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...
2 days 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...
3 days ago
Balancing business and open source in 2024
December 24, 2024During the holidays, we’re releasing some highlights from a year full of conversations with developers and technologists. Enjoy! We’ll see you in 2025. Credit: Alexandra Francis
3 days ago
How developer jobs (and the job market) changed in 2024
December 17, 2024Ben and Ryan catch up with Nenne Adaora “Adora” Nwodo, who recently joined Stack Overflow as a platform engineering manager. From her childhood fascination with computers to her years as a software engineer at Microsoft, Adora shares her evolution as a technologist. She tells Ben and Ryan about her experience interviewing for and accepting a role at Stack Overflow, the projects she’s working on in her new role, her nonprofit work in the edtech space, and how she...
3 days ago
Can a programming language implement time travel?
Traveling through time is a pretty common science fiction trope, so much so that there are differing theories as to what happens if you go back in time and affect the past. While time travel has made for some entertaining movies and books, there’s been little success in the real world. The 2005 time traveler convention hosted at the MIT volleyball courts drew zero time travelers.Now there’s a toy programming language called Mariposa that claims to implement time travel as...
4 days 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...
7 days ago
Why do developers love clean code but hate writing documentation?
In the Developer Coefficient, a study commissioned by the fintech giant Stripe, developers reported that they spent over 17 hours a week on maintenance tasks like debugging and refactoring—work classified as “toil.”Our 2024 Developer Survey revealed a lot of the same issues and grievances for professional developers. The biggest frustration, by a large margin, was technical debt. Conversely, the thing that made developers happiest was improving the quality of their code and developer environment. And looking to the future, the...
8 days ago
Legal advice from an AI is illegal
December 17, 2024Mark Doble, CEO of Alexi, an AI-powered litigation platform, joins Ben to talk about GenAI’s transformative effect on the legal world. Their conversation touches on the importance of ensuring accurate results and eliminating hallucinations when AI tools are used for legal work, how lawyers (like the rest of us) can adapt to GenAI, and what Alexi’s tech stack looks like. Credit: Alexandra FrancisAlexi leverages AI to streamline litigation workflows and speed up research, with an eye to giving...
10 days ago
AI agents that help doctors get paid
December 13, 2024Dan Parsons, co-founder and Chief Experience Officer at Thoughtful AI, talks about how his company is using AI to simplify how providers get paid by insurance companies.On this episode, Ben and Ryan chat with Dan Parsons, co-founder and Chief Experience Officer at Thoughtful AI. He’s on a mission to fix improve the U.S. health care system, using AI to simplify how providers get paid by insurance companies. They cover the difficulties in navigating legacy systems that don’t have...
14 days ago
It’s not what you know, it’s how you know you know it
December 10, 2024The complex relationship of give-and-take in the knowledge journey is untangled in the results from the latest Stack Overflow Knows survey.When was the last time you recall learning something new? It might have been after passing a test in class or publishing a paper for an academic program. It might have been while you were troubleshooting code or researching a new tool to solve a problem at work. Maybe the last thing you learned was so simple or...
17 days ago
Enterprise 2024.8 release: Maintain a healthy roster of SMEs
December 10, 2024This release introduces the ability to automatically and programmatically demote an inactive Subject Matter Expert (SME) to ensure a healthy roster of contributing experts.SMEs come and go; team members change roles, shift focus, or get swamped with their day-to-day work. To ensure a continuous transfer of knowledge, it’s important to maintain a healthy roster of SMEs that are regularly contributing helpful answers and articles to your community.In our previous release, we granted admins the ability to automatically assign...
17 days ago
“You don’t want to be that person”: What security teams need to understand about developers
December 10, 2024The home team is joined by Kinnaird McQuaid, founder and CTO of NightVision, which offers developer-friendly API and web app security testing. Kinnaird talks about his path from school-age hacker to white-hat security expert, why it’s important to build security practices into the software development lifecycle, how GenAI is changing security testing, and what security teams need to understand about developers’ working lives. Credit: Alexandra FrancisNightVision offers web and API security testing tools built to integrate with developers’...
17 days ago
From bugs to performance to perfection: pushing code quality in mobile apps
December 6, 2024Ben and Ryan talk all things mobile app development with Kenny Johnston, Chief Product Officer at Instabug. They explore what’s unique about mobile observability, how AI tools can reduce developer toil, and why user experience matters so much for app quality. Credit: Alexandra FrancisInstabug helps developers monitor, prioritize, and debug performance and stability issues throughout the mobile app development lifecycle. Get started with their docs.Connect with Kenny on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user itoctopus earned a Populist badge by explaining...
