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.
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...
How do you turn AI coding chaos into a repeatable playbook?
Vivek Raghunathan, SVP of engineering at Snowflake, joins Leaders of Code at Snowflake Summit to break down the five-stage framework his org used to go from "let chaos reign" to a repeatable, org-wide system for AI-assisted engineering.
Vivek explains how Snowflake systematically rolled out coding agents across its engineering org — starting with unrestricted experimentation, then codifying what worked into a shared vocabulary of 14 "AI design patterns," from plan-in-English to fencing off parallel agents to reducing on-call toil through continuously updated skills. Vivek walks through the "inner loop" and "outer loop" of software development, explains Snowflake's internal Yegge sc...
Why intent prediction needs more than an LLM
Ryan sits down with Frank Portman, CTO at Yobi, to talk about why next-token prediction, though great for language, isn’t the right inductive bias for forecasting human behavior. They discuss how Yobi builds a “foundation model of behavior” using transformers and graph neural networks instead of chat-style LLMs, and what it takes to run millions of personalization decisions per second while keeping consumer data private.
Episode notes:
Yobi is a behavioral AI company building foundation models that predict future behavior for ad tech, marketing, and more.
Connect with Frank via fportman.com or at...
Code isn’t the only thing causing your production failures
Ryan sits down with Anish Agarwal, CEO and co-founder of Traversal, to chat about why AI coding agents have made writing code easier but running it safely in production harder, why production failures are really caused by interactions between systems and not just the code itself, and how teams can troubleshoot more effectively when traditional observability tools are not enough for agentic AI workflows.
Episode notes:
Traversal is an AI-powered autonomous SRE for complex software systems with automatic triage alerts, root cause investigation, and incident prevention at petabyte scale.
Connect with Anish on Li...
Oh the places you’ll go with spatial data
Ryan is joined by Jeffrey Hightower, VP of Places Data at Microsoft, and Amy Rose, CTO of the Overture Maps Foundation, to chat about their partnership in bringing spatial data to the next generation of Microsoft tools; how Overture’s 50 organization members are creating open, standardized, and interoperable global spatial data sets; and their solutions to the innate challenges of trying to digitally map the world.
Episode notes:
The Overture Maps Foundation is a free, open, and collaborative spatial data platform creating reliable and interoperable map data infrastructure. Microsoft is a founding member and part of Overt...
You don’t understand DNS like you think you do
Ryan welcomes Cricket Liu, DNS expert and Chief Evangelist at Infoblox, to the show to talk all things DNS. They cover the evolution of one of the oldest DNS server implementations, BIND, and what the future holds for protected DNS configurations; the realities of security threats like DDoS and DNS spoofing; and why outages often trace back to a lack of understanding of DNS’s fundamental role.
Episode notes:
Infoblox is a cloud-managed network services platform for core networking, combining automated infrastructure management and real-time threat intelligence.
You think this is a lot abo...
If context is king, architecture is the castle
Recorded live at the AI Agent Conference, Ryan sits down with Apollo GraphQL CEO Matt DeBerglis to discuss how enterprises can leverage GraphQL and MCP as a structured semantic architecture to feed clean data to autonomous agents, safeguard internal microservices against unprecedented "east-west" data exfiltration risks, and rein in skyrocketing token spend by explicitly querying only the exact context required.
Episode notes:
Apollo GraphQL lets you orchestrate APIs with a composable, declarative, self-service model. Apollo's MCP Server is now available.
Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.c...
Developers are emotionally attached to their tools
Ryan welcomes Trisha Gee, a Java champion and developer productivity advocate, to explore how AI is transforming the role of IDEs and the broader developer experience; the relevance of traditional tools, muscle memory, the risks of hype; and how to adapt workflows for AI-driven development.
Episode notes:
Trisha Gee is a developer advocate and Java champion with over 20 years of software experience.
Connect with Trisha on LinkedIn and X.
Congrats to user citelao for winning a Famous Question Badge for their question VS Code SSH keeps dropping connections, but I can S...
When the cost of code approaches zero, what does engineering leadership look like?
On this episode of Leaders of Code, Eric Anderson, director of engineering at Intuit, joins Stack Overflow engineering director Ben Matthews to talk about what happens to software teams when AI makes code generation seemingly free.
Eric explains how Intuit rolled out Claude Code across the entire organization, why PMs are now merging their own PRs, and what it means for engineering culture when product/engineering roles start to converge. Eric and Ben unpack the engineering skills that matter most in an AI-first industry and why the work of developing junior talent has gotten harder.
...
Creating checkpoints by gaslighting a Postgres database
Ryan welcomes Bryan Clark, director of product for Lakebase at Databricks, to discuss what happens when AI agents become the primary creators and users of databases; why agents are “sloppy” about cleaning up infrastructure; and how database branching, scale-to-zero, and centralized access control can help teams keep up with agent-driven development.
