At scale, anything that could fail definitely will

On today’s episode we chat with Pradeep Vincent, Senior Vice President and Chief Technical Architect for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI for short. He shares experiences from his time as an engineer at IBM and what it was like to be a senior engineer working on AWS during the … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 2 months ago

Mobile Observability: monitoring performance through cracked screens, old batteries, and crappy Wi-Fi

Today we chat with Austin Emmons, an iOS developer at Embrace, where he spent time rebuilding their SDK to work with OpenTelemetry. He discusses the challenge of tracking performance and watching for edge cases when your app is deployed across dozens of devices with enormous vari … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 2 months ago

Where does Postgres fit in a world of GenAI and vector databases?

Today we chat with Avthar Sewrathan, AI Lead at Timescale, about adapting developers’ favorite database management system, Postgres, to support a range of new technologies involved in the GenAI ecosystem, especially vector databases. Avthar details his long history with Postgres … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 2 months ago

From PHP to JavaScript to Kubernetes: how one backend engineer evolved over time

On today’s episode, we chat with a listener, Geshan Manandhar, who has been working in the world of software engineering for two decades. He started programming in a small village in Kathmandu during the days of dial-up. Since then he’s worked across three continents and today is … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 3 months ago

LLMs evolve quickly. Their underlying architecture, not so much.

The decoder-only transformer architecture is one of the most fundamental ideas in AI research. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 3 months ago

Ryan Dahl explains why Deno had to evolve with version 2.0

On today’s episode, we chat with Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js and Deno. He explains why he feels the first version of Deno has reached certain limits and what he and his team are doing with Deno 2.0 to scale up the module system and ensure it's a great tool for the modern web. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 3 months ago

Battling ticket bots and untangling taxes at the frontiers of e-commerce

On today's episode we chat with Ilya Grigorik, a Distinguished Engineer and Technical Advisor to the CEO at Shopify. From battling hordes of bots trying to scalp seats before humans can get their hands on concert tickets, to automatically handling relevant tax codes and regulatio … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 3 months ago

Practical tips for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is one of the best (and easiest) ways to specialize an LLM over your own data, but successfully applying RAG in practice involves more than just stitching together pretrained models. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 3 months ago

Navigating cities of code with Norris Numbers

Settling down in a new city (or codebase) is a marathon, not a sprint. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 3 months ago

Scaling systems to manage all the metadata ABOUT the data

On this episode, Ryan and Cassidy talk to Satish Jayanthi, CTO and co-founder of Coalesce, about the growth of metadata and how you can manage it, especially in systems using generative AI. They explore the importance in providing context and transparency to data, how metadata ca … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 3 months ago

How we’re making Stack Overflow more accessible

August 9, 2024 How we’re making Stack Overflow more accessible Credit: Alexandra Francis Read Dan’s blog post about the process of making Stack Overflow more accessible. We followed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), with a few exceptions. For example, we chose to m … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 3 months ago

Accessibility by design: Building interfaces for everyone at Stack Overflow

How we took a proactive approach to making our sites and products accessible to all. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 3 months ago

Unpacking the 2024 Developer Survey results

Ryan and Eira talk with Stack Overflow senior research analyst Erin Yepis about the results of our 2024 Developer Survey, which polled more than 65,000 developers about the tools they use, the technologies they want to learn, their experiences at work, and much more. Erin highlig … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 3 months ago

This developer tool is 40 years old: can it be improved?

