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.

Ben Popper

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.

Ben Popper

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.

Ben Popper

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.

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.

Eira May

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.

Eira May

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.

Eira May

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.

Eira May

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.

Eira May

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.

Eira May

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.

Eira May

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.

Eira May

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.

Eira May

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.

Eira May

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.

Eira May

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.

Eira May

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.

Ryan Donovan

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.

Eira May

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.

Eira May

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.

Ryan Donovan

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.

Eira May

We sit down with Jessica Clark, a senior data scientist at Stack Overflow, to discuss how our company approaches generative AI and data quality.

Ben Popper

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?

Eira May