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SPONSORED BY INTUIT Chase Roossin, group engineering manager, and Steven Kulesza, staff software engineer, from Intuit join the podcast to chat about what might be the hardest problem in engineering right now: getting multiple AI agents to work together in a complex system. They discuss how automated evals can make agent behaviors more predictable, agent swarms vs. one highly skilled agent, and how customer behavior shaped their technical architecture.  Episode notes Want to work on complex engineering problems like these? Explore careers at Intuit. We’ve worked with Intuit on a few other great blogs and podcasts, including Best practices for building LLMs and How Intuit democratizes AI development across teams through reusability. Connect with Chase on LinkedIn.  Connect with Steven on LinkedIn.  Congrats to Lifejacket badge winner Sean for saving Creating the simplest HTML toggle button? with a great answer. TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes Mike Swift, co-founder and CEO of Major League Hacking, to the show to chat about the never-ending need for software developer communities and entry points into programming; MHL’s recent acquisition of DEV and how they’re creating a place for shared knowledge, building, and publishing; and why now is the best time to be both an artisan and a builder in a world with AI software development tools. Episode notes:  Major League Hacking is a 500k+ global member community that hosts hackathons and open-source fellowships for the next generation of developers. They recently acquired DEV, an online community for 3M+ developers to learn and share together.  Connect with Mike on LinkedIn or email him at [email protected].  Congrats to Stellar Answer badge winner Antony Hatchkins for getting over a hundred saves on their answer to Git replacing LF with CRLF.  TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes Stephen Watt, distinguished engineer and VP of Red Hat’s Office of the CTO, to chat about digital sovereignty and sovereign AI. They explore major infrastructure constraints for things like power, cooling, and scarce hardware that cause the regional disparities we see in sovereign AI, plus why we need to extend Kubernetes and integrate PyTorch Stack not just for a sovereign cloud but for sovereign AI. Episode notes:  Red Hat’s Office of the CTO is a division of 150 software engineers and researchers working on their Research and Emerging Technologies arms, helping to shape the vision and strategy of Red Hat’s technology.  Connect with Stephen on LinkedIn.  Congrats to user Ittiel for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Print timestamps in Docker Compose logs. TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes RunPod co-founder and CEO Zhen Lu to discuss circumventing VC money by going straight to your community for funding, how Zhen balances founder intuition with user feedback when the community is the one backing the project, and RunPod’s journey from basement servers to global infrastructure partnerships with a software-layer approach and data-first paradigm.  Episode notes:  RunPod is an end-to-end AI cloud that provides developers with GPUs so they can build and run custom AI systems that scale. Connect with Zhen on LinkedIn or email him at [email protected].  Today’s shoutout goes to Famous Question badge winner cigol on, who won the badge for getting 10,000+ views on their question Using JavaScript, is it possible to capture the body payload from an outgoing fetch request?. TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes Hema Raghavan, co-founder and head of engineering at Kumo.ai, to dive into all the messy stuff that comes with implementing AI, from pipeline sprawl to shadow AI. They discuss governance approaches like deploying models inside approved platforms and routing calls through monitored gateways, and how broken pipelines from complex feature-engineering motivated Kumo.ai’s approach of using a single foundation model with on-the-fly database queries.  Episode notes:  Kumo.ai allows you to train and run state-of-the-art AI models on your relational data, allowing you to make predictions about your users and transactions in seconds.  Connect with Hema on LinkedIn or reach out to her at her email [email protected].   Congrats to user BalusC for winning a Populist badge on their answer to How to sanitize HTML code to prevent XSS attacks in Java or JSP?. TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes Bjarne Stroustrup, designer of C++ and professor at Columbia, to the show to dive into all things C++, from its history to where it's going today. They discuss its first emergence as a way to bridge high-level abstractions with low-level systems control, the criticisms some have around memory safety and null pointers (and how to solve these problems in your code), and why “move to Rust” thinking is too simplistic for modern codebases.  Episode notes:  Keep up with everything happening with C++ at the Standard C++ Foundation’s website.  Connect with Bjarne on LinkedIn and explore more of his work at his website.  Congrats to Populist badge winner Michael Sorens for winning the badge for their answer to PowerShell equivalent for "head -n-3"?. TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan sits down with Galen Wolfe-Pauly, CEO of Tlon, to chat about calm computing and how humans can take back ownership of their data and digital world. They discuss the early internet’s evolution from individual creativity into today’s internet that turns users into products, Galen’s takeaways from building a new network architecture that prioritizes user control, and why messenger applications are ripe for decentralization.  Episode notes: Tlon is releasing a decentralized messenger app that gives you ownership of your data, built on Urbit, a complete, wholly encapsulated system that allows you to run a personal server in the cloud. Use the code STACK to skip the waitlist for the Tlon Messenger app. Connect with Galen on LinkedIn.  