The Stack Overflow Podcast

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 built CSS-Tricks, a website all about building websites, and ran it for 15 years, from 2007 to 2022, before selling it to DigitalOcean.CodePen is an online community for frontend developers where you can build, deploy, and show-off your code. CodePen 2.0 is their all-new IDE that is currently in private beta. Check out Chris’ blog and his podcast ShopTalk.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 Fourth Intelligence Revolution details how espionage practices are being transformed by a new global intelligence conflict, driven by AI and competition with China, and what everyday citizens can do to defend their privacy. Learn more at Anthony’s website. Connect with Anthony on Linkedin, Twitter, and Substack.Populist badge winner Orez gets today’s shoutout for their answer to Break or exit out of "with" statement?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 computer and data scientists from the University College London, TurinTech automates your code optimization so you can deploy better AI models. Preview their new Artemis coding agent for free. Connect with Michael on LinkedIn.User Adam Franco won a Stellar Answer badge—and this week’s shoutout—for their answer to How can I delete a remote tag?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 build systems with visual logic, APIs, and modular AI components. Check out their tutorials on YouTube. Connect with Prakash on LinkedIn. User Bruno Bronosky is the winner of today’s shoutout and a Stellar Answer badge for their answer to How do I parse command line arguments in Bash?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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. Listen to our other episodes from the floor with the Stack Overflow team and Corey Quinn. Keep up with the latest AWS updates, including what they’re doing with AI, at their site.Connect with David on Linkedin and Twitter.  TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 employees, particularly regarding automation and AI assistance.The discussion also:Explores what it means for a company like IBM to truly embrace AI, with Lyteson sharing strategies for integrating AI into every workflow to maximize productivity across the organization. Highlights key challenges like data privacy, security risks, and the critical need for workforce reskilling in an AI-enabled world.NotesConnect with Matt Lyteson on LinkedIn.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 simple app over lunch. Episode notes:Scott last sat down with us in 2017 to discuss his journey into tech and his advice for supporting the next generation of developers. You can learn more about Scott’s work at his website. If you love the sound of his voice, you can also check out his podcasts Hanselminutes, Azure Friday, and his show with Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich: Scott & Mark Learn To. You can also check out the app he vibe coded over lunch on his GitHub.This week’s shoutout goes to user Keavon for their answer to Move Line Up/Down shortcut in Visual Studio, which won them a Populist badge.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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. Episode notes:  We spoke with Shopify about how they’re building developer-focused AI products last May; you can check it out here. Sidekick is Shopify’s new AI assistant that combines commerce knowledge with advanced reasoning. Learn more about how Shopify is using AI agents to evolve their product taxonomy at scale on their blog.Connect with Vanessa on Twitter. Congrats to user Erwin Brandstetter for winning a Great Answer badge for their answer to How to convert empty to null in PostgreSQL?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

SPONSORED BY MONGODBPete 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 human workers, how embeddings and vectorization will move the productivity needle, and the five decisions you need to make to realize ROI on AI. Episode notes:If you’re curious, read the OpenAI blog post and paper yourself. For those of you looking for inspiration, check out Werner Vogel’s keynote from re:Invent 2025. MongoDB provides a flexible and dynamic database that excels with AI data. Connect with Pete on LinkedIn.Congrats to Populist badge winner Scheff's Cat for dropping a banger of an answer on error: non-const static data member must be initialized out of line.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 threats further away using the world’s most distributed compute platform. Connect with Robert on LinkedIn and check out his AI Pulse blogs.Today’s shoutout goes to user Evan Phoenix for winning a Populist badge for their answer to llvm ir back to human-readable source language?