The Stack Overflow Podcast

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 ever...

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 th...

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...

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 e...

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 w...

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 keepin...

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 work...

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 digi...

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.&nbs...

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 co...

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 experienc...

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 pr...

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...

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 ap...

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...

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 intentiona...

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, combin...

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 perfo...

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 w...

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 f...

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 t...

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!...

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 note...

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...

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 in...