambling to find out Yeah, a system or you know, how to find a log for a system that you've just encountered. So that's definitely been the biggest challenge.

PF I mean, you know, there's a big part of this, right, like you need and it's actually I'm teasing Kyle about it, but I'm hearing it from Ian as well. And and Ian, you use the word and I think this is real. Humility is key to these transitions. Because you're going to lose, if you're going to jump from field to field, job to job industry to industry, you're going to lose some of the respect and power and control that you have, you're going to be a newcomer and the deal, you know, listening to you, it feels to me, like the deal that we're all making, when we make these these jumps, is saying, even though the new organization that I'm jumping to may not fully value, all of my experience, I am going to be able to bring that experience forward into this new world after a period of learning, and that will actually make me more valuable. And they may not fully see that, you know, like, maybe I'll just be, you know, I'm going to be a valuable, we need data scientists, so great, you know, we need data engineers, and come on over, you know, Kyle, you seem to have a, you seem to have good experience over here in city government, I think you could do the work. But there is a kind of internal assumption, right, that I'm going to be able to bring those experiences into this new role. And it's going to, I'm going to be able to move faster as a result of combining those two things. And I, you know, like, for me, my media experience has been really valuable in communicating outward about the work that I do, right, like, it actually turns out that communications is about half of engineering, it's just nobody talks about it, because engineers are bad communicators. And so it's just like, but you know, I couldn't have proven that when I made this jump in my career, it took me years to put those worlds together.

KP I know, I really struggled with, you know, the visibility of the work that I do, you know, working in local government working on a bunch of internal stuff, like that's not something you can, you know, build a portfolio out of, so, you know, I made a lot of steps to like, you know, here, maybe I could work on some GitHub projects before coming to Stack, pad up my CV a little. And coming to Stack has just been a huge opportunity for me to do this visible work, you know, I get to work on one of the most visible sites in the world. And it's a huge growth opportunity for me.

BP Yeah, one thing that really struck me is interesting listen to you talk, Kyle, is that I didn't realize this about the world of software before I came. But it's a very public job. And I that's probably changed in the last couple of years, because it didn't used to be so online and Git wasn't there. But now, as you're pointing out, like, if you're working for local government, it's hard to be sharing a lot of what you're doing and sharing it in public and doing it on a regular basis. Like, I guess I thought of software engineering as sort of like an introverted job and something where like, not a lot of people see what you're writing. But recently, I think it's kind of become the opposite. Like, you kind of have to build your brand, you have to be broadcasting contributing to open source. Like, that's how you sort of move forward in your career.

KP I think there's a big conversation on like, do you need to grind open source outside of work or not. And, you know, if you work your if you work your invisible nine to five government job, you still you're still a valid programmer, you're still visible. But I think the the communication part is so much of the job, like, the software isn't as much about the code as it is the people you're helping out. And so the more visible your work, and the more people you get to help out. Like, the more impact you make, the better you can show to potential employers.

PF I mean, Ben's actually wading into one of the great controversies going on right now in our culture, right, which is like, our culture being the culture of nerds who do a lot of programming, to get a job to move forward in your career, how do you need to represent yourself? Because, like, somebody without a lot of resources, or who's at home with their kids can't grind open source in the evenings, like they just don't have the time. Right. So how do you evaluate them? And that's, and then people are like, well, we do the whiteboard test, but then that that really prioritizes people who are--the reality is there is no--interviewing people is horrible. I've done it hundreds of times. And never, it never actually seems to make sense. We do at work, we do a paid test, give people a task, and then we pay them to do it, which feels like the best compromise we could find. And so like, and it also makes you feel okay about asking someone to go do some work. And we evaluate that, but I mean, it is this is really tricky, right? And but at the same time, you have to publicly represent yourself, like a good Stack score is kind of a meaningful indicator, GitHub repos are a meaningful indicator. So we're all we're all kind of juggling with this. This is actually towards the point of career transitions, right? Like they take time and energy that other people may not have in their careers, you get to move forward. They also really do benefit from having a kind of public, you know, style of communication, you know, people you need to be able to talk to people about why you should come over. That's tricky. I'm glad we went there. Because it's kind of a it's kind of a tricky thing, because the people who get to jump forward and backward in their career are people who have the time to make these moves, and they feel safe.

