The Stack Overflow Podcast
For well over a decade, the Stack Overflow Podcast has been exploring what it means to be a developer and how the art and practice of software engineering is changing our world. From creating code to running it in production, we host important conversations and fascinating guests that will help you understand how technology is made and where it’s headed. Hosted by Ryan Donovan, the Stack Overflow Podcast is your home for all things software.
Oh, your agents need OAuth2, too
Recorded at LDX3 by LeadDev, Ryan chats with Dan Moore, Senior Director of CIAM Strategy and Identity Standards at FusionAuth, about adapting established OAuth2 protocols for the agentic era, the security necessity of giving autonomous AI agents their own distinct identities, and how AI coding tools are shifting developers' focus toward solving core business problems.
Episode notes:
FusionAuth is an identity and access management platform that provides customer authentication, OAuth, and security solutions for developers.
This episode was recorded at LDX3. Listen to our other LDX3 conversation with engineering leaders Nivia Henry and...
It’s ok that computers are (sometimes) better than us
Ryan is joined by Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO at Honeycomb, for a conversation about applying the concept of immutable infrastructure to software development to treat code like cattle instead of pets, shifting the paradigm of system specifications to accommodate the rapid influx of AI-generated code, and navigating the complex ethical boundaries between system observability and human surveillance in modern technology ecosystems.
Episode notes:
Honeycomb is an observability platform that empowers engineering teams to visualize, analyze, and understand the behavior of their complex cloud systems.
Connect with Charity on her blog at charity.w...
Elevators, toasters, and the birth of Java
Ryan sits down with James Gosling, creator of Java at Sun Microsystems, to talk about the early networking friction that drove the need for interconnectedness, the stringent reliability requirements of consumer electronics companies that inspired the Java virtual machine, and the evolution of garbage collectors that allow Java to handle large-scale concurrent memory management.
Episode notes:
Check out CultRepo’s recently released Java documentary to learn more about the early history of the language and the engineers who built it.
Connect with James on LinkedIn and X.
Congrats to Famous Question ba...
Rumors of the SaaS demise are greatly exaggerated
Recorded on the floor of LDX3, Ryan chats with Nivia Henry, an engineering leader most recently at Netflix, about the reality of the supposed SaaS apocalypse, the complex calculus of the modern build-versus-buy decision in the era of AI, and the critical importance of understanding system architectures to manage long-term infrastructure costs.
Episode notes:
This episode was recorded at this year’s LDX3 by LeadDev, a conference focused on modern engineering leadership, management, and technical strategy
Nivia recently spent two and a half years tackling complex data and engineering challenges at Netflix and pr...
Don't forget about the UI for AI
Recorded at OpenAI Dev Day 2026, Ryan sits down with Andrew Ambrosino, member of the technical staff at OpenAI, for a conversation on OpenAI's strategy for merging ChatGPT and Codex into a unified experience, the advantages of localized computer access in their successful desktop application, and the technical hurdles of constructing ChatGPT Spaces to support real-time multi-agent collaboration.
Episode notes:
ChatGPT Space is a newly launched collaborative workspace within ChatGPT and Codex that allows software engineering teams and their active AI agents to work together in real-time.
Connect with Andrew on X.
...
AI says you’re right, formal methods say you’re wrong
Ryan is joined by Gabriela Moreira, CEO at Quint, about why formal specification languages like TLA+ are essential for catching system design flaws before writing code, how Quint brings developer-friendly syntax and executability to formal methods, and the ways trace validation and model-based testing can verify AI-generated code against real-world production data.
Episode notes:
Quint is an open-source, executable specification language and toolchain based on TLA+ that enables engineers to model, simulate, and verify system behaviors using an intuitive, programmer-friendly syntax.
Connect with Gabriela on LinkedIn and X.
Congrats to Populist...
Keep calm and call clone with Rust
Ryan sits down with Josh Triplett, member of the Rust Leadership Team at the Rust Project, to chat about how the borrow checker delivers compile-time memory safety without garbage collection overhead, why Rust consistently ranks as developers' most loved language by providing psychological safety for complex systems, and how strict compiler constraints make Rust an ideal target for AI coding agents.
Episode notes:
Rust is an open-source systems programming language focused on performance, type safety, and compile-time memory safety without the runtime overhead of garbage collection.
Connect with Josh on his website, on...
