The Stack Overflow podcast is a weekly conversation about working in software development, learning to code, and the art and culture of computer programming. Hosted by Paul Ford and Ben Popper, the series features questions from our community, interviews with fascinating guests, and hot takes on what’s happening in tech. Founded in 2008, Stack Overflow is empowering the world to develop technology through collective knowledge. It’s best known for being the largest, most trusted online community for developers and technologists. More than 100 million people come to Stack Overflow every month to ask questions, help solve coding problems, and develop new skills.
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Featuring an ongoing panel of racially and gender diverse tech panelists, the majority of podcast guests so far have been women in tech! We’ve covered topics including imposter syndrome, mental illness, sexuality, unconscious bias and social justice. We also have a major focus on skill sets that tech too often devalues, like team-building, hiring, community organizing, mentorship and empathy. Each episode also includes a transcript.
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Netlify CEO Matt Biilmann explains what we'll see with UI 2.0
Biilmann says we can't ignore the impact GenAI is having on developer productivity. One of their engineers created a GPT that automatically generates stories for React + TypeScript components, and after seeing how successful it was internally, Netlify made it open source for the public.We also chat over the results of their recent State of Web Development survey. The key takeaway is below: The 80% of developers that have integrated AI into their workflow are quickly reaping the benefits. Seventy percent report using AI to automate manual and repetitive tasks and 42% are using it to improve internal knowledge sharing and increase productivity, freeing up more time for impactful work and enabling faster launch times. Over 50% of developers also realized new opportunities that AI created, such as generating new web projects with a single prompt or reading API documentation.However, AI experimentation is not without its own unique challenges. Developers are concerned about receiving incorrect answers and information (65%), security issues and leaking confidential information (52%), a lack of regulation (48%), and a decrease in code quality (45%).So much opportunity, but plenty of risk as well. Last but not least, Biilmann tells us what he's looking forward to in the near future, specifically apps that can reformat their UI on the fly to be more customized to each user. He calls this UI 2.0, and it sounds a bit like what Google showed off in its recent Gemini demo. Congrats to our lifeboat winner of the week, Petrus Theron, who answered the question: How can I make a public struct where all fields are public without repeating `pub` for every field?
From prompt attacks to data leaks, LLMs offer new capabilities and new threats
SPONSORED BY DOITThe broken nose in jail scam is on the rise. With AI improvements, it’ll get harder to spot. OWASP, a non-profit dedicated to software security, tracks the top ten security risks for LLMs.We’ve spoken with DoIT on the podcast before about LLM hallucinations. DoIT’s sales pitch is simple: they provide technology and expertise to clients who want to use the cloud, free of charge, with the big cloud providers paying the bills.
A tax change is hurting startups and developers
On today’s home team episode, Ben and Ryan discuss the implications of a lapse in section 174 of the tax code. Here’s a great explainer on how it’s affecting startups and software firms, threatening jobs and potentially bankrupting some struggling companies. Video game employees are exploring a union and Microsoft recently announced it will stay neutral in the process. What’s the difference between a bad game, a low effort developer, and shovelware? Our game development Stack Exchange has some thoughts.Today’s lifeboat badge winner is “that_other_guy”, who explained: What is the difference between kill and kill -9? Hint, you want to terminate your process, not brutally murder it, ok!
Can an AI get depressed?
Does ChatGPT have seasonal depression?AIs aren’t building apps on their own, at least not yet—but they are helping developers build them. Read Isaac Lyman’s article about the three types of AI-assisted programmers.ICYMI: Listen to our interview with linguist Gašper Beguš, director of the Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, about how LLMs and humans acquire language. Shoutout to Stack Overflow user nhgrif, who earned a Lifeboat badge by rescuing Store only date without time in a database from the ash heap of history.
Bringing context to alerting and incident management
SPONSORED BY FIREHYDRANTWhile FireHydrant is mostly known for their incident management software, they’re introducing Signals to modernize alerting and consolidate it with incident management. FireHydrant was born out of an incident where a database was dropped at 5:30pm on a Friday right before network maintenance started. It also led to Robert’s social media handle, Bobby Tables. This one time…at band camp…Robert got paged in the middle of trumpet practice…on his sabbatical.Congrats to Great Question badge winner timdim for asking How can I flush GPU memory using CUDA (physical reset is unavailable)?. 100 people thought it was worth voting for.
What Gemini means for the GenAI boom
Gemini, Google’s new AI model, is great at competitive programming, among other things.AI Explained is a YouTube channel that covers the latest developments in AI.One problem with regulating AI is that the technology evolves (much) faster than regulators can.Wikifunctions is an open repository of code that anyone can use or contribute to.Did we need another study to tell us that longer commutes are bad for mental health? Probably not, but here’s one anyway.Are governments spying on you through push notifications? Sounds like it! In fact, push notifications are a privacy nightmare.