Episode notes:
Databricks Lakebase is a Postgres-compatible operational database built around fast branching, separated compute and storage, and tight integration with the Databricks lakehouse.
Connect with Bryan on LinkedIn and X.
Congrats to Populist badge winner Benjamin Merchin for earning the...
Making the OWASP top ten in the vibe code era
Ryan welcomes back Tanya Janca, now part of the OWASP Top 10 team, to discuss what changed in the latest OWASP Top 10 release, how the list shifted from “outdated components” to a broader software supply chain focus, and why they added memory safety and vibe-coding as awareness items.
Episode notes:
The OWASP Top 10 for 2025 is the latest standard awareness document for developers and web application security that represents a broad consensus about the most critical security risks to web applications.
Learn more about Tanya’s work at her website and her new podcast DevSec Station...
What it takes to be a player in the international AI game
From the floor of HumanX, Ryan welcomes Songyee Yoon, managing partner at Principal Venture Partners (PVP), to chat about AI development outside the US, from the need to adapt models to local languages and culture to the challenges of the global supply-chain for things like semiconductors to how venture capital is looking at international AI companies.
Episode notes:
PVP supports early stage, AI-native companies shaping the future of how we live and work. Learn more about their work at their Substack.
Connect with Songyee on LinkedIn.
TRANSCRIPT
See Privacy Pol...
The find out stage of AI is just supply chain and password protection
In this two-for-one special recorded at HumanX, Ryan is joined by Dataiku’s Florian Douetteau to chat about the governance, orchestration, and data requirements for serious agentic systems and 1Password’s Nancy Wang for a conversation on making agent swarms secure.
Ryan first catches up with Dataiku co-founder and CEO Florian Douettea to chat serious agentic systems and why they require intentional frameworks, orchestration, governance, and reusable, documented data products. Then, 1Password’s CTO Nancy Wang returns to the show to discuss why current identity standards don’t fit the new world of agents, especially when ephemeral agent sw...
Do you have what it takes to run AI in production?
From the floor of HumanX, Ryan Donovan is joined by Peter Salanki, CTO and co-founder of CoreWeave, to chat about what it really takes to run AI in production; the growing importance of observability, utilization, and scheduling; and Peter’s advice for avoiding the trap of over-architecting too early.
Episode note:
CoreWeave is the AI-native platform cloud that’s purpose-built for AI, combining next-generation infrastructure and intelligent tools to power the world’s most complex AI workloads.
Connect with Peter on X.
TRANSCRIPT
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/priv...
Breaking your AI storage bottlenecks
Recorded at HumanX, Ryan sits down with Garima Kapoor and Anand Babu Periasamy, co-founders and co-CEOs of MinIO, to chat about eliminating the storage bottlenecks that leave GPUs underutilized, their partnership with NVIDIA on the new STX reference architecture, and why modern AI infrastructure is converging on S3-compatible object storage.
Episode notes:
MinIO delivers exascale performance, unifying enterprise data across edge, core, and cloud environments. Reach out to them at hello@min.io.
Connect with Garima on LinkedIn.
Connect with AB on LinkedIn.
See Privacy Policy at https://art1...
Pack your agentic stack in Slack
SPONSORED BY SLACK BY SALESFORCE
Ryan welcomes Jaime DeLanghe, chief product officer at Slack, to chat about how they’re preparing to integrate everybody’s agents in their chat application. They chat about the similarities between bots and agents, managing the wealth of context available in enterprise chat, and how the best agent to agent protocols might be a DM.
Episode notes:
Get started with building agents on Slack with their developer site.
Today is Slack’s Dev Day! Tune into the livestream for info on integrating agents into Slack.
Congra...
Your fridge could be a threat to national security
On the floor of HumanX, Ryan is joined by Adam Meyers, Senior VP of Counter Adversary Operations at Crowdstrike, for a deep dive on their latest Global Threat Report that tracks over 281 adversaries across nation states, e-crime, and hacktivist organizations. They discuss the new wave of phishing attacks that target identity and use social engineering, how foreign bodies are exploiting security flaws to get your information, and how you can protect yourself from attacks as AI makes both defenders and attackers smarter at what they do.
Episode notes:
Crowdstrike’s latest Global Threat Report tracks 281 known...
Observability and human intuition in an AI world
In this two for one episode recorded at HumanX, Ryan is first joined by Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb, to discuss how AI compresses the software development lifecycle, making observability about capturing the right telemetry. Then, Spiros Xanthos, founder and CEO of Resolve AI, shares with us how AI coding increases code volume but decreases human intuition, making production operations harder than ever.
