The Stack Overflow Podcast

The paranoid style in application development

Episode Summary

The home team talks out encrypting DNS, the shiny new Apple gear, the ease and pitfalls of no-code/low-code application development, productivity vs. our guilt and self-loathing, and the after effects of the pandemic on our online presence.

Episode Notes

We talked about obscuring DNS traffic based on this article.

Cassidy and Ben are pretty excited about all the new Apple stuff announced recently. Ryan, the curmudgeon, does not. 

There are several theories as to where the word dongle came from. 

The Conductor framework makes building web apps simpler in a  low-code/no-code  style. 

Did the pandemic worsen everyone else's guilt and self-loathing over decreased productivity or was it just us?

Our only point of contact during the height of the pandemic was the Internet connection. Has the loosening of quarantine made us less likely to  live online?

 

Episode Transcription

Ryan Donovan I don't know if JavaScript was ever intended to be this sort of complicated application running thing.

Ben Popper It was never meant to be this important.

Cassidy Williams It's grown beyond our control! [Ryan laughs]

[intro music]

BP Alright, everybody, welcome to the Stack Overflow Podcast, home team edition. I am Ben Popper, Director of Content here at Stack Overflow, joined today by some wonderful co-hosts. Why don't y'all go around the horn and introduce yourself—counter clockwise? Do you see me in the top left of the video?

CW I don't. I see you in the bottom left.

RD I see you on the top right. Ohhh boy.

BP Oh boy. Alright, Cassidy, you go first, and we'll pass the hat. 

CW Sure. Hello, everybody! My name is Cassidy Williams and I am—what am I? I'm a person. Director of Developer Experience at Netlify. [Cassidy laughs]

RD Good morning! I'm Ryan Donovan. I'm a content marketer and editor of the Stack Overflow blog.

BP Well, everybody, thank you for coming on the show. We're trying out some new technology, Riverside FM. So we'll see how the recording sounds in the end. And today, we brought a couple of ideas, things to chat about. I will start with a link that Ryan shared, which is about DNS traffic and surveillance. So Ryan, just give us the broad strokes here. For people who are not super familiar, what is DNS? And why should I care if people can see what I do over that? 

RD Sure, DNS is a internet backbone server thing, that anytime you go to a website, you type in www.example.com, your DNS server will come back and tell you what the IP address is of example.com. Most people use a DNS server from their ISP. So your ISP will see every single website that you go to. And the article is saying that—

BP But wait. No if I'm in Incognito mode? 

RD No, no, it does. 

BP Ohhh. 

RD Your DNS server knows everything. You can change your DNS server to the Google one, but then Google knows everything you do.

BP Okay. CloudFlare has one and then CloudFlare knows everything I do. 

RD Sure, sure. But this article was talking about how apps are getting more paranoid, and are starting to use encrypted DNS and this oblivion DNS server, which I didn't quite understand, but the extent of it is that they are going to hide their DNS traffic.

BP A series of complicated pipes and encryptions. Cassidy. would you trust a service called Oblivion? Does that feel like an arco punk, a good fit for you?

CW I definitely thought that it sounded like my note taking software Obsidian. And so yeah, sure! Keep it all in the word family. 

BP Yeah. Ryan, I think we might be covered because I turn on this Stack Overflow suggested VPN every day. So I can connect to a bunch of different work things. And I think that also has like an encrypted tunnel. I don't know, do you think that helps a DNS or not?

RD I'm not sure that that encrypts the DNS server, you still have a DNS server to get to whatever you're hitting. I think it just protects the traffic between two IP addresses.

BP Cassidy on a scale of like, one to 10, how much do you care about this? Cuz I know, typically, people who work with code are much more sensitive to privacy and identity than normies like me.

CW I care. The problem is, though, is that I don't fully understand all of it. Like I tried to add my own protections here and there, like, sometimes we'll use a VPN, or sometimes I'll use a password manager for most things and stuff. But besides that, I don't really know how to set up some of this stuff. And it's mostly just because I've never really tried.

RD Yeah, I mean, I know how to change a DNS server. I know the address of the Google DNS server. But another thing that sort of blew me away on this is that the Facebook app is a pretty big app. It's about 200 megabytes, because it includes an entire networking stack. 

CW Wow. 

RD Yeah. So it's, it's avoiding the entire phone networking stack. And they're saying, like, you know, in the future data is so valuable that they're not going to give it away.