Taking a look under your agent’s hood
Ryan is joined by Yanbing Li, Chief Product Officer at Datadog, to talk about applying observability to non-deterministic AI agents, blurring the boundaries between software development and production workflows, and navigating emerging challenges in AI security and tokenomics.
Episode notes:
Datadog is an observability and security platform for cloud applications, providing real-time monitoring for infrastructure, distributed systems, and AI agent behavior.
Connect with Yanbing on LinkedIn and learn more on the Datadog website.
Congrats to Great Answer badge winner insertusernamehere for winning the badge on their answer to How can I get...
Tales from the 2026 Developer Survey results
Ryan chats with Erin Yepis, Senior Analyst at Stack Overflow, about the results from this year’s Annual Developer Survey, including the overwhelming daily usage of AI coding assistants despite lingering developer trust issues, the critical role of well-organized documentation in providing verifiable context to mitigate AI hallucinations, and the evolving ways developers are shifting away from active community posting in favor of passive knowledge consumption.
Episode notes:
Check out the full 2026 Developer Survey results.
Connect with Erin on LinkedIn and read her past articles on the Stack Overflow blog.
Congrats to...
Constraints that make developers faster
Ryan chats with Julien Verlaguet, CEO at Skip Labs, about finding the balance between human tolerance and tooling constraints, the spectrum of typed programming languages, and building cost-effective tooling for AI agents.
Episode notes:
Skip Labs develops a programming language designed for reactive programming alongside specialized constraint-based tooling for AI agents.
Connect with Julien Verlaguet on LinkedIn.
Congrats to Populist badge winner s0nix for winning the badge on their answer to Git through Visual Studio Code is unusably slow.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and Cal...
Your phone is AI’s newest hardware
Ryan sits down with Div Garg, CEO at AGI Inc., to talk about running AI agents entirely on mobile devices, optimizing models for edge computing chips, and building safety mechanisms into autonomous app interactions.
Episode notes:
AGI Inc. is a research lab building the world's best on-device models that allow AI to autonomously interact with millions of third-party mobile applications.
Connect with Div on LinkedIn and check out AGI on X.
Congrats to Great Question badge winner Nathan Fellman for winning the badge on their question How does reverse debugging work?.
Professional skepticism is a dev’s best skill
Ryan chats with David Burns, Head of Developer Advocacy and Open Source at BrowserStack, about the value of professional skepticism in an AI-driven world, applying test-driven development to agentic engineering, and why fixing flaky tests comes down to managing application state.
Episode notes:
BrowserStack is a software testing platform where David heads up developer advocacy and the open source office.
Connect with David Burns on LinkedIn to check out his podcast, BrowserStack Talks.
Congrats to Populist badge winner brentvatne for winning the badge on their answer to Read app.json (or ex...
Multiplayer AI: Why your team (and its agents) need a group chat
SPONSORED BY SLACK BY SALESFORCE
In this episode, Ryan chats with the GM of Slack, Rob Seaman, about how their new Code Channels feature is bringing multiplayer AI to your team chats. They discuss how most interactions with coding agents become siloed context, why a party chat with devs and agents flattens writing code and code review into a single step, and why a Slack channel might be a better dev environment than a terminal.
Episode notes:
Check out the article Rob mentioned: Learning on the shop floor.
If you want to c...
Haters think AI agents can't write GPU code? This'll ROCm
Ryan chats with Anush Elangovan, VP of Software at AMD, about ROCm's open-source unified toolchain for GPUs, how agentic AI is drastically lowering the barrier to entry for low-level hardware programming, and the rapid convergence of software and hardware development timelines.
Episode notes:
ROCm is AMD's unified, open-source software layer and toolchain that allows developers to program on AMD's hardware accelerators.
Connect with Anush on X.
Congrats to Populist badge winner Blitz for winning the badge on their answer to Is there a way to view your apps dot entitlements file fro...
The AI magic words
Ryan sits down with Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO at O'Reilly Media, to talk about the role of books as user interfaces to knowledge, the power of "magic words" to extract better outputs from AI, and why human taste is becoming highly valuable as knowledge becomes a commodity.
Episode notes:
O'Reilly Media is a technology transfer company that leverages books, online learning platforms, and their new O'Reilly Expert Intelligence tool to shape both human and agentic learning.
Connect with Tim on X and read his Substacks, Conversations with AI and Asimov's Addendum.
...
