The Stack Overflow Podcast - podcast cover

The Stack Overflow Podcast

The Stack Overflow Podcaststackoverflow.blog
For more than a dozen years, the Stack Overflow Podcast has been exploring what it means to be a software developer and how the art and practice of programming is changing our world. From Rails to React, from Java to Node.js, join the Stack home team for conversations with fascinating guests to help you understand how technology is made and where it’s headed.

Episodes

Think you don’t need observability? Think again

Memento is a real-time data platform designed to help developers ship better products faster. Explore the platform here or get started in the docs . Connect with Daniela on LinkedIn and follow Momento on X . Stack Overflow user Simon Juhl won a Lifeboat badge for dropping some knowledge on HTMLCSS change Date input highlight color ....

Oct 08, 202429 minEp. 743

A developer works to balance the data center boom with his climate change battle

You can find David on LinkedIn . You can learn more about Arcjet here. You can subscribe to to the console.dev newsletter and podcast here. Congrats to Stack Overflow user Greg Hewgill who earned a Populist badge for his answer to the question: What’s a good tool to determine the lowest version of Python required? Greg is getting close to the magic one million rep mark!...

Oct 01, 202427 minEp. 741

He sold his first company for billions. Now he’s building a better developer experience.

Jyoti is a cofounder and CEO of Harness , a software delivery platform meant to modernize your DevOps tooling and take the friction out of CI/CD. Devs can get started with the developer portal . In addition to Harness, Jyoti is a cofounder and entrepreneur partner at Unusual Ventures , which specializes in working with early-stage startups (pre-seed to Series A). Connect with Jyoti on LinkedIn . Shoutout to Stack Overflow user kukuh , who won a Lifeboat badge for dishing out some wisdom on Andro...

Sep 24, 202427 minEp. 739

How to detect errors in AI-generated code

Read the paper Gias coauthored about incorrectness in AI-generated code or explore more of his research . You can connect with Gias via his website . We previously covered research on Stack Overflow code snippets that Gias was involved in and spoke to his team about deriving sentiment from SO comments . Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Adhi Ardiansyah for an excellent explanation of How to update a GitHub access token via command line ....

Sep 20, 202426 minEp. 738

Looking under the hood of multimodal AI

Multimodal AI combines different modalities—audio, video, text, etc.—to enable more humanlike engagement and higher-quality responses from the AI model. WebRTC is a free, open-source project that allows developers to add real-time communication capabilities that work on top of an open standard to their applications. It supports video, voice, and generic data. LiveKit is an open-source project that provides scalable, multi-user conferencing based on WebRTC. It’s designed to provide everything dev...

Sep 17, 202429 minEp. 737

The world’s largest open-source business has plans for enhancing LLMs

Red Hat Enterprise Linux may be the world’s largest open-source software business. You can dive into the docs here . Created by IBM and Red Hat, InstructLab is an open-source project for enhancing LLMs. Learn more here or join the community on GitHub . Connect with Scott on LinkedIn . User AffluentOwl earned a Great Question badge by wondering How to force JavaScript to deep copy a string? ....

Sep 13, 202429 minEp. 736

The evolution of full stack engineers

From her early days coding on a TI-84 calculator, to working as an engineer at IBM, to pivoting over to her new role in DevRel, speaking, and community, Mrina has seen the world of coding from many angles. You can follow her on Twitter here and on LinkedIn here . You can learn more about CK editor here and TinyMCE here . Congrats to Stack Overflow user NYI for earning a great question badge by asking: How do I convert a bare git repository into a normal one (in-place)?...

Sep 10, 202424 minEp. 735

The creator of Jenkins discusses CI/CD and balancing business with open source

You can learn more about Kohsuke on his website . You can read more about Jenkins here . You can read more about Cloudbees here . Shout to Mossmyr for contributing a question that's now part of our CI/CD Collective: Is there a way to call a Jenkins Shared Library method from another Jenkins Shared Library?...

Sep 06, 202425 minEp. 734

At scale, anything that could fail definitely will

Pradeep talks about building at global scale and preparing for inevitable system failures. He talks about extra layers of security, including viewing your own VMs as untrustworthy. And he lays out where he thinks the world of cloud computing is headed as GenAI becomes a bigger piece of many company’s tech stack. You can find Pradeep on LinkedIn . He also writes a blog and hosts a podcast over at Oracle First Principles . Congrats to Stack Overflow user shantanu, who earned a Great Question badge...

