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The Stack Overflow Podcast

Scaling systems to manage all the metadata ABOUT the data

On this episode, Ryan and Cassidy talk to Satish Jayanthi, CTO and co-founder of Coalesce, about the growth of metadata and how you can manage it, especially in systems using generative AI. They explore the importance in providing context and transparency to data, how metadata can be generated automatically, and the future of metadata including knowledge graphs.

Unpacking the 2024 Developer Survey results

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

How developer experience can escape the spreadsheet

Ben and Ryan are joined by Cortex cofounders Anish Dhar, CEO, and Ganesh Datta, CTO. Cortex offers an internal developer portal that helps devs document and reinforce organizational best practices and improve developer productivity. The portal includes features like scorecards that incentivize developers to improve their work and AI-powered search to make finding information easier.

How Stack Overflow fends off scraping bots

Josh Zhang, a staff site reliability engineer at Stack Overflow, tells Ryan and Eira how the Stack Exchange network defends against scraping bots. They also cover the emergence of human botnets, why DDoS attacks have spiked in the last couple of years, and the constant balancing act of protecting sites from attack without inhibiting legitimate users.

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

In this episode, Ben interviews Jannis Kallinikos, a professor at Luiss University in Rome, Italy about his new book Data Rules: Reinventing the Market Economy, coauthored with Cristina Alaimo. They discuss the social impact of data, explore the idea that data filters how we see the world and interact with each other, and highlight the need for social accountability in data tracking and surveillance.

The problem with the tech debt mindset

Ryan chats with Jon Bevan, a software engineer currently building the cloud version of Scriptrunner, an Atlassian app, about the concept of tech debt. They explore how tech debt can arise from outdated technology choices, shortcuts, and the need for maintenance work. They also delve into the challenges of upgrading dependencies and the potential scope creep of requirements and features over time.

The framework helping devs build LLM apps

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).

How to build open-source apps in a highly regulated industry

Today we chat with Reshma Khilnani, co-founder and CEO of Medplum, an open-source platform enabling companies to build healthcare applications like EHRs and patient portals. She discusses how to iterate rapidly in an industry where SOC2 compliance is just the beginning (one of the compliance tests is named after Dante’s epic poem depicting the nine circles of hell, if that gives you an idea).

Say goodbye to "junior" engineering roles

We chat with Kirimgeray Kirimli, a director at Flatiron Software and CEO of Snapshot Reviews, a tool that measures 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. Plus, why "junior engineer" is not likely to be a job available to humans for much longer.

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

In this episode, Alexa Montelibano and Tiago Torre, sales engineers at Stack Overflow, take you behind the scenes to show how customer feedback shapes our products, including OverflowAI. Alexa and Tiago have been working with clients to explore the three features of OverflowAI—Enhanced Search, an Auto-answer App for Slack and Microsoft Teams, and an IDE extension.

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

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

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

Today's episode is a chat with Benjamin Shestakofsky, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania with a focus on the ways in which digital technologies are affecting work and employment, organizations, and economic exchange. We discuss research from his new book which dives into the venture capital business and explores the cooperative model that some software startups are taking instead.