The Stack Overflow Podcast

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 eventua...

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 manage...

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 wh...

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 ho...

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 develo...

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...

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: ...

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 usin...

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 Ru...

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 a...

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...

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 sec...

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...

Ryan is joined by Stefan Weitz, CEO and co-founder of the HumanX Conference, for a conversation on how AI has evolved in the last year. They discuss whether “the year of the agent” came to fruition, why companies are moving away from AGI, and the major blockers for AI adoption, from distrust in non-deterministic systems to enterprise data-readiness.  Episode notes:   HumanX 2026 , one of...

In this episode of Leaders of Code, Stack Overflow’s Chief of Product and Technology, Jody Bailey, sits down with Dana Lawson, CTO at Netlify. Dana shares her insights on leading a lean, globally distributed engineering team that powers 5% of the internet. The conversation touches on the realities of remote work, the importance of maintaining a written culture, and why Dana believes AI and agents...

Ryan sits down with Chainguard CEO Dan Lorenc to chat about how his team is keeping the foundation of the internet—open source projects—alive by forking archived but widely-used repos to provide security maintenance and dependency upgrades. They also discuss open source’s sustainability problems when it comes to funding, security, and maintainer burnout, and how trusted stewardship can reduce risk...

Ryan is joined by Jan Liphardt,  CEO and co-founder of OpenMind, to chat about the rapidly evolving world of humanoid robotics and what it means for humans, why OpenMind is building an open source operating system for robots that processes logic in natural language, and how putting Asimov’s Laws on the blockchain might be the key to robotics guardrails. Episode notes:  OpenMind ’s OM1 is an o...

Ryan welcomes Kari Briski, NVIDIA’s VP of Generative AI Software for Enterprise, to the show to explore how a chip manufacturer got into the model development game. They discuss NVIDIA’s co-design feedback loop between model builders and hardware architects, share insights on precision model training and memory management systems, and take a look at the roadmap and development of NVIDIA’s fully op...

Ryan chats with Kevin Peterson, CTO of Bedrock Robotics, about the evolution of self-driving technology and why robotics is now advancing; how real data is still relevant but simulation becomes essential for scale; and the future of robotics in addressing labor shortages and enhancing productivity. Episode notes: Bedrock Robotics creates technology that upgrades existing heavy equipment, enabling...

SPONSORED BY DOCKER In this sponsored episode, Ryan chats with Mark Cavage, President and COO of Docker, joins the show to dive into hardened containers and agent sandboxes. They discuss what it means for a container to be hardened, how agents are starting to look a lot like microservices, and where containers fit into agentic workflows now and in the future.  Episode notes Docker Hardened Im...

Ryan sits down with Member of the Technical Staff at Anthropic and Model Context Protocol co-creator David Soria Parra to talk the evolution of MCP from local-only to remote connectivity, how security and privacy fit into their work with OAuth2 for authentication and authorization, and how they’re keeping MCP completely open-source and widely available by moving it to the Linux Foundation.  E...

Ryan welcomes Marcus Fontoura, technical fellow at Microsoft and author of Human Agency in the Digital World , to discuss the intersection of technology, society, and human dignity in a digital-first world. They chat about the non-determinism of social media algorithms, the need for balance between efficiency and human dignity in technology, and the role that trust plays in AI. Episode notes:&nbsp...

Ryan welcomes Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI’s engineering lead on Codex, to discuss how the Codex team dogfoods Codex to build Codex, what distinguishes an agentic coding tool from a chat-based code assistant, and why they’re focusing on a safe and secure agentic SDLC rather than just code generation. Episode notes:  Codex CLI is a coding agent from OpenAI that runs locally on your computer. Try...

Ryan is joined by Philippe Saade, the AI project lead at Wikimedia Deutschland, to dive into the Wikidata Embedding Project and how their team vectorized 30 million of Wikidata’s 119 million entries for semantic search. They discuss how this project helped offload the burden that scraping was creating for their sites, what Wikimedia. DE is doing to maintain data integrity for their entries, and th...

In this episode of Leaders of Code, Stack Overflow’s Janice Manningham and Josh Zhang sit down with Cloudflare VP Will Allen to discuss the innovative pay-per-crawl model co-launched by their organizations. They explore how the rise of AI has disrupted the traditional “open versus block” internet model, creating a need for platforms to protect their content and data from commercial exploitation wh...