Looking under the hood at the tech stack that powers multimodal AI
September 17, 2024Ryan chats with Russ d’Sa, cofounder and CEO of LiveKit, about multimodal AI and the technology that makes it possible. They talk through the tech stack required, including the use of WebRTC and UDP protocols for real-time audio and video streaming. They also explore the big challenges involved in ensuring privacy and security in streaming data, namely end-to-end encryption and obfuscation. Credit: Alexandra FrancisMultimodal AI combines different modalities—audio, video, text, etc.—to enable more humanlike engagement and higher-quality responses...
1 day ago
The world’s largest open-source business has plans for enhancing LLMs
September 13, 2024Ben and Ryan talk to Scott McCarty, Global Senior Principal Product Manager for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, about the intersection between LLMs (large language models) and open source. They discuss the challenges and benefits of open-source LLMs, the importance of attribution and transparency, and the revolutionary potential for LLM-driven applications. They also explore the role of LLMs in code generation, testing, and documentation. Credit: Alexandra Francis
5 days ago
Enterprise 2024.6: Identify and engage your subject matter experts
September 11, 2024This release includes updates that improve subject matter expert (SME) visibility and engagement in Stack Overflow for Teams. It's also now easier to capture and discover SME knowledge in Microsoft Teams and Slack with the Auto-Answer App. The Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise 2024.6 Release Subject matter experts (SMEs) are critical to your business operations because of their specialized knowledge and skills, but how do you ensure they’re engaged and not burnt out, or even identify who they...
7 days ago
One of the best ways to get value for AI coding tools: generating tests
In our 2024 Developer Survey, lots of coders highlighted the fact that they were using AI-powered tools in their workflows. While generating code is the most common use case today, many saw testing and documentation as the big areas where they will utilize AI in the year to come.2024 Dev SurveyWe wanted to explore this result in more depth. Why do programmers think AI will become useful for testing specifically? Is that ultimately a more valuable application of GenAI (at...
8 days ago
The evolution of fullstack engineers
September 10, 2024On today’s episode we chat with Mrinalini Sugosh, Developer Relations and Community Manager at CKEditor and TinyMCE. She discusses how modern full stack developers have to master both front and backend skills, stitch the two together, and master adjacent skills like data analysis and security compliance.
8 days ago
The hidden cost of speed
There’s nothing quite like the rush of starting a new job and whipping out projects, particularly at an organization where technology is not generally prioritized. Management falls head over heels for your ability to stand up and deploy marketing requests, and as you crank out project after project, it seems like you’re going straight to the top.Then one fateful day, an urgent request comes in: “We have a real opportunity to capture some immediate sales, but we don’t have an...
13 days ago
Best practices for cost-efficient Kafka clusters
Kafka enables real-time data processing and movement across distributed systems, supporting use cases such as log aggregation, messaging, event sourcing, and data integration.However, managing costs while maintaining Kafka's performance and reliability can be challenging due to its complex architecture, the need for high throughput and low latency, and the substantial storage and computational resources required. Balancing these factors demands careful planning and optimization to ensure efficient operation without escalating expenses. In this article, we’ll explain what drives Kafka costs and...
14 days ago
At scale, anything that could fail definitely will
September 3, 2024On today’s episode we chat with Pradeep Vincent, Senior Vice President and Chief Technical Architect for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI for short. He shares experiences from his time as an engineer at IBM and what it was like to be a senior engineer working on AWS during the early years of its development as a commercial product.
15 days ago
Mobile Observability: monitoring performance through cracked screens, old batteries, and crappy Wi-Fi
August 30, 2024Today we chat with Austin Emmons, an iOS developer at Embrace, where he spent time rebuilding their SDK to work with OpenTelemetry. He discusses the challenge of tracking performance and watching for edge cases when your app is deployed across dozens of devices with enormous variability in their hardware, software, and network capabilities.
19 days ago
Where does Postgres fit in a world of GenAI and vector databases?
August 27, 2024Today we chat with Avthar Sewrathan, AI Lead at Timescale, about adapting developers’ favorite database management system, Postgres, to support a range of new technologies involved in the GenAI ecosystem, especially vector databases. Avthar details his long history with Postgres and how clients are weighing the build vs. buy question when it comes to choosing a database to support their newly minted GenAI initiatives.
