
The Stack Overflow Podcast
941 episodes — Page 1 of 19
How Braze’s CTO is rethinking engineering for the agentic area
Connecting the dots for accurate AI
AI giveth and AI taketh CPU
What (un)exactly do you mean by semantic search?
Time is a construct but it can still break your software
Your LLM issues are really data issues
Lights, camera, open source!
How to get multiple agents to play nice at scale
We still need developer communities
No country left behind with sovereign AI
Who needs VCs when you have friends like these?
The messy truth of your AI strategies
He designed C++ to solve your code problems

Ep 933Seizing the means of messenger production
Ryan sits down with Galen Wolfe-Pauly, CEO of Tlon, to chat about calm computing and how humans can take back ownership of their data and digital world. They discuss the early internet’s evolution from individual creativity into today’s internet that turns users into products, Galen’s takeaways from building a new network architecture that prioritizes user control, and why messenger applications are ripe for decentralization. Episode notes:Tlon is releasing a decentralized messenger app that gives you ownership of your data, built on Urbit, a complete, wholly encapsulated system that allows you to run a personal server in the cloud. Use the code STACK to skip the waitlist for the Tlon Messenger app.Connect with Galen on LinkedIn. Shoutout to user mkobuolys for winning a Populist badge for their answer to Set default transition for go_router in Flutter.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 932How can you test your code when you don’t know what’s in it?
Ryan hosts SmartBear’s VP of AI and Architecture Fitz Nowlan to explore how we’re moving away from old assumptions about software development, the challenges of testing MCP servers as LLM-driven agents introduce non-determinism that breaks tradition, and how data locality and data construction are becoming more valuable when source code is so easy to generate.Episode notes: SmartBear gives devs tools for application performance monitoring, software development, software testing, and API management—all at AI speed and scale.Connect with Fitz on LinkedIn and email him at [email protected] Congrats to Great Answer winner Alexander for winning the badge for their answer to Is there a way to make Runnable's run() throw an exception?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 931Prevent agentic identity theft
Ryan is joined by Nancy Wang, CTO of 1Password, to discuss the security challenges local agents present, how enterprises can create robust governance of credentials through zero-knowledge architecture, and the implications of agent intent and misuse in a world where AI agents are becoming more and more integrated into everyday applications.Episode notes: 1Password keeps your credentials secure through end-to-end encryption, zero-knowledge architecture, and more. Read their latest white paper on security design. Connect with Nancy on LinkedIn or email her at [email protected]. Congratulations to user Binita Bharati for winning a Populist badge for their answer to How to know the version of currently installed package from yarn.lock.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 930Multi-stage attacks are the Final Fantasy bosses of security
Ryan welcomes Gee Rittenhouse, VP of Security at AWS, to the show to discuss the complexities of multi-stage attacks in cybersecurity and how these attacks unfold, the challenges in detecting them, and the evolving role of AI in both enhancing security and creating new vulnerabilities. Episode notes: AWS Security Hub is expanding to unify your cloud security options. Learn more about how AWS is keeping your cloud safe on their website. Connect with Gee on LinkedIn. Shoutout to user James Kanze for winning a Populist badge for their answer to The spiral rule about declarations — when is it in error?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 929After all the hype, was 2025 really the year of AI agents?
