How to build open source apps in a highly regulated industry
Fri, 28 Jun 2024 04:20:00 GMT
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).
	Read More...

Explaining generative language models to (almost) anyone
Thu, 27 Jun 2024 16:20:00 GMT
Here’s a simple, three-part framework that explains generative language models.
	Read More...

A very special 5th anniversary edition of the Stack Overflow podcast!
Tue, 25 Jun 2024 04:15:00 GMT
Ben Popper, Cassidy Williams, and Ryan Donovan sit down to discuss how much has changed in the five years they have been collaborating on Stack Overflow’s blog, newsletter, and podcast. If you're sick of AI talk today, remember how bad the crypto craze was just two years ago!
	Read More...

Say goodbye to "junior" engineering roles
Fri, 21 Jun 2024 04:15:00 GMT
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.
	Read More...

---

Enterprise 2024.4: Demonstrating and improving community impact
Thu, 20 Jun 2024 13:00:00 GMT
In the latest Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise release, you'll see reporting capabilities and insights that help demonstrate community impact. Microsoft customers can also rejoice: OverflowAI now includes an Auto-Answer App for Microsoft Teams.
	Read More...

The real 10x developer makes their whole team better
Wed, 19 Jun 2024 16:20:00 GMT
Single individuals make less of a difference to the success or failure of a technology project than you might think (and that’s a good thing).
	Read More...

Making ETL pipelines a thing of the past
Tue, 18 Jun 2024 04:15:00 GMT
On today’s episode we chat with Cassandra Shum, VP of Field Engineering at RelationalAI, about her company’s efforts to create what it calls the industry’s first coprocessor for data clouds and language models. The goal is to allow companies to keep all their data where it is today while still tapping into the capabilities of the latest generation of AI tools.
	Read More...

---

The world’s most popular web framework is going AI native
Fri, 14 Jun 2024 04:30:00 GMT
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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

---

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

---

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

---

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

---

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

---

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

---

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

---

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

What language should beginning programmers choose?
Thu, 25 Apr 2024 18:07:54 GMT
Should a language be easy or comprehensive?
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...

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.
	Read More...