22 days ago
From PHP to JavaScript to Kubernetes: how one backend engineer evolved over time
August 23, 2024On today’s episode, we chat with a listener, Geshan Manandhar, who has been working in the world of software engineering for two decades. He started programming in a small village in Kathmandu during the days of dial-up. Since then he’s worked across three continents and today is a senior software engineer at Simply Wall Street. He gives his advice on how developers can change with the times and what it’s like to move into the era of serverless...
26 days ago
LLMs evolve quickly. Their underlying architecture, not so much.
August 22, 2024The decoder-only transformer architecture is one of the most fundamental ideas in AI research. Credit: Alexandra FrancisNew language models get released every day (Gemini-1.5, Gemma, Claude 3, potentially GPT-5 etc. etc.), but one component of LLMs has remained constant over the last few years—the decoder-only transformer architecture.Why should we care? Research on LLMs moves fast. Shockingly, however, the architecture used by most modern LLMs is pretty similar to that of the original GPT model. We just make the...
27 days ago
Ryan Dahl explains why Deno had to evolve with version 2.0
August 20, 2024On today’s episode, we chat with Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js and Deno. He explains why he feels the first version of Deno has reached certain limits and what he and his team are doing with Deno 2.0 to scale up the module system and ensure it's a great tool for the modern web.
29 days ago
Battling ticket bots and untangling taxes at the frontiers of e-commerce
August 16, 2024On today's episode we chat with Ilya Grigorik, a Distinguished Engineer and Technical Advisor to the CEO at Shopify. From battling hordes of bots trying to scalp seats before humans can get their hands on concert tickets, to automatically handling relevant tax codes and regulations across countries and states so small merchants can focus on their business, Ilya shares some of the projects he enjoys most and the challenges that make e-commerce interesting for software developers. You can...
about 1 month ago
Practical tips for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
August 15, 2024Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is one of the best (and easiest) ways to specialize an LLM over your own data, but successfully applying RAG in practice involves more than just stitching together pretrained models. Credit: Alexandra FrancisAt the highest level, RAG is a combination of a pretrained LLM with an external (searchable) knowledge base. At inference time, we can search for relevant textual context within this knowledge base and add it to the LLM’s prompt. Then, the LLM can...
about 1 month ago
Navigating cities of code with Norris Numbers
When I was eight, my family moved from Salt Lake City to the Utah/Arizona border. Our new house was a suburban three-story, part of a neighborhood whose streets were curling rays extending outward from a private golf course.Any kid with a bike knows what to do in a new neighborhood. I wheeled out on evenings and weekends and learned the streets. It wasn’t long before I could call up a mental map from point A to anywhere. All the same,...
about 1 month ago
Scaling systems to manage all the metadata ABOUT the data
August 13, 2024On 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.
about 1 month ago
How we’re making Stack Overflow more accessible
Site design / logo © 2024 Stack Exchange Inc. User contributions licensed under CC BY-SA. TermsPrivacy policyCookie policy Go to stackoverflow.com
about 1 month ago
Accessibility by design: Building interfaces for everyone at Stack Overflow
Accessibility has always been important to our organization, and we've learned from community members and Stack Overflow for Teams customers that it's important to them too. Encouraged by Stack Overflow for Teams customers, we started considering a more systematic and sustainable approach to improving the accessibility of our products. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at how we established that system, and the work we continue to do to keep our products (Stack Overflow for Teams) and sites (Stack Overflow and the...
about 1 month ago
Unpacking the 2024 Developer Survey results
August 6, 2024Ryan 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...
about 1 month ago
This developer tool is 40 years old: can it be improved?
In this era of exponential acceleration that AI has brought forth, the average VS Code or Jetbrains developer benefits from a toolkit stacked with modern, state-of-the-art components. From IDEs to extensions to CLIs, if you stop and consider all the tools you use weekly, which would you guess is the oldest? That is, which tool do you interact with regularly (say, an hour per week) that hasn't substantively changed in years?Since IDEs are refreshed every few years, maybe you've guessed...
about 1 month ago
How developer experience can escape the spreadsheet
August 2, 2024Ben 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. Credit: Alexandra Francis
about 2 months ago
Research roadmap update: August 2024
August 1, 2024An update to the research that the User Experience team is running over the next quarter.Last month, we shared our upcoming priorities from a product roadmap point of view. This included initiatives like scaling Staging Ground, improving answering, and user activation. Today, I want to share the research the User Experience team, which I lead, will be focused on over the next quarter and how you can help. At Stack Overflow, our researchers are focused on strategic initiatives...
