The Stack Overflow Podcast
500 episodes listed below
Stack Overflow's Ryan Donovan interviews founders and engineers on AI agents, protocols, and dev tools.
The Stack Overflow Podcast pairs Ryan Donovan with builders, engineers, and technical leaders working through software problems. Conversations move from C++ design and compiler behavior to AI agents, data governance, local credentials, distributed messaging, and the changing value of source code.
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This is an interview-format podcast: a Stack Overflow host, most often Ryan Donovan, holds a one-on-one conversation with a single outside guest for roughly 25 to 33 minutes per episode. Guests are typically founders, CTOs, or the original creators of a language or protocol, such as Bjarne Stroustrup discussing the design history of C++, David Suryapara discussing Model Context Protocol governance at Anthropic, or Nancy Wang discussing agent identity security at 1Password. Recurring themes include AI agent security and credential brokering, enterprise AI governance and pipeline sprawl, decentralized and self-hosted software architecture, open source standards and protocol design, and how AI is changing software testing and coding practice. Episodes are conversational and explanatory in tone, walking through technical concepts like OAuth extensions for MCP, matryoshka embeddings, or robot driver standards in some depth rather than staying at a headline level. A consistent closing segment recognizes a specific Stack Overflow community member's answer or badge, tying the show back to the Q&A site it comes from. The guest roster changes episode to episode rather than featuring repeat guests, so listeners hear from a new practitioner or founder each time. The show is best suited to working software engineers, engineering managers, and technologists who want grounded, specific discussion of AI tooling, developer infrastructure, and language or protocol design rather than general tech news. It does not appear to use a narrative or panel format, and episodes are structured as single-guest interviews throughout the sample reviewed. The RSS feed also credits Ben Popper and Cassidy Williams and Ceora Ford as hosts, though the sampled episodes are hosted by Ryan Donovan.
Made for: Software engineers, engineering leads, and technologists who want detailed conversations about AI agent infrastructure, developer protocols, and programming language design.
What sets it apart: Closes each interview with a callback to a specific Stack Overflow community answer or badge, tying broader AI and infrastructure debates back to the site's own Q&A ecosystem.
For more than a dozen years, the Stack Overflow Podcast has been exploring what it means to be a developer and how the art and practice of software programming is changing our world. From Rails to React, from Java to Node.js, we host important conversations and fascinating guests that will help you understand how technology is made and where it’s headed. Hosted by Ben Popper, Cassidy Williams, and Ceora Ford, the Stack Overflow Podcast is your home for all things code.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Ryan Donovan turns ambitious technology claims into concrete questions about testing, architecture, security, governance, and the realities of maintaining software.
Ryan Donovan builds each conversation around a working problem, then lets a guest test its assumptions. Recent discussions move from evaluating non-deterministic AI systems and designing MCP infrastructure to governing enterprise data access, securing credentials for local…
Stack Overflow turns agent-era headaches into questions you'd actually ask before shipping.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A practical Stack Overflow conversation on AI governance, warehouse architecture, LLM pipelines, and the messier online systems that sit beyond them.
The Stack Overflow Podcast frames corporate AI strategy less as a vision exercise than as infrastructure work: pipeline sprawl, shadow AI, data access, and the hard boundary between analytics systems and the online services customers actually touch.
Bjarne makes C++ feel like a practical argument about systems, security, and the cost of keeping real software alive.
C++ comes across as a working engineer's argument, not a museum piece. Ryan Donovan starts with Bjarne's path into computing, from mathematics and room sized machines to the moment languages, architecture, and data structures hooked him.
A practical discussion of agent security as a credential, endpoint signal, and identity problem.
Agent security becomes concrete here: local software agents are already reaching for the same credential stores, packages, API keys, and SSH keys developers use every day.
A practical look at humanoid robots as an open source platform problem with very physical bugs.
Robotics comes across here as a software problem that happens to have legs. Ryan Donovan talks with Jan Lippard, CEO and co-founder of OpenMind, about open source robot platforms, humanoid hardware, chips, sensors, drivers, and the awkward business of making physical machines…
Long-form interviews on AI coding agents, infrastructure, and security, plus a recurring SED News roundup.
Founders and engineers on AI coding agents like Claude Code, and supply chain security.
Michael Kennedy interviews Python maintainers on packaging, security, web tools, and AI.
Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken run down the week's Python tooling, typing, and packaging news.
Matt Stratton interviews DevOps practitioners on security, platform engineering, and trusting AI-written code.
AI strategy gets messy fast.
Bjarne's path to C++ starts with a room-sized computer.
Local agents put credentials in play.
This episode discusses multi-stage attacks in cybersecurity, comparing them to Final Fantasy bosses, with insights from an AWS security expert on how AI and ML have complicated these threats.
This episode discusses whether 2025 lived up to its hype as the year of AI agents, featuring insights from Stefan Weitz on the AI landscape's evolution and practical applications.
This episode discusses building a global engineering team and integrating AI agents, focusing on observing trends, fostering curiosity, and reducing development barriers.
This episode discusses the challenges of open source projects, including maintainer burnout and funding issues, with guest Dan Lerenk, CEO of ChainGuard.
Robots are messy.
Ryan Donovan interviews NVIDIA's VP of Generative AI about why a chipmaker is entering the model business.
An interview with Kevin Peterson, CTO of Bedrock Robotics, discussing his background in self-driving cars and the robotics industry.
Ryan Donovan interviews Docker president Mark Kavich about how containers are evolving in the AI era.
An interview with Marcus Fontora about steering technology towards human dignity and his journey into software.
This episode discusses how the Codex team uses Codex to build Codex, with an interview about AI-assisted programming.
Engineering leaders discuss a new pay-per-crawl model co-launched by CloudFlare and Stack Overflow to monetize public data from AI crawlers.
Ryan Donovan interviews Suresh Thotta about cloud databases, focusing on Postgres and the Azure database landscape.
An interview with Scott Stevenson, founder of DeepGram, discussing his journey from physics to building voice AI models.
An interview with Professor Tom Griffiths about his book 'The Laws of Thought' and how mathematical models of the brain led to modern AI.
An interview at AWS re:Invent with Pathway's CEO and CCO about their post-transformer AI model that enables continual learning and long-term reasoning.
An interview with Stefano Ermano about diffusion language models, a new approach to AI text generation that is faster than traditional autoregressive models.
An interview with Chris Coyier about the current state of CSS and web styling.
An interview with Anthony Vinci about artificial intelligence applied to intelligence services and spy tech.
Ryan Donovan interviews Michael Parfitt about AI-generated tech debt and how to improve developer productivity with AI.
Ryan Donovan interviews Prakash Chandran about backend challenges arising from universal front-end interfaces, with a focus on software engineering and startup experiences.
An interview with AWS Senior Principal Engineer David Janicek about his journey into software development and his work at Amazon.
Host Ryan Donovan interviews Corey Quinn about AWS reInvent announcements and the state of cloud computing.
This episode features an interview with Asaf Elavik, head of AI at monday.com, discussing the challenges and lessons learned in creating effective AI agents and chatbots that deliver real business value.
This episode explores the real-world productivity of AI agents in software development through an interview with Tom Moore, head of engineering at Linear, who shares his journey into technology.
This episode explores how open source AI agents and interoperability are shaping the future of software and technology ecosystems.
An interview with Andrei Kvapel about building a cloud using Kubernetes and its declarative API.
Ryan Donovan interviews AI researcher Dhruv Batra about proactive AI agents and his career in AI.
Interview with Evan Yu, creator of Vite and Vue, discussing the need for build tools in web development and the evolution of front-end engineering.