21 days ago
Four approaches to creating a specialized LLM
December 5, 2024Wondering how to go about creating an LLM that understands your custom data? Start here. Credit: Alexandra FrancisTrying to create a language model that understands your own custom data? Here are four techniques you can use to create a specialized LLM, ordered in terms of the amount of complexity/compute involved.TL;DR: When trying to solve problems with language models, we should start simple and only introduce complexity as needed. Along these lines, we can just try to prompt the...
22 days ago
Even high-quality code can lead to tech debt
December 3, 2024Ben talks with Eran Yahav, a former researcher on IBM Watson who’s now the CTO and cofounder of AI coding company Tabnine. Ben and Eran talk about the intersection of software development and AI, the evolution of program synthesis, and Eran’s path from IBM research to startup CTO. They also discuss how to balance the productivity and learning gains of AI coding tools (especially for junior devs) against very real concerns around quality, security, and tech debt. Credit:...
24 days ago
Your docs are your infrastructure
November 26, 2024Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti, who spent many years as a technical writer for Splunk and New Relic, joins Ben and Ryan for a conversation about the evolving role of documentation in software development. They explore how documentation can (and should) be integrated with code, the importance of quality control, and the hurdles to maintaining up-to-date documentation. Plus: Why technical writers shouldn’t be afraid of LLMs. Credit: Alexandra Francis
about 1 month ago
The app that fights for your data privacy rights
November 22, 2024Ben and Ryan sit down with public interest technologist Sukhi Gulati Gilbert, a senior product manager at Consumer Reports, for a conversation about digital data privacy. They talk about why digital privacy matters, the challenges consumers face in safeguarding their data, and the legislative gaps in privacy protection, along with the app Sukhi is working, Permission Slip, that helps users exercise their rights to digital data privacy. Plus: Why it might be worth reducing your digital footprint. Credit:...
about 1 month ago
We'll Be In Touch - A New Podcast From Stack Overflow!
November 21, 2024Most job interviews are stressful. This one is not.Hello everyone and welcome to the very first episode of We'll Be in Touch, a new podcast series from Stack Overflow.This show will explore the world of job interviews, career development, and software engineering. Each episode, we'll sit down with folks working in software development to hear their stories, dive into their latest projects, learn about tricky bugs they've tackled, and discuss the tricks they use to keep up with...
about 1 month ago
Joining forces: How Web2 and Web3 developers can build together
Web2 and Web3 developers don’t always have the kindest view of one another. They think Web3 is all scams and we think Web2 is stuck in the stone age with a technology that doesn’t take advantage of the distributed technology landscape. Both of these are unfair: any hype cycle draws unethical opportunists and technology isn’t better just because it's newer.But it’s time to call a truce and explore the real differences, the pros and cons. Much of the divide comes...
about 1 month ago
The open-source ecosystem built to reduce tech debt
November 19, 2024Today’s guest is Jonathan Schneider, co-founder and CEO of Moderne and creator of OpenRewrite, an open-source automated refactoring ecosystem for source code built to help developers eliminate tech debt. He tells Ben and Ryan about the challenges of automatic refactoring, how Java continues to evolve, and what kind of impact tech debt has on software development. Jonathan also describes the transition from open-source project to startup, why clean code is so important, and the role AI plays for...
about 1 month ago
Meet the guy responsible for building the Call of Duty game engine
November 15, 2024Chris Fowler, Director of Engine for Call of Duty, tells Ben and Ryan about his path from marine biology to game development, the ins and outs of game engines, and the technical feats involved in creating massively popular games like Call of Duty. Chris also explains why community feedback is so critical in game development and offers his advice for aspiring game developers. Credit: Alexandra Francis
about 1 month ago
A student of Geoff Hinton, Yann LeCun, and Jeff Dean explains where AI is headed
November 12, 2024Ben and Ryan are joined by Matt Zeiler, founder and CEO of Clarifai, an AI workflow orchestration platform. They talk about how the transformer architecture supplanted convolutional neural networks in AI applications, the infrastructure required for AI implementation, the implications of regulating AI, and the value of synthetic data. Credit: Alexandra Francis
about 2 months ago
One of the world’s biggest web scrapers has some thoughts on data ownership
November 8, 2024Or Lenchner, CEO of Bright Data, joins Ben and Ryan for a deep-dive conversation about the evolving landscape of web data. They talk through the challenges involved in data collection, the role of synthetic data in training large AI models, and how public data access is becoming more restrictive. Or also shares his thoughts on the importance of transparency in data practices, the likely future of data regulation, and the philosophical implications of more people using AI to...
