The Stack Overflow Podcast

Do LLMs herald the end of computer programming (as we know it)? A Harvard lecture weighs in on this contentious topic.An epic hardware bug story.Question from the academic trenches: How bad will it look to prospective employers if you refuse to defend your PhD? (Answer: Pretty bad.)Another intriguing question: Were postal pneumatic tubes in Berlin really cleaned with wine?The Jetsons misled us about many aspects of the future, from flying cars to the role of pneumatics, but they were onto something with the series of tubes.Before influencers and social media algorithms, there were coolhunters.Congrats to Stack Overflow user tjati, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering What does 'HTML is escaping' mean?.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

5 Des 202322min

As the year winds to a close, some big employers are facing lower-than-expected attrition rates—in other words, fewer people than expected are quitting. What a difference a year or two makes.People have strong opinions on the return-to-office conversation. Read Eira’s article and let us know how you feel.We are just beginning to explore the effects of prompting on the capabilities and performance of LLMs.The Humane AI pin can be described as a cross between two of humanity’s most beloved technologies: Google Glass and the pager.People are using low-cost drones, 3D printers, and private satellites to preserve irreplaceable cultural heritage sites before they are destroyed or lost to time. (Stay tuned while Eira figures out how to apply this tech as a cemetery tour guide.)Stack Overflow user FlipperPA earned a Lifeboat badge with their answer to The 'Black' formatter - Python.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

1 Des 202318min

Bito AI is an AI coding tool that helps developers work more productively with features like code completion within the IDE and personalized answers drawn from your codebase. Get started with their docs here.ICYMI: Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is a way of addressing LLM hallucinations and outdated training data.Listen to our recent episode about how an original architect of Jira is rethinking meaningful engineering metrics.Connect with Anand on LinkedIn or Twitter.com. Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Jan Kardaš, whose answer to Go: Retrieve a string from between two characters or other strings earned them a Lifeboat badge.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

28 Nov 202332min

Cloudflare is a cloud provider used by almost 20% of all websites. Developers new to Cloudflare can get started here.Cloudflare recently launched Workers AI, an open, pay-as-you-go AI inference-as-a-service platform that lets developers run machine learning models on the Cloudflare network from their own code. Developers can get started here.On a related note, read Ryan’s article exploring the infrastructure and code behind edge functions or check out his conversation with Vercel CTO Malte Ubl.Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is a strategy that helps address both LLM hallucinations and out-of-date training data.Connect with Rita on LinkedIn.Connect with Cassidy through her website.Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Bamieh, whose answer to What does the function call app.use(cors()) do? earned them a Lifeboat badge.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

21 Nov 202325min

Sana automates user enrollment, training reminders, and other manual/admin tasks associated with onboarding and learning. Sana AI, their AI assistant, is trained on a company’s data so employees can self-serve the knowledge they need.On a related note, listen to our interview with Gašper Beguš, director of the Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, about his research into how LLMs and humans acquire language.You can also read about how Stack Overflow implemented semantic search.Connect with Joel on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user Donagh Hatton received a well-earned Lifeboat badge with their answer to Why is StringBuilder much faster than String?.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

17 Nov 202328min

SPONSORED BY CHRONOSPHEREEpisode notes:Chronosphere is introducing Lens, a cloud-native observability tool to view data flows between services. At Uber, Rob created M3, an open-source metrics engine compatible with Prometheus.  Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, ralf htp, for their answer to How to read an image in Python OpenCV. If you want to meet Rob and the Chronosphere team, they’ll be at AWS re:Invent  from Nov. 27 to Dec. 1.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

15 Nov 202327min

ICYMI, listen to part one of this conversation.Craig is the cofounder and CEO of Stacklok, which helps developers and open-source communities build safer software, secure the supply chain, and choose safer dependencies. Stacklok’s free-to-use service, Trusty, employs a statistical analysis of author/repo activity and a package’s source of origin to assess its trustworthiness.Craig cofounded the Kubernetes project, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.Craig is on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user mprivat earned a well-deserved Lifeboat badge by answering Abstract class extending concrete classes.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

14 Nov 202312min

Stacklok helps developers and open-source communities build safer software, secure the supply chain, and choose safer dependencies. Trusty is their free-to-use service that employs a statistical analysis of author/repo activity and a package’s source of origin to assess its trustworthiness.Craig cofounded the Kubernetes project, an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.He is also the former VP of Research and Development at VMWare.Follow Craig on LinkedIn.Congrats to Stack Overflow user netcorefan, who earned a Lifeboat badge with their answer to Need a workaround to access ReadOnlySpan inside a function that returns an IEnumerable.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

10 Nov 202316min