Sep 03, 202430 minEp. 733

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

You can learn more about Austin on LinkedIn and check out a blog he wrote on building the SDK for Open Telemetry here . You can find Austin at the CNCF Slack community, in the OTel SIG channel, or the client-side SIG channels. The calendar is public on opentelemetry.io. Embrace has its own Slack community to talk all things Embrace or all things mobile observability. You can join that by going to embrace.io as well. Congrats to Stack Overflow user Cottentail for earning an Illuminator badge , aw...

Aug 30, 202427 minEp. 732

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

For the last two years, Postgres has been the most popular database among respondents to our Annual Developer Survey. Timescale is a startup working on an open-source PostgreSQEL stack for AI applications. You can follow the company on X and check out their work on GitHub . You can learn more about Avthar on his website and on LinkedIn . Congrats to Stack Overflow user Haymaker for earning a Great Question badge. They asked: How Can I Override the Default SQLConnection Timeout ? Nearly 250,000 o...

Aug 27, 202425 minEp. 731

From PHP to JavaScript to Kubernetes: how backend engineering evolved

You can learn more about Geshan on his website or check him out on LinkedIn . Geshan also shared the slide decks for a few of his talks on serverless and containers . Congrats to Stack Overflow user Matthew Reed for earning a populist badge with his answer to the question: GitHub: How to do case sensitive search for the code in repository?...

Aug 23, 202426 minEp. 730

Ryan Dahl explains why Deno had to evolve with version 2.0

If you’ve never seen it, check out Ryan’s classic talk, 10 Things I Regret About Node.JS , which gives a great overview of the reasons he felt compelled to create Deno. You can learn more about Ryan on Wikipedia , his website , and his Github page . To learn more about Deno 2.0, listen to Ryan talk about it here and check out the project’s Github page here . Congrats to Hugo G, who earned a Great Answer Badge for his input on the following question: How can I declare and use Boolean variables in...

Aug 20, 202427 minEp. 729

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

You can find Ilya on LinkedIn here . You can listen to Ilya talk about Commerce Components here , a system he describes as a "modern way to approach your commerce architecture without reducing it to a (false) binary choice between microservices and monoliths." As Ilya notes, “there are a lot of interesting implications for runtime and how we're solving it at Shopify. There is a direct bridge there to a performance conversation as well: moving untrusted scripts off the main thread, sandboxing UI ...

Aug 16, 202431 minEp. 728

Scaling systems to manage the data about the data

Coalesce is a solution to transform data at scale. You can find Satish on LinkedIn . We previously spoke to Satish for a Q&A on the blog: AI is only as good as the data: Q&A with Satish Jayanthi of Coalesce We previously covered metadata on the blog: Metadata, not data, is what drags your database down Congrats to Lifeboat winner nwinkler for saving this question with a great answer: Docker run hello-world not working...

Aug 13, 202423 minEp. 727

How we’re making Stack Overflow more accessible

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 measure color contrast using the Accessible Perceptual Contrast Algorithm (APCA) . We quantified the accessibility of our products using the Axe accessibility testing engine . Our accessibility dashboard helps our internal teams and the community track the accessibility of our products: Stacks (our design sys...

Aug 09, 202428 minEp. 726

Unpacking the 2024 Developer Survey results

Read the blog post or dive into the results of our 2024 Developer Survey. A few highlights to get you started: most popular technologies , most admired and desired programming languages , feelings about/use of AI coding tools , and what we know about the global developer community . Speaking of our developer community, Stack Overflow user Frank earned a Stellar Question badge by wondering How to use C++ in Go ....

Aug 06, 202424 minEp. 725

How developer experience can escape the spreadsheet

Cortex is an internal developer portal that cuts noise and helps devs build and continuously improve software. Explore their docs or see what’s happening on their blog . Cortex is also hiring, so if you’re an engineer who wants to work on these kinds of problems, check out their careers page. Connect with Anish on LinkedIn or X . Ganesh is also on LinkedIn and X . Shoutout to Alex Chesters , who earned a Great Question badge with How to count occurrences of an element in a Swift array? ....

Aug 02, 202428 minEp. 724

How Stack Overflow fends off scraping bots

As Josh explains, DDoS attacks aim to take down a website, while bot scrapers try to gather as much data as possible without getting caught. Josh Zhang is a staff site reliability engineer (SRE) at Stack Overflow. Connect with him on LinkedIn . ICYMI: In 2022, Josh wrote an article for our blog about how Stack defends itself against DDoS attacks. Stack Overflow user Serge Ballesta won a Lifeboat badge for answering What does |= mean in c++ ....

