Hello everyone and welcome to the very first episode of We'll Be in Touch, a new podcast series from Stack Overflow. This show will explore the world of job interviews, career development, and software engineering. Each episode, we'll sit down with folks working in software development to hear their stories, dive into their latest projects, learn about tricky bugs they've tackled, and discuss the tricks they use to keep up with all the latest languages and frameworks.Your host, Kyle Mitofsky, is a Staff Software Engineer here at Stack Overflow. With over a decade of experience as an independent contributor, manager, and team leader, he's interviewed a wide range of people and is excited to be able to share these revealing and engaging conversations, WITHOUT the pressure of an actual job interview.Whether you're an aspiring developer or a seasoned professional, join us as we delve into meaningful discussions that can help shape your career. We're kicking off the series by chatting with a former colleague of Kyle's, Yaakov Ellis, a long time Stack Overflow community member and employee who currently  holds a role as a Staff Engineer at Intuit.

Moderne is an open-source company building automated source code transformations for framework migrations, vulnerability patches, and API migrations. Explore the platform here.OpenRewrite is a community-driven open source project that consists of an auto-refactoring engine that runs prepackaged refactoring recipes for common framework migrations, security fixes, and stylistic consistency tasks.Connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn.Props to Stack Overflow user Benjamin Atkin, who earned a Populist badge by offering up some wisdom on Rails - How to refresh an association after a save.

Chris works at Sledgehammer Games (a division of Activision), which develops titles in the Call of Duty franchise. Explore their open roles here.Want to see Chris’s engine in action? Check out COD: Modern Warfare III.Connect with Chris on LinkedIn.Kudos to Stack Overflow user teh.fonsi, who earned a Lifeboat badge by explaining How to execute 1 command x times in java. 

Clarifai is a developer-friendly AI workflow orchestration platform built to help devs integrate AI into technical workflows and customer experiences.We’ve written about best practices for integrating AI tools into your workflows.Connect with Matt on LinkedIn or via his website. You can also read his posts on the Clarifai blog. Well-deserved congrats to Stack Overflow user Jay Wick, who earned a Populist badge by explaining how to Get image preview before uploading in React.

Or Lenchner is the CEO of Bright Data, a web data platform that offers ready-made datasets, proxy networks, and AI-powered web scrapers. Developers can get started with their docs here.ICYMI, read our blog post about the knowledge-as-a-service business model and how it will guide the future of our paid platform. AI answers alone aren’t knowledge.Connect with Or on LinkedIn. Stack Overflow user guizo earned a Populist badge by explaining How can I minify JSON in a shell script?.

Logan previously worked at OpenAI, where he led developer relations. He’s now a senior product manager for Google AI Studio, the fastest way for devs to get started with the Gemini API. Logan’s team just rolled out Grounding with Google Search, a feature built to help developers get fresher, more accurate responses from the Gemini models aided by Google Search. Learn more here.Connect with Logan on LinkedIn. Props to Stack Overflow user Jonik, who earned a Populist badge by explaining How to write an S3 object to a file?.

Want to learn more about the early days of React? React.js: The Documentary gives you the full story from the perspective of the developers who created it.Vercel is a native Next.js platform.v0 aims to democratize software development for non-technical users. Check it out here.Listen to our recent conversation with Vercel’s VP of AI.Connect with Tom on LinkedIn or X.Kudos to Stack Overflow user Sodruldeen Mustapha, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering How to remove the environment variables from Laravel Debug?. 

 Fastlane by PayPal is an accelerated guest checkout experience. Visit theFastlane Resource Center for Developers to get started.You can find Sunny Patel on LinkedIn and on GitHub.Find Kyle Prinsloo on X and on LinkedIn.Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner M.M who provided an answer to What does the "Expected '(' for function-style cast or type construction" error mean?

Watch Fay build a Harry Potter-themed chatbot with an assist from AI.Cursor is the AI code editor Fay’s using. Get started with their docs.Connect with Ricky on LinkedIn or X. Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Mahendra Kulkarni, who earned a Lifeboat badge by answering How do I get current rowindex of a table using JavaScript?. 

The Data Provenance Initiative is a collective of volunteer AI researchers from around the world. They conduct large-scale audits of the massive datasets that power state-of-the-art AI models with a goal of mapping the landscape of AI training data to improve transparency, documentation, and informed use of data. Their Explorer tool allows users to filter and analyze the training datasets typically used by large language models.Shayne and Robert are the authors of a new study called Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons: the first large-scale, longitudinal audit of the consent protocols for the web domains underlying AI training sets.Connect with Shayne via his website.Connect with Robert via his website or on LinkedIn. Stack Overflow user George Hawkins earned a Populist badge by explaining How to get base url in angular 5?.

Tariq Shaukat, the former president of Google Cloud and Bumble, is the CEO of Sonar. Follow him on LinkedIn.Sonar offers code quality and security solutions that help developers write clean code and remediate existing code organically. Their product SonarQube helps devs ensure the quality and security of AI-generated code.Watch Olivier Gaudin, founder of Sonar, explain why clean code is the foundation for well-functioning dev teams.Stack Overflow user Ogglas earned a Populist badge by explaining How to access the appsettings in Blazor WebAssembly.