One weird trick for teaching users your software
CommandBar is a user assistance platform (UAP). Their flagship product, Copilot, is an embedded user assistant agent that companies can configure to help their users with on-demand help, including interactive walkthroughs and personalized responses. Read James’s article about why CommandBar built Copilot, then get started with their docs.Follow James on LinkedIn and Twitter.Follow CommandBar on LinkedIn and Twitter.If you’ve ever wondered Why "Yarn 2" is Yarn 3.0.1, Lifeboat badge winner Ilias Karim has your answer.
Are LLMs the end of computer programming (as we know it)?
Do LLMs herald the end of computer programming (as we know it)? A Harvard lecture weighs in on this contentious topic.An epic hardware bug story.Question from the academic trenches: How bad will it look to prospective employers if you refuse to defend your PhD? (Answer: Pretty bad.)Another intriguing question: Were postal pneumatic tubes in Berlin really cleaned with wine?The Jetsons misled us about many aspects of the future, from flying cars to the role of pneumatics, but they were onto something with the series of tubes.Before influencers and social media algorithms, there were coolhunters.Congrats to Stack Overflow user tjati, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering What does 'HTML is escaping' mean?.
Will developers return to hostile offices?
As the year winds to a close, some big employers are facing lower-than-expected attrition rates—in other words, fewer people than expected are quitting. What a difference a year or two makes.People have strong opinions on the return-to-office conversation. Read Eira’s article and let us know how you feel.We are just beginning to explore the effects of prompting on the capabilities and performance of LLMs.The Humane AI pin can be described as a cross between two of humanity’s most beloved technologies: Google Glass and the pager.People are using low-cost drones, 3D printers, and private satellites to preserve irreplaceable cultural heritage sites before they are destroyed or lost to time. (Stay tuned while Eira figures out how to apply this tech as a cemetery tour guide.)Stack Overflow user FlipperPA earned a Lifeboat badge with their answer to The 'Black' formatter - Python.
Can GenAI 10X developer productivity?
Bito AI is an AI coding tool that helps developers work more productively with features like code completion within the IDE and personalized answers drawn from your codebase. Get started with their docs here.ICYMI: Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is a way of addressing LLM hallucinations and outdated training data.Listen to our recent episode about how an original architect of Jira is rethinking meaningful engineering metrics.Connect with Anand on LinkedIn or Twitter.com. Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Jan Kardaš, whose answer to Go: Retrieve a string from between two characters or other strings earned them a Lifeboat badge.
Cloudflare Workers have a new skill: AI inference-as-a-service
Cloudflare is a cloud provider used by almost 20% of all websites. Developers new to Cloudflare can get started here.Cloudflare recently launched Workers AI, an open, pay-as-you-go AI inference-as-a-service platform that lets developers run machine learning models on the Cloudflare network from their own code. Developers can get started here.On a related note, read Ryan’s article exploring the infrastructure and code behind edge functions or check out his conversation with Vercel CTO Malte Ubl.Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is a strategy that helps address both LLM hallucinations and out-of-date training data.Connect with Rita on LinkedIn.Connect with Cassidy through her website.Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Bamieh, whose answer to What does the function call app.use(cors()) do? earned them a Lifeboat badge.
The AI assistant trained on your company’s data
Sana automates user enrollment, training reminders, and other manual/admin tasks associated with onboarding and learning. Sana AI, their AI assistant, is trained on a company’s data so employees can self-serve the knowledge they need.On a related note, listen to our interview with Gašper Beguš, director of the Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, about his research into how LLMs and humans acquire language.You can also read about how Stack Overflow implemented semantic search.Connect with Joel on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user Donagh Hatton received a well-earned Lifeboat badge with their answer to Why is StringBuilder much faster than String?.
Build vs. buy doesn't matter. Tool adoption does.
SPONSORED BY CHRONOSPHEREEpisode notes:Chronosphere is introducing Lens, a cloud-native observability tool to view data flows between services. At Uber, Rob created M3, an open-source metrics engine compatible with Prometheus. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, ralf htp, for their answer to How to read an image in Python OpenCV. If you want to meet Rob and the Chronosphere team, they’ll be at AWS re:Invent from Nov. 27 to Dec. 1.
Trust as a service for validating OSS dependencies
ICYMI, listen to part one of this conversation.Craig is the cofounder and CEO of Stacklok, which helps developers and open-source communities build safer software, secure the supply chain, and choose safer dependencies. Stacklok’s free-to-use service, Trusty, employs a statistical analysis of author/repo activity and a package’s source of origin to assess its trustworthiness.Craig cofounded the Kubernetes project, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.Craig is on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user mprivat earned a well-deserved Lifeboat badge by answering Abstract class extending concrete classes.
How the cocreator of Kubernetes is helping developers build safer software
Stacklok helps developers and open-source communities build safer software, secure the supply chain, and choose safer dependencies. Trusty is their free-to-use service that employs a statistical analysis of author/repo activity and a package’s source of origin to assess its trustworthiness.Craig cofounded the Kubernetes project, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.He is also the former VP of Research and Development at VMWare.Follow Craig on LinkedIn.Congrats to Stack Overflow user netcorefan, who earned a Lifeboat badge with their answer to Need a workaround to access ReadOnlySpan inside a function that returns an IEnumerable.