The Stack Overflow Podcast

Jannis Kallinikos is a coauthor of Data Rules: Reinventing the Market Economy (MIT Press, 2024) with Cristina Alaimo, which lays out a framework for a new social science focused on the socioeconomic changes driven by data. You can read an excerpt from Data Rules on our blog here.Explore more of Dr. Kallinikos’s work.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Ebrahim Ghasemi for answering What is the structure of an application protocol data unit (APDU) command and response?

Chelsea Troy defines technical debt and maintenance load in her blog post, “Stop saying ‘technical debt.’”Learn more about technical bankruptcy in this blog post, “Monitoring debt builds up faster than software teams can pay it off.”Joel Spolsky’s classic blog post on avoiding rewriting code from scratch – Things you should never do, part I.Technical debt as explained by Ward Cunningham, who coined the term.Code as an asset, a conversation from Hacker News.Middleware is the “software glue” that provides services to applications beyond those available from the operating system. Ratpack framework is a toolkit for creating high performance web applications.React is a front end javascript library.jQuery is a JavaScript library designed to simplify HTML.Questions about functional programming.User shout out! Nikoksr received the lifeboat badge after answering a question related to math.pow.

You can connect with Lenny Primak at Flow Logix, X, LinkedIn, Github, or Mastodon. Got questions about Java? Check out the site.Apache Groovy is a Java programming language. Virtual Threads reduce the effort put into writing and maintaining code as well as observing high-throughput concurrent applications.Apache Shiro is an open-source security framework that can do authentication, authorization, cryptography, and session management. Jakarta EE, or Jakarta Enterprise Edition, is a suite of services that helps developers write enterprise applications for the Java platform. 

LlamaIndex is a data framework for building LLM applications. Check out the open-source framework or get started with the developer community, LlamaHub.Looking for a deeper understanding of RAG? Start with our guide.Wondering how to import `SimpleDirectoryReader` from LlamaIndex? This question has you covered.Jerry Chen is a partner at Greylock. Connect with him on LinkedIn.Read Jerry Liu’s posts on the LlamaIndex blog or connect with him on LinkedIn.

Learn more about Staging Ground on our blog or in the help center.Find Kyle on LinkedIn, GitHub, and Twitter.Spevacus is a full stack developer and Stack Overflow moderator. They’re a participant in Charcoal, a user-run group that fights spam and rude/abusive content across the Stack Exchange network.

Stack Overflow and Elastic are collaborating to improve the search experience using vector search and generative AI. Learn more about the new AI features for Stack Overflow for Teams, including Enhanced Search.Learn more about the Elastic platform, including vector search. Developers can start building here.Connect with Paul, Steffi, and Gregor on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user chepner won a Lifeboat badge for answering How do I use __repr__ with multiple arguments?.

Carol is an applied clinical and intervention scientist: she develops and tests cognitive, behavioral, and social interventions that activate key mechanisms to elicit change. Learn more about understanding and mitigating code review anxiety (the full version of her article is here).You can also check out the code review anxiety workbook.Pluralsight’s Developer Success Lab is a team of scientists studying how developers work, learn, and innovate. Explore more of Carol’s work on code review anxiety, her bio, or her other work, from developer productivity and stress management to coding with GenAI. Connect with Carol on LinkedIn or Mastodon.

Still thinking about developer happiness and productivity? Read Eira’s article about the real 10x developers among us.Connect with Ben Borra through his website or LinkedIn.Asked and answered: Stack Overflow user Jian earned a Great Question badge with How do I close a frozen SSH session?. 

Before Medplum, Reshma founded and exited two startups in the healthcare space – MedXT (managing medical images online acquired by Box) and Droplet (at-home diagnostics company acquired by Ro). Reshma has a B.S. in computer science and a Masters of Engineering from MIT.You can learn more about Medplum here and check out their Github, which has over 1,200 stars, here.You can learn more about Khilnani on her website, GitHub, and on LinkedIn.Congrats to Stack Overflow user Kvam for earning a Lifeboat Badge with an answer to the question: What is the advantage of using a Bitarray when you can store your bool values in a bool[]?

Cassidy reflect on her time as a CTO of a startup and how the shifting environment for funding has created new pressures and incentives for founders, developers, and venture capitalists.Ben tries to get a bead on a new Moore’s law for the GenAI era: when will we start to see diminishing returns and fewer step factor jumps? Ben and Cassidy remember the time they made a viral joke of a keyboard!Ryan sees how things goes in cycles. A Stack Overflow job board is back! And what do we make of the trend of AI assisted job interviews where cover letters and even technical interviews have a bot in the background helping out.Congrats to Erwin Brandstetter for winning a lifeboat badge with an answer to this question:  How do I convert a simple select query like select * from customers into a stored procedure / function in pg?