Would updating a tool few think about make a diff(erence)? | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 3 months ago

How developer experience can escape the spreadsheet

Ben and Ryan are joined by Cortex cofounders Anish Dhar, CEO, and Ganesh Datta, CTO. Cortex offers an internal developer portal that helps devs document and reinforce organizational best practices and improve developer productivity. The portal includes features like scorecards th … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 3 months ago

Research roadmap update: August 2024

An update to the research that the User Experience team is running over the next quarter. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 3 months ago

Enterprise 2024.5: Encouraging and growing community contributions

The latest Stack Overflow for Teams release makes it easier to encourage and grow contributions to your community through the use of flexible bounties, more user search options, Slack thread summarization, and more. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 3 months ago

How Stack Overflow fends off scraping bots

Josh Zhang, a staff site reliability engineer at Stack Overflow, tells Ryan and Eira how the Stack Exchange network defends against scraping bots. They also cover the emergence of human botnets, why DDoS attacks have spiked in the last couple of years, and the constant balancing … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 3 months ago

On the web, data doesn’t define us. It creates us.

In this episode, Ben interviews Jannis Kallinikos, a professor at Luiss University in Rome, Italy about his new book Data Rules: Reinventing the Market Economy, coauthored with Cristina Alaimo. They discuss the social impact of data, explore the idea that data filters how we see … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 4 months ago

Developers want more, more, more: the 2024 results from Stack Overflow’s Annual Developer Survey

This year, technologies such as JavaScript and PostgreSQL remain most popular, Rust and Markdown remain most admired, developers are most frustrated by technical debt at work, and they don’t see AI as a threat to their jobs. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 4 months ago

The problem with the tech debt mindset

Ryan chats with Jon Bevan, a software engineer currently building the cloud version of Scriptrunner, an Atlassian app, about the concept of tech debt. They explore how tech debt can arise from outdated technology choices, shortcuts, and the need for maintenance work. They also de … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 4 months ago

Java, but why? The state of Java in 2024

Ben and Ryan chat with listener, professional pilot, and Java enthusiast Lenny Primak about what he finds exciting about Java in 2024. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 4 months ago

How to bridge the gap between Web2 skills and Web3 workflows

You’re familiar with older web and pre-web languages like JavaScript and Java. Did you know that you can use these well-known languages with Web3 technologies? | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 4 months ago

The framework helping devs build LLM apps

Ben and Eira talk with LlamaIndex CEO and cofounder Jerry Lu, along with venture capitalist Jerry Chen, about how the company is making it easier for developers to build LLM apps. They touch on the importance of high-quality training data to improve accuracy and relevance, the ro … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 4 months ago

The ghost jobs haunting your career search

There’s no silver bullet for this type of ghost. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 4 months ago

Why we built Staging Ground

A two-part episode: In part one, Ben chats with friend of the show and senior software engineer Kyle Mitofsky about Staging Ground, a private space within Stack Overflow where new users can receive guidance from experienced users before their question is posted. In part two, Ben … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 4 months ago

How data are reshaping society: “Datafication” and socioeconomic transformations

With the ever-increasing importance of data, we’re always looking for expert voices that can expand our view of what data and our reliance on data means for software development and society as a whole. More and more of our lives are becoming data-driven. Is that a good thing? | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 4 months ago

We chat search from both sides now

In this episode, Ben chats with Elastic software engineering director Paul Oremland along with Stack Overflow staff software engineer Steffi Grewenig and senior software developer Gregor Časar about vector databases and semantic search from both the vendor and customer perspectiv … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 4 months ago

What can devs do about code review anxiety?

For this episode, we spoke with Carol Lee, PhD, principal research scientist in the Developer Success Lab at Pluralsight, about her research into code review anxiety, how developers are coping, and how a workbook can help. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 4 months ago

Happy people make better products

The home team welcomes developer and software consultant Ben Borra to the show for a wide-ranging conversation about developer productivity, the value of positive feedback and identifying quick wins, the impact of code assistants on devs’ everyday work, and the challenges of syst … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 4 months ago

Community Products Roadmap Update, July 2024

An update on recent launches and the upcoming roadmap. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 4 months ago

How to build open source apps in a highly regulated industry

Today we chat with Reshma Khilnani, co-founder and CEO of Medplum, an open-source platform enabling companies to build healthcare applications like EHRs and patient portals. She discusses how to iterate rapidly in an industry where SOC2 compliance is just the beginning (one of th … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 4 months ago

Explaining generative language models to (almost) anyone

Here’s a simple, three-part framework that explains generative language models. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 4 months ago

A very special 5-year-anniversary edition of the Stack Overflow podcast!

