The Stack Overflow Podcast

Adora is the author of Cloud Engineering for Beginners, Beginning Azure DevOps, and Confident Cloud.She’s also the founder and executive director of NexaScale, an ed-tech non profit that offers educational support and simulated work experiences for entry-level software engineers, designers, and product managers. Check out their programs.Find Adora on LinkedIn or through her website.

Alexi leverages AI to streamline litigation workflows and speed up research, with an eye to giving lawyers more time and energy to devote to client strategy and support. Find Mark on LinkedIn. Shoutout to Stack Overflow user ycr for dropping some knowledge in our CI/CD Collective: How to get the BUILD_USER in Jenkins when a human rebuilds a job triggered by timer?.Here’s a quick preview of the episode:“The founding thesis was, let’s try and build an AI that knows the law. And if we do that, there'll be lots of applications throughout the legal field. We knew that these foundational models, the underlying technology, were going to continue to improve and allow us to do more and more.” “I mean, law is one of the fields where it seems like these large language models could have the most utility, because often what you're doing is taking on a case with potentially an enormous amount of case law that you need to search through to find the needle in a haystack that will help you and/or enormous amount of documents that you need to search through. And so a system that's capable of understanding, synthesizing, and annotating and pointing you to the ground truth is incredibly valuable.”“ It's not supposed to give legal advice if it doesn't have the licensure and the insurance.”“Part of the problem is we have these laws that are just not being enforced at all. And so either the laws have to change or they need to start getting enforced.”“ We realized that if we have almost 100% recall in the top 5,000 documents, why don't we just apply some sort of agentic flow to filter down from these 5,000 to the 10 documents that were really needed?"

Thoughtful AI provides AI agents that help revenue cycle management (RCM) teams get providers their money from insurance companies. Does AI have a better bedside manner than doctors? One study suggest they do. Connect with Dan on X and LinkedIn. Congrats to Populist badge winner Marcio Mazzucato for doing the accepted answer one better on How do I emulate a 403 error page?.Want a preview? Here are some great quotes from this episode: “ The human transformation of getting off of this computer platform and back out into the world and back out into trying to advance, some of the existential, whether it's risks or opportunities or threats, but get away from this huge workforce sitting in front of computers. We also have this fundamental belief that humans actually aren't great at operating computers, but other computers are really good at it.”“ We find the average RCM team has attrition rates of 10 to 40%, which is three to 10X other industries. So they already have a leaky bucket. They are actually understaffed. They are having trouble keeping up. So for us, it's more about adding abundance of capacity at a much more lower cost that a higher quality that will allow them to be more financially sound organizations. I know there's a lot of conversation about replacing the actual human. Yeah, of course. There are folks out there who organizations will look and say, Hey, if you're just sitting there moving data around and you're not very good at it and you hate that job and like it's hard to staff and train, it's going to make a lot of sense to replace with an AI solution.”“ We think our mission is to fix the healthcare system, not to duct tape the current environment. And we have multiple acts in our mission to achieve that. And I completely align. It is the broken down institutions. That is actually what's driving a lot of the problem. We do have to get closer to the metal or we do have to get closer to the systematic changes. And, that's likely going to require some big movement as it relates to how the money moves.”

NightVision offers web and API security testing tools built to integrate with developers’ established workflows. NightVision identifies issues by precise area(s) of code, so devs don’t have to chase down and validate vulnerability reports, a process that eats up precious engineering resources. Get started with their docs.Connect with Kinnaird on LinkedIn. Stack Overflow user Cecil Curry earned a Populist badge with their exceptionally thoughtful answer to In Python how can one tell if a module comes from a C extension?.Some great excerpts from this episode:“From the program side, I would say if you're running a security program or you're starting from day one, there's a danger with security people and being the security person who's out of touch or doesn't know what the life of a developer is like. And you don't want to be that person. And that's not how you have actual business impact, right? So you got to embed with teams, threat model, and then do some preventative security testing, right? Testing things before it gets into production, not just relying on having a bug bounty program.”“With code scanning, you're looking for potentially insecure patterns in the code, but with dynamic testing, you're actually testing the live application. So we're sending HTTP traffic to the application, sending malicious payloads in forms or in query parameters, et cetera, to try to elicit a response or to send something to an attacker controlled server. And so using this, we're able to. Not just have theoretical vulnerabilities, but exploitable vulnerabilities. I mean, how many times have you looked at something in GitHub security alerts and thought, yeah, that's not real. That's not exploitable. Right. So we're trying to avoid that and have higher quality touch points with developers. So when they look at something, they say, okay, that's exploitable. You showed me how. And you traced it back to code.”