about 2 months ago
How Google is helping developers get better answers from AI
November 5, 2024Today’s guest is Logan Kilpatrick, a senior product manager at Google, who tells Ben about his journey from software engineering to machine learning to product management, all with an emphasis on reducing developer friction. They talk through the challenges of non-determinism in AI models and how Google is addressing these issues with a new feature: Grounding with Google Search. Plus, what working at the Apple Store taught Logan about product management. Credit: Alexandra Francis
about 2 months ago
Research roadmap update: November 2024
November 4, 2024An update to the research that the User Experience team is running over the next quarter.Research at Stack Overflow is increasingly focused on addressing our community’s unique challenges and improving the experience of our users. With the community at the center of our efforts, we have the opportunity to address complex and exciting questions that support some of our most significant features.As a reminder, our researchers often operate ahead of the product roadmap by several months or even...
about 2 months ago
How a creator of React is rethinking IDEs
November 1, 2024Tom Occhino, now Chief Product Officer at Vercel, tells Ben about how he contributed to the development of React at Facebook and the contentious decision to make React open-source. They also talk about what community feedback has been like on Next.js 15, Vercel’s GenAI web development tool, and how Vercel is rethinking IDEs. Credit: Alexandra Francis
about 2 months ago
A brief summary of language model finetuning
Fine-tuning techniques: The term “fine tuning” refers to further training a pretrained model. In the case of LLMs, this means that we take a pretrained foundation model and train it some more. But, there are so many different ways that this training can be done, which makes the concept of fine tuning incredibly vague. This single term can refer to a variety of different techniques, such as:Continued pretrainingInstruction tuningSupervised fine tuning (SFT)Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) or Direct Preference...
about 2 months ago
Life in the Fastlane: SDK tools built with developers in mind
October 30, 2024On this sponsored episode, Ben and Ryan talk to Sunny Patel, Staff Software Engineer at PayPal, and Kyle Prinsloo, a developer and a PayPal partner, about all the ways that Fastlane by PayPal makes developers’ lives easier. They explore the needs that both merchants and consumers have for creating a seamless checkout experience, the importance of reducing friction in payment processes, and how documentation can directly assist the integration experience.
about 2 months ago
How can you get your kids into coding? We asked an 8-year-old app builder.
October 29, 2024Ben welcomes Ricky Robinett, VP of Developer Relations and Community at Cloudflare, and his eight-year-old daughter Fay for a chat about how AI tools are helping new developers get started and how to encourage your kids to try coding. Credit: Alexandra Francis
about 2 months ago
Tragedy of the (data) commons
October 25, 2024Ben chats with Shayne Longpre and Robert Mahari of the Data Provenance Initiative about what GenAI means for the data commons. They discuss the decline of public datasets, the complexities of fair use in AI training, the challenges researchers face in accessing data, potential applications for synthetic data, and the evolving legal landscape surrounding AI and copyright. Credit: Alexandra Francis
2 months ago
How to improve the developer experience in today’s ecommerce world
We recently introduced Fastlane by PayPal—an accelerated guest checkout experience—to the US market. Customers can save their card and shipping information once, then use those prefilled details for future purchases wherever Fastlane is available.As we designed Fastlane, we wanted it to fit seamlessly into our merchants’ ecommerce sites. That meant also building this product with developers in mind to create a seamless and flexible integration experience.In this article, we’ll talk about the features and design of the Fastlane SDK that...
2 months ago
Enterprise 2024.7: Empower your subject matter experts to contribute
October 23, 2024This release introduces Subject Matter Expert (SME) Auto-Assign to the Stack Overflow for Teams experience so expert knowledge is automatically captured, verified, and distributed to users. The Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise 2024.7 Release No matter what strategic initiative your organization is driving, subject matter experts (SMEs) are always at the center because of their deep knowledge and expertise. And while well-known, veteran SMEs are often consulted, rising SMEs should also have the opportunity to step up and...
2 months ago
CEO Update: Building trust in AI is key to a thriving knowledge ecosystem
We’ve had a breakneck first half of our year here at Stack Overflow, with the last two quarters marked by the announcement of major partnerships, the general availability of our OverflowAI features in Stack Overflow for Teams, and many more milestones across our public platform. At a macro level, we’ve moved well past the inflection point of the AI hype cycle. The customers, partners, and technologists I engage with every day grapple with the very real questions and challenges of...
