Stack Overflow Blog: Recent Episodes
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Ken Stott, Field CTO of API platform Hasura, tells Ryan about the data doom loop: the concept that organizations are spending lots of money on data systems without seeing improvements in data quality or efficiency. Their conversation touches on the challenges of data management, the impact of microservices, the importance of feedback loops in ensuring data quality, and how a data architecture that uses a supergraph would enhance data accessibility and quality.
APIs have steadily become the backbone of AI systems, connecting data and tools seamlessly. Discover how they can drive scalable and secure training for AI models and intelligence automation.
Sagar Batchu, CEO and cofounder of API tooling company Speakeasy, talks with Ryan about the evolving API landscape, AI integration, the role of human technologists in an increasingly automated environment, and what people building APIs right now should keep in mind.
Can an org automate security, change its culture to up their dev velocity, and stave off burnout?
Ben and Ryan chat with Babak Behzad, senior engineering manager at Verkada, about running a pipeline that vectorizes 25,000 images per second into a custom-built vector database. They discuss whether the speed is due to technical brains or brawn, the benefits of processing on device vs. off, and the importance of privacy when using image recognition on frames from a video camera.
Jaime Torrealba, a frontend developer currently at Push Security, joins Ryan to talk about 3D graphics and web development. Their conversation ranges from the evolution of technologies like WebGL and WebGPU to the importance of performance optimization for different devices to the frameworks available for creating 3D experiences. Jaime also explains the layers of abstraction in 3D development and shares some insight into what the future of 3D applications might look like.
Ryan is joined by Fynn Glover (CEO) and Ben Papillon (CTO), cofounders of Schematic, for a conversation about managing feature flags in software development. They explore theoretical and practical applications of feature flags, the issue of tech debt, and how orgs could manage entitlements and pricing models more effectively.
The first release of the year is packed with features to make your knowledge-sharing community better.
Ben and Ryan are joined by RJ Tuit, Head of UI Platform and Client Architect at ClickUp, formerly an engineering director at Microsoft. They talk about ClickUp’s vision for a comprehensive productivity platform, the complexities of measuring productivity and UX in software development, how to navigate the hype around AI, and more. Plus: What it was like scaling Microsoft’s cloud services to meet the unprecedented demands of a global workforce in quarantine.
John Graham-Cumming, CTO of Cloudflare, joins Ben and Ryan for a conversation about the latest trends in internet usage highlighted in Cloudflare's 2024 Year in Review report.
Kyle welcomes Wes Copeland, a senior frontend engineer at Apartment Advisor, to the interview. They talk about how good test coverage helps you develop software faster, the benefits of low-fidelity prototypes, and why he prefers to avoid vibes-driven development.
Ben and Ryan talk with Geoffrey (Jef) Huck, a software developer turned public speaking coach, about the importance of soft skills in the tech industry—in particular, speaking and communication skills. Their conversation touches on how Huck’s experiences with anxiety shaped his efforts to become a better communicator, practical techniques for dispelling anxiety and connecting with the audience, and the MVP approach to public speaking.
Ryan talks with Sterling Chin, a senior developer advocate at Postman, about the intersection of APIs and AI. They cover the emergence of AI APIs, the importance of quality APIs for AI integrations, and the evolving role of GraphQL in this new landscape. Sterling explains how some organizations are shifting toward an API-first development approach and talks about the future of data access in the agentic era, where APIs will play a crucial role in AI interactions.
In this episode, Ben and Ryan sit down with Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer and Head of R&D at Twilio. They talk about how Twilio is incorporating AI into its offerings, the enormous importance of data quality in achieving high-quality responses from AI, the challenges of integrating cutting-edge AI technology into legacy systems, and how companies are turning to AI to improve developer productivity and customer engagement.
Happy New Year! In this episode, Ryan talks with Jetify founder and CEO Daniel Loreto, a former engineering lead at Google and Twitter, about what AI applications have in common with Google Search. They also discuss the challenges inherent in developing AI systems, why a data-driven approach to AI development is important, the implications of non-determinism, and the future of test automation.
Chris Fowler, Director of Engine for Call of Duty, tells Ben and Ryan about his path from marine biology to game development, the ins and outs of game engines, and the technical feats involved in creating massively popular games like Call of Duty. Chris also explains why community feedback is so critical in game development and offers his advice for aspiring game developers.
Ben and Ryan are joined by Matt Zeiler, founder and CEO of Clarifai, an AI workflow orchestration platform. They talk about how the transformer architecture supplanted convolutional neural networks in AI applications, the infrastructure required for AI implementation, the implications of regulating AI, and the value of synthetic data.