about 2 months ago
Enterprise 2024.5: Encouraging and growing community contributions
July 31, 2024The latest Stack Overflow for Teams release makes it easier to encourage and grow contributions to your community through the use of flexible bounties, more user search options, Slack thread summarization, and more.When your organization’s knowledge community contributes their learnings and solutions on an ongoing basis, it makes it easier for others to reuse them and be more productive. Sometimes it takes subtle nudges to encourage these contributions, and other times product workflows need to be simplified. This...
about 2 months ago
How Stack Overflow fends off scraping bots
July 30, 2024Josh 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. Credit: Alexandra Francis
about 2 months ago
On the web, data doesn’t define us. It creates us.
July 26, 2024In 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.
about 2 months ago
Developers want more, more, more: the 2024 results from Stack Overflow’s Annual Developer Survey
In June of 2024, we opened up the 14th annual Stack Overflow Developer Survey to technologists worldwide—and the results are in!. This year, technologies such as JavaScript and PostgreSQL remain most popular, Rust and Markdown remain most admired, developers are most frustrated by technical debt at work, and they don’t see AI as a threat to their jobs. Themes we see in this year’s survey results show us that developers are not threatened by AI, and developers are most frustrated...
about 2 months ago
The problem with the tech debt mindset
July 23, 2024Ryan 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. Credit: Alexandra Francis
about 2 months ago
Java, but why? The state of Java in 2024
July 19, 2024Ben and Ryan chat with listener, professional pilot, and Java enthusiast Lenny Primak about what he finds exciting about Java in 2024. Credit: Alexandra FrancisLenny started using Java around 1997 as a college student. He got his first Wall Street job right before he turned 18, working with programming languages like C++ and distributor trading systems before becoming a pilot in 2007. Since then he has been an avid Java programming hobbyist.Why get excited about Java? According to...
2 months ago
How to bridge the gap between Web2 skills and Web3 workflows
Plenty of developers assume that working with blockchain technologies requires programming languages created specifically for the blockchain, like Solidity, which lets you create smart contracts that run on Ethereum. But you can bridge the gap between Web2 and Web3 using languages you’re already comfortable with.In this post, we’ll show developers how to build Web3 applications using JavaScript. We’ll include a tutorial that allows you to build the foundation of any Web3 application you want to build.For those of you familiar...
2 months ago
The framework helping devs build LLM apps
July 16, 2024Ben and Eira talk with LlamaIndex CEO and cofounder Jerry Lu, 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). Credit: Alexandra Francis
2 months ago
Why we built Staging Ground
July 12, 2024A two-part episode: In part one, Ben chats with friend of the show and senior software engineer Kyle Mitofsky about Staging Ground, a private space within Stack Overflow where new users can receive guidance from experienced users before their question is posted. In part two, Ben talks to Stack Overflow moderator Spevacus, who participated in the beta of Staging Ground. They talk about why we wanted to build a safer asking experience for new users, the positive feedback...
2 months ago
We chat search from both sides now
July 9, 2024In this episode, Ben chats with Elastic software engineering director Paul Oremland along with Stack Overflow staff software engineer Steffi Grewenig and senior software developer Gregor Časar about vector databases and semantic search from both the vendor and customer perspectives. They talk about the impact of GenAI on productivity and the search experience, the value of structured data for LLMs, and the potential for knowledge extraction and sharing. Credit: Alexandra Francis
2 months ago
What can devs do about code review anxiety?
July 5, 2024For this episode, we spoke with Carol Lee, PhD, principal research scientist in the Developer Success Lab at Pluralsight, about her research into code review anxiety, how developers are coping, and how a workbook can help. Credit: Alexandra Francis
3 months ago
Happy people make better products
July 2, 2024The home team welcomes developer and software consultant Ben Borra to the show for a wide-ranging conversation about developer productivity, the value of positive feedback and identifying quick wins, the impact of code assistants on devs’ everyday work, and the challenges of system rewrites. Credit: Alexandra Francis
3 months ago
Community Products Roadmap Update, July 2024
July 1, 2024An update on recent launches and the upcoming roadmap.Last quarter, I shared learnings from our generative AI exploration and how it shaped our point of view for the coming year. As we continue to explore ways in which AI/ML accelerates developer productivity, we remain committed to doing so thoughtfully and purposefully to support the core values of Stack Overflow: human connection, collaboration, and knowledge sharing.Our goals are focused on building and supporting a healthy ecosystem of active users...
