The Stack Overflow Podcast

Ryan welcomes Anurag Goel, CEO and co-founder of Render, to discuss why most startups shouldn’t start by managing their Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure. They discuss how frustration with spinning up nodes at Stripes led him to build a company, a future where your application itself may allocate its own compute, and why DevOps jobs aren’t going anywhere. Episode notesRender calls itself the cloud for builders, intuitive infrastructure for scale. Connect with Anurag at anurag@render.com. Congrats to Populist badge winner Hovercraft Full Of Eels for bringing the knowledge to How can I disable System.out for speed in Java. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes WPEngine CTO Ramadass Prabakar to the show to chat about what happens—and what we should do—when agents start acting like humans online, how our internet is evolving to serve both human and agentic experiences from the same interface, and what we can do to differentiate and protect human actions online from malicious bot activity. Episode notes: WP Engine hosts and manages over 5 million WordPress sites, combining enterprise-grade software, developer tools, and cutting-edge AI to support your website.Connect with Ramadass on LinkedIn or Twitter.Congrats to user Nama on winning a Famous Question badge for asking how to store the spinner values into database? See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan is joined by Asaf Savich, Komodor’s AI Engineering Group Manager, to discuss why modern reliability work requires navigating massive cross-service context, what good context engineering actually likes when AI is integrated into site reliability, and how the work of human SREs is shifting towards strategy and AI agent management.Episode notes: Komodor is an autonomous AI SRE platform designed to troubleshoot, manage, and optimize Kubernetes-based cloud-native infrastructure. Connect with Asaf on LinkedIn. Congrats to Populist badge winner joemaller, who won the badge for answering Is there a Python equivalent to the 'which' command. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes VoidZero’s Evan You and Cloudflare’s Dane Knecht back to the show to discuss Cloudflare’s recent acquisition of VoidZero and what it means for JavaScript development, how partnerships like theirs can help open-source projects stay maintained and sustainably monetized, and how Cloudflare’s distributed systems are helping to improve developer experience in Vite and beyond. Episode notes:VoidZero is now officially a part of Cloudflare. You can read more about the recent acquisition here. Connect with Evan on LinkedIn and X. Check out Evan’s previous episodes on the pod for a deep dive on the evolutions of Vite and Vue.js.Connect with Dane on LinkedIn and X. Listen to Dane’s previous episode of Leaders of Code to learn how Cloudflare is building a better internet. Congrats to user Luis Sieira, who won a Stellar Answer badge for answering How to get the difference between two arrays in JavaScript?. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Live from Snowflake Summit, Ryan talks with Snowflake’s Head of Developer Experience Umesh Unnikrishnan about the industry-wide shift from “vibe coding” for quick prototypes to agentic engineering for enterprise-ready software, how enterprises can scale governance with guardrails like human-in-the-loop approval and control layers that go beyond the underlying LLM, and why Umesh predicts all developers will become someday become full-stack builders.Episode notes: This episode was recorded at Snowflake Summit. You can learn more about CoCo and Snowflake’s other new releases on their website.Connect with Umesh on LinkedIn or reach out to him at Umesh.Unnikrishnan@snowflake.comVivek Raghunathan, SVP of engineering at Snowflake, also sat down this us at this year’s Snowflake Summit to break down the five-stage framework his org used to go from "let chaos reign" to a repeatable, org-wide system for AI-assisted engineering. Listen to his episode of Leaders of Code. Our sixteenth Annual Developer Survey is now open and we want to hear your thoughts on all things software. Take the survey now! See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

At MS Build, Ryan is joined by Cassidy Williams, Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub and former Stack Overflow Podcast host, to discuss how agentic coding is shifting dev work towards higher-level strategy while increasing decision fatigue; why human taste, community feedback, and mentorship are becoming more essential than ever for developer careers; and the new GitHub Copilot announcements coming out of Microsoft, including the new GitHub Copilot app. Episode notes: This episode was recorded at Microsoft Build. You can learn more about what they announced at the show and what’s new at GitHub here. Listen to our other episodes recorded at Build on agentic workflows and responsible AI. Connect with Cassidy on LinkedIn and X.  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Recorded at Microsoft Build, Ryan welcomes Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s Chief Product Officer for Responsible AI, about how we can build and use AI responsibly with the NIST approach, why most irresponsible AI comes from experimentation without thought of impact, and how Microsoft is researching thoughtful human/AI workflow design to reduce unnecessary escalation. Episode notes: This episode was recorded at Microsoft Build. Listen to our other episode recorded at Build on agentic workflows here. Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Live from Microsoft Build, Ryan is joined by Jay Parikh, Microsoft’s VP of AI Core, for a conversation on what enterprises need to build, deploy, and run AI agents at scale with demonstrable ROI; how Microsoft built an end-to-end agent development system that goes past just the harness; and how you can evaluate for reliability and correctness in models that get more intelligent and autonomous everyday. Episode notes: This episode was recorded at Microsoft Build. Learn more about the announcement and news from Build, including Microsoft’s new GitHub app and Foundry platform, at the Microsoft blog.Connect with Jay on LinkedIn. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