Or Lenchner, CEO of Bright Data, joins Ben and Ryan for a deep-dive conversation about the evolving landscape of web data. They talk through the challenges involved in data collection, the role of synthetic data in training large AI models, and how public data access is becoming more restrictive. Or also shares his thoughts on the importance of transparency in data practices, the likely future of data regulation, and the philosophical implications of more people using AI to innovate and solve problems.
Will prompt engineering replace the coder’s art or will software engineers who understand code still have a place in future software lifecycles?
Today’s guest is Logan Kilpatrick, a senior product manager at Google, who tells Ben about his journey from software engineering to machine learning to product management, all with an emphasis on reducing developer friction. They talk through the challenges of non-determinism in AI models and how Google is addressing these issues with a new feature: Grounding with Google Search. Plus, what working at the Apple Store taught Logan about product management.
An update to the research that the User Experience team is running over the next quarter.
Tom Occhino, now Chief Product Officer at Vercel, tells Ben about how he contributed to the development of React at Facebook and the contentious decision to make React open-source. They also talk about what community feedback has been like on Next.js 15, Vercel’s GenAI web development tool, and how Vercel is rethinking IDEs.
Here's a (brief) summary of language model finetuning, the various approaches that exist, their purposes, and what we know about how they work.
On this sponsored episode, Ben and Ryan talk to Sunny Patel, Staff Software Engineer at PayPal, and Kyle Prinsloo, a developer and a PayPal partner, about all the ways that Fastlane by PayPal makes developers’ lives easier. They explore the needs that both merchants and consumers have for creating a seamless checkout experience, the importance of reducing friction in payment processes, and how documentation can directly assist the integration experience.
Ben welcomes Ricky Robinett, VP of Developer Relations and Community at Cloudflare, and his eight-year-old daughter Fay for a chat about how AI tools are helping new developers get started and how to encourage your kids to try coding.
Ben chats with Shayne Longpre and Robert Mahari of the Data Provenance Initiative about what GenAI means for the data commons. They discuss the decline of public datasets, the complexities of fair use in AI training, the challenges researchers face in accessing data, potential applications for synthetic data, and the evolving legal landscape surrounding AI and copyright.
We walk through the process of designing an SDK that makes it easy for developers to integrate new technology into their e-commerce stack and is flexible enough to serve the needs of small businesses and large enterprises.
This release introduces Subject Matter Expert (SME) Auto-Assign to the Stack Overflow for Teams experience so expert knowledge is automatically captured, verified, and distributed to users.
The internet and its business models are changing. Stack Overflow has been at the forefront, helping to shape the future of the web.
Ben welcomes Sonar CEO Tariq Shaukat for a conversation about AI coding tools’ potential to boost developer productivity—and how to balance those potential gains against code quality and security concerns. They talk about Sonar’s origins as an open-source code quality tool, the excellent reasons to embrace a “clean as you code” philosophy, and how to determine where AI coding tools can be helpful and where they can’t (yet).
Ben Popper chats with Keith Babo, Head of Product at Solo.io, about how the API security landscape is changing in the era of GenAI. They talk through the role of governance in AI, the importance of data protection, and the role API gateways play in enhancing security and functionality. Keith shares his insights on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, protecting PII, and the necessity of human-in-the-loop AI development.
There are worries that GenAI systems may run out of fresh data as they scale. Synthetic data is an option, but using AI-generated data to train AI can degrade the model's performance. There may be a better solution. Can data quality overcome a loss of data quantity?
On today’s sponsored episode, we chat with Ryan Ellis and Martin Best about the developer-centric features built into Unity 6, the latest release of the well-known game engine. The pair explains how Unity 6 was built to help developers enhance graphics, add multiplayer, and easily port games to an audience on the mobile web.
Austin Spiegel, CTO and co-founder of Sift, tells Ben and Ryan about his journey from studying film to working at SpaceX to founding Sift.
Ben Popper interviews Vladislav Voroninski, CEO of Helm.ai, about unsupervised learning and the future of AI in autonomous driving. They discuss GenAI’s role in bridging the gap between simulation and reality, the challenges of scaling autonomous driving systems, the commercial potential of partial autonomy, and why software is emerging as a key differentiator in vehicle sales. Vlad spotlights the value of multimodal foundation models and how compute shortages affect AI startups.
Ben and Ryan chat with Daniela Miao, cofounder and CTO of Momento, a real-time data platform, about real-time observability, the challenges of multi-tenancy in databases and caching, the use of WebAssembly in UI development, and the benefits of Rust.
On today’s episode we chat with Crystal Xu, chief of staff at FSH Tech. She explains how she learned to build and deploy apps and services inside her company using Python and Java, without ever getting a traditional computer science education or training to write code. Instead, Xu works with GenAI systems like ChatGPT, Cursor, and Replit to build software through prompt engineering.
We explore how our platform is evolving to support a new framework and business model, knowledge-as-a-service, and how we will incorporate this with our ongoing investment in our community.