3 months ago
How to build open-source apps in a highly regulated industry
June 28, 2024Today 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).
3 months ago
Explaining generative language models to (almost) anyone
June 27, 2024Here’s a simple, three-part framework that explains generative language models. Credit: Alexandra FrancisGenerative AI has now become a popular topic among both researchers and the general public. Now more than ever before, it is important that researchers and engineers (i.e., those building the technology) develop an ability to communicate the nuances of their creations to others. A failure to communicate the technical aspects of AI in an understandable and accessible manner could lead to widespread public skepticism (e.g.,...
3 months ago
A very special 5th anniversary edition of the Stack Overflow podcast!
June 25, 2024In 2019, as the original co-founders and hosts moved on, the Stack Overflow podcast was rebooted with a new cast of hosts. On today’s episode 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 you are sick of AI talk today, remember how bad the crypto craze was just two years ago!
3 months ago
Say goodbye to "junior" engineering roles
June 21, 2024On today’s episode we chat with Kirimgeray Kirimli, a director at Flatiron Software and CEO of Snapshot Reviews, a tool that measure 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. He also speaks to the growing power of AI coding assistants and suggests "junior engineer" is not likely to be a job available to humans for...
3 months ago
Enterprise 2024.4: Demonstrating and improving community impact
June 20, 2024In 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.Stack Overflow for Teams improves collaboration, breaks down silos, and accelerates your organization’s initiatives, but gathering the data to tell this story to stakeholders can take time and effort. In this release, we’ve added reporting capabilities and insights that help prove your community is impacting...
3 months ago
The real 10x developer makes their whole team better
June 19, 2024Single 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). Credit: Alexandra FrancisWe’re all familiar with the concept of the 10x engineer or developer: “the nerdy, antisocial genius who makes groundbreaking products almost by accident,” per one description. People love to cite my hometown hero Steve Wozniak as an example of this character: the superdev who’s ten times smarter or more productive than...
3 months ago
Making ETL pipelines a thing of the past
June 18, 2024On 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.
3 months ago
The world’s most popular web framework is going AI native
June 14, 2024On 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.Palmer says that a huge percentage of today’s top websites, including apps like ChartGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, were built with...
3 months ago
A peek behind the curtain with Stack Overflow’s sales engineers
June 11, 2024In 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.
3 months ago
Generative AI is not going to build your engineering team for you
When I was 19 years old, I dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco. I had a job offer in hand to be a Unix sysadmin for Taos Consulting. However, before my first day of work I was lured away to a startup in the city, where I worked as a software engineer on mail subsystems.I never questioned whether or not I could find work. Jobs were plentiful, and more importantly, hiring standards were very low. If you...
3 months ago
Breaking up is hard to do: Chunking in RAG applications
As you go deeper down the rabbit hole building LLM-based applications, you may find that you need to root your LLM responses in your source data. Fine-tuning an LLM with your custom data may get you a generative AI model that understands your particular domain, but it may still be subject to inaccuracies and hallucinations. This has led a lot of organizations to look into retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to ground LLM responses in specific data and back them up with...
3 months ago
Introducing Staging Ground: The private space to get feedback on questions before they’re posted
June 4, 2024Learn about the workflow designed to help new askers improve their questions on Stack Overflow.Over our fifteen years, Stack Overflow has grown to be an essential knowledge resource for developers and technologists around the world. The entire network is built on the premise that good questions asked with a good process behind them can get good answers.However, we know that asking a good question can be pretty daunting for newcomers and first-time question-askers. If you’ve ever spent time...
4 months ago
How to prevent your new chatbot from giving away company secrets
June 4, 2024This 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.
4 months ago
Can software startups that need $$$ avoid venture capital?
May 31, 2024Today'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.
4 months ago
Developers get by with a little help from AI: Stack Overflow Knows code assistant pulse survey results
May 29, 2024We also 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.While GenAI has been dominating the tech news cycles for a while, does all the AI hype translate into usage for professional developers? We tapped the Stack Overflow community for answers (I hear they like answering questions). Over 1,700 people told us what code assistant...
