What we learned at TDX 2025
March 14, 2025Some high-level takeaways, with more to come.Last week, we were on-site in San Francisco at Trailblazer DX, the developer conference of cloud colossus Salesforce. TDX 2025 was all about the future of AI agents and agentic AI’s potential to reimagine software development and the developer experience.If you’re new to the topic or could use a refresher, AI agents are AI systems that use machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NPL) to understand and respond to users without...
about 6 hours ago
Can climate tech startups address the current crisis?
March 14, 2025Lisbeth Kaufman, Head of Climate Tech at AWS, sits down with Ryan to talk about her work helping climate tech startups get off the ground and the role startups can play in addressing the climate change crisis. She highlights a few projects to get excited about, including ones focused on fusion energy and sustainable agriculture. Credit: Alexandra Francis
about 2 hours ago
Junky data is like an out-of-tune guitar—it prevents AI harmony
March 13, 2025In our very first episode, Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar talks to Don Woodlock, Head of Global Healthcare Solutions at InterSystems, about the challenges in their AI journey and the critical role of a robust data strategy in any successful AI initiative. Credit: Alexandra FrancisWelcome to Leaders of Code, a new business segment of the Stack Overflow podcast. On this show, we chat with business, tech, and engineering leaders from forward-thinking companies across industries about their business strategies,...
1 day ago
A look under the hood: How (and why) we built Question Assistant
Last year we released Staging Ground to help new question-askers get feedback on their drafts from experienced users in a dedicated space before their question is posted publicly on Stack Overflow. We’ve since seen measurable improvements in the quality of questions posted; however, it still takes time for a question to get human feedback and make it through the full Staging Ground process.Reviewers also noticed that they were repeating the same comments over and over: this post doesn’t belong here,...
1 day ago
Sharing the power of the command line
March 11, 2025Ryan welcomes Zach Lloyd, founder and CEO of Warp, to the show to talk about reimagining the terminal. They also discuss why Warp was built in Rust (“it’s definitely harder”), how AI is transforming developer tools, and what Zach (formerly a principal engineer at Google) learned building Docs and Sheets. Credit: Alexandra Francis
3 days ago
Is Postgres the best database for GenAI?
March 7, 2025Jeremy “Jezz” Kellway, VP of Engineering for Analytics and Data & AI at EDB (Enterprise Database), joins Ryan for a conversation about Postgres and AI. They unpack how Postgres is becoming the standard database for AI applications, the importance of managing unstructured data, and the implications of data sovereignty and governance in AI. Credit: Alexandra Francis
7 days ago
How can AI perform on the edge?
March 5, 2025What are the capabilities, constraints, and benefits of running AI models of edge devices?Ryan chats with Clark Jarvis, Senior Staff Technical Marketer at Infineon, and Alexander Samuelsson, CTO at Imagimob, an Infineon Technologies Company, to talk about the capabilities, constraints, and benefits of running AI models of edge devices. They discuss the various tools that let them optimize models for edge devices, how the ecosystem is maturing to support more use cases, and how low code can help...
9 days ago
Boosting collaboration and control: New features for Stack Overflow for Teams
March 4, 2025Our latest Enterprise release brings exciting new features designed to enhance collaboration, streamline user management, and expand API capabilities. At Stack Overflow for Teams, we’re always looking for ways to make knowledge-sharing seamless, intuitive, and impactful. Our latest Enterprise release brings exciting new features designed to enhance collaboration, streamline user management, and expand API capabilities. Whether you’re keeping your team engaged, simplifying admin tasks, or integrating with external tools, these updates are here to make your experience even...