In 2019, as the original co-founders and hosts moved on, the Stack Overflow podcast was rebooted with a new cast of hosts. On today’s episode Ben Popper, Cassidy Williams, and Ryan Donovan sit down to discuss how much has changed in the five years they have been collaborating on … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 5 months ago

Say goodbye to "junior" engineering roles

On today’s episode we chat with Kirimgeray Kirimli, a director at Flatiron Software and CEO of Snapshot Reviews, a tool that measure developer productivity based on activity from Github, Jira, standups, and more. Kirimli explains how Snapshot Reviews tries to measure a developer' … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 5 months ago

Enterprise 2024.4: Demonstrating and improving community impact

In the latest Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise release, you'll see reporting capabilities and insights that help demonstrate community impact. Microsoft customers can also rejoice: OverflowAI now includes an Auto-Answer App for Microsoft Teams. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 5 months ago

The real 10x developer makes their whole team better

Single individuals make less of a difference to the success or failure of a technology project than you might think (and that’s a good thing). | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 5 months ago

Making ETL pipelines a thing of the past

On today’s episode we chat with Cassandra Shum, VP of Field Engineering at RelationalAI, about her company’s efforts to create what it calls the industry’s first coprocessor for data clouds and language models. The goal is to allow companies to keep all their data where it is tod … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 5 months ago

The world’s most popular web framework is going AI native

On today’s episode we chat with Jared Palmer, VP of AI at Vercel, who says the company has three key goals. First, support AI native web apps like ChatGPT and Claude. Second, use GenAI to make it easier to build. Third, provide an SDK so that developers have the tools they need t … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 5 months ago

A peek behind the curtain with Stack Overflow’s sales engineers

In this episode, Alexa Montelibano and Tiago Torre, sales engineers at Stack Overflow, take you behind the scenes to show how customer feedback shapes our products, including OverflowAI. Alexa and Tiago have been working with clients to explore the three features of OverflowAI—En … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 5 months ago

Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You

It’s easy to generate code, but not so easy to generate good code. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 5 months ago

This startup uses a team of AI agents to write and review their pull requests

In this episode we chat with Saumil Patel, co-founder and CEO of Squire AI. The company uses an agentic workflow to automatically review your code, write your pull requests, and even review and provide opinions on other people’s PRs. Different AI systems with specific capabilitie … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 5 months ago

Breaking up is hard to do: Chunking in RAG applications

A look at some of the current thinking around chunking data for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 5 months ago

Introducing Staging Ground: The private space to get feedback on questions before they’re posted

Learn about the workflow designed to help new askers improve their questions on Stack Overflow. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 5 months ago

How to prevent your new chatbot from giving away company secrets

This week we chat with Kamakshi Narayan, Director of Product Management at SnapLogic, who is focused on how APIs can apply fine-grained controls for privacy and governance to the LLM-powered AI apps vacuuming up our data. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 5 months ago

Can software startups that need $$$ avoid venture capital?

Today's episode is a chat with Benjamin Shestakofsky, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania with a focus on the ways in which digital technologies are affecting work and employment, organizations, and economic exchange. We discuss research from his … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 5 months ago

Developers get by with a little help from AI: Stack Overflow Knows code assistant pulse survey results

We also asked when and how often CodeGen tools fall short, what challenges developers face with these tools, and what they are doing with all of the free time these tools purport to offer. | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 5 months ago

An open-source development paradigm

Temporal is an open-source project focused on durable execution and workflow orchestration. Cofounder and CTO Maxim Fateev tells Ben and Ryan about the challenges of building a cloud service based on an open-source project and how Temporal is helping teams simplify their code and … | Continue reading


@stackoverflow.blog | 6 months ago