The Stack Overflow Podcast

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 the importance of user feedback even as they work to bring Wikipedia’s vast knowledge to people building open-source AI projects. Episode notes: Wikimedia.DE announced the Wikidata Embedding Project with MCP support in October of last year. Check out their vector database and codebase for the project. Connect with Philippe on LinkedIn and his Wiki page. Today’s shoutout goes to an Unsung Hero on Stack Overflow—someone who has more than 10 accepted answers with a zero score, making up 25% of their total. Thank you to user MWB for bringing your knowledge to the community!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’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 while maintaining community access.The discussion also:Explores the future of the bot ecosystem, emphasizing the importance of putting publishers back in the driver’s seat to decide how their content is accessed and monetized.Explains the technical implementation of the pay-per-crawl system, which uses Cloudflare’s bot categorization and WAF rules to serve a 402 “Payment Required” message to specific crawlers.Highlights the strategic value of data licensing, comparing comprehensive enterprise contracts with the more flexible, programmatic pay-per-use access enabled by the new model.NotesConnect with Will Allen, Janice Manningham and Josh Zhang on LinkedIn.Learn more about Stack Overflow Data Licensing here.See 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 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: You can read all about the latest Azure database announcements from Microsoft Ignite—including updates for SQL Server, Postgres, DocumentDB, and Fabric—on their Azure blog. Connect with Shireesh on LinkedIn.Today’s shoutout goes to user Guffa for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Virtual method tables. TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 when it comes to voice cloning and synthetic data training. Episode notes: Deepgram builds accurate, scalable, and affordable large scale voice AI for speech recognition, generation, and AI Agents.Connect with Scott on LinkedIn, Twitter, or email him at Scott@Deepgram.comTRANSCRIPTSee 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 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 of probabilistic AI “thinking,” and where Aristotle fits into the philosophical discussions we’re having on consciousness and sentience in AI. Episode notes: The Laws of Thought details our quest to use mathematics to describe the ways we think, from its origins three hundred years ago to the ideas behind modern AI systems and how our human minds differ from the neural networks of AI. Connect with Tom on LinkedIn and find more of his work at the Princeton website. Congrats to user Andreas Rayo Kniep for winning a Populist badge for their answer to Is there a difference between the UTC and Etc/UTC time zones?.We want to know what you're using to upskill and learn in the age of AI. Take this five minute survey on learning and AI to have your voice heard in our next Stack Overflow Knows Pulse Survey. TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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. In the second part of this episode, Ryan is joined by Rowan McNamee, co-founder and COO of Mary Technology, to discuss bringing AI into the carefully governed world of litigation and how LLMs are helping lawyers manage and interpret the vast amounts of legal evidence that pass across their desks every day.Episode notes: Pathway is building the first post-transformer frontier model that solves for attention span and continual learning.Mary Technology is an AI for attorneys that turns evidentiary documents into structured, easy-to-review facts.Connect with Zuzanna on LinkedIn and Twitter. Reach out to Victor at his email: victor@pathway.com Connect with Rowan on LinkedIn.We want to know what you're using to upskill and learn in the age of AI. Take this five minute survey on learning and AI to have your voice heard in our next Stack Overflow Knows Pulse Survey.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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, Aldo Luevano, dive into Roomie’s purpose built models for both physical and software AI, and how their ROI-first approach helps companies track the impact of their robotics and AI implementation. Episode notes: Inception researches and builds diffusion language models for faster and more efficient AI.Roomie is a robotics and enterprise AI company with an ROI-first platform that tracks how well their AI solutions are actually working. Connect with Stefano on LinkedIn.Connect with Aldo 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 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.