10 days ago
Secure coding beyond just memory safety
March 4, 2025Software security expert Tanya Janca, author of Alice and Bob Learn Secure Coding and Staff DevRel at AppSec company Semgrep, joins Ryan to talk about secure coding practices. Tanya unpacks the significance of input validation, the challenges of trusting data sources, and the intersection of security and law. Bonus: what she learned trying to secure a Canadian national election. Credit: Alexandra Francis
10 days ago
“Translation is the tip of the iceberg”: A deep dive into specialty models
February 28, 2025Olga Beregovaya, VP of AI at Smartling, joins Ryan and Ben to explore the evolution and specialization of language models in AI. They discuss the shift from rule-based systems to transformer models, the importance of fine-tuning for translation tasks, and the role of human translators in ensuring reliable, high-quality output. They also touch on the implications of AI in language education and the challenges faced in implementing LLMs in enterprise workflows. Credit: Alexandra Francis
14 days ago
Our next phase—Q was just the beginning
February 27, 2025For those that missed our February AMA, let’s discuss the future of Stack OverflowFor more than 16 years, Stack Overflow has served as the central hub for technologists worldwide, empowering them to learn, showcase skills, and thrive in their careers. We have been proud to be an open tab on the desktop of almost every developer. But times change, resources evolve and the day to day needs of users are not the same as they were the day...
15 days ago
Variants of LoRA
February 26, 2025Want to train a specialized LLM on your own data? The easiest way to do this is with low rank adaptation (LoRA), but many variants of LoRA exist. Credit: Alexandra FrancisThere are many variants of LoRA you can use to train a specialized LLM on your own data. Here’s an overview of all (or at least most) of the techniques that are out there.LoRA models the update derived for a model’s weights during finetuning with a low rank...
16 days ago
Writing tests with AI, but not LLMs
February 24, 2025Animesh Mishra, senior solutions engineer at Diffblue, joins Ryan and Ben to talk about how AI agents can help you get better test coverage. Animesh explains how agentic AI can expedite and enhance automation and refactoring processes, how Diffblue leverages machine learning techniques to write effective unit tests, and why clear use cases and trust are so important in developing AI tools. Plus: Why Diffblue sees Copilot as a complement, not a competitor. Credit: Alexandra Francis
18 days ago
One quality every engineering manager should have? Empathy.
February 21, 2025Ryan talks with senior engineering manager Caitlin Weaver about how her childhood fascination with computers led to her leading CLEAR’s Cloud Infrastructure Engineering team, her experiences in DevOps, the role of empathy in engineering management, and how the platform engineering landscape is evolving. Credit: Alexandra Francis
21 days ago
Research roadmap update, February 2025
February 20, 2025An update to the research that the User Experience team is running over the next quarter.As the digital landscape evolves, understanding this community’s needs, desires, and pain points becomes increasingly vital. Research at Stack Overflow is focused on addressing the unique challenges and improving the experience of our users. In this post, we will explore the roadmap set forth by our User Experience team, highlighting their mission to leverage insights and drive innovation. Join us as we delve...
22 days ago
WBIT #4: Using GIS to understand the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to
February 19, 2025How a theater major became a fullstack engineer building software to manage climate change.
23 days ago
Why is it so hard for companies to protect your privacy?
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24 days ago
Solving the data doom loop
February 14, 2025Ken Stott, Field CTO of API platform Hasura, tells Ryan about the data doom loop: the concept that organizations are spending lots of money on data systems without seeing improvements in data quality or efficiency. Their conversation touches on the challenges of data management, the impact of microservices, the importance of feedback loops in ensuring data quality, and how a data architecture that uses a supergraph would enhance data accessibility and quality. Credit: Alexandra Francis
28 days ago
How to harness APIs and AI for intelligent automation
As AI applications become more intelligent, integrating varied data sources is critical to operability and security, particularly as LLMs have no delete button. APIs can scale to efficiently train AI models, opening doors to new business models and service delivery opportunities.APIs are the steady bridges connecting diverse systems and data sources. This reliable technology, which emerged in the 1960s and matured during the noughties ecommerce boom, is bridging today’s next-gen technologies. APIs allow data transfer to be automated, which is...
29 days ago
A distributed database that can withstand a meteor strike
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30 days ago
“In the short term, more chaos”: What’s next for API design
February 11, 2025Sagar Batchu, CEO and cofounder of API tooling company Speakeasy, talks with Ryan about the evolving API landscape, AI integration, the role of human technologists in an increasingly automated environment, and what people building APIs right now should keep in mind. Credit: Alexandra Francis
about 1 month ago
Shifting left without slowing down: Q with Moti Gindi of Apiiro
Fast, cheap, good: pick two. That was always the mantra in any design or process. But for software security, does this tradeoff have to exist? I spoke with Moti Gindi, Chief Product Officer at Apiiro about why compromising development velocity for security (or paying out the nose for both) isn’t always the rule for software development organizations.Ryan Donovan: What is the traditional tradeoff between development velocity and strong security?Moti Gindi: For years, the traditional mindset assumed a tradeoff: accelerating development...