Ryan is joined by Stefan Weitz, CEO and co-founder of the HumanX Conference, for a conversation on how AI has evolved in the last year. They discuss whether “the year of the agent” came to fruition, why companies are moving away from AGI, and the major blockers for AI adoption, from distrust in non-deterministic systems to enterprise data-readiness. Episode notes: HumanX 2026, one of the biggest AI conferences of the year, is happening in San Francisco from April 6-9. Listen to our episodes recorded on the conference floor last year. Connect with Stefan on LinkedIn.Congrats to Populist badge recipient humblebee for winning the badge for their answer to How to open/run YML compose file?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 928Building a global engineering team (plus AI agents) with Netlify
In this episode of Leaders of Code, Stack Overflow’s Chief of Product and Technology, Jody Bailey, sits down with Dana Lawson, CTO at Netlify. Dana shares her insights on leading a lean, globally distributed engineering team that powers 5% of the internet. The conversation touches on the realities of remote work, the importance of maintaining a written culture, and why Dana believes AI and agents are lowering the barrier to entry for builders everywhere.The discussion also:Explores how to manage a polyglot environment and the trade-offs between adopting nascent tech and maintaining operational reliability with a globally distributed team.Highlights Netlify’s approach to AI integration and how Dana addresses the natural scepticism from those hesitant to hand over control to AI.Covers realities of technical debt and how Netlify balances rapid product work with scaling.NotesConnect with Dana Lawson on LinkedIn.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 927Keeping the lights on for open source
Ryan sits down with Chainguard CEO Dan Lorenc to chat about how his team is keeping the foundation of the internet—open source projects—alive by forking archived but widely-used repos to provide security maintenance and dependency upgrades. They also discuss open source’s sustainability problems when it comes to funding, security, and maintainer burnout, and how trusted stewardship can reduce risk when maintainers step away.Episode notes: Chainguard provides secure-by-default open source artifacts for the modern software stack, keeping important open source projects maintained instead of archived.Chainguard just announced a whole bunch of new stuff at their user conference, Assemble. Connect with Dan on LinkedIn.Congrats to user Andreas Grapentin for winning a Lifejacket badge for their answer to Nested if-statement in loop vs two separate loops.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 926Open source for awkward robots
Ryan is joined by Jan Liphardt, CEO and co-founder of OpenMind, to chat about the rapidly evolving world of humanoid robotics and what it means for humans, why OpenMind is building an open source operating system for robots that processes logic in natural language, and how putting Asimov’s Laws on the blockchain might be the key to robotics guardrails.Episode notes: OpenMind’s OM1 is an open source OS for robots that allows robots to perceive, adapt, and act within human environments. Connect with Jan on LinkedIn and GitHub.This week’s shoutout goes to user Sean, who won a Lifejacket badge for their answer to Creating the simplest HTML toggle button?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 925Even the chip makers are making LLMs
Ryan welcomes Kari Briski, NVIDIA’s VP of Generative AI Software for Enterprise, to the show to explore how a chip manufacturer got into the model development game. They discuss NVIDIA’s co-design feedback loop between model builders and hardware architects, share insights on precision model training and memory management systems, and take a look at the roadmap and development of NVIDIA’s fully open-source Nemotron. Episode notes: Nemotron is a family of open models with open weights, training data, and recipes for building specialized AI agents.You can learn more on their Hugging Face page or at NVIDIA GTC on March 16-19. Connect with Kari on LinkedIn.Congrats to user The4thIceman for winning a Populist badge on their answer to How to Center Text in Pygame.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 924Building brains for bulldozers
Ryan chats with Kevin Peterson, CTO of Bedrock Robotics, about the evolution of self-driving technology and why robotics is now advancing; how real data is still relevant but simulation becomes essential for scale; and the future of robotics in addressing labor shortages and enhancing productivity.Episode notes:Bedrock Robotics creates technology that upgrades existing heavy equipment, enabling autonomous operation for construction machinery. Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn and Twitter. Congrats to user charlie for winning a Necromancer badge on their answer to Linking Rust application with a dynamic library not in the runtime linker search path.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 923AI-assisted coding needs more than vibes; it needs containers and sandboxes