On today’s episode we chat with David Mytton, CEO of Arcjet and co-founder of Console.dev. We discuss his early work in cloud monitoring, his passion for the environment, and his love for sharing great developer tools.
The internet is changing once again: it is becoming more fragmented as the separation between sources of knowledge and how users interact with that knowledge grows.
If you’re weary of reading about the latest chatbot innovations and the nine ways AI will change your daily life next year, this series of posts may be for you.
Socially responsible use of community data needs to be mutually beneficial: the more potential partners are willing to contribute to community development, the more access to community content they receive.
We chat with Deedy Das, a Principal at Menlo Ventures, who began his career as a software engineer at Facebook and Google. He then dipped a toe in the startup world, spending time at the company now know as Glean. More recently he started a career as a venture capitalist, investing in AI and Infra out of the Anthology Fund, a partnership between Menlo Ventures and Anthropic.
Masked self-attention is the key building block that allows LLMs to learn rich relationships and patterns between the words of a sentence. Let’s build it together from scratch.
How are developers actually using GenAI-powered coding tools now that some of the initial hype has faded?
Founder and entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal tells Ben, Cassidy, and Eira about the developer challenges he aims to solve with his new venture, Harness, an AI-driven software development platform meant to take the pain out of DevOps. Jyoti shares his journey as a founder, his perspective on the venture capital landscape, and his reasons behind his decision to raise debt capital for Harness.
Ben chats with Gias Uddin, an assistant professor at York University in Toronto, where he teaches software engineering, data science, and machine learning. His research focuses on designing intelligent tools for testing, debugging, and summarizing software and AI systems. He recently published a paper about detecting errors in code generated by LLMs. Gias and Ben discuss the concept of hallucinations in AI-generated code, the need for tools to detect and correct those hallucinations, and the potential for AI-powered tools to generate QA tests.
Today, we're excited to share details about our latest experiment that aims to make your search results in Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise even more relevant and useful.
Ryan chats with Russ d’Sa, cofounder and CEO of LiveKit, about multimodal AI and the technology that makes it possible. They talk through the tech stack required, including the use of WebRTC and UDP protocols for real-time audio and video streaming. They also explore the big challenges involved in ensuring privacy and security in streaming data, namely end-to-end encryption and obfuscation.
Ben and Ryan talk to Scott McCarty, Global Senior Principal Product Manager for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, about the intersection between LLMs (large language models) and open source. They discuss the challenges and benefits of open-source LLMs, the importance of attribution and transparency, and the revolutionary potential for LLM-driven applications. They also explore the role of LLMs in code generation, testing, and documentation.
This release includes updates that improve subject matter expert (SME) visibility and engagement in Stack Overflow for Teams. It's also now easier to capture and discover SME knowledge in Microsoft Teams and Slack with the Auto-Answer App.
On today’s episode we chat with Mrinalini Sugosh, Dev Rel Manager CKEditor. She discusses how modern fullstack developers have to master both front and backend skills, stitch the two together, and master adjacent skills like data analysis and security compliance.
On today’s episode we speak with Kohsuke Kawaguchi, who won the Google-O’Reilly Open Source award for his work on the Hudson/Jenkins project. Kohsuke began his career at Sun Microsystems. He shares insights on the balance between community-driven open source and the need to monetize through enterprise services.
It’s tempting to push projects out the door to woo and impress colleagues and supervisors, but the stark truth is that even the smallest projects should have proper review periods.
In today's data-driven world, Apache Kafka has emerged as a cornerstone of modern data streaming, particularly with the rise of AI and the immense volumes of data it generates.
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 early years of its development as a commercial product.
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 variability in their hardware, software, and network capabilities.
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 and how clients are weighing the build vs. buy question when it comes to choosing a database to support their newly minted GenAI initiatives.
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 Kathmandu during the days of dial-up. Since then he’s worked across three continents and today is a senior software engineer at Simply Wall Street. He gives his advice on how developers can change with the times and what it’s like to move into the era of serverless containers.
The decoder-only transformer architecture is one of the most fundamental ideas in AI research.
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.
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 regulations across countries and states so small merchants can focus on their business, Ilya shares some of the projects he enjoys most and the challenges that make e-commerce interesting for software developers.
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.
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 can be generated automatically, and the future of metadata including knowledge graphs.
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 highlights what the survey reveals about devs’ favorite programming languages (JavaScript, HTML, Python), the rise of Rust, the popularity of embedded technologies (Raspberry Pi, Arduino), developer sentiment around AI, and why tech debt tops the list of developer frustrations.
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 that incentivize developers to improve their work and AI-powered search to make finding information easier.
An update to the research that the User Experience team is running over the next quarter.
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.
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 act of protecting sites from attack without inhibiting legitimate users.