Episode notes:
Honeycomb is an observability platform that enables deep, high-dimensional exploration so you can debug unpredictable behavior with precision.
Resolve AI allows you to resolve incidents, optimize costs, and cod...
How Braze’s CTO is rethinking engineering for the agentic area
Jon Hyman, co-founder and CTO of Braze, joins Stack Overflow CPTO Jody Bailey on Leaders of Code to share how he's led the company's engineering organization over nearly 15 years of growth — and how they transformed into an AI-first team in just a few months.
Jon explains some pivotal moments where his thinking shifted (watching his team ship an MCP server six weeks ahead of schedule will do that!) and talks candidly about the cultural and practical challenges of driving adoption across a 300-person engineering org. He explains how model quality, not mandates, was the key factor in wi...
Connecting the dots for accurate AI
At HumanX, Ryan is joined by Philip Rathle, CTO at Neo4j to discuss what knowledge context means for AI agents, how limitations like stale training data make the model-only approach to agents a bad fit for enterprise environments, and how Graph RAG raises the bar for accuracy and reduces context rot by combining vectors with a knowledge graph so agents are more targeted and connected.
Episode notes:
Neo4j is a native graph database management system designed to handle complex, highly-connected data by focusing on relationships rather than tables. You can try it out...
AI giveth and AI taketh CPU
Recorded on the floor of HumanX, Ryan is joined by AMD CTO Mark Papermaster to discuss AMD’s silicon strategy for AI borne of their long history of heterogeneous CPU/GPU computing, how chipmakers are dealing the wide range of AI workloads from training to inference, and the paradox of agents both eating up all the compute and helping AMD accelerate chip innovation.
Episode notes:
Want to learn more about the topics Mark and Ryan discussed in this episode? Check out the AMD Advanced Insights podcast, a monthly show hosted by Mark.
Connect with...
What (un)exactly do you mean by semantic search?
Ryan welcomes Bryan O’Grady, Head of Field Research and Solutions Architecture at Qdrant, to discuss the differences between traditional text search engines powered by Lucene and modern vector databases, when vector search’s exact-match needs work for things like logs and security analytics and when semantic search works for user-facing discovery and non-exact results, and how Qdrant is growing into video embeddings and local-agent contexts.
Episode notes:
Qdrant offers high-performance vector search at scale with any deployment model.
Connect with Brian on LinkedIn or email the Qdrant team at support@qdrant.io.
Co...
Time is a construct but it can still break your software
Ryan welcomes Jason Williams, senior software engineer at Bloomberg and the creator of Rust-based JavaScript engine Boa, to the show to dive into why date and time handling in JavaScript is so difficult and how the Temporal proposal aims to fix it. They explore the current flaws and issues in JavaScript that make the Date object so hard to work with, how libraries like Moment.js helped but eventually became too complex themselves, and why the Temporal proposal took nine years to complete.
Episode notes:
Temporal is a new TC39 proposed standard for JavaScript that re...
Your LLM issues are really data issues
Ryan welcomes Harsha Chintalapani, co-founder and CTO at Collate and co-creator of Open Metadata, to the show to discuss why AI and LLMs struggle with real-time, structured production data. They explore how schema changes, inconsistent definitions (like “customer”), and weak governance can break both your analytics and MLs, and what companies can do to get their data AI-ready, from metadata management to observability.
Episode Notes:
Collate is a semantic intelligence platform built on a semantic metadata graph for discovery, governance, and AI observability across your data ecosystem.
Connect with Harsha on LinkedIn.
Congr...
Lights, camera, open source!
Ryan is joined on the show by Cult.Repo producers Emma Tracey and Josiah Mcgarvie to discuss making documentaries about open-source software and the people behind the major technologies that uphold the internet. They explore why open-source projects and the people who maintain them are such interesting stories for audiences, how being outsiders has helped them tell these community stories, and what they see as the common stressors that plague all open-source projects, such as sustainability, compensation, and burnout.
Episode notes:
Cult.Repo produces documentaries and shorts about the human stories behind open-source technology. Check ou...
How to get multiple agents to play nice at scale
SPONSORED BY INTUIT
Chase Roossin, group engineering manager, and Steven Kulesza, staff software engineer, from Intuit join the podcast to chat about what might be the hardest problem in engineering right now: getting multiple AI agents to work together in a complex system. They discuss how automated evals can make agent behaviors more predictable, agent swarms vs. one highly skilled agent, and how customer behavior shaped their technical architecture.
Episode notes
Want to work on complex engineering problems like these? Explore careers at Intuit.
We’ve worked with Intuit on a few...
We still need developer communities
Ryan welcomes Mike Swift, co-founder and CEO of Major League Hacking, to the show to chat about the never-ending need for software developer communities and entry points into programming; MLH’s recent acquisition of DEV and how they’re creating a place for shared knowledge, building, and publishing; and why now is the best time to be both an artisan and a builder in a world with AI software development tools.