SPONSORED BY DOCKERIn this sponsored episode, Ryan chats with Mark Cavage, President and COO of Docker, joins the show to dive into hardened containers and agent sandboxes. They discuss what it means for a container to be hardened, how agents are starting to look a lot like microservices, and where containers fit into agentic workflows now and in the future. Episode notesDocker Hardened Images are minimal and secure containers. They’re free and available for most applications in the Docker registry. Docker for AI provides an easy way to build, run, and secure AI agents. Connect with Mark on LinkedIn. Congrats Populist badge winner humblebee for answering How to open/run YML compose file?.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 922No need for Ctrl+C when you have MCP
Ryan sits down with Member of the Technical Staff at Anthropic and Model Context Protocol co-creator David Soria Parra to talk the evolution of MCP from local-only to remote connectivity, how security and privacy fit into their work with OAuth2 for authentication and authorization, and how they’re keeping MCP completely open-source and widely available by moving it to the Linux Foundation. Episode notes:The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open-source standard for connecting AI applications to external systems created by Anthropic. You can keep up with—or join—the work the MCP community is doing at their Discord server. Connect with David on Twitter. Today’s shoutout goes to Populist badge winner competent_tech for their answer to How do I review a PR assigned to me in VS 2022.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 921To live in an AI world, knowing is half the battle
Ryan welcomes Marcus Fontoura, technical fellow at Microsoft and author of Human Agency in the Digital World, to discuss the intersection of technology, society, and human dignity in a digital-first world. They chat about the non-determinism of social media algorithms, the need for balance between efficiency and human dignity in technology, and the role that trust plays in AI.Episode notes: Human Agency in the Digital World is an “AI-era self-help book” about reclaiming our role as pilots—not passengers—in the technology revolution. It’s available now on Amazon and everywhere books are sold. Connect with Marcus on LinkedIn and learn more about his work at his website.Congrats to user Romain for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Django: show the count of related objects in admin list_display. TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 920Dogfood so nutritious it’s building the future of SDLCs
Ryan welcomes Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI’s engineering lead on Codex, to discuss how the Codex team dogfoods Codex to build Codex, what distinguishes an agentic coding tool from a chat-based code assistant, and why they’re focusing on a safe and secure agentic SDLC rather than just code generation.Episode notes: Codex CLI is a coding agent from OpenAI that runs locally on your computer. Try it now with your Free or Go ChatGPT plan. You can keep up with everything happening at OpenAI on their blog. Connect with Thibault on LinkedIn and Twitter.Congrats to user kevinyu for winning a Great Question badge for Does println! borrow or own the variable?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 919Even GenAI uses Wikipedia as a source
Ryan is joined by Philippe Saade, the AI project lead at Wikimedia Deutschland, to dive into the Wikidata Embedding Project and how their team vectorized 30 million of Wikidata’s 119 million entries for semantic search. They discuss how this project helped offload the burden that scraping was creating for their sites, what Wikimedia.DE is doing to maintain data integrity for their entries, and the importance of user feedback even as they work to bring Wikipedia’s vast knowledge to people building open-source AI projects. Episode notes: Wikimedia.DE announced the Wikidata Embedding Project with MCP support in October of last year. Check out their vector database and codebase for the project. Connect with Philippe on LinkedIn and his Wiki page. Today’s shoutout goes to an Unsung Hero on Stack Overflow—someone who has more than 10 accepted answers with a zero score, making up 25% of their total. Thank you to user MWB for bringing your knowledge to the community!TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 918Why Stack Overflow and Cloudflare launched a pay-per-crawl model
In this episode of Leaders of Code, Stack Overflow’s Janice Manningham and Josh Zhang sit down with Cloudflare VP Will Allen to discuss the innovative pay-per-crawl model co-launched by their organizations. They explore how the rise of AI has disrupted the traditional “open versus block” internet model, creating a need for platforms to protect their content and data from commercial exploitation while maintaining community access.The discussion also:Explores the future of the bot ecosystem, emphasizing the importance of putting publishers back in the driver’s seat to decide how their content is accessed and monetized.Explains the technical implementation of the pay-per-crawl system, which uses Cloudflare’s bot categorization and WAF rules to serve a 402 “Payment Required” message to specific crawlers.Highlights the strategic value of data licensing, comparing comprehensive enterprise contracts with the more flexible, programmatic pay-per-use access enabled by the new model.NotesConnect with Will Allen, Janice Manningham and Josh Zhang on LinkedIn.Learn more about Stack Overflow Data Licensing here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 917Data is the new oil, and your database is the only way to extract it
