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

Tue, 11 Jun 2024 04:30:00 GMT

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.

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Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 16:03:00 GMT

It’s easy to generate code, but not so easy to generate good code.

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

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 13:18:00 GMT

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.

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Breaking up is hard to do: Chunking in RAG applications

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 16:00:00 GMT

A look at some of the current thinking around chunking data for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems.

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Introducing Staging Ground: The private space to get feedback on questions before they’re posted

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 21:30:00 GMT

Learn about the workflow designed to help new askers improve their questions on Stack Overflow.

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How to prevent your new chatbot from giving away company secrets

Tue, 04 Jun 2024 07:40:00 GMT

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.

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

Fri, 31 May 2024 10:14:00 GMT

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.

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Developers get by with a little help from AI: Stack Overflow Knows code assistant pulse survey results

Wed, 29 May 2024 14:00:00 GMT

We 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.

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An open-source development paradigm

Tue, 28 May 2024 07:40:00 GMT

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.

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Would you board a plane safety-tested by GenAI?

Fri, 24 May 2024 07:40:00 GMT

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.

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You should keep a developer’s journal

Wed, 22 May 2024 14:00:00 GMT

A developer’s journal is a place to define the problem you’re solving and record what you tried and what worked.

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How to train your dream machine

Tue, 21 May 2024 07:40:00 GMT

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.

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The Good, the Bad, and the Disruptive: Let us know where you stand in the 2024 Annual Developer Survey

Mon, 20 May 2024 19:21:00 GMT

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.

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OverflowAI and the holy grail of search

Fri, 17 May 2024 07:40:00 GMT

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.

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OverflowAI is now Generally Available! A new era of community-driven AI

Tue, 14 May 2024 12:00:00 GMT

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.

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Spreading the gospel of Python

Tue, 14 May 2024 07:40:00 GMT

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.

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Why do only a small percentage of GenAI projects actually make it into production?

Mon, 13 May 2024 15:35:40 GMT

Only about 5% of GenAI projects lead to significant monetization of new product offerings.

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Between hyper-focus and burnout: Developing with ADHD

Fri, 10 May 2024 07:40:00 GMT

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.

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Reshaping the future of API platforms

Tue, 07 May 2024 07:40:00 GMT

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.

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The reverse mullet model of software engineering

Fri, 03 May 2024 19:40:00 GMT

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.

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Upcoming research at Stack Overflow

Wed, 01 May 2024 14:00:00 GMT

All about the research that the User Experience team will be focused on over the next quarter and how you can help.

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Enterprise 2024.3: Collaborating smarter, not harder

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 13:00:00 GMT

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.

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Net neutrality is in; TikTok and noncompetes are out

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 07:40:00 GMT

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.

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Supporting the world’s most-used database engine through 2050

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 07:40:00 GMT

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.

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What language should beginning programmers choose?

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 18:07:54 GMT

Should a language be easy or comprehensive?

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Is GenAI the next dot-com bubble?

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 07:40:00 GMT

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.

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Why configuration is so complicated

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 19:40:00 GMT

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.

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If everyone is building AI, why aren't more projects in production?

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 04:40:00 GMT

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.

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How do you evaluate an LLM? Try an LLM.

Tue, 16 Apr 2024 07:40:00 GMT

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.

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How to succeed as a data engineer without the burnout

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 14:45:10 GMT

The key strategies for building a headache-free data platform.

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Diverting more backdoor disasters

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 07:40:00 GMT

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.

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Climbing the GenAI decision tree

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 04:40:00 GMT

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.

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Want to be a great software engineer? Don’t be a jerk.

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 07:40:00 GMT

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.

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What a year building AI has taught Stack Overflow

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 21:02:29 GMT

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

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How do mixture-of-experts layers affect transformer models?

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 14:31:11 GMT

This new LLM technique has started improving the results of models without additional training.

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Developers with AI assistants need to follow the pair programming model

Wed, 03 Apr 2024 15:25:05 GMT

CodeGen is fast, but you need to be good.

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Are long context windows the end of RAG?

Tue, 02 Apr 2024 07:40:00 GMT

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?

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Will antitrust suits benefit developers?

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 19:40:00 GMT

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.

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Controlling cloud costs: Where to start, and where to go from there

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 18:54:25 GMT

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.

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Community products: Reflections and looking ahead

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 14:00:00 GMT

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.

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