The Stack Overflow Podcast

Ryan sits down with Tim Lindholm, an early contributor to the Java language at Sun Microsystems, to chat about what it was like building one of the most popular programming languages ever at its inception, why it was strategically important for the Java team to create a cross-platform ABI to compete with Windows NT, and how applets were initially just an interesting demo. Episode notes: Watch the new documentary by Cult.Repo on YouTube to learn more about the early history of Java and the people who built it.Connect with Tim Lindholm on LinkedIn.Shoutout to user gabuzo for winning a Populist badge for answering What is the standard method for generating a nonce in Python?.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 Praveen Bodigutla, Principal AI Researcher at LinkedIn, to chat about the four-layer memory system his team built to give LinkedIn's hiring assistant a persistent, personalized state. Praveen explains why his team moved off GraphRAG in favor of a tree-structured memory for faster incremental updates and how they balance retrieval freshness, latency budgets, and access control at LinkedIn's scale.Connect with Praveen on LinkedIn.Congrats to Populist badge winner Luka Ganić, who answered SVG image as button in Flutter so well it outscored the accepted answer!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Andi Gutmans, head of Agentic Data Cloud at Google and co-creator of PHP, joins Leaders of Code to talk about why agentic development feels less like a break from the past and more like the next chapter of the same story. This is part one of a two-part conversation.In this episode, Eira May and Stack Overflow Director of Platform Engineering Peter O'Connor talk with Andi Gutmans about the throughline between democratizing web development with PHP and democratizing software development with agents today. Andi makes the case that every individual contributor is becoming “a team lead of agents” and walks through how that reshapes code review, interviewing, and the balance of human versus agent judgment. He also explains why he thinks the biggest bottleneck left isn't the models, but the challenge of getting an organization's data into a state where agents can actually reason over it.The discussion also:Covers how Google is changing its own interview process to evaluate how candidates reason with and guide agents, rather than how well they can hand-code a solution alone.Explores the "human in the loop, agent in the loop, agent on the loop" framework for deciding where review actually needs to happen — and why that's fundamentally a risk-management question, not a trust-in-AI question.Uses the Waymo safety-data-versus-perception gap as an analogy for why organizations (and individuals) sometimes resist agent autonomy even when the numbers favor it.Introduces Google's "borderless lakehouse" concept and the shift from human data stewardship to agent-driven ontology building.Notes:Connect with Andi Gutmans on LinkedIn.Connect with Peter O'Connor 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 Meryll Blanchet, Director of Engineering for Adobe Brand Visibility, to chat about Adobe’s recent acquisition of Semrush, how Adobe Brand Visibility was born from Semrush’s AI visibility product and Adobe’s LLM Optimizer, and how Adobe used a three-day internal hackathon instead of a large-scale infrastructure integration to quickly deliver value to customers. Episode notes:  Adobe Brand Visibility is a GEO software that helps companies improve their AI visibility, citations, and share of voice. You can preview the new product here.Connect with Meryll on LinkedIn. Congratulations to user patti_jane, who won a Stellar Question badge for asking Setting PATH environment variable in macOS permanently.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes McLaren Stanley, Senior Principal Engineer for Amazon Stores, to discuss what it actually takes to make teams AI native, why agentic engineering is shifting code bottlenecks downstream to testing and deployment, and why robust validation is essential to build trust and enable “fearless commits.”Episode notes:You can learn more about how Amazon’s frontier teams became AI native on the AWS blog. Connect with McLaren on LinkedIn.Congrats to user o11c for winning a Populist badge for answering Pythonic way to count the number of trailing zeros in base 2. 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 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.

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 [email protected]. 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.