The Stack Overflow Podcast

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...

Ryan sits down with Shireesh Thota, CVP of Azure Databases at Microsoft, to discuss the evolution of databases at Microsoft; Azure’s comprehensive portfolio that includes SQL Server, CosmosDB, and Postgres; and the challenges that come with database architecture, from the importance of cost governance and multi-cloud strategies to the future of databases when it comes to AI. Episode notes:  Y...

Recorded last December at AWS re:Invent, Ryan welcomes CEO and co-founder of Deepgram, Scott Stephenson, for a conversation on advancing voice AI technology. They cover how Deepgram is improving speech-to-text and text-to-speech capabilities using deep learning to take on challenges posed by dialects and noisy environments and the moral and ethical considerations voice AI companies have to make wh...

Ryan is joined by Professor Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton University’s AI Lab, to dive into findings from his new book The Laws of Thought , which explores the history of the philosophy, mathematics, and logic that underlie artificial intelligence, and scientists' efforts to describe our minds using mathematics. They discuss the challenges of understanding human cognition, the implications...

We have another two-for-one special this week, with two more interviews from the floor of re:Invent. First, Ryan welcomes Pathway CEO Zuzanna Stamirowska and CCO Victor Szczerba to dive into their development of Baby Dragon Hatchling, the first post-transformer frontier model, from how continual learning and memory will transform AI to the real-world use cases for longer LLM attention span. ...

Two guests for the price of one! This episode has two interviews recorded at AWS re:Invent back in December. In part 1, Ryan chats with the co-founder and CEO of Inception, Stefano Ermon, about diffusion language models and how their multiple token generation compares to traditional LLMs (spoiler: they’re faster and more accurate). In the second half of the episode, Ryan and the chairman of Roomie...

Ryan is joined by Chris Coyier, founder of CSS Tricks and CodePen, to talk all about what the state of the art of CSS is today, including new features like variables and scroll-driven animations. They talk about the importance of accessibility in web design, how the web went from table-based layouts to modern CSS techniques, and exciting developments coming to CodePen 2.0. Episode notes: Chris bui...

Ryan welcomes Anthony Vinci, former senior intelligence officer and author of The Fourth Intelligence Revolution , to explore AI’s evolving role in intelligence in places like translation and image analysis, the challenges of evolving modern tech into government infrastructure, and the importance of democratized intelligence so citizens can keep themselves and loved ones safe. Episode notes: The F...

Ryan sits down with Michael Parker, VP of Engineering at TurinTech to discuss the newest kind of tech debt—AI-generated tech debt. They dive into the uneven productivity results of AI tools, how tech teams are evolving their roles and work in response to these massive technological shifts, and what the nervous developer can do to maintain joy in their work.  Episode notes:  Founded by co...

Ryan welcomes Prakash Chandran, CEO and co-founder of Xano, to the show to discuss the intricate relationship between frontend and backend development, the potential challenges that universal frontend interfaces pose for developers, and the importance of understanding both your frontend and your backend when using AI code.  Episode notes:  Xano is a no-code backend platform that lets you...

From the floor at AWS re:Invent, Ryan is joined by AWS Senior Principal Engineer David Yanacek to chat about all things AWS, from the truth behind AWS’s Black Friday origin mythos to the development of essential cloud tools like SQS and DynamoDB. Plus, how David envisions autonomous agents will ease developers' operational burdens. Episode notes: This episode was recorded live at AWS re:Invent . L...

In this episode of Leaders of Code, Stack Overflow Chief of Product and Technology Jody Bailey chats with Matt Lyteson, CIO of Technology Platform Transformation at IBM, about the processes and challenges of adopting AI within an enterprise environment. They explore IBM's strategic approach to integrating AI into workflows and emphasise the importance of fostering the right behaviours among employ...

Ryan welcomes back the mighty Scott Hanselman, VP of Developer Community at Microsoft, for a crossover episode about all things vibe coding. They cover the ways it can really improve the software development lifecycle, the importance of keeping human judgement in software so developers can truly understand their code, and how AI can be leveraged as a learning tool…like when Scott vibe coded a simp...

Ryan is joined by Vanessa Lee, VP of Product at Shopify, to discuss how AI is a tech renaissance and how these new technologies are affecting the ecommerce world. They cover the development of Sidekick, their new tool, along with the general challenges of building AI tools, the importance of maintaining human oversight in AI, and what the future holds for personalized user experiences in ecommerce...

SPONSORED BY MONGODB Pete Johnson, Field CTO, Artificial Intelligence at MongoDB, joins the podcast to talk about a recent OpenAI paper on the impact that AI will have on jobs and overall GDP. Pete, who reads the papers (and datasets) so you don’t have to, says that looking at AI’s impact as a job killer is a flawed metric. Instead, he and Ryan talk about how AI will be a collaborator for actual h...

Ryan hosts Akamai data scientist Robert Lester on the show to discuss how the growth of AI bots affects internet traffic, the ways these AI bots differ from the original search engine optimization ones, and why you might not want to mitigate AI bots on your websites. Episode notes: Akamai is a CDN, full-stack cloud computing, and cybersecurity company that keeps experiences closer to users and thr...

Ryan sits down with Tom Totenberg, head of release automation at LaunchDarkly, to discuss the perils of taking too many shortcuts in software development, how business pressures and AI code tools have contributed to dangerous corner cutting, and the importance of balancing speed with sustainability to maintain system integrity.  Episode notes:  LaunchDarkly is a feature management and ex...

MIT and Stanford professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland joins the show to explore the power of communities for shared knowledge and how AI could hurt or help the growth of these communities. Ryan and Sandy dive into the findings from Sandy’s new book Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI , the ethical implications of rapidly advancing technology, and AI’s potential to foster community dialog...

Ryan sits down with Dan Ciruli, VP and General Manager of Cloud Native at Nutanix, to talk about getting your virtual machines and Kubernetes to play nice in cloud-native environments, why VMs are still relevant in enterprise applications, and how AI can help modernize legacy systems.  Episode notes:  Nutanix combines compute, storage, virtualization, and networking so you can run applic...

Ryan welcomes Anil Dash, writer and former Stack Overflow board member, back to the show to discuss how AI is not a magical technology, but rather the normal next step in computing’s evolution. They explore the importance of democratizing access to technology, the unique challenges that LLMs’ non-determinism poses, and how developers can keep Stack Overflow’s ethos of community alive in a world of...

Ryan sits down with Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill, at AWS re:Invent to get Corey’s patented snarky take on all the happenings from the conference. They discuss whether the AI agent hype is supported by actual buyers, how startups are faring as AWS focuses on large enterprises, and how many of the new technologies coming out this year will actually be transformative.  Episode...