Ben and Eira talk with LlamaIndex CEO and cofounder Jerry Lu, along with venture capitalist Jerry Chen, about how the company is making it easier for developers to build LLM apps. They touch on the importance of high-quality training data to improve accuracy and relevance, the role of prompt engineering, the impact of larger context windows, and the challenges of setting up retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).
There’s no silver bullet for this type of ghost.
A two-part episode: In part one, Ben chats with friend of the show and senior software engineer Kyle Mitofsky about Staging Ground, a private space within Stack Overflow where new users can receive guidance from experienced users before their question is posted. In part two, Ben talks to Stack Overflow moderator Spevacus, who participated in the beta of Staging Ground. They talk about why we wanted to build a safer asking experience for new users, the positive feedback we’ve gotten from the community so far, and the challenges of building Staging Ground within the existing Stack Overflow architecture.
In this episode, Ben chats with Elastic software engineering director Paul Oremland along with Stack Overflow staff software engineer Steffi Grewenig and senior software developer Gregor Časar about vector databases and semantic search from both the vendor and customer perspectives.
For this episode, we spoke with Carol Lee, PhD, principal research scientist in the Developer Success Lab at Pluralsight, about her research into code review anxiety, how developers are coping, and how a workbook can help.
The home team welcomes developer and software consultant Ben Borra to the show for a wide-ranging conversation about developer productivity, the value of positive feedback and identifying quick wins, the impact of code assistants on devs’ everyday work, and the challenges of system rewrites.
Single individuals make less of a difference to the success or failure of a technology project than you might think (and that’s a good thing).
Temporal is an open-source project focused on durable execution and workflow orchestration. Cofounder and CTO Maxim Fateev tells Ben and Ryan about the challenges of building a cloud service based on an open-source project and how Temporal is helping teams simplify their code and build more features more quickly.
Ben and Ryan are joined by Robin Gupta for a conversation about benchmarking and testing AI systems. They talk through the lack of trust and confidence in AI, the inherent challenges of nondeterministic systems, the role of human verification, and whether we can (or should) expect an AI to be reliable.
Ben and Ryan talk with Vikram Chatterji, founder and CEO of Galileo, a company focused on building and evaluating generative AI apps. They discuss the challenges of benchmarking and evaluating GenAI models, the importance of data quality in AI systems, and the trade-offs between using pre-trained models and fine-tuning models with custom data.
Product manager Ash Zade joins the home team to talk about the journey to OverflowAI, a GenAI-powered add-on for Stack Overflow for Teams that’s available now. Ash describes how his team built Enhanced Search, the problems they set out to solve, how they ensured data quality and accuracy, the role of metadata and prompt engineering, and the feedback they’ve gotten from users so far.
On this episode: Al Sweigart is a software developer, developer advocate, and author of ten Python books. He tells Ben and Ryan why he’s such a fan of the language, why it’s a great programming language for beginners, and how it became the default for so many data science and backend AI projects.
Only about 5% of GenAI projects lead to significant monetization of new product offerings.
Eira and Ryan talk with Chris Ferdinandi, a front-end developer and ADHD advocate, about his diagnosis experience, the importance of accommodations for neurodivergent folks, and some advice for devs looking for the best tools and tactics for managing ADHD at work.
Marco Palladino, CTO and cofounder of cloud-native API gateway Kong, talks with Ryan about the complexities of multi-cloud Kubernetes architecture, how AI has the potential to improve infrastructure management, and how Kong’s large action model will reshape the future of API platforms.
Ben and Ryan are joined by software developer and listener Patrick Carlile for a conversation about how the job market for software engineers has changed since the dot-com days, navigating boom-and-bust hiring cycles, and the developers finding work at Walmart and In-N-Out. Plus: “Party in the front, business in the back” isn’t just for haircuts anymore.
On this episode: The FTC bans most noncompete agreements, the implications of the TikTok “ban,” why a 2017 law is hitting startups with huge tax bills seven years later, and the return of net neutrality. Plus: the wunderkind hacker who ransomed Finland’s anxieties and secrets.
Dr. Richard Hipp, creator of SQLite, shares how he taught himself to program, the challenges he faced in creating SQLite, and the importance of testing and maintaining the software for long-term support.
The home team talks about the current state of the software job market, the changing sentiments around AI job opportunities, the impact of big players like Facebook and OpenAI on the space, and the challenges for startups. Plus: The philosophical implications of LLMs and the friendship potential of corvids.
Ben and Ryan explore why configuration is so complicated, the right to repair, the best programming languages for beginners, how AI is grading exams in Texas, Automattic’s $125M acquisition of Beeper, and why a major US city’s train system still relies on floppy disks. Plus: The unique challenge of keeping up with a field that’s changing as rapidly as GenAI.
On this episode: Stack Overflow senior data scientist Michael Geden tells Ryan and Ben about how data scientists evaluate large language models (LLMs) and their output. They cover the challenges involved in evaluating LLMs, how LLMs are being used to evaluate other LLMs, the importance of data validating, the need for human raters, and more needs and tradeoffs involved in selecting and fine-tuning LLMs.
In the wake of the XZ backdoor, Ben and Ryan unpack the security implications of relying on open-source software projects maintained by small teams. They also discuss the open-source nature of Linux, the high cost of education in the US, the value of open-source contributions for job seekers, and what Apple is up to AI-wise.
The home team convenes to discuss the XZ backdoor attack, what great software engineers have in common, how GenAI is changing the face of drug development, and the rise of managed service providers for AI.
The home team is joined by Michael Foree, Stack Overflow’s director of data science and data platform, and occasional cohost Cassidy Williams, CTO at Contenda, for a conversation about long context windows, retrieval-augmented generation, and how Databricks’ new open LLM could change the game for developers. Plus: How will FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s sentence of 25 years in prison reverberate in the blockchain and crypto spaces?