Ryan sits down with Shireesh Thota, CVP of Azure Databases at Microsoft, to discuss the evolution of databases at Microsoft; Azure’s comprehensive portfolio that includes SQL Server, CosmosDB, and Postgres; and the challenges that come with database architecture, from the importance of cost governance and multi-cloud strategies to the future of databases when it comes to AI.Episode notes: You can read all about the latest Azure database announcements from Microsoft Ignite—including updates for SQL Server, Postgres, DocumentDB, and Fabric—on their Azure blog. Connect with Shireesh on LinkedIn.Today’s shoutout goes to user Guffa for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Virtual method tables. TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 916Even your voice is a data problem
Recorded last December at AWS re:Invent, Ryan welcomes CEO and co-founder of Deepgram, Scott Stephenson, for a conversation on advancing voice AI technology. They cover how Deepgram is improving speech-to-text and text-to-speech capabilities using deep learning to take on challenges posed by dialects and noisy environments and the moral and ethical considerations voice AI companies have to make when it comes to voice cloning and synthetic data training. Episode notes: Deepgram builds accurate, scalable, and affordable large scale voice AI for speech recognition, generation, and AI Agents.Connect with Scott on LinkedIn, Twitter, or email him at [email protected] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 915The logos, ethos, and pathos of your LLMs
Ryan is joined by Professor Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton University’s AI Lab, to dive into findings from his new book The Laws of Thought, which explores the history of the philosophy, mathematics, and logic that underlie artificial intelligence, and scientists' efforts to describe our minds using mathematics. They discuss the challenges of understanding human cognition, the implications of probabilistic AI “thinking,” and where Aristotle fits into the philosophical discussions we’re having on consciousness and sentience in AI. Episode notes: The Laws of Thought details our quest to use mathematics to describe the ways we think, from its origins three hundred years ago to the ideas behind modern AI systems and how our human minds differ from the neural networks of AI. Connect with Tom on LinkedIn and find more of his work at the Princeton website. Congrats to user Andreas Rayo Kniep for winning a Populist badge for their answer to Is there a difference between the UTC and Etc/UTC time zones?.We want to know what you're using to upskill and learn in the age of AI. Take this five minute survey on learning and AI to have your voice heard in our next Stack Overflow Knows Pulse Survey. TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 914AI attention span so good it shouldn’t be legal
We have another two-for-one special this week, with two more interviews from the floor of re:Invent. First, Ryan welcomes Pathway CEO Zuzanna Stamirowska and CCO Victor Szczerba to dive into their development of Baby Dragon Hatchling, the first post-transformer frontier model, from how continual learning and memory will transform AI to the real-world use cases for longer LLM attention span. In the second part of this episode, Ryan is joined by Rowan McNamee, co-founder and COO of Mary Technology, to discuss bringing AI into the carefully governed world of litigation and how LLMs are helping lawyers manage and interpret the vast amounts of legal evidence that pass across their desks every day.Episode notes: Pathway is building the first post-transformer frontier model that solves for attention span and continual learning.Mary Technology is an AI for attorneys that turns evidentiary documents into structured, easy-to-review facts.Connect with Zuzanna on LinkedIn and Twitter. Reach out to Victor at his email: [email protected] Connect with Rowan on LinkedIn.We want to know what you're using to upskill and learn in the age of AI. Take this five minute survey on learning and AI to have your voice heard in our next Stack Overflow Knows Pulse Survey.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 913Generating text with diffusion (and ROI with LLMs)
Two guests for the price of one! This episode has two interviews recorded at AWS re:Invent back in December. In part 1, Ryan chats with the co-founder and CEO of Inception, Stefano Ermon, about diffusion language models and how their multiple token generation compares to traditional LLMs (spoiler: they’re faster and more accurate). In the second half of the episode, Ryan and the chairman of Roomie, Aldo Luevano, dive into Roomie’s purpose built models for both physical and software AI, and how their ROI-first approach helps companies track the impact of their robotics and AI implementation. Episode notes: Inception researches and builds diffusion language models for faster and more efficient AI.Roomie is a robotics and enterprise AI company with an ROI-first platform that tracks how well their AI solutions are actually working. Connect with Stefano on LinkedIn.Connect with Aldo on LinkedIn.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 912Wanna see a CSS magic trick?