Instabug helps developers monitor, prioritize, and debug performance and stability issues throughout the mobile app development lifecycle. Get started with their docs.Connect with Kenny on LinkedIn. Stack Overflow user itoctopus earned a Populist badge by explaining how to Break huge URLs so they don't overflow.Some great excerpts from today’s episode: On why they built a lean, mean SDK: “Nowadays mobile developers spend a lot of time thinking about SDK bloat and how much they're taxing their app’s performance just from the SDKs they’re including. We spent a lot of time and a lot of effort making sure that our SDK has very minimal performance impact. You can't do this without any performance impact, but making sure that it has really minimal performance impact as an SDK itself. A lot of that has to do with the way in which, from years of experience, we capture the information and offload certain information to storage for when we have network connectivity bandwidth later so that we're not constantly eating network.”On the future of self-fixing code and mobile app development: “Our belief is that the place where we're going to see this kind of auto fixing of code, auto healing of code, it's probably going to be mobile first. So we're invested heavily in seeing that reality. You can think of it as straightforward as crashes, for example. There's a known set of crash error codes. And so there's a known set of crash behaviors. So it's pretty easy for us. And that was what our smart resolve 1.0 was to get to, Hey, this is generally how you should solve these types of crashes. Our 1.0 version is not giving you code suggestions, but it's at least giving you known best practices from places like Stack Overflow and others that have content about how to solve these types of problems.”On using AI models to spot UI issues: “We think that there are a lot less deterministic ways to spot a frustration signal. So the thing we're working on is, on device models for your users’ behavior that will allow our SDK to capture a frustration signal that nobody else has. Maybe today when I opened my banking app, I usually look at page one and then do a transfer, check out my balance, and now I'm doing this weird swiping behavior because something's not working well. A model could spot that. It wouldn't be reported as a bug, but a model could spot that.”

Tabnine is an AI code assistant that offers AI tools for code generation, testing, and code review.Eran was previously a researcher at IBM, where he worked on IBM Watson. Connect with Eran on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user Anders earned a Populist badge with their first-class answer to How to detect the current screen resolution?.

Fabrizio is now the lead documentation engineer Tinybird, a data platform for user-facing analytics. Get started with their docs or explore their blog.Find Fabrizio’s blog here. Some reading suggestions:What docs as code really meansHow I'm using AI as a technical writerWhy I became a Documentation Engineer (and what that even means)Find Fabrizio on LinkedIn or GitHub.

Sukhi is a senior product manager for Permission Slip by Consumer Reports, an app to help people exercise their digital data privacy rights.Consumer Reports is a nonprofit organization with a long history of protecting consumers’ rights and advocating for changes that make them safer.Connect with Sukhi on LinkedIn or via her website. Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Martijn Pieters, who’s earned over a million reputation by delivering wisdom to questions like Runtime of python's if substring in string.

Hello everyone and welcome to the very first episode of We'll Be in Touch, a new podcast series from Stack Overflow. This show will explore the world of job interviews, career development, and software engineering. Each episode, we'll sit down with folks working in software development to hear their stories, dive into their latest projects, learn about tricky bugs they've tackled, and discuss the tricks they use to keep up with all the latest languages and frameworks.Your host, Kyle Mitofsky, is a Staff Software Engineer here at Stack Overflow. With over a decade of experience as an independent contributor, manager, and team leader, he's interviewed a wide range of people and is excited to be able to share these revealing and engaging conversations, WITHOUT the pressure of an actual job interview.Whether you're an aspiring developer or a seasoned professional, join us as we delve into meaningful discussions that can help shape your career. We're kicking off the series by chatting with a former colleague of Kyle's, Yaakov Ellis, a long time Stack Overflow community member and employee who currently  holds a role as a Staff Engineer at Intuit.

Moderne is an open-source company building automated source code transformations for framework migrations, vulnerability patches, and API migrations. Explore the platform here.OpenRewrite is a community-driven open source project that consists of an auto-refactoring engine that runs prepackaged refactoring recipes for common framework migrations, security fixes, and stylistic consistency tasks.Connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn.Props to Stack Overflow user Benjamin Atkin, who earned a Populist badge by offering up some wisdom on Rails - How to refresh an association after a save.