AI, JD, and other letters of the law
Ryan chats with Kevin Frazier, director of the AI Innovation and Law program at the University of Texas School of Law, about the legal and social impacts of data centers, the realities of workforce disruption, and regulating AI for child safety using existing consumer protection laws.
Episode notes:
The AI Innovation and Law program at the University of Texas School of Law explores the complex legal and policy questions surrounding artificial intelligence, which Kevin also covers on his own podcast, Scaling Laws.
This episode was recorded at the Ai4 conference. Listen to our...
AI cybersecurity is a cat and mouse game
Ryan chats with Sam Curry, CSO at Zscaler, about where human intelligence sits in the new security landscape with AI, why shifting security protections closer to applications helps limit probes for vulnerabilities, and why building more resilient code infrastructure is the best way to address the vulnerabilities AI does discover.
Episode notes:
Zscaler is a cybersecurity company that provides cloud-based security solutions, zero trust architecture, and TLS inspection to help organizations securely operate in multi-tenant environments.
This episode was recorded at the Ai4 conference. Listen to our other Ai4 conversation with Anaconda’s Gr...
Java’s age is its AI superpower
SPONSORED BY IBM
Ryan welcomes Markus Eisele to the program to talk about why your coding agent should be writing Java. They talk about why the long history of Java both makes for a stable language and a source of training data for AI. On top of that, they discuss how agentic Java excels by working with powerful partners: a massive ecosystem of Java libraries and agentic harnesses.
Try out Bob, IBM’s coding agent that Markus talked about in the episode.
Connect with Markus on
Congrats to Populist badge winner, Alex...
Scaling your money safely with AI
Episode notes:
This episode with Paypal’s CTO Srini Venkatesan was recorded at the Ai4 conference.
Listen to our other Ai4 conversation with Greg Jennings, VP of Engineering for AI Products at Anaconda, about building secure-by-default AI coding agents here.
Connect with Srini on LinkedIn.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
How to build a secure-by-default AI coding agent
Ryan chats with Greg Jennings, VP of Engineering for AI Products at Anaconda, about what it takes to build a secure-by-default AI coding agent, why prompts shouldn't be treated as strict security guardrails, and how Anaconda is using strategic acquisitions to secure the AI software supply chain.
Episode notes:
Anaconda is a foundational platform for Python data science and machine learning, providing secure software supply chain governance and enterprise AI infrastructure.
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn and X.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at...
The good ol’ days of building Java
Ryan sits down with Tim Lindholm, an early contributor to the Java language at Sun Microsystems, to chat about what it was like building one of the most popular programming languages ever at its inception, why it was strategically important for the Java team to create a cross-platform ABI to compete with Windows NT, and how applets were initially just an interesting demo.
Episode notes:
Watch the new documentary by Cult.Repo on YouTube to learn more about the early history of Java and the people who built it.
Connect with Tim Lindholm on...
When you keep AI Lean, you keep AI correct
Ryan chats with Leo de Moura, Senior Principal Applied Scientist at AWS and the creator of the Lean language, about proving correctness in AI agents with the Lean language, how automated reasoning complements probabilistic AI models, and the use of AI for continuous code optimization.
Episode notes:
Lean is a functional programming language and proof assistant that allows developers to write programs and verify their mathematical correctness within the exact same system.
Connect with Leo on LinkedIn and check out his many badges on Stack Overflow.
Congrats to Populist badge winner...
Inside LinkedIn's cognitive memory agent for agentic personalization
Ryan is joined by Praveen Bodigutla, Principal AI Researcher at LinkedIn, to chat about the four-layer memory system his team built to give LinkedIn's hiring assistant a persistent, personalized state. Praveen explains why his team moved off GraphRAG in favor of a tree-structured memory for faster incremental updates and how they balance retrieval freshness, latency budgets, and access control at LinkedIn's scale.
Connect with Praveen on LinkedIn.
Congrats to Populist badge winner Luka Ganić, who answered SVG image as button in Flutter so well it outscored the accepted answer!
See Privacy Policy at h...
From PHP to team lead of agents: rethinking judgment, review, and data with Google's Andi Gutmans (Part 1)
Andi Gutmans, head of Agentic Data Cloud at Google and co-creator of PHP, joins Leaders of Code to talk about why agentic development feels less like a break from the past and more like the next chapter of the same story. This is part one of a two-part conversation.