4 months ago
An open-source development paradigm
May 28, 2024Temporal 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. Credit: Alexandra Francis
4 months ago
Would you board a plane safety-tested by GenAI?
May 24, 2024Ben 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. Credit: Alexandra Francis
4 months ago
You should keep a developer’s journal
Writing is a fantastic tool for processing and communicating abstract ideas. And developers are steeped in abstract ideas! From system design to the finest implementation details, we keep a tremendous amount of information in our heads.At the project level, a small army of project managers, product managers, engineering managers, and scrum masters (sometimes the same overworked person) helps us figure out what to build next. We turn to project management tools like Jira to track our progress. But at the...
4 months ago
How to train your dream machine
May 21, 2024Ben 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. Credit: Alexandra Francis
4 months ago
The Good, the Bad, and the Disruptive: Let us know where you stand in the 2024 Annual Developer Survey
May 20, 2024This 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.
4 months ago
OverflowAI and the holy grail of search
May 17, 2024Product 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. Credit: Alexandra Francis
4 months ago
OverflowAI is now Generally Available! A new era of community-driven AI
May 14, 2024We'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.Since the beginning of Stack Overflow nearly 16 years ago, community has always played a central role in our organization and how we support the world’s most active developers and technologists. In my short time here as the chief product officer, I've had the privilege of witnessing firsthand the...
4 months ago
Spreading the gospel of Python
May 14, 2024On 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. Credit: Alexandra Francis
4 months ago
Why do only a small percentage of GenAI projects actually make it into production?
May 13, 2024Only about 5% of GenAI projects lead to significant monetization of new product offerings. Credit: Alexandra FrancisIt seems like everybody in tech is working on a new AI project. But how many of these generative AI (GenAI) initiatives will make it into production—much less lead directly to a new revenue stream?In all likelihood, not very many. A 2023 Gartner report found that while tech executives are full of enthusiasm for AI initiatives, actual deployment rates remain low. On...
4 months ago
Between hyper-focus and burnout: Developing with ADHD
May 10, 2024Eira 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. Credit: Alexandra Francis
4 months ago
Reshaping the future of API platforms
May 7, 2024Marco 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. Credit: Alexandra Francis
4 months ago
The reverse mullet model of software engineering
May 3, 2024Ben 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. Credit: Alexandra Francis
5 months ago
Upcoming research at Stack Overflow
Last month, we shared our upcoming priorities from a product roadmap point of view. This included initiatives like better onboarding, Staging Ground (our experiment with a shielded experience for new users), Discussions, and technical investments. Today I want to share the research the User Experience team, which I lead, will be focused on over the next quarter and how you can help. At Stack Overflow, our researchers are focused on strategic initiatives and big, complex questions. They typically run ahead...
5 months ago
Enterprise 2024.3: Collaborating smarter, not harder
Smart collaboration is outcome-driven, involves real-time learning, and engages an internal community of subject matter experts and diverse stakeholders. When done right, it can drive organizational change from the bottom-up. In this release, we’ve made enhancements to the homepage and search experience across integrations so your teams collaborate smarter and find knowledge faster. We’re also excited to announce the release of OverflowAI: Smart, outcome-driven AI that gets users to better solutions faster. OverflowAI is a GenAI-powered add-on to your Stack...
5 months ago
Net neutrality is in; TikTok and noncompetes are out
April 30, 2024On 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. Credit: Alexandra Francis
5 months ago
Supporting the world’s most-used database engine through 2050
April 26, 2024Dr. 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. Credit: Alexandra Francis
5 months ago
What language should beginning programmers choose?
April 25, 2024Should a language be easy or comprehensive? Credit: Alexandra FrancisNow that Stack Overflow has a space for subjective content—Discussions—we want to occasionally highlight the great conversations happening on site. Personally, I love hearing about different people’s perspectives on software and technology issues. With the answers to so many technology questions tending towards “it depends” as one gains experience, more perspectives reveal additional factors that “it” could depend on.For today’s “it” question, I want to highlight the discussion happening...
5 months ago
Is GenAI the next dot-com bubble?