Ryan is joined by Chris Coyier, founder of CSS Tricks and CodePen, to talk all about what the state of the art of CSS is today, including new features like variables and scroll-driven animations. They talk about the importance of accessibility in web design, how the web went from table-based layouts to modern CSS techniques, and exciting developments coming to CodePen 2.0.Episode notes:Chris built CSS-Tricks, a website all about building websites, and ran it for 15 years, from 2007 to 2022, before selling it to DigitalOcean.CodePen is an online community for frontend developers where you can build, deploy, and show-off your code. CodePen 2.0 is their all-new IDE that is currently in private beta. Check out Chris’ blog and his podcast ShopTalk.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 911Spy vs spy at scale
Ryan welcomes Anthony Vinci, former senior intelligence officer and author of The Fourth Intelligence Revolution, to explore AI’s evolving role in intelligence in places like translation and image analysis, the challenges of evolving modern tech into government infrastructure, and the importance of democratized intelligence so citizens can keep themselves and loved ones safe.Episode notes:The Fourth Intelligence Revolution details how espionage practices are being transformed by a new global intelligence conflict, driven by AI and competition with China, and what everyday citizens can do to defend their privacy. Learn more at Anthony’s website. Connect with Anthony on Linkedin, Twitter, and Substack.Populist badge winner Orez gets today’s shoutout for their answer to Break or exit out of "with" statement?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 910AI can 10x developers...in creating tech debt
Ryan sits down with Michael Parker, VP of Engineering at TurinTech to discuss the newest kind of tech debt—AI-generated tech debt. They dive into the uneven productivity results of AI tools, how tech teams are evolving their roles and work in response to these massive technological shifts, and what the nervous developer can do to maintain joy in their work. Episode notes: Founded by computer and data scientists from the University College London, TurinTech automates your code optimization so you can deploy better AI models. Preview their new Artemis coding agent for free. Connect with Michael on LinkedIn.User Adam Franco won a Stellar Answer badge—and this week’s shoutout—for their answer to How can I delete a remote tag?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 909Don’t let your backend write checks your frontend can’t cache
Ryan welcomes Prakash Chandran, CEO and co-founder of Xano, to the show to discuss the intricate relationship between frontend and backend development, the potential challenges that universal frontend interfaces pose for developers, and the importance of understanding both your frontend and your backend when using AI code. Episode notes: Xano is a no-code backend platform that lets you build systems with visual logic, APIs, and modular AI components. Check out their tutorials on YouTube. Connect with Prakash on LinkedIn. User Bruno Bronosky is the winner of today’s shoutout and a Stellar Answer badge for their answer to How do I parse command line arguments in Bash?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 908How AWS re:Invented the cloud
From the floor at AWS re:Invent, Ryan is joined by AWS Senior Principal Engineer David Yanacek to chat about all things AWS, from the truth behind AWS’s Black Friday origin mythos to the development of essential cloud tools like SQS and DynamoDB. Plus, how David envisions autonomous agents will ease developers' operational burdens.Episode notes:This episode was recorded live at AWS re:Invent. Listen to our other episodes from the floor with the Stack Overflow team and Corey Quinn. Keep up with the latest AWS updates, including what they’re doing with AI, at their site.Connect with David on Linkedin and Twitter. TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 906Transforming enterprise workflows: How IBM is unlocking AI's potential
In this episode of Leaders of Code, Stack Overflow Chief of Product and Technology Jody Bailey chats with Matt Lyteson, CIO of Technology Platform Transformation at IBM, about the processes and challenges of adopting AI within an enterprise environment. They explore IBM's strategic approach to integrating AI into workflows and emphasise the importance of fostering the right behaviours among employees, particularly regarding automation and AI assistance.The discussion also:Explores what it means for a company like IBM to truly embrace AI, with Lyteson sharing strategies for integrating AI into every workflow to maximize productivity across the organization. Highlights key challenges like data privacy, security risks, and the critical need for workforce reskilling in an AI-enabled world.NotesConnect with Matt Lyteson on LinkedIn.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 907Vibe code anything in a Hanselminute
