The Stack Overflow Podcast The Stack Overflow Podcast

In this episode, Ben interviews Jannis Kallinikos, a professor at Luiss University in Rome, Italy about his new book Data Rules: Reinventing the Market Economy, coauthored with Cristina Alaimo. They discuss the social impact of data, explore the idea that data filters how we see the world and interact with each other, and highlight the need for social accountability in data tracking and surveillance.

Ryan chats with Jon Bevan, a software engineer currently building the cloud version of Scriptrunner, an Atlassian app, about the concept of tech debt. They explore how tech debt can arise from outdated technology choices, shortcuts, and the need for maintenance work. They also delve into the challenges of upgrading dependencies and the potential scope creep of requirements and features over time.

Ben and Ryan chat with listener, professional pilot, and Java enthusiast Lenny Primak about what he finds exciting about Java in 2024. Lenny started using Java around 1997 as a college student. He got his first Wall Street job right before he turned 18, working with programming languages like C++ and distributor trading systems before becoming a pilot in 2007. Since then he has been an avid Java programming hobbyist.

Why get excited about Java? According to Lenny, he finds Java to be a brilliant technology, far ahead of its time. He loves that Java is no longer a verbose language as it was in the early days, works well on machines, has had no recent security breaches, and no real failures attributed to Java not working. In addition, every six months you get a production quality release.

Ben and Eira talk with LlamaIndex CEO and cofounder Jerry Liu, along with venture capitalist Jerry Chen, about how the company is making it easier for developers to build LLM apps. They touch on the importance of high-quality training data to improve accuracy and relevance, the role of prompt engineering, the impact of larger context windows, and the challenges of setting up retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).

A two-part episode: In part one, Ben chats with friend of the show and senior software engineer Kyle Mitofsky about Staging Ground, a private space within Stack Overflow where new users can receive guidance from experienced users before their question is posted. In part two, Ben talks to Stack Overflow moderator Spevacus, who participated in the beta of Staging Ground. They talk about why we wanted to build a safer asking experience for new users, the positive feedback we’ve gotten from the community so far, and the challenges of building Staging Ground within the existing Stack Overflow architecture.

In this episode, Ben chats with Elastic software engineering director Paul Oremland along with Stack Overflow staff software engineer Steffi Grewenig and senior software developer Gregor Časar about vector databases and semantic search from both the vendor and customer perspectives. They talk about the impact of GenAI on productivity and the search experience, the value of structured data for LLMs, and the potential for knowledge extraction and sharing.