BP Yeah, it has been really interesting to see the turf wars already emerging between hardware providers like Apple and software providers like Facebook and Google and you know, sort of skirmishing over who's going to own data. And to what degree are we protecting consumer privacy, offering that as sort of like almost like one of our services, one of our values. Versus well, you know, who's really protecting the consumer and who's really just trying to monopolize the data for themselves in their own ecosystem. Cassidy. I know you had been mentioning yesterday, you wanted to chat a little bit about the recent Apple event. Is there anything you saw last week that you thought was interesting?

CW Well, speaking of Apple, an Apple event happened last week. And it's curious, I'm very excited about the show cinema mode on iPhone that's coming out. That seems like it's going to be pretty cool, where you can kind of change the focus actively, dynamically as you shoot video and stuff. And you can also do it after the fact. And what was kind of wild is way back in, I think it was 2012, I entered this contest thing for a scholarship to talk about what technology will be available in the future. And that is an exact thing I talked about, being able to change focus in a single shot. And so the fact that it's real, I was like, oh my gosh, it only took nine years. But it happened!

BP What was that—there was like a standalone camera. It was like big on Kickstarter, just big member. And it lets you do that trick of like, recording and then shifting between focus. I remember, it was like people were blown—I have to look it up. But at the time, it was kind of seen as like a real breakthrough. It didn't end up working because like, you kind of held it like a GoPro or a like a flip—remember flip cam? It was like that, but it had depth of field for recording at multiple depths of field at once. And then later, right, you could go in and select like, you're focused on the kid in the front. But actually, I wanted to look at the horse in the back.

RD And kind of stitch two photos together. 

BP Yeah, I wonder how—did they explain how Apple does that all on a phone?

CW I assume that it's similar to how they do portrait mode, because like with portrait mode, you can change the lighting after the fact. And you can—I don't even know what it's called. So you can adjust some kind of focus level in portrait mode. And so all I can assume is that they're doing the exact same thing. But for video, and it seems more complicated. [Ryan laughs]

BP Yeah, it was called the lytro. And the technology—

CW I do remember that!

BP The technology has a light field field camera. Yeah, the lytro was like a little box. And it was like, it was the first kind of like, standalone handheld light field camera, which prior that was something you had like in a studio or a science lab or something like that.

CW Yeah! Wow. Memories. Good times.

BP But also amazing. Yeah, it's like all you know, these things that at that time, I forget what it was, it was very expensive. You know, for this little handheld box, it could only do that one trick. And now Apple's just like, yeah, we just do that on the new iPhone, you know, no big deal. Nbd.

CW Yeah, they also released the new Apple Watch, which I don't have one of those. But they kept talking about fall detection. I was like, you know, I'm a klutz, this would be great. [Ben & Ryan laugh] It would constantly just telling my watch I'm okay, this is just who I am. They also released the new iPad Mini, which I think looks really, really cool because it works with the Apple Pencil and pretty colors. You know, all that jazz.

BP I'm firmly in the apple ecosystem. I have MacBook, iPhones, iPads, we don't have the watch yet. Maybe some—oh, Apple TV. So I'm pretty ensconced in their ecosystem. But then ironically, all the apps on my homescreen are Google Apps. It's like the whole G Suite is the home screen. And Apple is all the hardware. What about you, Ryan? What are you? Well, you have a Windows machine, don't you?

RD Oh, yeah, I got a Windows desktop. I'm kind of a anti-Apple fanboy. You know, Apple kind of feels like a cult to me. They're shiny, they're polished. They're super expensive. They're closed ecosystem. You know, I have a desktop here with the the side panel still open. I want to be able to access it at any point and right, knock the dust off my graphics card.

BP Yeah. If you're capable of doing that stuff, like it's kind of like if you're if you're the kind of person who could tune their own machine, then I think it's good. The reason I really don't like Windows is because older people in my family or friends are always getting Windows machines. And then after like a year, they're so kludgy. They're running like molasses, because they've accidentally downloaded a million things that open and start. And I just find if I say, like, get a Mac next time, you know that that happens so much less frequently. Like it's just the closed ecosystem kind of protects people often from—

RD It's, you know, a safety versus freedom issue.

CW Yeah, I have my foot in both worlds where I use my desktop PC for all my personal things. And I have a Mac for work. And I have an iPad and an iPhone, but I also test a lot of things on an Android phone. And so I touch all the things that I do think the power in Apple is its ecosystem because of the apps that just work on Apple, and you're very clear design system and stuff. But I do like that freedom of Windows. 