April 23, 2024The 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. Credit: Alexandra Francis
5 months ago
Why configuration is so complicated
April 19, 2024Ben 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. Credit: Alexandra Francis
5 months ago
If everyone is building AI, why aren't more projects in production?
April 17, 2024Ben 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.
5 months ago
How do you evaluate an LLM? Try an LLM.
April 16, 2024On 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. Credit: Alexandra Francis
5 months ago
How to succeed as a data engineer without the burnout
When building and maintaining a modern data platform, the pressure on data engineers from businesses can be immense. The key to success in this challenging environment isn’t to work even harder; it’s to be smart about what you work on, and how it is implemented.By embracing the foundational principles of DataOps—including a well-planned modular infrastructure, proactive monitoring, robust data governance, resilience, and a collaborative learning culture—engineers can ensure data platforms of any size run efficiently and smoothly, with minimal maintenance...
5 months ago
Diverting more backdoor disasters
April 12, 2024In 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. Credit: Alexandra Francis
5 months ago
Climbing the GenAI decision tree
April 10, 2024In 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.SPONSORED BY INTELIn 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. They explore the decision tree for choosing between building your own model, delve into the ongoing challenges of maintenance and sustainability,...
5 months ago
Want to be a great software engineer? Don’t be a jerk.
April 9, 2024The 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. Credit: Alexandra Francis
5 months ago
What a year building AI has taught Stack Overflow
April 5, 2024We sit down with Jessica Clark, a senior data scientist at Stack Overflow, to discuss how our company approaches generative AI and data quality.
6 months ago
How do mixture-of-experts layers affect transformer models?
April 4, 2024This new LLM technique has started improving the results of models without additional training. Credit: Alexandra Francis[Ed. note: This article comes from a Tweet first posted here. We’ve partnered with Cameron Wolfe to give his insights a wider audience, as we think they provide insight into various topics around GenAI.]Mixture of experts (MoE) has arisen as a new technique to improve LLM performance. With the release of Grok-1 and the continued popularity of Mistral’s MoE model, this is...
6 months ago
Developers with AI assistants need to follow the pair programming model
Now that generative AI, large language models, and CodeGen applications have been out for a while, we’ve seen developers figure out their strengths, their weaknesses, and how they can deliver value to customers faster without getting hung up on untangling LLM confabulations. CodeGen applications pump out code fast for pretty cheap prices, but it’s not always good. AI-generated code always needs a strong code review, and that can reduce the productivity gains it offers.However, there’s a programming model that incorporates...
6 months ago
Are long context windows the end of RAG?
April 2, 2024The 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? Credit: Alexandra FrancisDBRX, an open, general-purpose LLM created by Databricks, reportedly outperforms...
6 months ago
Will antitrust suits benefit developers?
March 29, 2024Ben 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. Credit: Alexandra FrancisSmall nations like Anguilla (.ai) and Tuvalu (.tv) are benefiting from their coveted domain names.The US government is suing Apple for violation of antitrust laws, which could have a huge impact on devs, end users, and the whole ecosystem.Reddit went public last...
6 months ago
Controlling cloud costs: Where to start, and where to go from there
March 27, 2024In 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.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,...
6 months ago
Community products: Reflections and looking ahead
March 27, 2024This 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.In 2023, Stack Overflow started exploring how generative AI capabilities could support and accelerate the developers' experience by honing in on the unique problems developers face with technical discovery and solution design. We’ve documented our experience along the...
6 months ago
Data, data everywhere and not a stop to think
March 26, 2024Ben and Ryan are joined by Nick Heudecker, Senior Director of Market Strategy and Competitive Intelligence at Cribl, to discuss the state of data and analytics. They cover GenAI, the role of incumbents vs. startups, challenges of data storage and security, data quality and ETL pipelines, measures of data quality for GenAI, and Cribl’s role in the data and observability space. Credit: Alexandra Francis
6 months ago
Is AI making your code worse?
March 22, 2024Ben and Ryan are joined by Bill Harding, CEO of GitClear, for a discussion of AI-generated code quality and its impact on productivity. GitClear’s research has highlighted the fact that while AI can suggest valid code, it can’t necessarily reuse and modify existing code—a recipe for long-term challenges in maintainability and test coverage if devs are too dependent on AI code-gen tools. Credit: Alexandra Francis
6 months ago
Why the creator of Node.js® created a new JavaScript runtime
March 19, 2024Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js and Deno, tells us about his journey into software development and the creation of Node.js. He explains why he started Deno, a new JavaScript runtime. Ryan also introduces JSR, an alternative to NPM, and emphasizes the importance of security in the JavaScript ecosystem. Plus: Thoughts on the future of JavaScript, including the role of TypeScript and bridging the gap between server-side and browser JavaScript. Credit: Alexandra FrancisNode.js® is an open-source JavaScript runtime environment.Deno...