In this episode, Eira May and Stack Overflow Director of Platform Engineering Peter O'Connor talk with Andi Gutmans about the throughline between democratizing web development with PHP and democratizing software development with agents today. Andi makes the case that every individual contributor is becoming “a team lead of ag...
Get rid of your CAPTCHA, the future of the web is bots
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Building an agentic SDLC with a QA engineering mindset
Ryan welcomes Suneet Malhotra, Senior Manager of Test Engineering at Motorola Solutions, to chat about building end-to-end agentic SDLC pipelines using MCPs, using Cohen’s kappa to evaluate multiple LLMs-as-judges, and how you can improve requirements by shifting QA left through a specification enrichment stage immediately after the design phase.
Episode notes:
You can learn more about Suneet’s five-agent SDLC (and see the companion code) on his GitHub.
Read the papers discussed: Cross-Layer Observability for LLM-Assisted Test Automation: A Reference Architecture and Web Feasibility Study and Cross-Layer Observability for LLM-Assisted Test Automation — Referen...
Solving integration woes with a hackathon
Ryan welcomes Meryll Blanchet, Director of Engineering for Adobe Brand Visibility, to chat about Adobe’s recent acquisition of Semrush, how Adobe Brand Visibility was born from Semrush’s AI visibility product and Adobe’s LLM Optimizer, and how Adobe used a three-day internal hackathon instead of a large-scale infrastructure integration to quickly deliver value to customers.
Episode notes:
Adobe Brand Visibility is a GEO software that helps companies improve their AI visibility, citations, and share of voice. You can preview the new product here.
Connect with Meryll on LinkedIn.
Congratulations to user patt...
Your tokenmaxxing is not valuemaxxing
Ryan is joined by Coder’s Rob Whiteley to chat about why tokenmaxxing isn’t proving real value and just triggering Goodhart’s Law, how release speed and PR merges can help you measure agentic outcomes with or without a human-in-the-loop, and what the democratization of skills means for junior developers and the talent pipeline.
Episode notes:
Coder is a self-hosted platform that lets you securely run cloud development environments and AI coding agents on your own internal infrastructure.
Connect with Rob on LinkedIn.
Today’s shoutout goes to an Unsung Hero badge...
How to be fearlessly AI native
Ryan welcomes McLaren Stanley, Senior Principal Engineer for Amazon Stores, to discuss what it actually takes to make teams AI native, why agentic engineering is shifting code bottlenecks downstream to testing and deployment, and why robust validation is essential to build trust and enable “fearless commits.”
Episode notes:
You can learn more about how Amazon’s frontier teams became AI native on the AWS blog.
Connect with McLaren on LinkedIn.
Congrats to user o11c for winning a Populist badge for answering Pythonic way to count the number of trailing zeros in base...
Your MVP doesn’t need a Kubernetes cluster
Ryan welcomes Anurag Goel, CEO and co-founder of Render, to discuss why most startups shouldn’t start by managing their Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure. They discuss how frustration with spinning up nodes at Stripes led him to build a company, a future where your application itself may allocate its own compute, and why DevOps jobs aren’t going anywhere.
Episode notes
Render calls itself the cloud for builders, intuitive infrastructure for scale.
Connect with Anurag at [email protected].
Congrats to Populist badge winner Hovercraft Full Of Eels for bringing the knowled...
What happens to the internet when robots act like humans?
Ryan welcomes WPEngine CTO Ramadass Prabakar to the show to chat about what happens—and what we should do—when agents start acting like humans online, how our internet is evolving to serve both human and agentic experiences from the same interface, and what we can do to differentiate and protect human actions online from malicious bot activity.
Episode notes:
WP Engine hosts and manages over 5 million WordPress sites, combining enterprise-grade software, developer tools, and cutting-edge AI to support your website.
Connect with Ramadass on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Congrats to user Nama o...
You need reliable AI context for your site reliability
Ryan is joined by Asaf Savich, Komodor’s AI Engineering Group Manager, to discuss why modern reliability work requires navigating massive cross-service context, what good context engineering actually likes when AI is integrated into site reliability, and how the work of human SREs is shifting towards strategy and AI agent management.
Episode notes:
Komodor is an autonomous AI SRE platform designed to troubleshoot, manage, and optimize Kubernetes-based cloud-native infrastructure.
Connect with Asaf on LinkedIn.
Congrats to Populist badge winner joemaller, who won the badge for answering Is there a Python equivalent to th...