BP Is that a big change, Cassidy? Like 10 years ago, would it have been to say, Oh, yeah, you know, I do most of my programming on Mac, and I do my personal stuff on Windows? I feel like it would have been reversed. Like it was much more frequent. Windows was where you spend time coding and Mac was like, for personal or artistic reasons.

CW Kind of depends on who you talk to. Because Mac has always had, its basically, Mac OS is on top of Linux. And so you could do a lot of—

RD That's fairly recent. I mean, within the last 10 or so years. I mean, once it switched it out, I think a lot of development moved to, to the Linux based Mac.

CW Exactly. But now that Windows has added WSL, the Windows subsystem for Linux, I think a lot of devs went back, they're just like, oh, great. And I know like, for example, my husband, he works at Microsoft and he got a new work PC and it just has so many ports. Like I wish my Mac had that where he's just like, oh, it's easy. I don't need a dongle to add an HDMI cord and I shed a tear as we watched Netflix.

RD I feel like Mac's have been externalizing all their ports, like you need a USB hub to do anything.

CW Yeah, right now I'm looking at my setup and I have a dongle and a gigantic hub that holds everything. The only things plugged into my Mac are the hubs and the dongles.

RD I mean, if you have a laptop, I feel like at that point, you might as well just get a desktop.

CW It's true. Well, and granted, I'm a snob. And so like I always want to use a mechanical keyboard and like my external mouse, and I have like a DAC amp for my headphones and all those things. 

BP Is there a word that means like keyboard snob? Like is there something that's specific that people use that? Or like a super keyboard fan?

CW I think that's it.

RD Keyboard snob. Typewriter.

CW Oh, yeah. Yeah. So anyway, when I'm at my desk, I'm a snob and use all of these accessories. But otherwise, it's decent when I'm on the couch.

BP I know somebody who just bought one of the Macs, you know, where it's just like a little box, like it doesn't come, you know, in the screen or whatever. 

CW Oh, yeah, yeah.

BP And if you do it that way, you actually get a lot of bang for your buck. It's like 700 bucks, but it's super powerful. And then you got to bring your own peripherals. But you can do that quite cheaply, if you want to. Again, it's a little more difficult to set up and configure, you might run into some issues. But if you're willing to do a little bit of work at the beginning, that's a great way to get into the Apple ecosystem without sort of overpaying for what you're getting.

CW Yeah, I'm very curious about the new Mac Pros or MacBook Pros that are coming out, supposedly this fall, we'll see. The rumors are saying that they're adding ports back, which will be very exciting. [Ryan laughs] We'll see if that's actually true.

BP The return of ports, oh my gosh.

CW But also, I'm mostly looking forward to the fact that it's going to be like those M1 or M2s or whatever chips.

BP Did Jony Ive leave? How could they add the ports back? I thought he just wanted to make it a solid pane of glass.

CW Yeah, as soon as it runs out of battery, you just buy a new one.

RD I feel like they removed the ports just so they had new features for the next release.

CW Yeah, ugh. Don't like it. But right now like the the M1 MacBook Airs and stuff, those ultimately can support one monitor. And so I'm not going to get one of those because I got my two monitors set up. I just told you about all my dongles.

BP I got a dongle on here for the USBCs. I got some SD card, regular USB port. HDMI. All that jazz.

CW Yeah. And so I'm looking forward to that. So that way, if I decide to get one of those computers, we'll see. I could actually use all of—

BP Think of the dongle industry Cassidy. What damage will this do to the dongle industry?

RD Side note, I feel like dongle was one of those words that somebody was like, "What is that? The whatchamacallit? The dongle over there." It just stuck. 

CW Yeah and then everyone just rolled with it.

BP Alright, well, now we have to look that up and see if there's like a very serious technical explanation for the word dongle. Can you enter that into Stack Exchange while we're talking? Okay, so I had one to bring to the table a little link. I don't know if you all had a chance to read this. But it was at the top of Hacker News earlier this week. It's called Building Apps in Minutes, Not Months. And it's lab notes from somebody named Alexander Obenauer, who works for like an indie sort of future of software. It's a framework made up of interface components built in React. And the magic is that each one has its own little item ID and it automatically sort of syncs between them, pipes the data around between these building blocks. So for me, this is always the dream, like just give me that drag and drop IDE where I can create, you know, a single page app that works really well, I can go in and mess with sort of the configuration or the you know, the the business logic pretty easily. And then real dream is like, okay, now can I take that same basic idea, and like hit a few buttons or go through a few permutations and then offer it up, you know, as a mobile app as well. So I was pretty interested by this, as somebody who struggles to code. Did either of you have a chance to read this or have some thoughts?