SPONSORED BY IBMRyan is joined by Rosemary Wang, Developer Advocate at IBM, to explore what infrastructure as code looks like once AI starts writing and deploying it. They discuss why guardrails still lag adoption, breaks down what it means when “anyone can deploy,” and why deep systems knowledge still matters. Episode notes:Try out Bob, IBM’s coding agent that Rosemary talked about in the episode. Connect with Rosemary on X, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes Saahil Jain, CTO of You.com, to discuss why building agents with a 2024 mindset is a mistake as modern models improve at long-horizon tasks, why heavy orchestration layers can hurt model performance more than help it, and why the 2026 competitive edge actually comes from information retrieval and unique data paired with end-to-end evaluation. Episode notes: You.com is an AI-powered search and productivity engine helping enterprises find information, create content, and automate complex tasks using web search APIs, multi-model AI access, and agentic intelligence. Connect with Saahil on LinkedIn or reach out to him at  saahil@you.com. Today’s shoutout goes to user knittl for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Remove all null values. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes Benny Chen, co-founder of Fireworks AI, to the show to explore what actually makes an AI application good or not, how to balance qualitative signals with quantitative metrics when evaluating AI, and how open-source eval protocols and community efforts are setting the standard for AI evaluation. Episode notes: Fireworks AI is a cloud platform designed for developers and enterprises to run, customize, and scale open-source generative AI models. Connect with Benny on LinkedIn.Congrats to user techtabu for winning a Stellar Answer badge for answering How can I delete all local Docker images?. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Vivek Raghunathan, SVP of engineering at Snowflake, joins Leaders of Code to explain how his org built a repeatable, org-wide system for AI-assisted engineering.

Ryan sits down with Frank Portman, CTO at Yobi, to talk about why next-token prediction is limited when it comes to forecasting human behavior.

Ryan sits down with Anish Agarwal, CEO and co-founder of Traversal, to chat about why AI coding agents have made writing code easier but running it safely in production harder, why production failures are really caused by interactions between systems and not just the code itself, and how teams can troubleshoot more effectively when traditional observability tools are not enough for agentic AI workflows.Episode notes: Traversal is an AI-powered autonomous SRE for complex software systems with automatic triage alerts, root cause investigation, and incident prevention at petabyte scale. Connect with Anish on LinkedIn or reach out to him at  anish@traversal.com. Our sixteenth Annual Developer Survey is now open and we want to hear your thoughts on all things software. Take the survey now!Congrats to user aioobe on winning a Populist badge for their answer to Javascript a=b=c statements. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan is joined by  Jeffrey Hightower, VP of Places Data at Microsoft, and Amy Rose, CTO of the Overture Maps Foundation, to chat about their partnership in bringing spatial data to the next generation of Microsoft tools; how Overture’s 50 organization members are creating open, standardized, and interoperable  global spatial data sets; and their solutions to the innate challenges of trying to digitally map the world. Episode notes: The Overture Maps Foundation is a free, open, and collaborative spatial data platform creating reliable and interoperable map data infrastructure. Microsoft is a founding member and part of Overture’s Steering committee. Connect with Amy on LinkedIn.Connect with Jeffrey on LinkedIn. Congrats to user Cesar Canassa for winning a Populist badge for their answer to Slicing a dictionary. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes Cricket Liu, DNS expert and Chief Evangelist at Infoblox, to the show to talk all things DNS. They cover the evolution of one of the oldest DNS server implementations, BIND, and what the future holds for protected DNS configurations; the realities of security threats like DDoS and DNS spoofing; and why outages often trace back to a lack of understanding of DNS’s fundamental role. Episode notes:Infoblox is a cloud-managed network services platform for core networking, combining automated infrastructure management and real-time threat intelligence.You think this is a lot about DNS? Cricket wrote several books about it. Connect with Cricket on LinkedIn or email him at  cricket@infoblox.com. Congrats to user Johannes Schaub - litb for winning a Populist badge for their answer to How do i check if a file is a regular file?. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Recorded live at the AI Agent Conference, Ryan sits down with Apollo GraphQL CEO Matt DeBerglis to discuss how enterprises can leverage GraphQL and MCP as a structured semantic architecture to feed clean data to autonomous agents, safeguard internal microservices against unprecedented "east-west" data exfiltration risks, and rein in skyrocketing token spend by explicitly querying only the exact context required.Episode notes: Apollo GraphQL lets you orchestrate APIs with a composable, declarative, self-service model. Apollo's MCP Server is now available.Connect with Matt on LinkedIn. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes Trisha Gee, a Java champion and developer productivity advocate, to explore how AI is transforming the role of IDEs and the broader developer experience; the relevance of traditional tools, muscle memory, the risks of hype; and how to adapt workflows for AI-driven development. Episode notes: Trisha Gee is a developer advocate and Java champion with over 20 years of software experience.  Connect with Trisha on LinkedIn and X. Congrats to user citelao for winning a Famous Question Badge for their question VS Code SSH keeps dropping connections, but I can SSH just fine. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Eric Anderson, director of engineering at Intuit, joins Stack Overflow engineering director Ben Matthews to talk about what happens to software teams when AI makes code generation seemingly free.

Ryan welcomes Bryan Clark, director of product for Lakebase at Databricks, to discuss what happens when AI agents become the primary creators and users of databases; why agents are “sloppy” about cleaning up infrastructure; and how database branching, scale-to-zero, and centralized access control can help teams keep up with agent-driven development. Episode notes: Databricks Lakebase is a Postgres-compatible operational database built around fast branching, separated compute and storage, and tight integration with the Databricks lakehouse. Connect with Bryan on LinkedIn and X. Congrats to Populist badge winner Benjamin Merchin for earning the badge for their answer to JSX element class does not support attributes because it does not have a 'props' property.ts(2607).  See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.