Solo.io provides API gateway, service mesh, and internal developer portal solutions. Follow Solo.io on X or LinkedIn or dig into the docs.Want to brush up on RAG? Our Guide to AI walks you through the concept and includes a practical example. Or check out one expert’s practical tips for RAG on our blog.Connect with Keith on LinkedIn.Shoutout to Stack Overflow user MrSimpleMind: their helpful answer to the question – How to run jq from gitbash in windows? – has been viewed by more than 213,000 people and won a Populist badge.

Ryan is a VP of Product focused on the Unity Engine and AI services. You can find him on LinkedIn and X.Martin Best is a Principal Product Architect working on the Unity Engine. You can find him on LinkedIn.To learn more about Unity 6, please visit their website. Show some love to this question and Stack Overflow user NPatch, who provided an accepted answer to the question: Why is my character floating in the air when death animation is played in Unity?

Sift is an end-to-end observability stack for safety-critical hardware development. See what they’re up to on their blog.We talked to SpaceX about their testing processes way back in 2021. Connect with Austin on LinkedIn. Stack Overflow user TheScholar earned a Great Question badge by wondering How to create a new deep copy (clone) of a List?, a question that’s helped more than 200,000 people.

Helm.ai licenses AI software throughout the L2-L4 autonomous driving stack, which includes perception, intent modeling, path planning, and vehicle control. They’re hiring!Connect with Vlad on LinkedIn.Stack Overflow user user3330840 won a Lifeboat badge for their answer to My commits appear as another user in GitHub?.

Memento is a real-time data platform designed to help developers ship better products faster. Explore the platform here or get started in the docs. Connect with Daniela on LinkedIn and follow Momento on X.Stack Overflow user Simon Juhl won a Lifeboat badge for dropping some knowledge on HTMLCSS change Date input highlight color.

You can find Crystal on LinkedIn.You can learn more about FSH Tech here.Congrats to Stack OVerflow user David Conrad, who earned a lifeboat badge for answering the question: How do I create a map with key and value in one line in Java?

You can find David on LinkedIn.You can learn more about Arcjet here.You can subscribe to to the console.dev newsletter and podcast here.Congrats to Stack Overflow user Greg Hewgill who earned a Populist badge for his answer to the question: What’s a good tool to determine the lowest version of Python required? Greg is getting close to the magic one million rep mark!

You can find Deedy on Twitter and LinkedIn.You can learn more about the Anthology Fund here.You can learn more about Menlo Ventures here.Congrats to Stack Overflow users Bobince for earning a Populist badge with their answer to the question: What does sorting mean in non-alphabetic languages?

Jyoti is a cofounder and CEO of Harness, a software delivery platform meant to modernize your DevOps tooling and take the friction out of CI/CD. Devs can get started with the developer portal. In addition to Harness, Jyoti is a cofounder and entrepreneur partner at Unusual Ventures, which specializes in working with early-stage startups (pre-seed to Series A).Connect with Jyoti on LinkedIn. Shoutout to Stack Overflow user kukuh, who won a Lifeboat badge for dishing out some wisdom on Android productFlavors in gradle-kotlin-dsl.

Read the paper Gias coauthored about incorrectness in AI-generated code or explore more of his research. You can connect with Gias via his website.We previously covered research on Stack Overflow code snippets that Gias was involved in and spoke to his team about deriving sentiment from SO comments.  Shoutout to Stack Overflow user Adhi Ardiansyah for an excellent explanation of How to update a GitHub access token via command line.

Multimodal AI combines different modalities—audio, video, text, etc.—to enable more humanlike engagement and higher-quality responses from the AI model. WebRTC is a free, open-source project that allows developers to add real-time communication capabilities that work on top of an open standard to their applications. It supports video, voice, and generic data.LiveKit is an open-source project that provides scalable, multi-user conferencing based on WebRTC. It’s designed to provide everything developers need to build real-time voice and video applications. Check them out on GitHub.Connect with Russ on LinkedIn or X and explore his posts on the LiveKit blog.Stack Overflow user Kristi Jorgji threw inquiring minds a lifejacket (badge) by answering their own question: Error trying to import dump from mysql 5.7 into 8.0.23.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux may be the world’s largest open-source software business. You can dive into the docs here.Created by IBM and Red Hat, InstructLab is an open-source project for enhancing LLMs. Learn more here or join the community on GitHub.Connect with Scott on LinkedIn.  User AffluentOwl earned a Great Question badge by wondering How to force JavaScript to deep copy a string?. 

From her early days coding on a TI-84 calculator, to working as an engineer at IBM, to pivoting over to her new role in DevRel, speaking, and community, Mrina has seen the world of coding from many angles. You can follow her on Twitter here and on LinkedIn here.You can learn more about CK editor here and TinyMCE here.Congrats to Stack Overflow user NYI for earning a great question badge by asking: How do I convert a bare git repository into a normal one (in-place)?