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 the world and interact with each other, and highlight the need for social accountability in data tracking and surveillance.
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.
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 delve into the challenges of upgrading dependencies and the potential scope creep of requirements and features over time.
Ben and Ryan chat with listener, professional pilot, and Java enthusiast Lenny Primak about what he finds exciting about Java in 2024.
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?
Ben and Eira talk with LlamaIndex CEO and cofounder Jerry Liu, 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 role of prompt engineering, the impact of larger context windows, and the challenges of setting up retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
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 talks to Stack Overflow moderator Spevacus, who participated in the beta of Staging Ground. They talk about why we wanted to build a safer asking experience for new users, the positive feedback we’ve gotten from the community so far, and the challenges of building Staging Ground within the existing Stack Overflow architecture.
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?
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 perspectives. They talk about the impact of GenAI on productivity and the search experience, the value of structured data for LLMs, and the potential for knowledge extraction and sharing.
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.
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 system rewrites.
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 the compliance tests is named after Dante’s epic poem depicting the nine circles of hell, if that gives you an idea).
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 Stack Overflow’s blog, newsletter, and podcast. If you you are sick of AI talk today, remember how bad the crypto craze was just two years ago!
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's true impact, not just the volume of their activity. He also speaks to the growing power of AI coding assistants and suggests "junior engineer" is not likely to be a job available to humans for much longer.
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.
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).
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 today while still tapping into the capabilities of the latest generation of AI tools.
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 to easily add GenAI to their websites.
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—Enhanced Search, an Auto-answer App for Slack and Microsoft Teams, and an IDE extension.
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 capabilities work together as a mixture of experts, following a chain of thought approach to provide recommendations on security, code quality, error handling, performance, scalability, and more.
A look at some of the current thinking around chunking data for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems.
Learn about the workflow designed to help new askers improve their questions on Stack Overflow.
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.
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 new book which dives into the venture capital business and explores the cooperative model that some software startups are taking instead.
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.
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 build more features more quickly.
Ben and Ryan are joined by Robin Gupta for a conversation about benchmarking and testing AI systems. They talk through the lack of trust and confidence in AI, the inherent challenges of nondeterministic systems, the role of human verification, and whether we can (or should) expect an AI to be reliable.
A developer’s journal is a place to define the problem you’re solving and record what you tried and what worked.
Ben and Ryan talk with Vikram Chatterji, founder and CEO of Galileo, a company focused on building and evaluating generative AI apps. They discuss the challenges of benchmarking and evaluating GenAI models, the importance of data quality in AI systems, and the trade-offs between using pre-trained models and fine-tuning models with custom data.
This year we are asking familiar questions about your experience, but also have some new questions about what embedded programming technology you are using and what AI ethical responsibilities are most important to you.
Product manager Ash Zade joins the home team to talk about the journey to OverflowAI, a GenAI-powered add-on for Stack Overflow for Teams that’s available now. Ash describes how his team built Enhanced Search, the problems they set out to solve, how they ensured data quality and accuracy, the role of metadata and prompt engineering, and the feedback they’ve gotten from users so far.
We're excited to announce the general availability of OverflowAI to Stack Overflow for Teams! OverflowAI represents a big step forward in our vision of integrating GenAI offerings within knowledge communities.
On this episode: Al Sweigart is a software developer, developer advocate, and author of ten Python books. He tells Ben and Ryan why he’s such a fan of the language, why it’s a great programming language for beginners, and how it became the default for so many data science and backend AI projects.
Only about 5% of GenAI projects lead to significant monetization of new product offerings.
Eira and Ryan talk with Chris Ferdinandi, a front-end developer and ADHD advocate, about his diagnosis experience, the importance of accommodations for neurodivergent folks, and some advice for devs looking for the best tools and tactics for managing ADHD at work.
Marco Palladino, CTO and cofounder of cloud-native API gateway Kong, talks with Ryan about the complexities of multi-cloud Kubernetes architecture, how AI has the potential to improve infrastructure management, and how Kong’s large action model will reshape the future of API platforms.
Ben and Ryan are joined by software developer and listener Patrick Carlile for a conversation about how the job market for software engineers has changed since the dot-com days, navigating boom-and-bust hiring cycles, and the developers finding work at Walmart and In-N-Out. Plus: “Party in the front, business in the back” isn’t just for haircuts anymore.
All about the research that the User Experience team will be focused on over the next quarter and how you can help.
In the latest Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise release, you'll see updates that make collaboration smarter and knowledge discovery easier. This release also includes OverflowAI, a GenAI-powered paid add-on to Enterprise subscriptions.
On this episode: The FTC bans most noncompete agreements, the implications of the TikTok “ban,” why a 2017 law is hitting startups with huge tax bills seven years later, and the return of net neutrality. Plus: the wunderkind hacker who ransomed Finland’s anxieties and secrets.
