The Stack Overflow Podcast

Ryan hosts SmartBear’s VP of AI and Architecture Fitz Nowlan to explore how we’re moving away from old assumptions about software development, the challenges of testing MCP servers as LLM-driven agents introduce non-determinism that breaks tradition, and how data locality and data construction are becoming more valuable when source code is so easy to generate. Episode notes:  SmartBear gives devs tools for application performance monitoring, software development, software testing, and API management—all at AI speed and scale. Connect with Fitz on LinkedIn and email him at FitzNowlan@SmartBear.com  Congrats to Great Answer winner Alexander for winning the badge for their answer to Is there a way to make Runnable's run() throw an exception?. TRANSCRIPT 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 Nancy Wang, CTO of 1Password, to discuss the security challenges local agents present, how enterprises can create robust governance of credentials through zero-knowledge architecture, and the implications of agent intent and misuse in a world where AI agents are becoming more and more integrated into everyday applications. Episode notes:  1Password keeps your credentials secure through end-to-end encryption, zero-knowledge architecture, and more. Read their latest white paper on security design.  Connect with Nancy on LinkedIn or email her at nancy.wang@1password.com.  Congratulations to user Binita Bharati for winning a Populist badge for their answer to How to know the version of currently installed package from yarn.lock. TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes Gee Rittenhouse, VP of Security at AWS, to the show to discuss the complexities of multi-stage attacks in cybersecurity and how these attacks unfold, the challenges in detecting them, and the evolving role of AI in both enhancing security and creating new vulnerabilities.  Episode notes:  AWS Security Hub is expanding to unify your cloud security options. Learn more about how AWS is keeping your cloud safe on their website.  Connect with Gee on LinkedIn.  Shoutout to user James Kanze for winning a Populist badge for their answer to The spiral rule about declarations — when is it in error?. TRANSCRIPT 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 Stefan Weitz, CEO and co-founder of the HumanX Conference, for a conversation on how AI has evolved in the last year. They discuss whether “the year of the agent” came to fruition, why companies are moving away from AGI, and the major blockers for AI adoption, from distrust in non-deterministic systems to enterprise data-readiness.  Episode notes:  HumanX 2026, one of the biggest AI conferences of the year, is happening in San Francisco from April 6-9. Listen to our episodes recorded on the conference floor last year.  Connect with Stefan on LinkedIn. Congrats to Populist badge recipient humblebee for winning the badge for their answer to How to open/run YML compose file?. TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

How Netlify built a global engineering team

Ryan sits down with Chainguard CEO Dan Lorenc to chat about how his team is keeping the foundation of the internet—open source projects—alive by forking archived but widely-used repos to provide security maintenance and dependency upgrades. They also discuss open source’s sustainability problems when it comes to funding, security, and maintainer burnout, and how trusted stewardship can reduce risk when maintainers step away. Episode notes:  Chainguard provides secure-by-default open source artifacts for the modern software stack, keeping important open source projects maintained instead of archived. Chainguard just announced a whole bunch of new stuff at their user conference, Assemble.  Connect with Dan on LinkedIn. Congrats to user Andreas Grapentin for winning a Lifejacket badge for their answer to Nested if-statement in loop vs two separate loops. TRANSCRIPT 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 Jan Liphardt,  CEO and co-founder of OpenMind, to chat about the rapidly evolving world of humanoid robotics and what it means for humans, why OpenMind is building an open source operating system for robots that processes logic in natural language, and how putting Asimov’s Laws on the blockchain might be the key to robotics guardrails. Episode notes:  OpenMind’s OM1 is an open source OS for robots that allows robots to perceive, adapt, and act within human environments.  Connect with Jan on LinkedIn and GitHub. This week’s shoutout goes to user Sean, who won a Lifejacket badge for their answer to Creating the simplest HTML toggle button?. TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes Kari Briski, NVIDIA’s VP of Generative AI Software for Enterprise, to the show to explore how a chip manufacturer got into the model development game. They discuss NVIDIA’s co-design feedback loop between model builders and hardware architects, share insights on precision model training and memory management systems, and take a look at the roadmap and development of NVIDIA’s fully open-source Nemotron.  Episode notes:  Nemotron is a family of open models with open weights, training data, and recipes for building specialized AI agents.You can learn more on their Hugging Face page or at NVIDIA GTC on March 16-19.  Connect with Kari on LinkedIn. Congrats to user The4thIceman for winning a Populist badge on their answer to How to Center Text in Pygame. TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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. TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

SPONSORED BY DOCKER In 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 notes Docker 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.

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. TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.  TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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?. TRANSCRIPT 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 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! TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.

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.  TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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.com TRANSCRIPT 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 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.  TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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. TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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. TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.