2 months ago
The new pair programming: an AI agent that cleans your code as you write
October 22, 2024Ben welcomes Sonar CEO Tariq Shaukat for a conversation about AI coding tools’ potential to boost developer productivity—and how to balance those potential gains against code quality and security concerns. They talk about Sonar’s origins as an open-source code quality tool, the excellent reasons to embrace a “clean as you code” philosophy, and how to determine where AI coding tools can be helpful and where they can’t (yet). Credit: Alexandra Francis
2 months ago
How API security is evolving for the GenAI era
October 18, 2024Ben Popper chats with Keith Babo, Head of Product at Solo.io, about how the API security landscape is changing in the era of GenAI. They talk through the role of governance in AI, the importance of data protection, and the role API gateways play in enhancing security and functionality. Keith shares his insights on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, protecting PII, and the necessity of human-in-the-loop AI development. Credit: Alexandra Francis
2 months ago
Brain Drain: David vs Goliath
One of the most striking things about today's generative AI models is the absolutely enormous amount of data that they train on. Meta wrote, for example, that its Llama 3 model was trained on 15 trillion tokens, which is equal to roughly 44 TERABYTES of disk space. In the case of large language models this usually means terabytes of text from the internet, although the newest generations of multimodal models also train on video, audio, and images.The internet, like the...
2 months ago
The team behind Unity 6 explains the new features aimed at helping developers
October 16, 2024On today’s sponsored episode, we chat with Ryan Ellis and Martin Best about the developer-centric features built into Unity 6, the latest release of the well-known game engine. The pair explains how Unity 6 was built to help developers enhance graphics, add multiplayer, and easily port games to an audience on the mobile web.
2 months ago
What launching rockets taught this CTO about hardware observability
October 14, 2024Austin Spiegel, CTO and co-founder of Sift, tells Ben and Ryan about his journey from studying film to working at SpaceX to founding Sift. Austin shares his perspective on software development in high-stakes environments, the challenges of hardware observability, and why paranoia is valuable in safety-critical engineering. Bonus story: Austin invited Elon Musk to speak at his student club…and he came! Credit: Alexandra Francis
2 months ago
Is this the real life? Training autonomous cars with simulations
October 11, 2024Ben Popper interviews Vladislav Voroninski, CEO of Helm.ai, about unsupervised learning and the future of AI in autonomous driving. They discuss GenAI’s role in bridging the gap between simulation and reality, the challenges of scaling autonomous driving systems, the commercial potential of partial autonomy, and why software is emerging as a key differentiator in vehicle sales. Vlad spotlights the value of multimodal foundation models and how compute shortages affect AI startups. Credit: Alexandra Francis
3 months ago
Rust is evolving from system-level language to UI and frontend development
October 8, 2024Ben and Ryan chat with Daniela Miao, cofounder and CTO of Momento, a real-time data platform. They discuss the advantages of real-time observability, the challenges of multi-tenancy in databases and caching, the use of WebAssembly in UI development, and the benefits of Rust. Daniela also shares her experiences working at AWS and a startup focused on observability, which led to the creation of Momento. Credit: Alexandra Francis
3 months ago
Meet the AI-native developers who build software through prompt engineering
October 4, 2024 On today’s episode we chat with Crystal Xu, chief of staff at FSH Tech. She explains how she learned to build and deploy apps and services inside her company using Python and Java, without ever getting a traditional computer science education or training to write code. Instead, Xu works with GenAI systems like ChatGPT, Cursor, and Replit to build software through prompt engineering.
3 months ago
Community Products Roadmap Update, October 2024
October 3, 2024We explore how our platform is evolving to support a new framework and business model, knowledge-as-a-service, and how we will incorporate this with our ongoing investment in our community.The knowledge-as-a-service framework and business model is shaping how we think about our position as a source of trusted knowledge in a new era. In a previous post, I shared some things we have learned and guiding principles for our AI/ML product strategy. Today, I will share some of the...
3 months ago
A developer works to balance the data center boom with his climate change battle
October 1, 2024On today’s episode we chat with David Mytton, CEO of Arcjet and co-founder of Console.dev. We discuss his early work in cloud monitoring, his passion for the environment, and his love for sharing great developer tools.
3 months ago
Ongoing community data protection
September 30, 2024Socially responsible use of community data needs to be mutually beneficial: the more potential partners are willing to contribute to community development, the more access to community content they receive.This post is the third in a series focused on the importance of human-centered sources of knowledge as LLMs transform the information landscape. The [first post] focuses on the changing state of the internet and the data marketplace, and the [second post] discusses the importance of attribution.Socially responsible use...