How would all this work in practice? Of course, any metric you set out can easily become a target that developers look to game. With Snapshot Reviews, the goal is to get a high level overview of a software team’s total activity and then use AI to measure the complexity of the tasks and output.If a pull request attached to a Jira ticket is evaluated as simple by the system, for example, and a programmer takes weeks to finish it, then their productivity would be scored poorly. If a coder pushes code changes only once or twice a week, but the system rates them as complex and useful, then a high score would be awarded. You can learn more about Snapshot Reviews here.You can learn more about Flatiron Software here.Connect with Kirim on LinkedIn here.Congrats to Stack Overflow user Cherry who earned a great question badge for asking: Is it safe to use ALGORITHM=INPLACE for MySQL?

RelationalAI’s first big partner is Snowflake, meaning customers can now start using their data with GenAI without worrying about the privacy, security, and governance hassle that would come with porting their data to a new cloud provider. The company promises it can also add metadata and a knowledge graph to existing data without pushing it through an ETL pipeline.You can learn more about the company’s services here.You can catch up with Cassie on LinkedIn.Congrats to Stack Overflow user antimirov for earning a lifeboat badge by providing a great answer to the question: How do you efficiently compare two sets in Python?

Palmer says that a huge percentage of today’s top websites, including apps like ChartGPT, Perplexity, and Claude, were built with Vercel’s Next.JS. For the second goal, you can see what Vercel is up to with its v0 project, which lets developers use text prompts and images to generate code. Third, the Vercel AI SDK, which aims to to help developers build conversational, streaming, and chat user interfaces in JavaScript and TypeScript. You can learn more here.If you want to catch Jared posting memes, check him out on Twitter. If you want to learn more abiout the AI SDK, check it out here.A big thanks to Pierce Darragh for providing a great answer and earning a lifeboat badge by saving a question from the dustinbin of history. Pierce explained: How you can split documents into training set and test set

You can learn more about these three features on our Overflow AI site.If you want to connect with Tiago, you can find him on LinkedIn. The same goes for Alexa.A shoutout to Stack Overflow user Mahozad for earning a LifeBoat badge with their answer to the question: How can I add Jetpack Compose & xml in the same activity?

You can learn more about Squire AI hereConnect with Patel on his LinkedInCongrats to Bharath Pabba for earning a Great Question badge and helping 129,000 people with a similar question by asking: How to disable source maps for React JS Application?

You can find Narayan on LinkedIn.Learn more about SnapLogic here.Congrats to our user of the week, Ethan Heilman, for earning a Great Question badge by showing some curiosity and asking: How do I deal with garbage collection logs in Java?This question has been viewed over 175,000 times and helped lots of folks gain some new knowledge :)

You can find Shestakofsky on his website or check him out on X.Grab a copy of his new book: Behind the Startup: How Venture Capital Shapes Work, Innovation, and Inequality. As he writes on his website, the book:Draws on 19 months of participant-observation research to examine how investors’ demand for rapid growth created organizational problems that managers solved by combining high-tech systems with low-wage human labor. The book shows how the burdens imposed on startups by venture capital—as well as the benefits and costs of “moving fast and breaking things”—are unevenly distributed across a company’s workforce and customers. With its focus on the financialization of innovation, Behind the Startup explains how the gains generated by tech startups are funneled into the pockets of a small cadre of elite investors and entrepreneurs. To promote innovation that benefits the many rather than the few, Shestakofsky argues that we should focus less on fixing the technology and more on changing the financial infrastructure that supports it.A big thanks to our user of the week, Parusnik, who was awarded a Great Question badge for asking: How to run a .NET Core console application on Linux?

Temporal is an open-source implementation of durable execution, a development paradigm that preserves complete application state so that upon host or software failure it can seamlessly migrate execution to another machine. Learn how it works or dive into the docs. Temporal’s SaaS offering is Temporal Cloud.Replay is a three-day conference focused on durable execution. Replay 2024 is September 18-20 in Seattle, Washington, USA. Get your early bird tickets or submit a talk proposal!Connect with Maxim on LinkedIn.User Honda hoda earned a Famous Question badge for SQLSTATE[01000]: Warning: 1265 Data truncated for column.

Robin is the author of a practical handbook for Selenium test automation.Connect with Robin on LinkedIn, Twitter, or via his website. Shoutout to user2651084, who earned a Great Question badge by asking How do I reset the Jupyter/IPython input prompt numbering?. 

Galileo is an end-to-end platform for GenAI evaluation, experimentation, and observability. Learn more by exploring their docs.Galileo’s Hallucination Index is a ranking and evaluation framework for LLM hallucinations (it includes a blooper reel).Connect with Vikram on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user Petr Janeček won a Lifeboat badge for answering Null array to empty list, a question that’s helped more than 47,000 other curious folks.Are you a software developer? Take Stack Overflow’s annual survey about how you learn and level up, which tools you’re using, and which ones you want most. You can check out the results of previous surveys here.