Ryan welcomes back the mighty Scott Hanselman, VP of Developer Community at Microsoft, for a crossover episode about all things vibe coding. They cover the ways it can really improve the software development lifecycle, the importance of keeping human judgement in software so developers can truly understand their code, and how AI can be leveraged as a learning tool…like when Scott vibe coded a simple app over lunch. Episode notes:Scott last sat down with us in 2017 to discuss his journey into tech and his advice for supporting the next generation of developers. You can learn more about Scott’s work at his website. If you love the sound of his voice, you can also check out his podcasts Hanselminutes, Azure Friday, and his show with Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich: Scott & Mark Learn To. You can also check out the app he vibe coded over lunch on his GitHub.This week’s shoutout goes to user Keavon for their answer to Move Line Up/Down shortcut in Visual Studio, which won them a Populist badge.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 905Every ecommerce hero needs a Sidekick
Ryan is joined by Vanessa Lee, VP of Product at Shopify, to discuss how AI is a tech renaissance and how these new technologies are affecting the ecommerce world. They cover the development of Sidekick, their new tool, along with the general challenges of building AI tools, the importance of maintaining human oversight in AI, and what the future holds for personalized user experiences in ecommerce. Episode notes: We spoke with Shopify about how they’re building developer-focused AI products last May; you can check it out here. Sidekick is Shopify’s new AI assistant that combines commerce knowledge with advanced reasoning. Learn more about how Shopify is using AI agents to evolve their product taxonomy at scale on their blog.Connect with Vanessa on Twitter. Congrats to user Erwin Brandstetter for winning a Great Answer badge for their answer to How to convert empty to null in PostgreSQL?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 904You need quality engineers to turn AI into ROI
SPONSORED BY MONGODBPete Johnson, Field CTO, Artificial Intelligence at MongoDB, joins the podcast to talk about a recent OpenAI paper on the impact that AI will have on jobs and overall GDP. Pete, who reads the papers (and datasets) so you don’t have to, says that looking at AI’s impact as a job killer is a flawed metric. Instead, he and Ryan talk about how AI will be a collaborator for actual human workers, how embeddings and vectorization will move the productivity needle, and the five decisions you need to make to realize ROI on AI. Episode notes:If you’re curious, read the OpenAI blog post and paper yourself. For those of you looking for inspiration, check out Werner Vogel’s keynote from re:Invent 2025. MongoDB provides a flexible and dynamic database that excels with AI data. Connect with Pete on LinkedIn.Congrats to Populist badge winner Scheff's Cat for dropping a banger of an answer on error: non-const static data member must be initialized out of line.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 903Search engine bots crawled so AI bots could run
Ryan hosts Akamai data scientist Robert Lester on the show to discuss how the growth of AI bots affects internet traffic, the ways these AI bots differ from the original search engine optimization ones, and why you might not want to mitigate AI bots on your websites.Episode notes:Akamai is a CDN, full-stack cloud computing, and cybersecurity company that keeps experiences closer to users and threats further away using the world’s most distributed compute platform. Connect with Robert on LinkedIn and check out his AI Pulse blogs.Today’s shoutout goes to user Evan Phoenix for winning a Populist badge for their answer to llvm ir back to human-readable source language?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 902The most dangerous shortcuts in software