about 1 month ago
Why build your own vector DB? To process 25,000 images per second
February 7, 2025Ben and Ryan chat with Babak Behzad, senior engineering manager at Verkada, about running a pipeline that vectorizes 25,000 images per second into a custom-built vector database. They discuss whether the speed is due to technical brains or brawn, the benefits of processing on device vs. off, and the importance of privacy when using image recognition on frames from a video camera.
about 1 month ago
Investing in the Stack Exchange Network and the future of Stack Overflow
February 6, 2025Mark your calendars to learn more about Stack’s Future—Feb 26th.2024 was an exciting year at Stack Overflow. From the launch of new products and features that came directly from integrations with global partnerships to outlining our vision for Knowledge-as-a-service and the changing state of internet models. Hard to believe, but in many ways we have so much more to share in 2025.As I closed out my last quarterly update, I mentioned, “At Stack Overflow, we’re committed to our...
about 1 month ago
Will the web ever be the primary delivery system for 3D games?
February 4, 2025Jaime Torrealba, a frontend developer currently at Push Security, joins Ryan to talk about 3D graphics and web development. Their conversation ranges from the evolution of technologies like WebGL and WebGPU to the importance of performance optimization for different devices to the frameworks available for creating 3D experiences. Jaime also explains the layers of abstraction in 3D development and shares some insight into what the future of 3D applications might look like. Credit: Alexandra Francis
about 1 month ago
Community Products Roadmap Update, January 2025
February 3, 2025An update on recent launches and the upcoming roadmap.Our Community Products teams continue to be focused on the pain points and tasks developers want to accomplish every day when they visit Stack Overflow. We are passionate about helping developers learn, share, and grow in their careers, and it has been exciting to watch some experimentation and discovery efforts come to life over the last quarter. Highlights from this last quarter include:Improving the experience for new askers:Question Assistant: Using...
about 1 month ago
Feature flags: Theory meets reality
January 31, 2025Ryan is joined by Fynn Glover (CEO) and Ben Papillon (CTO), cofounders of Schematic, for a conversation about managing feature flags in software development. They explore theoretical and practical applications of feature flags, the issue of tech debt, and how orgs could manage entitlements and pricing models more effectively. Credit: Alexandra Francis
about 1 month ago
New year, new features: Level up your Stack Overflow for Teams in 2025
January 29, 2025The first release of the year is packed with features to make your knowledge-sharing community better. As we step into 2025, we’re kicking things off with a series of powerful updates designed to make your Stack Overflow for Teams experience even better. Whether you’re celebrating the milestones of the past year or gearing up to tackle new challenges, these enhancements are here to support your knowledge-sharing community in meaningful ways.This release is packed with tools to help your...
about 1 month ago
How engineering teams can thrive in 2025
In 2025, forward-thinking engineering teams are reshaping their approach to work, combining emerging technologies with new approaches to collaboration. Successful teams are leaning into AI-powered engineering while rethinking their role in an AI-enhanced business world.In this article, we explore how top teams are adapting to AI-first development, embracing new ways of working, and adapting to stay ahead in unpredictable economic times.The world of business as a whole underwent significant upheaval in 2024, marked by ongoing layoffs in tech firms and...
about 1 month ago
“Countries are coming online tomorrow, whole countries”
January 28, 2025Ben and Ryan are joined by RJ Tuit, Head of UI Platform and Client Architect at ClickUp, formerly an engineering director at Microsoft. They talk about ClickUp’s vision for a comprehensive productivity platform, the complexities of measuring productivity and UX in software development, how to navigate the hype around AI, and more. Plus: What it was like scaling Microsoft’s cloud services to meet the unprecedented demands of a global workforce in quarantine. Credit: Alexandra Francis
about 2 months ago
Stack Gives Back 2024!