RD Yeah, I mean, I looked at it, it looked very interesting. Looked like it was a lot of built on stuff on it. But I'm not sure what the difference between this and like a Squarespace or something. Besides this has a less user friendly interface.

CW There's this whole no code movement for making all of these different apps and stuff. And in my brief glance over this, it looks like a lot of the other no code apps out there. And so I think the most popular one is Webflow, where you can add all of these smarter components than just kind of a typical something like Squarespace or Wix or something where you drag and drop things. I've seen like, I think Flutterflow is one of them. Bubble is one of them. Glide I think is one of them. There's all of these different, no code options for building apps. And what's interesting is with this whole no code movement, it's cool to see the accessibility of a lot of these different things. But I admit when I have played around with them, as a developer myself, it works really well until you want to customize it yourself. And then you have to deal with the code that it generates to actually mess with it. And then that's where it can start to get fairly hairy. 

BP Can you open up the hood and then try to poke around? But like, I guess just Yeah, the way it's built, you know, so you can connect the blocks as soon as you start to mess with it, it kind of confuses the system?

CW It depends on which one you use. There's so many of them. I know. Like, for example, I think there's one called Plasmic, where that one, it purposely tries to make very specifically readable and editable React components. And so, when I was talking with them, they, they were aware of that problem of people wanting to edit it, and it becomes a pain. And I played around with one called blocks where I could edit it. But once I did, it started to get hairier and hairier over time. And so it definitely, it varies from from app to app, I do think that we're kind of in the baby year still have this whole no code movement, but the accessibility that it brings for building applications, I think is really exciting.

RD Yeah, I think it's so many of these low code, no code, things are kind of trying to solve the problems that JavaScript has developed over the years with, like, all the data piping or the state storage, just like things that feel like work arounds on like—I don't know, I don't know if JavaScript was ever intended to be this sort of complicated application running thing.

BP It was never meant to be this important! [Ben laughs]

CW It's grew beyond our control!

RD I mean, maybe these are all the RPG makers of web design.

BP That's like the aliens like travel into the future after they build. They're like, "What? JavaScript is forever, like everybody's using JavaScript. This is insane!" [Ryan laughs]

CW "There's so many other options!"

RD "Don't they know about the Great War?" [Cassidy laughs]

BP Alright, so a few items here that are a little bit less related to the specifics of software and a little bit more about just work and life. Cassidy, you shared a link the title is Productivity Versus Guilt and Self-loathing. So this seems like a nice light one for us to end the episode on.

RD With guilt and self loathing? [Ryan laughs]

BP Do you want to take us through the sort of big idea here?

CW The post that I shared that it's actually a pretty old poster, I think it's from like, 2012, or something. But I think especially in the pandemic, people have been facing this where, because you're home, you just keep working. And we get kind of addicted to this productivity, because it's doing something while you're stuck at home. And then when you're not doing anything, you end up feeling guilty about it. It's hard to actually rest and kind of rejuvenate your mind by doing nothing, because you're stuck in this. And so the title alone, yes, the rest of the article, but the title alone felt like something that quite a few of us are facing right now with the way we've been treating work.

RD Yeah, I mean, I definitely know, some people like that during the pandemic, it's hard to see, or to actually not see other people working and living their lives. Like, during the pandemic, we got so disconnected from everybody else that we don't actually know how people are working. We just sort of see people's you know, Slack notification, and assume that they're working.

BP Yeah, I am joined a co working space locally. And so then I started, you know, trying to leave the house around nine, and then trying to get back to the house around five. And that was a nice way to sort of like, isolate work time and workspace, you know, it's hard for me as I'm working from my bedroom in my kitchen. Like, then at night, if my computer is open either other spaces, like the habit is just to open email and check out one more time or like to, you know, look at the Slack notification or whatever. So, for me that sort of like even it's like a 12 minute commute, but that was kind of helpful to put up some boundaries.

CW And I had more of that and earlier pre pandemic because I've been working remotely for a few years now, not just in this time period. And because you couldn't go to co-working spaces or the library or the cafes and stuff those lines blurred a ton were working remotely. Now versus working remotely before is very very different. Because I was able to be social after work, I was able to have that kind of disconnection stuff, but it's hard to be disconnected when you're just stuck.