6 months ago
Exploring what inspired folks to start coding
March 18, 2024Users have been sharing the spark that started them on their journey as computer programmers. From IRC to Minecraft, users found a passion that became a career. Credit: Alexandra FrancisOur new Discussions feature has expanded the kinds of conversations that can happen on Stack Overflow. Instead of strictly limiting user engagement to Q&A, we now have a space where users can chat with one another about software development in a more open ended way.User Muusy kicked thing off...
6 months ago
Your whole repo fits in the context window
March 15, 2024The home team discusses the challenges (hardware and otherwise) of building AI models at scale, why major players like Meta are open-sourcing their AI projects, what Apple’s recent changes mean for developers in the EU, and Perplexity AI’s new approach to search. Credit: Alexandra Francis
6 months ago
How Stack Overflow is partnering with Google to encourage socially responsible AI
March 12, 2024Ben talks with Ryan Polk, Chief Product Officer at Stack Overflow, about our strategic partnership with Google Cloud, the importance of collaboration between AI companies and the Stack Overflow community, and why Stack Overflow’s Q&A format is so suitable for training AI models. Credit: Alexandra Francis
6 months ago
A leading ML educator on what you need to know about LLMs
March 8, 2024Machine learning scientist, author, and LLM developer Maxime Labonne talks with Ben and Ryan about his role as lead machine learning scientist, his contributions to the open-source community, the value of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and the process of fine-tuning and unfreezing layers in LLMs. The team talks through various challenges and considerations in implementing GenAI, from data quality to integration. Credit: Alexandra Francis
6 months ago
Making collaboration intuitive and meaningful
Knowledge silos can sometimes feel inevitable, but when you leave them unchecked, they can quickly lead to frustrated employees and stalled innovation. The answer is typically more frequent and efficient collaboration, but how do you take that from what feels like a lofty goal to reality? When you invest in products that make collaboration both intuitive and meaningful, collaboration not only increases, but becomes a recurring habit that creates self-sustaining communities and accelerates learning and adoption for your latest initiatives.In...
6 months ago
Building GenAI features in practice with Intuit Mailchimp
March 6, 2024SPONSORED BY INTUIT -- Ryan and Ben chat with Shivang Shah, Chief Architect, and Jon Fasoli, Chief Design & Product Officer, both of Intuit Mailchimp. Where we talked last time about building their generative AI operating system, this time we talk about implementing it and how all the pieces came together to make a better end user experience.
7 months ago
Chunking express: An expert breaks down how to build your RAG system
March 5, 2024This is part two of our conversation with Roie Schwaber-Cohen, Staff Developer Advocate at Pinecone, about retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and why it’s crucial for the success of your AI initiatives. Credit: Alexandra Francis
7 months ago
In Rust we trust? White House Office urges memory safety
Is the programming language you use to write software a matter of national security? The US White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) thinks so. On February 26, they issued a report urging that all programmers move to memory-safe programming languages for all code. For those legacy codebases that can’t be ported easily, they suggest enforcing memory-safe practices.Some of the biggest exploits of the internet era have come from unsafe memory practices with languages that allow unsafe memory...
7 months ago
It’s RAG time for LLMs that need a source of truth
March 1, 2024On this episode: Roie Schwaber-Cohen, Staff Developer Advocate at Pinecone, joins Ben and Ryan to break down what retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is and why the concept is central to the AI conversation. This is part one of our conversation, so tune in next time for the thrilling conclusion.
7 months ago
Defining socially responsible AI: How we select partners
February 29, 2024Stack Overflow is on a journey to build a new era in the practice of AI: the era of social responsibility. All products based on models that consume public Stack Overflow data are required to provide attribution back to the highest relevance posts that influenced the summary given by the model. Stack Overflow is the world’s largest developer community, with more than 59 million questions and answers. By integrating human capabilities and AI advancements in our community, we...
7 months ago