January 27, 2025We’re excited to announce our 16th annual Stack Gives Back campaign donations. Credit: Stack Overflow Brand DesignStack Gives Back is an annual tradition where we donate $100 to a charity on behalf of each moderator on the Stack Exchange network. We are thrilled to announce that we donated $49,000 USD, distributed between seven different organizations that each do important work. The amount that went to each charity was determined by the percentage of moderators that selected that organization...
about 2 months ago
How the internet changed in 2024
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about 2 months ago
Why all developers should adopt a safety-critical mindset
In a world where software powers everything from spacecraft to banking systems, the consequences of failure can be devastating. Even minor software failures can have far-reaching consequences—we’ve seen platforms crash, businesses lose millions, and users lose trust, all due to bugs or breakdowns that could have been prevented. Just ask Crowdstrike. This raises an important question: Shouldn’t all developers think about safety, reliability, and trust, even when building apps or services that don’t seem critical?The answer is a resounding yes....
about 2 months ago
WBIT#3: Can good team dynamics make Agile obsolete?
January 22, 2025Kyle welcomes Wes Copeland, a senior frontend engineer at Apartment Advisor, to the interview. They talk about how good test coverage helps you develop software faster, the benefits of low-fidelity prototypes, and why he prefers to avoid vibes-driven development.
about 2 months ago
The developer skill you might be neglecting
January 17, 2025Ben and Ryan talk with Geoffrey (Jef) Huck, a software developer turned public speaking coach, about the importance of soft skills in the tech industry—in particular, speaking and communication skills. Their conversation touches on how Huck’s experiences with anxiety shaped his efforts to become a better communicator, practical techniques for dispelling anxiety and connecting with the audience, and the MVP approach to public speaking. Credit: Alexandra Francis
about 2 months ago
Robots building robots in a robotic factory
January 14, 2025Ryan talks with Sterling Chin, a senior developer advocate at Postman, about the intersection of APIs and AI. They cover the emergence of AI APIs, the importance of quality APIs for AI integrations, and the evolving role of GraphQL in this new landscape. Sterling explains how some organizations are shifting toward an API-first development approach and talks about the future of data access in the agentic era, where APIs will play a crucial role in AI interactions. Credit:...
about 2 months ago
“Data is the key”: Twilio’s Head of R on the need for good data
January 10, 2025In this episode, Ben and Ryan sit down with Inbal Shani, Chief Product Officer and Head of R&D at Twilio. They talk about how Twilio is incorporating AI into its offerings, the enormous importance of data quality in achieving high-quality responses from AI, the challenges of integrating cutting-edge AI technology into legacy systems, and how companies are turning to AI to improve developer productivity and customer engagement. Credit: Alexandra Francis
2 months ago
Failing fast at scale: Rapid prototyping at Intuit
Site design / logo © 2025 Stack Exchange Inc. User contributions licensed under CC BY-SA. TermsPrivacy policyCookie policy Go to stackoverflow.com
2 months ago
WBIT #2: Memories of persistence and the state of state
Site design / logo © 2025 Stack Exchange Inc. User contributions licensed under CC BY-SA. TermsPrivacy policyCookie policy Go to stackoverflow.com
2 months ago
How AI apps are like Google Search
January 3, 2025Happy New Year! In this episode, Ryan talks with Jetify founder and CEO Daniel Loreto, a former engineering lead at Google and Twitter, about what AI applications have in common with Google Search. They also discuss the challenges inherent in developing AI systems, why a data-driven approach to AI development is important, the implications of non-determinism, and the future of test automation. Credit: Alexandra Francis
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...
2 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...
2 months ago
How developers (really) used AI coding tools in 2024
December 31, 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
2 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...
2 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
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
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 months 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 months 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 months 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...
3 months 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...
3 months 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...
3 months 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...
3 months 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...
3 months 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...
3 months 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...
3 months 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’...
3 months 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...
3 months 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...
3 months 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:...
3 months 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
4 months 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:...
4 months 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...
4 months 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...
4 months 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...
4 months 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
4 months 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
4 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...
4 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
4 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...
4 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
4 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...
4 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.
5 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
5 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
5 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...
5 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...
5 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...
5 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
5 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
5 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...
5 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.
5 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
5 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
5 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
5 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.
5 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...
5 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.
5 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...
5 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...
5 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...
5 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...
5 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.
6 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...
6 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
6 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...
6 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...
6 months ago