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.
Your whole repo fits in the context window
AI shops are now releasing LLMs optimized for RAG. Turn a repo into a prompt for a long-context LLM.Perplexity AI is an AI-powered search and discovery tool.Good news for developers: Apple will not remove progressive web app support on iOS in the EU.Basil Bourque earned a Lifeboat badge by explaining How to get full name of month from date in Java 8 while formatting.
How Stack Overflow is partnering with Google to encourage socially responsible AI
Stack Overflow has teamed up with Google Cloud to develop an API—Overflow API—to give Gemini, Google’s AI model, access to Stack Overflow knowledge communities. Learn how Ryan’s team is working toward socially responsible AI.Connect with Ryan on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user verygoodsoftwarenotvirus earned a Great Question badge by asking something at least 87,000 people have also wondered: How can I get all keys from a JSON column in Postgres?.
A leading ML educator on what you need to know about LLMs
Check out Maxime’s three-part LLM course. Part 1 “covers essential knowledge about mathematics, Python, and neural networks.Part 2 “focuses on building the best possible LLMs using the latest techniques."Part 3 “focuses on creating LLM-based applications and deploying them.” Read Maxime’s blog.Follow Maxime on GitHub or LinkedIn.Nikhil Wagh earned a Lifeboat badge by explaining how to Efficiently compare two sets in Python.
Building GenAI features in practice with Intuit Mailchimp
Intuit shares more about their generative AI operating system (GenOS) in this Medium blog. If you want to try out generative AI in MailChimp, sign up here. Learn more about Intuit technology here.Many thanks (and a Lifeboat badge) to Dherik for dropping an answer on cURL: how can I return 0 if status is 200?Connect with Shivang on LinkedIn.
Chunking express: An expert breaks down how to build your RAG system
Build GenAI applications faster and cheaper with a vector database like Pinecone.New to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and other GenAI topics? Our guide is a good place to start.Learn more about RAG and Pinecone.Connect with Roie on GitHub or LinkedIn.
It’s RAG time for LLMs that need a source of truth
Pinecone is a vector database that lets companies build GenAI applications faster for less cost.Read our primer on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or explore RAG and Pinecone.Follow Roie on GitHub or LinkedIn.If you need a handy guide to what’s what in the AI space, check out Stack Overflow’s Industry Guide to AI.
Optimizing both hardware and software for GenAI
SPONSORED BY INTEL Ryan and Ben chat with Raymond Lo, AI software evangelist at Intel, about the AI PC, the software that powers AI breakthroughs, and optimizing hardware and software in unison to improve generative AI performance. Bonus: what’s the difference between a GPU optimized for graphics and a VPU or NPU optimized for AI? Episode notes If you’re interested in trying any of the demos that Raymond talked about, check out Intel’s OpenVINO notebooks. Learn more about Intel’s Edge AI resources here. Raymond previously wrote about enhancing image and video resolution using OpenVINO. You can reach out to Raymond Lo on LinkedIn. Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, Andrey Korneyev, for saving the question, How can I delete specific nodes from an XElement?
How to convince your CTO it's worth paying down tech debt
Sema’s AI code monitor helps companies manage the risks and capture the benefits of AI in the software development lifecycle. Learn how it works here.Connect with Matt on LinkedIn.Erstwhile podcast cohost Cassidy Williams is the CTO of Contenda. Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Jim, who earned a Stellar Question badge with Docker cannot start on Windows, a question (well, more of a statement) that’s helped 1.1 million people and counting.
Down the rabbit hole in the Stack Exchange network
Discussions are now taking place across all tags on Stack Overflow. Check out this one about why people keep proclaiming the death of PHP or this one on whether Jenkins is still the dominant player in the CI/CD space.What would happen if you suddenly lost consciousness? The Philosophy Stack Exchange has thoughts.Did knights wear glasses? Historical records don’t really answer this question, but the History Stack Exchange does.The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has deemed AI-generated robocalls illegal.
Who owns this tool? A software component catalog to help devs find answers
Andrew has worked in many roles, including as Executive Manager at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, where he established and grew a platform engineering function that supported 7,000 engineers.You can find him on LinkedIn here.You can learn more about Compass, a developer experience platform, here.Shout to Amelio for earning a stellar question badge and helping over six hundred thousand people with this gem: Getting the name of a variable as a string
Would you trust an AI bot to find the fix for vulnerabilities in your code?
Mobb offers AI-powered technology that automates vulnerability remediations with a goal of helping development teams significantly reduce their security backlogs and free up more time for innovation. Check out their blog or dive into their docs.Connect with Eitan on LinkedIn.Shoutout to Konrad, who won a Stellar Question badge for What is the difference between private and protected members of C++ classes?.
Exploring the inclusive tech revolution
Find out why others have joined Shell.If you want to experience what being a developer at one of the world’s largest energy companies looks like, they’re hiring.Great question, Alexander Myshov! This badge was awarded for Are arrow functions faster (more performant, lighter) than ordinary standalone function declaration in v8?Reach out to Maya on LinkedIn.
The creator of PyTorch Lightning on the AI hype cycle
William is the CEO of Lightning AI and the creator of PyTorch Lightning, the lightweight PyTorch wrapper for high-performance AI research.Dive into their docs or explore the developer community.ICYMI: Across tech, layoffs are boosting share prices.Follow William on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn.Shoutout to Brian61354270, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils' in Python 3.12.
Building a PDF larger than the known universe
Is it possible to make a PDF bigger than Germany? Here’s one larger than the known universe. As its creator says, “it’s mostly empty space, but so is the universe.”Massachusetts is leading the way in the skills-based hiring revolution by eliminating degree requirements for state jobs.Did you miss these deeply uncanny AI-generated food images, from the conjoined chickens to the macaroni and cheese rendered in shapes formerly unknown to geometry? Never fear; you can still see some here.You may have forgotten about crypto (or at least tried), but more than 2% of the United States’s electricity generation goes to large-scale crypto mining.Stack Overflow user Jeff Allen earned a Great Question badge for Create a Vector of All Days Between Two Dates, which has helped 85,000 R users.
AI isn't putting tech workers out of jobs, the stock price is
AI-generated code is “not equivalent to reliable and robust code, especially in the context of real-world software development,” according to a new study whose title got our attention.Tech layoffs continue in the wake of the pandemic hiring boom, sending some share prices into the sky.Take a look at how AI coding assistants are already changing the way code is made.Shoutout to Stack Overflow user nonopolarity, who earned a Great Question badge by asking Can someone explain SSH tunnel in a simple way?.