RD You need that commute. It reminds me a little bit of a something I read about World War Two and PTSD. [Ben laughs] Yeah, no, I'm gonna get there because the trip back to America was so long it was this this boat ride that took you know, a month, they had time to unpack. And I think for those of us who work it's not, you know, it's not PTSD. But there is no time to unpack. There's no commute, you know, sitting down or reading a book and being mad thinking about the person playing their music on the other seat, wondering what's for dinner.

BP There's definitely a hard transition to make for me when it's like I'm working right up till five and then my kids like come crashing in. It's like all of us. You know, like you're still like struggling to send the last email but they're like pulling you away. Although I will say neat life hack. If you want to not work between, you know, like 5pm and 8pm, or on the weekends, just have kids. And then by the time you say seven or eight, they literally will not let you use that time for anything but playing with them. So simple.

RD Life hacks!

BP Yeah. All right, I had one more, which I don't know if it relates to this, but I've had sort of like some kind of like, I wouldn't say it's an epiphany, but some sort of like mental shift, emotional shift, or something where I realized that after like, seven years of playing Hearthstone almost every single day, and a lot and on the weekends, I just, like stopped completely. Without even like thinking about it, just like stopped. And then I also realized that, yeah, like I basically stopped using Twitter as well, that I was feeling a lot better. It was actually great in terms of like, just like my mental health. I don't really know why that happened. I was speculating because now I'm a homeowner. So like, a lot of time now, I spent like thinking about my house, can I fix it up? Can I work on it? And then like, outside doing stuff. It's more like I'm like, not like to be cheesy about it. I'm like here now or whatever, versus you know, like, it caught up in sort of like, the meta space of whatever, you know, tech I was using. I guess, like, do you feel like, yeah, the the pandemic and the remote stuff. We were just talking sort of about like, what it what it's like for work? Has that changed your relationship with some of these other kind of like forms of entertainment and screentime? Whether that be like video games or social media?

CW I definitely use social media less. Like I still use Twitter just because I like Twitter. But Instagram, I pretty much never use, Facebook I almost never use. I only use Snapchat, if I'm talking to my cousin's, which that's, that's just where our group chat is. And so it has changed a little bit, mostly because I don't want to deal with it.

RD I feel like I was ahead of the game man, I stopped using all those years ago. [Ryan & Cassidy laugh] I still post on Facebook once in a while if I have good jokes, something pithy.

BP One thing that I do occasionally dip into Facebook for is Facebook Marketplace, man. I don't know what it's like where y'all are. But I can put anything on there. And within five minutes have like six inbounds to be like I will come and get that. I will pick that up. I'll get it right now. And people actually get really angry. Like if you don't respond within the first 15 minutes, they're like wow, ghosting me. Okay, cool. I guess you don't want me to have this. It's like, whoa, whoa. 

CW Calm down, man. Be cool!

BP Yeah, be cool.

[music]

BP Everybody, thank you so much as always, for tuning in and listening to the episode. I'm gonna try something new. I used to always read a lifeboat badge at the end of the episode. But I've decided that it might actually be more interesting to go to the sort of like hot network questions. And that's where there's just a bunch of questions from all these different Stack Exchanges, the stuff that's getting, you know, like a lot of interest over the last couple of weeks. And Ryan and I work on like a little project called Stack Overflow Nose, where we try to find interesting questions, and throw those into the newsletter and share them on social media. So this is my favorite from this week. It says "If my electronic devices are searched, can a police officer use my ideas? On my phone I have many different ideas for startups, books and other creative endeavors." So that's a pretty good one. The answer is also pretty good. Which is to say no, you can't like copyright ideas. So if you've got a great idea for a novel or startup, don't give the officer your phone.

RD Yeah, encrypt it.

BP Encrypt it. Alright, everybody, I am Ben Popper, Director of Content here at Stack Overflow. You can always find me on Twitter @BenPopper, you can email us podcast@stackoverflow.com. And if you'd like to show leave a rating and a review, it really helps. We may be, now that we're using Riverside FM sharing this also as a video on YouTube. So if you're interested in consuming the podcast as a video, send us an email and let us know.

RD Alright, I'm Ryan Donovan. I'm on Twitter @RThorDonovan, and if you have a great idea for a blog, you can email me at pitches@stackoverflow.com

BP No tutorials though. Great ideas, no tutorials.

CW My name is Cassidy Williams. I'm Director of Developer Experience at Netlify, you can find me @cassidoo on most things.

BP Wonderful. Alright everybody. Thanks for listening, we'll talk to you soon.

CW Bye!

[outro music]