Dr. Richard Hipp, creator of SQLite, shares how he taught himself to program, the challenges he faced in creating SQLite, and the importance of testing and maintaining the software for long-term support.
The home team talks about the current state of the software job market, the changing sentiments around AI job opportunities, the impact of big players like Facebook and OpenAI on the space, and the challenges for startups. Plus: The philosophical implications of LLMs and the friendship potential of corvids.
Ben and Ryan explore why configuration is so complicated, the right to repair, the best programming languages for beginners, how AI is grading exams in Texas, Automattic’s $125M acquisition of Beeper, and why a major US city’s train system still relies on floppy disks. Plus: The unique challenge of keeping up with a field that’s changing as rapidly as GenAI.
Ben talks with Shane McAllister, lead developer advocate at MongoDB, Stanimira Vlaeva, senior developer advocate at MongoDB, and Miku Jha, director, AI/ML and generative AI at Google Cloud, about the challenges and opportunities of operationalizing and scaling generative AI models in enterprise organizations.
On this episode: Stack Overflow senior data scientist Michael Geden tells Ryan and Ben about how data scientists evaluate large language models (LLMs) and their output. They cover the challenges involved in evaluating LLMs, how LLMs are being used to evaluate other LLMs, the importance of data validating, the need for human raters, and more needs and tradeoffs involved in selecting and fine-tuning LLMs.
In the wake of the XZ backdoor, Ben and Ryan unpack the security implications of relying on open-source software projects maintained by small teams. They also discuss the open-source nature of Linux, the high cost of education in the US, the value of open-source contributions for job seekers, and what Apple is up to AI-wise.
In this sponsored episode, Ben and Ryan are joined by Ria Cheruvu, an AI evangelist at Intel, to discuss the different approaches to incorporating AI models into organizations.
The home team convenes to discuss the XZ backdoor attack, what great software engineers have in common, how GenAI is changing the face of drug development, and the rise of managed service providers for AI.
We sit down with Jessica Clark, a senior data scientist at Stack Overflow, to discuss how our company approaches generative AI and data quality.
This new LLM technique has started improving the results of models without additional training.
The home team is joined by Michael Foree, Stack Overflow’s director of data science and data platform, and occasional cohost Cassidy Williams, CTO at Contenda, for a conversation about long context windows, retrieval-augmented generation, and how Databricks’ new open LLM could change the game for developers. Plus: How will FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s sentence of 25 years in prison reverberate in the blockchain and crypto spaces?
Ben and Ryan talk about how tiny nations are making huge money from their domain names, the US government’s antitrust case against Apple, the implications of a four-day work week, Reddit’s IPO, and more.
In this episode, Ben and Ryan are joined by Joshua Fox, a senior cloud architect at DoiT, to discuss cloud cost optimization. They explore the importance of controlling and understanding cloud costs, the role of good architecture in cost optimization, and strategies for dealing with surprise costs.
This past year, we’ve explored and learned how AI can support the community on Stack Overflow and across the Stack Exchange network. Read more to see our reflections and learn more about the initiatives our product team is prioritizing this year.
Ben and Ryan are joined by Nick Heudecker, Senior Director of Market Strategy and Competitive Intelligence at Cribl, to discuss the state of data and analytics. They cover GenAI, the role of incumbents vs. startups, challenges of data storage and security, data quality and ETL pipelines, measures of data quality for GenAI, and Cribl’s role in the data and observability space.
Ben and Ryan are joined by Bill Harding, CEO of GitClear, for a discussion of AI-generated code quality and its impact on productivity. GitClear’s research has highlighted the fact that while AI can suggest valid code, it can’t necessarily reuse and modify existing code—a recipe for long-term challenges in maintainability and test coverage if devs are too dependent on AI code-gen tools.
Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js and Deno, tells us about his journey into software development and the creation of Node.js. He explains why he started Deno, a new JavaScript runtime. Ryan also introduces JSR, an alternative to NPM, and emphasizes the importance of security in the JavaScript ecosystem. Plus: Thoughts on the future of JavaScript, including the role of TypeScript and bridging the gap between server-side and browser JavaScript.
Users have been sharing the spark that started them on their journey as computer programmers. From IRC to Minecraft, users found a passion that became a career.
The home team discusses the challenges (hardware and otherwise) of building AI models at scale, why major players like Meta are open-sourcing their AI projects, what Apple’s recent changes mean for developers in the EU, and Perplexity AI’s new approach to search.
Ben talks with Ryan Polk, Chief Product Officer at Stack Overflow, about our strategic partnership with Google Cloud, the importance of collaboration between AI companies and the Stack Overflow community, and why Stack Overflow’s Q&A format is so suitable for training AI models.