Partnerships can keep open source sustainable
Ryan welcomes VoidZero’s Evan You and Cloudflare’s Dane Knecht back to the show to discuss Cloudflare’s recent acquisition of VoidZero and what it means for JavaScript development, how partnerships like theirs can help open-source projects stay maintained and sustainably monetized, and how Cloudflare’s distributed systems are helping to improve developer experience in Vite and beyond.
Episode notes:
VoidZero is now officially a part of Cloudflare. You can read more about the recent acquisition here.
Connect with Evan on LinkedIn and X. Check out Evan’s previous episodes on the pod for a de...
The future of development is full-stack
Live from Snowflake Summit, Ryan talks with Snowflake’s Head of Developer Experience Umesh Unnikrishnan about the industry-wide shift from “vibe coding” for quick prototypes to agentic engineering for enterprise-ready software, how enterprises can scale governance with guardrails like human-in-the-loop approval and control layers that go beyond the underlying LLM, and why Umesh predicts all developers will become someday become full-stack builders.
Episode notes:
This episode was recorded at Snowflake Summit. You can learn more about CoCo and Snowflake’s other new releases on their website.
Connect with Umesh on LinkedIn or reach out to hi...
Developers who move fast still need to do it together
At MS Build, Ryan is joined by Cassidy Williams, Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub and former Stack Overflow Podcast host, to discuss how agentic coding is shifting dev work towards higher-level strategy while increasing decision fatigue; why human taste, community feedback, and mentorship are becoming more essential than ever for developer careers; and the new GitHub Copilot announcements coming out of Microsoft, including the new GitHub Copilot app.
Episode notes:
This episode was recorded at Microsoft Build. You can learn more about what they announced at the show and what’s new at GitH...
Your AI is only as responsible as you are
Recorded at Microsoft Build, Ryan welcomes Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s Chief Product Officer for Responsible AI, about how we can build and use AI responsibly with the NIST approach, why most irresponsible AI comes from experimentation without thought of impact, and how Microsoft is researching thoughtful human/AI workflow design to reduce unnecessary escalation.
Episode notes:
This episode was recorded at Microsoft Build. Listen to our other episode recorded at Build on agentic workflows here.
Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notic...
Building more than just an agent harness
Live from Microsoft Build, Ryan is joined by Jay Parikh, Microsoft’s VP of AI Core, for a conversation on what enterprises need to build, deploy, and run AI agents at scale with demonstrable ROI; how Microsoft built an end-to-end agent development system that goes past just the harness; and how you can evaluate for reliability and correctness in models that get more intelligent and autonomous everyday.
Episode notes:
This episode was recorded at Microsoft Build. Learn more about the announcement and news from Build, including Microsoft’s new GitHub app and Foundry platform, at the Mi...
What's left for infrastructure-as-code after AI moves in?
SPONSORED BY IBM
Ryan is joined by Rosemary Wang, Developer Advocate at IBM, to explore what infrastructure as code looks like once AI starts writing and deploying it. They discuss why guardrails still lag adoption, breaks down what it means when “anyone can deploy,” and why deep systems knowledge still matters.
Episode notes:
Try out Bob, IBM’s coding agent that Rosemary talked about in the episode.
Connect with Rosemary on X, LinkedIn, or Bluesky.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and Cali...
Agent orchestration is so two-years ago
Ryan welcomes Saahil Jain, CTO of You.com, to discuss why building agents with a 2024 mindset is a mistake as modern models improve at long-horizon tasks, why heavy orchestration layers can hurt model performance more than help it, and why the 2026 competitive edge actually comes from information retrieval and unique data paired with end-to-end evaluation.
Episode notes:
You.com is an AI-powered search and productivity engine helping enterprises find information, create content, and automate complex tasks using web search APIs, multi-model AI access, and agentic intelligence.
Connect with Saahil on LinkedIn or reach out...
The good, the bad, and the AI apps
Ryan welcomes Benny Chen, co-founder of Fireworks AI, to the show to explore what actually makes an AI application good or not, how to balance qualitative signals with quantitative metrics when evaluating AI, and how open-source eval protocols and community efforts are setting the standard for AI evaluation.
Episode notes:
Fireworks AI is a cloud platform designed for developers and enterprises to run, customize, and scale open-source generative AI models.
Connect with Benny on LinkedIn.
Congrats to user techtabu for winning a Stellar Answer badge for answering How can I delete all...