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 experimentation platform that allows you to decouple software feature rollouts from code deployment so you can manage features safely and securely.Connect with Tom on Linkedin. This episode’s shoutout goes to user Boris Gorelik, who won a Great Question badge for asking Removing handlers from python's logging loggers. TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 dialogue and decision-making. Episode notes:Sandy’s new book Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI explores how we can build a flourishing society by using what we know about human nature to design our technology—rather than letting technology shape our society.Connect with Sandy on Linkedin. Check out the work he’s doing with AI at deliberation.io and Loyal Agents.Congratulations to user Harshal for winning a Populist badge on their answer to How to start search only when user stops typing?TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 applications and manage data across on-premises datacenters, public clouds, and edge locations all on one platform. Connect with Dan on Linkedin and Bluesky.Congrats to Necromancer badge winner David Ferenczy Rogožan! They won the badge on their answer to Where does adb shell mkdir create directories.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 AI. Episode notes: Anil is a tech entrepreneur (former CEO at our sister company Fog Creek Software) and writer. You can find him at his blog anildash.com and on Linkedin. Check out the last time Anil was on the pod in 2020 to talk all things Glitch and Glimmer. Shoutout to user pgrad for winning a Lifejacket badge on their answer to Using type hint Any in Django - NameError: name 'Any' is not defined.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 notes:This episode was recorded at AWS re:Invent 2025! Check out Ryan’s recap of events on our blog. Duckbill provides financial planning and analysis for enterprise infrastructure to help you understand, negotiate, and optimize your cloud spend.Connect with Corey on Linkedin and subscribe to his newsletter Last Week in AWS.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan is joined by Stack Overflow’s CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar and Director of Data Science Michael Foree on the floor at re:Invent to discuss all they’ve seen and heard at the event, from the future of AI agents to the trust issues the enterprise has around AI and the impact of AI and robotics on the job market.Episode Notes:This episode was recorded at AWS re:Invent 2025! Check out Ryan’s recap of events from the floor on our blog. Connect with Prashanth on LinkedIn.Connect with Michael on LinkedIn.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan talks with Wesley Yu, head of engineering at Metalab, about the evolution of interfaces in technology, the pressure that UI generated on the fly would put on your backend systems, and why AI is just the latest and fanciest in a long line of CRUD apps. Episode notes:Metalab designs interfaces for top brands around the world, helping them design, build, and ship their products.Connect with Wesley on Twitter and LinkedIn.Congrats to Populist badge winner SiddAjmera, who won the badge for their answer to Angular FormControl check if required.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan is joined by Kayvon Beykpour, CEO and founder of Microscope, to dive into AI-powered code review’s potential for managing large codebases, the need for humans-in-the-loop for reviewing PRs so AI tools can efficiently and effectively debug, and how AI can increase visibility  through summarization at the abstract syntax tree level and high signal-to-noise ratio code reviews.Episode notes:Macroscope helps you understand your code through AI-powered code review, automated PR descriptions, and real-time status reportsConnect with Kayvon on Twitter and LinkedIn.This week’s shoutout goes to user Jesper Grann Laursen for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Exclude Table during pg_restore. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan is joined by Outshift by Cisco’s VP of Engineering Guillaume De Saint Marc to discuss the future of multi-agent architectures as microservices, the challenges and limitations of the infrastructure for these multi-agent systems, and the importance of communication protocols and interoperability in order to build decentralized and scalable architectures. Episode notes:Outshift is Cisco’s tech incubator that pursues emerging technologies like agentic AI, quantum computing, and next-gen infrastructure. Learn more about multi-agent architecture at their open-source collective AGNTCY.Connect with Guillaume on Linkedin. Today we’re shouting out a Socratic badge winner, Avraam Mavridis, who won the badge for asking well received questions on 100 separate days. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes Simone Kalmakis, VP of Engineering at Viam, to dive into how her team is bridging the gap between software and robotics, the importance of abstraction layers in making robotics more accessible, and the real-world applications of robotics from lobster traps to industrial sanding robots.Episode notes:Viam is a robotics platform that brings modern software development tools into hardware applications. Connect with Simone on Linkedin. This week’s shoutout goes to Lifejacket winner Sergey Kalinichenko for their answer to How does this K&R code for reading an int work?.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.