3 months ago
Attribution as the foundation of developer trust
This post is the second in a series focused on the importance of human-centered sources of knowledge as LLMs transform the information landscape. The first post discusses the changing state of the internet and the related transitions in business models that emerged from that.To be explicit, we know that attribution also matters to our community and Stack Overflow. Beyond Creative Commons licensing or credit given to the author or knowledge source, we know it builds trust. As we’ve outlined in...
3 months ago
Knowledge-as-a-service: The future of community business models
Looking back a few decades, search-based navigation of knowledge was rocky for knowledge producers. Google Knowledge Graph reminded us that many seekers were happy to find the quick answer, but the benefits still rolled back to the source platforms. These search platforms made money from high-scale audiences via advertising, affiliates, performance marketing, etc. Companies that survived and thrived adjusted to this by leveraging meta-information and links, which enabled them to generate traffic; an entire industry built around optimization and performance...
3 months ago
The changing state of the Internet and related business models
September 30, 2024If you’re weary of reading about the latest chatbot innovations and the nine ways AI will change your daily life next year, this series of posts may be for you. If you’re weary of reading about the latest chatbot innovations and the nine ways AI will change your daily life next year, this series of posts may be for you. In it, we’ll examine how the economics of human knowledge are rapidly changing beneath our feet. And we’ll...
3 months ago
Deedy Das: from coding at Meta, to search at Google, to investing with Anthropic
September 27, 2024We chat with Deedy Das, a Principal at Menlo Ventures, who began his career as a software engineer at Facebook and Google. He then dipped a toe in the startup world, spending time at the company now know as Glean. More recently he started a career as a venture capitalist, investing in AI and Infra out of the Anthology Fund, a partnership between Menlo Ventures and Anthropic.
3 months ago
Masked self-attention: How LLMs learn relationships between tokens
September 26, 2024Masked self-attention is the key building block that allows LLMs to learn rich relationships and patterns between the words of a sentence. Let’s build it together from scratch. Credit: Alexandra FrancisThe big picture: Large language models are based upon a deep neural network architecture called a decoder-only transformer. Within each layer of this model, we have two key components:1. Masked self-attention learns relationships between tokens/words.2. Feed-forward transformation individually transforms the representation of each word.These components are complementary—attention looks...
3 months ago
He sold his first company for billions. Now he’s building a better developer experience.
September 23, 2024Founder and entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal tells Ben, Cassidy, and Eira about the developer challenges he aims to solve with his new venture, Harness, an AI-driven software development platform meant to take the pain out of DevOps. Jyoti shares his journey as a founder, his perspective on the venture capital landscape, and his reasons behind his decision to raise debt capital for Harness. Credit: Alexandra Francis
3 months ago
Where developers feel AI coding tools are working—and where they’re missing the mark
Our annual survey of more than 65,000 developers captures a portrait of the global developer community: who you are, how you learn, what kind of job you have, the tools and technologies you use, and more. We previously summarized some of the results in this blog post, but we wanted to dive deeper into certain insights the survey uncovered.This year, we were interested to know how developers are using GenAI-powered coding tools now that some of the initial hype has...
3 months ago
Detecting errors in AI-generated code
September 20, 2024Ben chats with Gias Uddin, an assistant professor at York University in Toronto, where he teaches software engineering, data science, and machine learning. His research focuses on designing intelligent tools for testing, debugging, and summarizing software and AI systems. He recently published a paper about detecting errors in code generated by LLMs. Gias and Ben discuss the concept of hallucinations in AI-generated code, the need for tools to detect and correct those hallucinations, and the potential for AI-powered...
3 months ago
Elevating your search experience: Stack Overflow for Teams ML-powered reranking experiment
September 19, 2024Today, we're excited to share details about our latest experiment that aims to make your search results in Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise even more relevant and useful.At Stack Overflow, we understand the central role search plays in helping technologists solve their problems, so we're constantly striving to improve the way you find the information you need. Today, we're excited to share details about our latest experiment that aims to make your search results in Stack Overflow for...
3 months ago
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...
3 months 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
4 months 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...
4 months 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...
4 months 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.
4 months 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...
4 months 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...
4 months 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.
4 months 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.
4 months 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.
4 months 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...
4 months 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...
4 months 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.
4 months 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...
4 months 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...
4 months 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,...
5 months 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.
5 months ago
How we’re making Stack Overflow more accessible
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5 months 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...
5 months 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...
5 months 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
5 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...
5 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...
5 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
5 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.
5 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...
5 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
5 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...
5 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...
5 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
5 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...
6 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
6 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
6 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
6 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...
6 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).
6 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.,...
6 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!
6 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...
6 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...
6 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.
6 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...
7 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.
7 months ago