BP Yeah. Ian, what do you think? I mean, how do you think about your public persona and like putting some of that out there? And also, when you made the transition, what did you have available to you to make that feel safe or did it feel risky?

IA It's interesting, especially like tiny saying, just like kind of is like a tax around like kind of switching careers. I definitely felt that to a degree especially going from a product team where one like just all my work is very public. Like, especially when I do for front end things like this search interface, you know, I can like point to that. And so that was me. Whereas like, I'm going to something where literally like no one outside the company sees. So if there was that, just, you know, just even in just preparing myself for the role just like spending a lot of extra time just brushing up on some math that haven't done since like, you know, college and things of that nature, or just, you know, picking up some new technologies, like for example, you know, we use a lot of containers now in the data team that I've never dealt with before. So just like finding my own time kind of brushing up on that so I can make a safe transition.

PF The two worst parts of engineering containers and math.

IA Yeah, exactly. You know, so I was putting myself through that hell kind of on my own time, just so you can feel comfortable going to that new roll. That was, ueah, that definitely took a lot of extra time. But, you know, luckily, I'm in a position to, you know, I was able to sacrifice.

BP Yeah, and I guess you know, another thing that's interesting about that we're talking about this before, it's like, when you do find something that you really love, and especially if you're like, Okay, I came into engineering, but now I realized that what I like within that realm is data science, you know, it feels less like work. That's dangerous, because you're doing it on your own time. But it feels like less like work when you really find that sweet spot, you know, where you kind of love the work that you're doing?

IA Oh, yeah, for sure.

KP I totally felt that I've been comparing my jump to Stack Overflow, like my jump into my my first Help Desk position, I worked, I worked retail for like a Canadian pharmacy chain. And then I moved to Help Desk and it's something I loved even more, and I got paid even more to do it. And I felt so uncomfortable. Like they're paying me this much to do, like less work it feels like. And so it's like the same feel coming to Stack. Like, you know, I picked the job. That's something I absolutely love, and I'm passionate about and like, they pay me more to work on this stuff. Like this is crazy.

PF You know, I have a question for you, which is how was it to get back into math, because that is always where I hit my wall. I'm like, Oh, no, I don't want to do this. 

IA It's an adventure. Like some it's fun. Like, I always just like math in general. I mean, I started with the basketball stuff, but I haven't made a lot of YouTube. [Ian laughs]

PF Ohhh. 

IA Khan Academy, you know, a lot of YouTube just like brush up on doing concepts like never dealt with even like my day to day job. If I'm like updating a report, and they use a technique that they were model that not familiar with, I'm like, Okay, I guess got to figure out that is. 

PF What are the branches of math that you need for data science, if you're coming from engineering?

IA I mean, it's mostly like statistics and like linear algebra helps a lot too.

PF Yeah, statistics I can always wrap my head around. And then I read like page three of the linear algebra textbook, I'm like, yeah, I don't, okay. I want to know more. But no, not going to, my brain just stops. So more power to you. You gotta cross the bridge.

IA The journey.

KP In university, I actually did a double major with computer science and math. And I love I love math, but just to read it and just to like, kind of experience it, but not actually to get my hands dirty, like statistics, that stuff is cool to read, like, hey, there's a cool p value, you did a good job. But like, I don't want to do any of that. That analysis, that's hard.

PF I feel the end up backing, as you get further and if you stay close to this industry, but aren't progressing every day, you end up backing into stats, no matter what you do, like you kind of can't everything that is technology that isn't programming ends up being stats, so you know, analytics or even product work at scale is still requires you to have a good statistical understanding. You can't hide from it. But I have, I've hidden from it for years, and I feel I feel that window is closing and it's sort of like, you know, I'm older than everybody on this call. And I'm like, man, I'm gonna have to be humble before statistics, I'm gonna have, I'm gonna have to go get that beginner mindset. You know, let's close this out. Okay, both of you are in a position where you you made some jobs, you went to beginner mindset, like, how did you prepare for that? Like, how did you remind yourself that you are a beginner and keep from getting frustrated and sort of stay in the game? Let's start with Kyle and go to Ian.