You can learn more about Kohsuke on his website.You can read more about Jenkins here.You can read more about Cloudbees here.Shout to Mossmyr for contributing a question that's now part of our CI/CD Collective:  Is there a way to call a Jenkins Shared Library method from another Jenkins Shared Library?

Pradeep talks about building at global scale and preparing for inevitable system failures. He talks about extra layers of security, including viewing your own VMs as untrustworthy. And he lays out where he thinks the world of cloud computing is headed as GenAI becomes a bigger piece of many company’s tech stack. You can find Pradeep on LinkedIn. He also writes a blog and hosts a podcast over at Oracle First Principles. Congrats to Stack Overflow user shantanu, who earned a Great Question badge for asking: Which shell I am using in mac? Over 100,000 people have benefited from your curiosity.

You can learn more about Austin on LinkedIn and check out a blog he wrote on building the SDK for Open Telemetry here.You can find Austin at the CNCF Slack community, in the OTel SIG channel, or the client-side SIG channels. The calendar is public on opentelemetry.io. Embrace has its own Slack community to talk all things Embrace or all things mobile observability. You can join that by going to embrace.io as well.Congrats to Stack Overflow user Cottentail for earning an Illuminator badge, awarded when a user edits and answers 500 questions, both actions within 12 hours.

For the last two years, Postgres has been the most popular database among respondents to our Annual Developer Survey. Timescale is a startup working on an open-source PostgreSQEL stack for AI applications. You can follow the company on X and check out their work on GitHub. You can learn more about Avthar on his website and on LinkedIn. Congrats to Stack Overflow user Haymaker for earning a Great Question badge. They asked: How Can I Override the Default SQLConnection Timeout? Nearly 250,000 other people have been curious about this same question.

You can learn more about Geshan on his website or check him out on LinkedIn.Geshan also shared the slide decks for a few of his talks on serverless and containers.Congrats to Stack Overflow user Matthew Reed for earning a populist badge with his answer to the question: GitHub: How to do case sensitive search for the code in repository?

If you’ve never seen it, check out Ryan’s classic talk, 10 Things I Regret About Node.JS, which gives a great overview of the reasons he felt compelled to create Deno.You can learn more about Ryan on Wikipedia, his website, and his Github page.To learn more about Deno 2.0, listen to Ryan talk about it here and check out the project’s Github page here.Congrats to Hugo G, who earned a Great Answer Badge for his input on the following question: How can I declare and use Boolean variables in a shell script?

You can find Ilya on LinkedIn here.You can listen to Ilya talk about Commerce Components here, a system he describes as a "modern way to approach your commerce architecture without reducing it to a (false) binary choice between microservices and monoliths."As Ilya notes, “there are a lot of interesting implications for runtime and how we're solving it at Shopify. There is a direct bridge there to a performance conversation as well: moving untrusted scripts off the main thread, sandboxing UI extensions, and more.” No badge winner today. Instead, user Kaizen has a question about Shopify that still needs an answer. Maybe you can help! How to Activate Shopify Web Pixel Extension on Production Store?

Coalesce is a solution to transform data at scale. You can find Satish on LinkedIn. We previously spoke to Satish for a Q&A on the blog: AI is only as good as the data: Q&A with Satish Jayanthi of CoalesceWe previously covered metadata on the blog: Metadata, not data, is what drags your database downCongrats to Lifeboat winner nwinkler for saving this question with a great answer: Docker run hello-world not working 

Read Dan’s blog post about the process of making Stack Overflow more accessible.We followed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), with a few exceptions. For example, we chose to measure color contrast using the Accessible Perceptual Contrast Algorithm (APCA). We quantified the accessibility of our products using the Axe accessibility testing engine.Our accessibility dashboard helps our internal teams and the community track the accessibility of our products: Stacks (our design system), the public platform (Stack Overflow and all Stack Exchange sites), and Stack Overflow for Teams (including Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise products). We also implemented robust accessibility testing and made those rules open-source in a comprehensive package you can find here.Shoutout to user Beejor for an excellent answer to the question What is the largest safe UDP packet size on the internet?.

Read the blog post or dive into the results of our 2024 Developer Survey.A few highlights to get you started: most popular technologies,most admired and desired programming languages,feelings about/use of AI coding tools, andwhat we know about the global developer community.Speaking of our developer community, Stack Overflow user Frank earned a Stellar Question badge by wondering How to use C++ in Go.

Cortex is an internal developer portal that cuts noise and helps devs build and continuously improve software. Explore their docs or see what’s happening on their blog.Cortex is also hiring, so if you’re an engineer who wants to work on these kinds of problems, check out their careers page.Connect with Anish on LinkedIn or X.Ganesh is also on LinkedIn and X.Shoutout to Alex Chesters, who earned a Great Question badge with How to count occurrences of an element in a Swift array?. 

As Josh explains, DDoS attacks aim to take down a website, while bot scrapers try to gather as much data as possible without getting caught.Josh Zhang is a staff site reliability engineer (SRE) at Stack Overflow. Connect with him on LinkedIn.ICYMI: In 2022, Josh wrote an article for our blog about how Stack defends itself against DDoS attacks.Stack Overflow user Serge Ballesta won a Lifeboat badge for answering What does |= mean in c++.

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?