Machine learning scientist, author, and LLM developer Maxime Labonne talks with Ben and Ryan about his role as lead machine learning scientist, his contributions to the open-source community, the value of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and the process of fine-tuning and unfreezing layers in LLMs. The team talks through various challenges and considerations in implementing GenAI, from data quality to integration.
In the latest Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise release, you'll see updates that make collaboration more intuitive and meaningful at several different touch points in the user journey, including a reimagined homepage.
Ryan and Ben chat with Shivang Shah, Chief Architect, and Jon Fasoli, Chief Design & Product Officer, both of Intuit Mailchimp, about implementing GenAI and how all the pieces came together to make a better end user experience.
This is part two of our conversation with Roie Schwaber-Cohen, Staff Developer Advocate at Pinecone, about retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and why it’s crucial for the success of your AI initiatives.
On this episode: Roie Schwaber-Cohen, Staff Developer Advocate at Pinecone, joins Ben and Ryan to break down what retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is and why the concept is central to the AI conversation. This is part one of our conversation, so tune in next time for the thrilling conclusion.
Stack Overflow is on a journey to build a new era in the practice of AI: the era of social responsibility. All products based on models that consume public Stack Overflow data are required to provide attribution back to the highest relevance posts that influenced the summary given by the model.
Ryan and Ben chat with Raymond Lo, AI software evangelist at Intel, about the AI PC, the software that powers AI breakthroughs, and optimizing hardware and software in unison to improve generative AI performance.
On this episode: Matt Van Itallie, Founder and CEO at Sema, a company that assesses code to improve outcomes for users, companies, and developers. Plus, friend of the show and erstwhile cohost Cassidy Williams joins the conversation.
If you’re building experimental GenAI features that haven’t proven their product market fit, you don’t want to commit to a model that runs up costs without a return on that investment.
On this home team episode: Discussions on Stack Overflow is a new feature that allows users to engage in open-ended conversations outside the site’s primary Q&A structure. The team explores deep-cut Stack Exchange questions about the nature of consciousness and the availability of corrective lenses for medieval knights. Plus: The psychology of downvoting and a recent FCC ruling on AI-generated robocalls.
We chat with Andrew Boyagi, Atlassian's Senior Developer Evangelist, about bringing great developer experience to teams and platforms with thousands of engineers. When the software sprawl gets so big you spend more time looking for answers than solving problems, it might be time to try something new.
On this episode: Eitan Worcel, CEO and cofounder of Mobb, a company that uses AI to automate security vulnerability remediation, talks about how AI can help reduce security backlogs and free up developers’ time, what security risks emerge with GenAI, and why we still need a human in the loop.
On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan chat with Maya Sellon, inclusive design and digital accessibility principal at Shell, about how she’s scaling accessibility and inclusive design practice across an organization the size of Shell. They talk about how knowing the accessibility issues is half the battle, how people are the key to scale, and what video games teach us about inclusive design.
The home team chats with William Falcon, an AI researcher and creator of PyTorch Lightning, about developing tooling for the AI ecosystem, open-source contributions, what happens when widely hyped technology needs to scale, and why he’s bullish on experienced developers using AI but not so bullish on new devs doing the same.
On this home team episode: Massachusetts makes a welcome shift toward skills-based hiring, AI-generated content robs us of our appetite for mac and cheese, and large-scale crypto mining operations account for more than 2% of the US’s electricity generation. Plus: A PDF quite a bit bigger than Germany.
We neglected unit tests for a long time because our code base made them difficult. But now we're putting in the work to change that.
The post How Stack Overflow is leveling up its unit testing game appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
When the bots came for us, we strengthened our defenses. Here's what we learned about parrying a few DDoS attacks.
The post Stack under attack: what we learned about handling DDoS attacks appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
What would you do if your code repositories suddenly stopped working?
The post Securing the data in your online code repository is a shared responsibility appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
In order to get the most performant site possible when building the codebase for our public Stack Overflow site, we didn’t always follow best practices.
The post Best practices can slow your application down appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
Stack Overflow celebrates site accomplishments with confetti in multiple places. That means it's time to formalize it in our design system.
The post CSS in SVG in CSS: Shipping confetti to Stack Overflow’s design system appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
Investigate a dataset with summary statistics and some basic data visualizations using the Python libraries NumPy, pandas, matplotlib, and Seaborn.
The post Level Up: Mastering statistics with Python – part 2 appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
We take a detailed look at a hacking incident that gave a user unauthorized access to our code and data.
The post A deeper dive into our May 2019 security incident appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
You’ve gone through the motions and play-acted a disaster recovery scenario, but despite spending a lot on the production, it’s not real. What you have is a fairy tale: “Once upon a time, in theory, if everything works perfectly, we have a plan to survive the disasters we thought of in advance.” In practice, it’s more likely to be a nightmare.