Jul 30, 202422 minEp. 723

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

Jannis Kallinikos is a coauthor of Data Rules: Reinventing the Market Economy (MIT Press, 2024) with Cristina Alaimo, which lays out a framework for a new social science focused on the socioeconomic changes driven by data. You can read an excerpt from Data Rules on our blog here . Explore more of Dr. Kallinikos’s work . Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Ebrahim Ghasemi for answering What is the structure of an application protocol data unit (APDU) command and response?...

Jul 26, 202420 minEp. 722

The problem with the tech debt mindset

Chelsea Troy defines technical debt and maintenance load in her blog post, “ Stop saying ‘technical debt .’” Learn more about technical bankruptcy in this blog post, “ Monitoring debt builds up faster than software teams can pay it off .” Joel Spolsky’s classic blog post on avoiding rewriting code from scratch – Things you should never do, part I . Technical debt as explained by Ward Cunningham, who coined the term. Code as an asset , a conversation from Hacker News. Middleware is the “software ...

Jul 23, 202425 minEp. 721

Java, but why? The state of Java in 2024

You can connect with Lenny Primak at Flow Logix , X , LinkedIn , Github , or Mastodon . Got questions about Java ? Check out the site. Apache Groovy is a Java programming language. Virtual Threads reduce the effort put into writing and maintaining code as well as observing high-throughput concurrent applications. Apache Shiro is an open-source security framework that can do authentication, authorization, cryptography, and session management. Jakarta EE , or Jakarta Enterprise Edition, is a suite...

Jul 19, 202426 minEp. 720

The framework helping devs build LLM apps

LlamaIndex is a data framework for building LLM applications. Check out the open-source framework or get started with the developer community, LlamaHub . Looking for a deeper understanding of RAG? Start with our guide . Wondering how to import `SimpleDirectoryReader` from LlamaIndex? This question has you covered. Jerry Chen is a partner at Greylock . Connect with him on LinkedIn . Read Jerry Liu’s posts on the LlamaIndex blog or connect with him on LinkedIn ....

Jul 16, 202434 minEp. 719

Why we built Staging Ground

Learn more about Staging Ground on our blog or in the help center . Find Kyle on LinkedIn , GitHub , and Twitter . Spevacus is a full stack developer and Stack Overflow moderator. They’re a participant in Charcoal , a user-run group that fights spam and rude/abusive content across the Stack Exchange network....

Jul 12, 202440 minEp. 718

We chat search from both sides now

Stack Overflow and Elastic are collaborating to improve the search experience using vector search and generative AI. Learn more about the new AI features for Stack Overflow for Teams, including Enhanced Search . Learn more about the Elastic platform, including vector search . Developers can start building here . Connect with Paul , Steffi , and Gregor on LinkedIn. Stack Overflow user chepner won a Lifeboat badge for answering How do I use __repr__ with multiple arguments? ....

Jul 09, 202426 minEp. 717

What can devs do about code review anxiety?

Carol is an applied clinical and intervention scientist: she develops and tests cognitive, behavioral, and social interventions that activate key mechanisms to elicit change. Learn more about understanding and mitigating code review anxiety (the full version of her article is here ). You can also check out the code review anxiety workbook . Pluralsight’s Developer Success Lab is a team of scientists studying how developers work, learn, and innovate. Explore more of Carol’s work on code review an...

Jul 05, 202424 minEp. 716

Happy people make better products

Still thinking about developer happiness and productivity? Read Eira’s article about the real 10x developers among us. Connect with Ben Borra through his website or LinkedIn . Asked and answered: Stack Overflow user Jian earned a Great Question badge with How do I close a frozen SSH session? ....

Jul 02, 202420 minEp. 715

How to build open source apps in a highly regulated industry

Before Medplum, Reshma founded and exited two startups in the healthcare space – MedXT (managing medical images online acquired by Box) and Droplet (at-home diagnostics company acquired by Ro). Reshma has a B.S. in computer science and a Masters of Engineering from MIT. You can learn more about Medplum here and check out their Github, which has over 1,200 stars, here . You can learn more about Khilnani on her website , GitHub , and on LinkedIn . Congrats to Stack Overflow user Kvam for earning a...

Jun 28, 202425 minEp. 714