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.
With the ever-increasing importance of data, we’re always looking for expert voices that can expand our view of what data and our reliance on data means for software development and society as a whole. More and more of our lives are becoming data-driven. Is that a good thing?
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.
An update on recent launches and the upcoming roadmap.
Today we chat with Reshma Khilnani, co-founder and CEO of Medplum, an open-source platform enabling companies to build healthcare applications like EHRs and patient portals. She discusses how to iterate rapidly in an industry where SOC2 compliance is just the beginning (one of the compliance tests is named after Dante’s epic poem depicting the nine circles of hell, if that gives you an idea).
Here’s a simple, three-part framework that explains generative language models.
Ben Popper, Cassidy Williams, and Ryan Donovan sit down to discuss how much has changed in the five years they have been collaborating on Stack Overflow’s blog, newsletter, and podcast. If you're sick of AI talk today, remember how bad the crypto craze was just two years ago!
We chat with Kirimgeray Kirimli, a director at Flatiron Software and CEO of Snapshot Reviews, a tool that measures developer productivity based on activity from Github, Jira, standups, and more. Kirimli explains how Snapshot Reviews tries to measure a developer's true impact, not just the volume of their activity. Plus, why "junior engineer" is not likely to be a job available to humans for much longer.
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).
On today’s episode we chat with Cassandra Shum, VP of Field Engineering at RelationalAI, about her company’s efforts to create what it calls the industry’s first coprocessor for data clouds and language models. The goal is to allow companies to keep all their data where it is today while still tapping into the capabilities of the latest generation of AI tools.
On today’s episode we chat with Jared Palmer, VP of AI at Vercel, who says the company has three key goals. First, support AI native web apps like ChatGPT and Claude. Second, use GenAI to make it easier to build. Third, provide an SDK so that developers have the tools they need to easily add GenAI to their websites.
In this episode, Alexa Montelibano and Tiago Torre, sales engineers at Stack Overflow, take you behind the scenes to show how customer feedback shapes our products, including OverflowAI. Alexa and Tiago have been working with clients to explore the three features of OverflowAI—Enhanced Search, an Auto-answer App for Slack and Microsoft Teams, and an IDE extension.
It’s easy to generate code, but not so easy to generate good code.
In this episode we chat with Saumil Patel, co-founder and CEO of Squire AI. The company uses an agentic workflow to automatically review your code, write your pull requests, and even review and provide opinions on other people’s PRs. Different AI systems with specific capabilities work together as a mixture of experts, following a chain of thought approach to provide recommendations on security, code quality, error handling, performance, scalability, and more.
A look at some of the current thinking around chunking data for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems.
Learn about the workflow designed to help new askers improve their questions on Stack Overflow.
This week we chat with Kamakshi Narayan, Director of Product Management at SnapLogic, about how APIs can apply fine-grained controls for privacy and governance to the LLM-powered AI apps vacuuming up our data.
Today's episode is a chat with Benjamin Shestakofsky, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania with a focus on the ways in which digital technologies are affecting work and employment, organizations, and economic exchange. We discuss research from his new book which dives into the venture capital business and explores the cooperative model that some software startups are taking instead.
We asked when and how often CodeGen tools fall short, what challenges developers face with these tools, and what they are doing with all of the free time these tools purport to offer.
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.