Chris works at Sledgehammer Games (a division of Activision), which develops titles in the Call of Duty franchise. Explore their open roles here.Want to see Chris’s engine in action? Check out COD: Modern Warfare III.Connect with Chris on LinkedIn.Kudos to Stack Overflow user teh.fonsi, who earned a Lifeboat badge by explaining How to execute 1 command x times in java. 

Clarifai is a developer-friendly AI workflow orchestration platform built to help devs integrate AI into technical workflows and customer experiences.We’ve written about best practices for integrating AI tools into your workflows.Connect with Matt on LinkedIn or via his website. You can also read his posts on the Clarifai blog. Well-deserved congrats to Stack Overflow user Jay Wick, who earned a Populist badge by explaining how to Get image preview before uploading in React.

Or Lenchner is the CEO of Bright Data, a web data platform that offers ready-made datasets, proxy networks, and AI-powered web scrapers. Developers can get started with their docs here.ICYMI, read our blog post about the knowledge-as-a-service business model and how it will guide the future of our paid platform. AI answers alone aren’t knowledge.Connect with Or on LinkedIn. Stack Overflow user guizo earned a Populist badge by explaining How can I minify JSON in a shell script?.

Logan previously worked at OpenAI, where he led developer relations. He’s now a senior product manager for Google AI Studio, the fastest way for devs to get started with the Gemini API. Logan’s team just rolled out Grounding with Google Search, a feature built to help developers get fresher, more accurate responses from the Gemini models aided by Google Search. Learn more here.Connect with Logan on LinkedIn. Props to Stack Overflow user Jonik, who earned a Populist badge by explaining How to write an S3 object to a file?.

Want to learn more about the early days of React? React.js: The Documentary gives you the full story from the perspective of the developers who created it.Vercel is a native Next.js platform.v0 aims to democratize software development for non-technical users. Check it out here.Listen to our recent conversation with Vercel’s VP of AI.Connect with Tom on LinkedIn or X.Kudos to Stack Overflow user Sodruldeen Mustapha, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering How to remove the environment variables from Laravel Debug?. 

 Fastlane by PayPal is an accelerated guest checkout experience. Visit theFastlane Resource Center for Developers to get started.You can find Sunny Patel on LinkedIn and on GitHub.Find Kyle Prinsloo on X and on LinkedIn.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner M.M who provided an answer to What does the "Expected '(' for function-style cast or type construction" error mean?

Watch Fay build a Harry Potter-themed chatbot with an assist from AI.Cursor is the AI code editor Fay’s using. Get started with their docs.Connect with Ricky on LinkedIn or X. Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Mahendra Kulkarni, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering How do I get current rowindex of a table using JavaScript?. 

The Data Provenance Initiative is a collective of volunteer AI researchers from around the world. They conduct large-scale audits of the massive datasets that power state-of-the-art AI models with a goal of mapping the landscape of AI training data to improve transparency, documentation, and informed use of data. Their Explorer tool allows users to filter and analyze the training datasets typically used by large language models.Shayne and Robert are the authors of a new study called Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons: the first large-scale, longitudinal audit of the consent protocols for the web domains underlying AI training sets.Connect with Shayne via his website.Connect with Robert via his website or on LinkedIn. Stack Overflow user George Hawkins earned a Populist badge by explaining How to get base url in angular 5?.

Tariq Shaukat, the former president of Google Cloud and Bumble, is the CEO of Sonar. Follow him on LinkedIn.Sonar offers code quality and security solutions that help developers write clean code and remediate existing code organically. Their product SonarQube helps devs ensure the quality and security of AI-generated code.Watch Olivier Gaudin, founder of Sonar, explain why clean code is the foundation for well-functioning dev teams.Stack Overflow user Ogglas earned a Populist badge by explaining How to access the appsettings in Blazor WebAssembly.

Solo.io provides API gateway, service mesh, and internal developer portal solutions. Follow Solo.io on X or LinkedIn or dig into the docs.Want to brush up on RAG? Our Guide to AI walks you through the concept and includes a practical example. Or check out one expert’s practical tips for RAG on our blog.Connect with Keith on LinkedIn.Shoutout to Stack Overflow user MrSimpleMind: their helpful answer to the question – How to run jq from gitbash in windows? – has been viewed by more than 213,000 people and won a Populist badge.