The post Failing over without falling over appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
Roberta Arcoverde, tech lead for Stack Overflow Teams, provides a deep dive into the decisions that shaped the architecture of Articles, an entirely new content type.
The post How we built it: our new Articles feature for Stack Overflow for Teams appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
Tune in for part two of our conversation with Adam Lear and Jon Chan, Stack Overflow developers working on our public sites and community tools.
The post Podcast 229: Jokes On Us appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
Unfriendly comments are an issue in our system because of the effect that their tone has on their recipient’s and future readers’ willingness to contribute to Stack Overflow. The solution to these issues isn’t to argue about circumstance or intent. The only remaining option is to work on the comments themselves.
The post The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
On March 30, 2020, we enabled folks to opt into a beta dark mode on Stack Overflow. Let’s talk about the work that went into it.
The post Building dark mode on Stack Overflow appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
We chat with two of the most creative and connected developers in New York about what they're building and how they learn.
The post Podcast: TFW You Accidentally Delete Your Database appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
What was life like before Git? Why do some many folks love React? How do you transition from a coder to a manager?
The post Podcast: A Few Of Our Favorite Things About React appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
How we approached and accomplished the integration between SO for Teams and MS Teams. This is a technical blog for folks who are interested in the process of how we got these two codebases to play nice with one another.
The post A Technical Deep Dive into Our MS Teams Integration appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
One way to scale support for a product is to invest in the community already asking and answering questions about your technology on Stack Overflow.
The post Why Sencha is moving its support forums to Stack Overflow appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
The impetus to provide an estimate for development work most often comes from non-developer stakeholders in your organization. Learning to do it well can improve collaboration and coordination across departments, making everyone happier and more productive.
The post Why Devs (Should) Like Estimates appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
Mariel Frank and Sonny Li, authors of Codecademy’s Learn C++ course, recently got a chance to interview with Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++. As part of the interview, he answered the highest voted C++ questions on Stack Overflow. While the whole interview is worth a read, Codecademy has generously allowed us to republish…
The post C++ Creator Bjarne Stroustrup Answers Our Top Five C++ Questions appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
As of September 23rd, 2019, we’re applying static analysis to some of the code behind public Stack Overflow, Stack Overflow for Teams, and Stack Overflow Enterprise in order to pre-emptively find and eliminate certain kinds of vulnerabilities. How we accomplished this is an interesting story and also illustrative of advancements in .NET’s open source community.…
The post Adding Static Code Analysis to Stack Overflow appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
I have been doing day-to-day code reviews for over a decade now. The benefits of code reviews are plenty: someone spot checks your work for errors, they get to learn from your solution, and the collaboration helps to improve the organization’s overall approach to tooling and automation. If you’re not currently doing code reviews in…
The post How to Make Good Code Reviews Better appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
Using cutting edge tech can help you move fast. But what happens when something breaks and you can't find experts with an answer? There are pros and cons to being a pioneer.
The post Apollo Mission: The Pros and Cons of Being an Early Adopter of New Technology appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
I’m Meg Risdal, the new Product Manager for Public Q&A. My team works on the public platform and the community tools that help power it (in contrast to our private Q&A products, Stack Overflow for Teams). Recently, we’ve shipped a new tag synonyms dashboard, a redesign of the mod flags dashboard, and Custom Filters. And…
The post What’s in the Works: Improving Feedback for All Users appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
In this part of a series on Stack Overflow's architecture, Nick Craver elaborates on why and how we utilize app caching.
The post How Stack Overflow Caches Apps for a Multi-Tenant Architecture appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
Warning: This post is long. While working through this massive server upgrade/migration process, tears were shed, many cuss words were uttered, along with a general feeling of frustration, which ultimately culminated into extreme happiness once the migration was completed. The scale and complexity of the implementation factor into the length of this post, and I’ll share…
The post How Stack Overflow upgraded from Windows Server 2012 appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
Hi, I’m Roberta Arcoverde, a Principal Software Developer at Stack Overflow. A few months ago I was tasked with figuring out how to enable single sign-on for Stack Overflow for Teams. We felt it was important to add SSO to the private version of Stack Overflow so the admins of our Teams could easily and…
The post Lessons Learned: Adding Single Sign-On to Stack Overflow for Teams appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
We are entering a new era in artificial intelligence, one where exciting breakthroughs seem to arrive every week. But the roots of today’s AI revolution actually date back many decades. So what changed? The catalyst for the recent advances is the fact that these techniques can now leverage unprecedented amounts of data and computing horsepower.…
The post Knowledge Engineering: Intuit’s Chief Innovation Officer Explains Their Approach to AI appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
Stack Speaks is a chance for us to highlight interesting appearances, talks, and presentations from Stack Overflow employees. Recently, I sat down with Kim Crayton as a guest on her #causeascene podcast. Kim is a coach, speaker, and leader who helps tech organizations put their values into operation and learn how to identify organizational barriers…
The post Stack Speaks: Talking text mining and developer data on the Cause A Scene podcast appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
Engineers from Expensify talk about how they are using Stack Overflow for Teams to improve collaboration and how it saves them hours of wasted time each week.