KP A lot of it was really great open communication with my my boss, we're having like, once or twice a week check ins and just being super vulnerable, like, Hey, I'm feeling anxious about, you know, imposter syndrome kind of stuff. And I'm feeling anxious about am I doing enough and I'm feeling burnt out because I'm the flexible worker stuff. So I think just being vulnerable with with my boss and vulnerable with my team, like, connecting emotionally with everybody and making sure that like they they know you're struggling and they know you're feeling weird, and you know, having that supportive team to be there for you. It's been it's been awesome. Maybe, maybe I'm lucky to have have a great team like that, but I've certainly leaned into it.

IA For me, it's just kind of similar, slinging the mindset of just like, you know, to be a developer is just like, you know, knowing how to learn things pretty quickly. You know, so I can lean back and just know, remind myself that okay, I don't know everything today, but day by day, I'll learn more, you know, and then just kind of leaning on my more experienced teammates, you know, they've been great and just like just being honest, like, Hey, can I just watch your work today and see what you're doing? And like just pick up things just from seeing how they approach things. Ask them. Yeah, shameless questions and yeah, just put any like ego to decide. You know, I have a lot of room to grow.

PF Ben, have you ever opened up R Studio? Ever looked at R?

BP No, all I know is that Ian once wrote a great blog post about R, which still gets traffic to this day, which is why I'm always pestering him to write for us again.

PF R is a challenging language, syntactically, it's surprising. Yeah, that whole world is amazing. They because they bundled up the tidy verse like the standard library for R bundles up so much amazing knowledge that you go in and play and you learn. It's really I gotta say, like as a as a kind of like cultural accomplishment. It's like 500 textbooks in one, it's pretty wild.

BP Right. There was, I definitely did have the experience when Dr. Julia was with us just being like, it would be cool if you could see this in real time. Or we could we could track this and she'd be like, "mhm" and then like three days later, she'd be like, "check out this thing I built in Rstudio." And I was just like, whoa.

PF It's like application development. But it doesn't get quite the same credit because it's inside of R but sociologists use it a lot. It's pretty fascinating.

[MUSIC]

BP While I look for a lifeboat, I just want to shout out Kyle for organizing a group Magic the Gathering game with a bunch of developers and other folks that Stack, we used something called Tabletop Simulator, which I have to say was the janky-est and most joyful experience I've had in a while. [Kyle laughs]

KP That was awesome. 

PF Oh, I've heard about this thing. It's literally like a 3d, it just simulates a table top? 

BP It just simulates a tabletop. There was a lot of people throwing dice unnecessarily.

PF So you can do it with more than one person. I didn't know that. I thought it was just like, Yeah, of course. That makes sense. I'm an idiot. Looking at it now. It's literally like a chessboard in a field. And you can throw, you can throw checkers. 

BP Yeah, exactly. Other people are trying to play and I was just throwing checkers at them. It was really great. So let's see here, every episode we want to shout out a lifeboat, that's somebody who earned a badge for giving an answer which got up to a score of 20 or more per question that had a score of three or less, stepped in and helped to save some knowledge. Today, it goes to Max Pevsner, who answers the question, how do you avoid reusing a cell in the UI TableView. So thanks, Max.

PF Max!

BP It's your decision, of course, but it's a very bad idea. Very bad in bold. But still, he came up with the answer, the scold and the answer. I'm Ben Popper, Director of Content here at Stack Overflow. If you want to find me, I'm always on Twitter @BenPopper. And if you want to chat with us suggest ideas, share thoughts, its podcast@stackoverflow.com.

PF Kyle, how can we find you?

KP I am Kyle Pollard. I'm a developer of public platform for Stack Overflow. You can find me @KyleJrp on Twitter, or I just started a website, Kylejrp.com. I'd love you to come read my blog and tell me what you want me to write about.

PF Ian, what about you?

IA I'm Ian Allen. I'm a data engineer at Stack Overflow. You can usually find me on Twitter @ianislike and also do DNI consulting at ujimanow.com that

PF I'm Paul Ford. friend of Stack Overflow, check out my company Postlight. We're hiring. I'd love to hear from you. We're looking for good, good people.

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