Ryan sits down with Tom Totenberg, head of release automation at LaunchDarkly, to discuss the perils of taking too many shortcuts in software development, how business pressures and AI code tools have contributed to dangerous corner cutting, and the importance of balancing speed with sustainability to maintain system integrity. Episode notes: LaunchDarkly is a feature management and experimentation platform that allows you to decouple software feature rollouts from code deployment so you can manage features safely and securely.Connect with Tom on Linkedin. This episode’s shoutout goes to user Boris Gorelik, who won a Great Question badge for asking Removing handlers from python's logging loggers. TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 901How AI is helping us build better communities
MIT and Stanford professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland joins the show to explore the power of communities for shared knowledge and how AI could hurt or help the growth of these communities. Ryan and Sandy dive into the findings from Sandy’s new book Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI, the ethical implications of rapidly advancing technology, and AI’s potential to foster community dialogue and decision-making. Episode notes:Sandy’s new book Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI explores how we can build a flourishing society by using what we know about human nature to design our technology—rather than letting technology shape our society.Connect with Sandy on Linkedin. Check out the work he’s doing with AI at deliberation.io and Loyal Agents.Congratulations to user Harshal for winning a Populist badge on their answer to How to start search only when user stops typing?TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 900Containers are easy—moving your legacy system off your VM is not
Ryan sits down with Dan Ciruli, VP and General Manager of Cloud Native at Nutanix, to talk about getting your virtual machines and Kubernetes to play nice in cloud-native environments, why VMs are still relevant in enterprise applications, and how AI can help modernize legacy systems. Episode notes: Nutanix combines compute, storage, virtualization, and networking so you can run applications and manage data across on-premises datacenters, public clouds, and edge locations all on one platform. Connect with Dan on Linkedin and Bluesky.Congrats to Necromancer badge winner David Ferenczy Rogožan! They won the badge on their answer to Where does adb shell mkdir create directories.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 899Settle down, nerds. AI is a normal technology
Ryan welcomes Anil Dash, writer and former Stack Overflow board member, back to the show to discuss how AI is not a magical technology, but rather the normal next step in computing’s evolution. They explore the importance of democratizing access to technology, the unique challenges that LLMs’ non-determinism poses, and how developers can keep Stack Overflow’s ethos of community alive in a world of AI. Episode notes: Anil is a tech entrepreneur (former CEO at our sister company Fog Creek Software) and writer. You can find him at his blog anildash.com and on Linkedin. Check out the last time Anil was on the pod in 2020 to talk all things Glitch and Glimmer. Shoutout to user pgrad for winning a Lifejacket badge on their answer to Using type hint Any in Django - NameError: name 'Any' is not defined.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 898Last week in AWS re:Invent with Corey Quinn
Ryan sits down with Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, at AWS re:Invent to get Corey’s patented snarky take on all the happenings from the conference. They discuss whether the AI agent hype is supported by actual buyers, how startups are faring as AWS focuses on large enterprises, and how many of the new technologies coming out this year will actually be transformative. Episode notes:This episode was recorded at AWS re:Invent 2025! Check out Ryan’s recap of events on our blog. Duckbill provides financial planning and analysis for enterprise infrastructure to help you understand, negotiate, and optimize your cloud spend.Connect with Corey on Linkedin and subscribe to his newsletter Last Week in AWS.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ep 897Live from re:Invent…it’s Stack Overflow!
Ryan is joined by Stack Overflow’s CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar and Director of Data Science Michael Foree on the floor at re:Invent to discuss all they’ve seen and heard at the event, from the future of AI agents to the trust issues the enterprise has around AI and the impact of AI and robotics on the job market.Episode Notes:This episode was recorded at AWS re:Invent 2025! Check out Ryan’s recap of events from the floor on our blog. Connect with Prashanth on LinkedIn.Connect with Michael on LinkedIn.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.