The Stack Overflow podcast is a weekly conversation about working in software development, learning to code, and the art and culture of computer programming. Hosted by Paul Ford and Ben Popper, the series features questions from our community, interviews with fascinating guests, and hot takes on what’s happening in tech. Founded in 2008, Stack Overflow is empowering the world to develop technology through collective knowledge. It’s best known for being the largest, most trusted online community for developers and technologists. More than 100 million people come to Stack Overflow every month to ask questions, help solve coding problems, and develop new skills.
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El Estoico | Estoicismo en español
En este podcast vamos a hablar Estoicismo, figuras estoicas y ejercicios estoicos para mejorar tu vida y tu resiliencia ante las adversidades.
Greater Than Code
For a long time, tech culture has focused too narrowly on technical skills; this has resulted in a tech community that too often puts companies and code over people. Greater Than Code is a podcast that invites the voices of people who are not heard from enough in tech: women, people of color, trans and/or queer folks, to talk about the human side of software development and technology. Greater Than Code is providing a vital platform for these conversations, and developing new ideas of what it means to be a technologist beyond just the code.
Featuring an ongoing panel of racially and gender diverse tech panelists, the majority of podcast guests so far have been women in tech! We’ve covered topics including imposter syndrome, mental illness, sexuality, unconscious bias and social justice. We also have a major focus on skill sets that tech too often devalues, like team-building, hiring, community organizing, mentorship and empathy. Each episode also includes a transcript.
We have an active Slack community that members can join by pledging as little as $1 per month via Patreon. (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode)
Command Line Heroes
Stories about the people transforming technology from the command line up.
Building brains for bulldozers
Ryan chats with Kevin Peterson, CTO of Bedrock Robotics, about the evolution of self-driving technology and why robotics is now advancing; how real data is still relevant but simulation becomes essential for scale; and the future of robotics in addressing labor shortages and enhancing productivity.Episode notes:Bedrock Robotics creates technology that upgrades existing heavy equipment, enabling autonomous operation for construction machinery. Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn and Twitter. Congrats to user charlie for winning a Necromancer badge on their answer to Linking Rust application with a dynamic library not in the runtime linker search path.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
AI-assisted coding needs more than vibes; it needs containers and sandboxes
SPONSORED BY DOCKERIn this sponsored episode, Ryan chats with Mark Cavage, President and COO of Docker, joins the show to dive into hardened containers and agent sandboxes. They discuss what it means for a container to be hardened, how agents are starting to look a lot like microservices, and where containers fit into agentic workflows now and in the future. Episode notesDocker Hardened Images are minimal and secure containers. They’re free and available for most applications in the Docker registry. Docker for AI provides an easy way to build, run, and secure AI agents. Connect with Mark on LinkedIn. Congrats Populist badge winner humblebee for answering How to open/run YML compose file?.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
No need for Ctrl+C when you have MCP
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. Episode notes:The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open-source standard for connecting AI applications to external systems created by Anthropic. You can keep up with—or join—the work the MCP community is doing at their Discord server. Connect with David on Twitter. Today’s shoutout goes to Populist badge winner competent_tech for their answer to How do I review a PR assigned to me in VS 2022.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
To live in an AI world, knowing is half the battle
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: Human Agency in the Digital World is an “AI-era self-help book” about reclaiming our role as pilots—not passengers—in the technology revolution. It’s available now on Amazon and everywhere books are sold. Connect with Marcus on LinkedIn and learn more about his work at his website.Congrats to user Romain for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Django: show the count of related objects in admin list_display. TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Dogfood so nutritious it’s building the future of SDLCs
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 it now with your Free or Go ChatGPT plan. You can keep up with everything happening at OpenAI on their blog. Connect with Thibault on LinkedIn and Twitter.Congrats to user kevinyu for winning a Great Question badge for Does println! borrow or own the variable?.TRANSCRIPTSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Even GenAI uses Wikipedia as a source
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.
Why Stack Overflow and Cloudflare launched a pay-per-crawl model
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.
Data is the new oil, and your database is the only way to extract it
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.
Even your voice is a data problem
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.
The logos, ethos, and pathos of your LLMs
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.
AI attention span so good it shouldn’t be legal
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.
Generating text with diffusion (and ROI with LLMs)
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.
Wanna see a CSS magic trick?
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.
Spy vs spy at scale
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.
AI can 10x developers...in creating tech debt
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.