Episode notes:
Major League Hacking is a 500k+ global member community that hosts hackathons and open-source fellowships for the next generation of developers. They recen...
No country left behind with sovereign AI
Ryan welcomes Stephen Watt, distinguished engineer and VP of Red Hat’s Office of the CTO, to chat about digital sovereignty and sovereign AI. They explore major infrastructure constraints for things like power, cooling, and scarce hardware that cause the regional disparities we see in sovereign AI, plus why we need to extend Kubernetes and integrate PyTorch Stack not just for a sovereign cloud but for sovereign AI.
Episode notes:
Red Hat’s Office of the CTO is a division of 150 software engineers and researchers working on their Research and Emerging Technologies arms, helping to shape t...
Who needs VCs when you have friends like these?
Ryan welcomes RunPod co-founder and CEO Zhen Lu to discuss circumventing VC money by going straight to your community for funding, how Zhen balances founder intuition with user feedback when the community is the one backing the project, and RunPod’s journey from basement servers to global infrastructure partnerships with a software-layer approach and data-first paradigm.
Episode notes:
RunPod is an end-to-end AI cloud that provides developers with GPUs so they can build and run custom AI systems that scale.
Connect with Zhen on LinkedIn or email him at zhenlu@runpod.io.
Tod...
The messy truth of your AI strategies
Ryan welcomes Hema Raghavan, co-founder and head of engineering at Kumo.ai, to dive into all the messy stuff that comes with implementing AI, from pipeline sprawl to shadow AI. They discuss governance approaches like deploying models inside approved platforms and routing calls through monitored gateways, and how broken pipelines from complex feature-engineering motivated Kumo.ai’s approach of using a single foundation model with on-the-fly database queries.
Episode notes:
Kumo.ai allows you to train and run state-of-the-art AI models on your relational data, allowing you to make predictions about your users and transactions in s...
He designed C++ to solve your code problems
Ryan welcomes Bjarne Stroustrup, designer of C++ and professor at Columbia, to the show to dive into all things C++, from its history to where it's going today. They discuss its first emergence as a way to bridge high-level abstractions with low-level systems control, the criticisms some have around memory safety and null pointers (and how to solve these problems in your code), and why “move to Rust” thinking is too simplistic for modern codebases.
Episode notes:
Keep up with everything happening with C++ at the Standard C++ Foundation’s website.
Connect with Bjarne on...
Seizing the means of messenger production
Ryan sits down with Galen Wolfe-Pauly, CEO of Tlon, to chat about calm computing and how humans can take back ownership of their data and digital world. They discuss the early internet’s evolution from individual creativity into today’s internet that turns users into products, Galen’s takeaways from building a new network architecture that prioritizes user control, and why messenger applications are ripe for decentralization.
Episode notes:
Tlon is releasing a decentralized messenger app that gives you ownership of your data, built on Urbit, a complete, wholly encapsulated system that allows you to run a p...
How can you test your code when you don’t know what’s in it?
Ryan hosts SmartBear’s VP of AI and Architecture Fitz Nowlan to explore how we’re moving away from old assumptions about software development, the challenges of testing MCP servers as LLM-driven agents introduce non-determinism that breaks tradition, and how data locality and data construction are becoming more valuable when source code is so easy to generate.
Episode notes:
SmartBear gives devs tools for application performance monitoring, software development, software testing, and API management—all at AI speed and scale.
Connect with Fitz on LinkedIn and email him at FitzNowlan@SmartBear.com
Congra...
Prevent agentic identity theft
Ryan is joined by Nancy Wang, CTO of 1Password, to discuss the security challenges local agents present, how enterprises can create robust governance of credentials through zero-knowledge architecture, and the implications of agent intent and misuse in a world where AI agents are becoming more and more integrated into everyday applications.
Episode notes:
1Password keeps your credentials secure through end-to-end encryption, zero-knowledge architecture, and more. Read their latest white paper on security design.
Connect with Nancy on LinkedIn or email her at nancy.wang@1password.com.
Congratulations to user Binita Bharati for...
Multi-stage attacks are the Final Fantasy bosses of security
Ryan welcomes Gee Rittenhouse, VP of Security at AWS, to the show to discuss the complexities of multi-stage attacks in cybersecurity and how these attacks unfold, the challenges in detecting them, and the evolving role of AI in both enhancing security and creating new vulnerabilities.
Episode notes:
AWS Security Hub is expanding to unify your cloud security options. Learn more about how AWS is keeping your cloud safe on their website.
Connect with Gee on LinkedIn.
Shoutout to user James Kanze for winning a Populist badge for their answer to The spir...