The post How Expensify Engineers Save Hours Each Week With Stack Overflow For Teams appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
Check out a cool project that leverages Stack Overflow Data and Google's Cloud AI to predict what tags would work best on Stack Overflow questions.
The post Predicting Stack Overflow Tags with Google’s Cloud AI appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
What languages do you want to work with next year? Are you more productive in an office or working from home? When did you write your first line of code? We want to hear from you in our annual developer survey! The survey, now in its ninth year, launches today and anyone who codes is…
The post Our 2019 Developer Survey is Open to Coders Everywhere! appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
JavaScript UI frameworks and libraries work in cycles. Every six months or so, a new one pops up, claiming that it has revolutionized UI development. Thousands of developers adopt it into their new projects, blog posts are written, Stack Overflow questions are asked and answered, and then a newer (and even more revolutionary) framework pops…
The post The Brutal Lifecycle of JavaScript Frameworks appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
It’s that time of year again—the annual developer survey is now open! This survey marks the 8th year we’ve been asking the developer community for their thoughts on everything from programming languages to career preferences. This year, we added in new questions about artificial intelligence, ethics in coding, and more. As in previous years, anonymized…
The post Take the 2018 Developer Survey appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
Life as a developer (or data scientist, in my case) involves being comfortable with changing technologies. I don’t use the same programming languages that I did at the beginning of my career, and I fully expect to be using different technologies several years from now. Here on the Stack Overflow blog, we’ve talked recently about…
The post The Cliffs of Insanity: Dramatic Shifts in Technologies on Stack Overflow appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
On Stack Overflow Jobs, you can create your own Developer Story to showcase your achievements and advance your career. One option you have when creating a Developer Story is to add tags you would like to work with or would not like to work with: This offers us an opportunity to examine the opinions of…
The post What are the Most Disliked Programming Languages? appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
If you hang out on Meta Stack Overflow, you may have noticed news from time to time about A/B tests of various features here at Stack Overflow. We use A/B testing to compare a new version to a baseline for a design, a machine learning model, or practically any feature of what we do here…
The post From Power Calculations to P-Values: A/B Testing at Stack Overflow appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
We found in a previous post that Python has a solid claim to being the fastest-growing programming language in terms of Stack Overflow visits. The same analysis showed that the R programming language has shown remarkable growth in the last five years as well. In fact, R is growing at a similar rate to Python…
The post The Impressive Growth of R appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
As Joel often says, “developers are writing the script for the future,” and that is definitely the case when it comes to AI. The knowledge shared on Stack Overflow includes an ever-growing pool on AI and related topics such as machine learning, natural language processing and deep learning. From C to Lisp to Java to…
The post How You Can Use the New Stack Overflow Bot from Microsoft appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
Today, we launched the Stack Overflow Salary Calculator, a tool that allows developers and employers to find typical salaries based on experience level, location, specific technologies, and education. We did this because we believe developers should be empowered with more information around job searches, careers, and salary. In fact, we know that developers want more…
The post How Much Do Developers Earn? Find Out with the Stack Overflow Salary Calculator appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
This post refers to “Channels”, a product which is now called “Teams.” Here’s What We’re Working on and How You Can Get Involved On Stack Overflow, a question gets asked once, answered, and then becomes a central point of knowledge for thousands of others who read it on our site. But what about developers who…
The post Introducing Channels: Private Q&A for Your Team appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
This week, my fellow Stack Overflow data scientist David Robinson and I are happy to announce the publication of our book Text Mining with R with O’Reilly. We are so excited to see this project out in the world, and so relieved to finally be finished with it! Text data is being generated all the…
The post Text Mining of Stack Overflow Questions appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
About two years ago, a significant event happened at Stack Overflow: a new system, named Providence, was released. Providence would allow us to tell which technologies a visitor is interested in, and measure the “fitness” between a visitor and a job. The release of Providence marked a stepping stone in Stack Overflow’s continuous effort to be…
The post A Dive Into Stack Overflow Jobs Search appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.
This morning, a popular Stack Overflow question hit a major milestone: You’re not alone, jclancy. In the five years since this question was asked, there have been over a million other developers who got stuck in Vim and couldn’t escape without a bit of help. Indeed, the difficulty of quitting the Vim editor is a…
The post Stack Overflow: Helping One Million Developers Exit Vim appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.