The Stack Overflow Podcast The Stack Overflow Podcast

Dr. Richard Hipp, creator of SQLite, shares how he taught himself to program, the challenges he faced in creating SQLite, and the importance of testing and maintaining the software for long-term support.

The home team talks about the current state of the software job market, the changing sentiments around AI job opportunities, the impact of big players like Facebook and OpenAI on the space, and the challenges for startups. Plus: The philosophical implications of LLMs and the friendship potential of corvids.

Ben and Ryan explore why configuration is so complicated, the right to repair, the best programming languages for beginners, how AI is grading exams in Texas, Automattic’s $125M acquisition of Beeper, and why a major US city’s train system still relies on floppy disks. Plus: The unique challenge of keeping up with a field that’s changing as rapidly as GenAI.

SPONSORED BY MONGODB

Ben talks with Shane McAllister, lead developer advocate at MongoDB, Stanimira Vlaeva, senior developer advocate at MongoDB, and Miku Jha, director, AI/ML and generative AI at Google Cloud, about the challenges and opportunities of operationalizing and scaling generative AI models in enterprise organizations. They discuss the importance of data quality, the role of cloud providers in simplifying the deployment and management of AI models, and the challenges of transitioning from experimentation to production.

On this episode: Stack Overflow senior data scientist Michael Geden tells Ryan and Ben about how data scientists evaluate large language models (LLMs) and their output. They cover the challenges involved in evaluating LLMs, how LLMs are being used to evaluate other LLMs, the importance of data validating, the need for human raters, and more needs and tradeoffs involved in selecting and fine-tuning LLMs.

In the wake of the XZ backdoor, Ben and Ryan unpack the security implications of relying on open-source software projects maintained by small teams. They also discuss the open-source nature of Linux, the high cost of education in the US, the value of open-source contributions for job seekers, and what Apple is up to AI-wise.