Shoutout to user mkobuolys for winning a Populist badge for their answer to Set default transition for go_router in Flutter. TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan hosts SmartBear’s VP of AI and Architecture Fitz Nowlan to explore how we’re moving away from old assumptions about software development, the challenges of testing MCP servers as LLM-driven agents introduce non-determinism that breaks tradition, and how data locality and data construction are becoming more valuable when source code is so easy to generate. Episode notes:  SmartBear gives devs tools for application performance monitoring, software development, software testing, and API management—all at AI speed and scale. Connect with Fitz on LinkedIn and email him at [email protected]  Congrats to Great Answer winner Alexander for winning the badge for their answer to Is there a way to make Runnable's run() throw an exception?. TRANSCRIPT 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 Nancy Wang, CTO of 1Password, to discuss the security challenges local agents present, how enterprises can create robust governance of credentials through zero-knowledge architecture, and the implications of agent intent and misuse in a world where AI agents are becoming more and more integrated into everyday applications. Episode notes:  1Password keeps your credentials secure through end-to-end encryption, zero-knowledge architecture, and more. Read their latest white paper on security design.  Connect with Nancy on LinkedIn or email her at [email protected].  Congratulations to user Binita Bharati for winning a Populist badge for their answer to How to know the version of currently installed package from yarn.lock. TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes Gee Rittenhouse, VP of Security at AWS, to the show to discuss the complexities of multi-stage attacks in cybersecurity and how these attacks unfold, the challenges in detecting them, and the evolving role of AI in both enhancing security and creating new vulnerabilities.  Episode notes:  AWS Security Hub is expanding to unify your cloud security options. Learn more about how AWS is keeping your cloud safe on their website.  Connect with Gee on LinkedIn.  Shoutout to user James Kanze for winning a Populist badge for their answer to The spiral rule about declarations — when is it in error?. TRANSCRIPT 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 Stefan Weitz, CEO and co-founder of the HumanX Conference, for a conversation on how AI has evolved in the last year. They discuss whether “the year of the agent” came to fruition, why companies are moving away from AGI, and the major blockers for AI adoption, from distrust in non-deterministic systems to enterprise data-readiness.  Episode notes:  HumanX 2026, one of the biggest AI conferences of the year, is happening in San Francisco from April 6-9. Listen to our episodes recorded on the conference floor last year.  Connect with Stefan on LinkedIn. Congrats to Populist badge recipient humblebee for winning the badge for their answer to How to open/run YML compose file?. TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In this episode of Leaders of Code, Stack Overflow’s Chief of Product and Technology, Jody Bailey, sits down with Dana Lawson, CTO at Netlify. Dana shares her insights on leading a lean, globally distributed engineering team that powers 5% of the internet. The conversation touches on the realities of remote work, the importance of maintaining a written culture, and why Dana believes AI and agents are lowering the barrier to entry for builders everywhere. The discussion also: Explores how to manage a polyglot environment and the trade-offs between adopting nascent tech and maintaining operational reliability with a globally distributed team.Highlights Netlify’s approach to AI integration and how Dana addresses the natural scepticism from those hesitant to hand over control to AI.Covers realities of technical debt and how Netlify balances rapid product work with scaling. Notes Connect with Dana Lawson 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 sits down with Chainguard CEO Dan Lorenc to chat about how his team is keeping the foundation of the internet—open source projects—alive by forking archived but widely-used repos to provide security maintenance and dependency upgrades. They also discuss open source’s sustainability problems when it comes to funding, security, and maintainer burnout, and how trusted stewardship can reduce risk when maintainers step away. Episode notes:  Chainguard provides secure-by-default open source artifacts for the modern software stack, keeping important open source projects maintained instead of archived. Chainguard just announced a whole bunch of new stuff at their user conference, Assemble.  Connect with Dan on LinkedIn. Congrats to user Andreas Grapentin for winning a Lifejacket badge for their answer to Nested if-statement in loop vs two separate loops. TRANSCRIPT 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 Jan Liphardt,  CEO and co-founder of OpenMind, to chat about the rapidly evolving world of humanoid robotics and what it means for humans, why OpenMind is building an open source operating system for robots that processes logic in natural language, and how putting Asimov’s Laws on the blockchain might be the key to robotics guardrails. Episode notes:  OpenMind’s OM1 is an open source OS for robots that allows robots to perceive, adapt, and act within human environments.  Connect with Jan on LinkedIn and GitHub. This week’s shoutout goes to user Sean, who won a Lifejacket badge for their answer to Creating the simplest HTML toggle button?. TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Ryan welcomes Kari Briski, NVIDIA’s VP of Generative AI Software for Enterprise, to the show to explore how a chip manufacturer got into the model development game. They discuss NVIDIA’s co-design feedback loop between model builders and hardware architects, share insights on precision model training and memory management systems, and take a look at the roadmap and development of NVIDIA’s fully open-source Nemotron.  Episode notes:  Nemotron is a family of open models with open weights, training data, and recipes for building specialized AI agents.You can learn more on their Hugging Face page or at NVIDIA GTC on March 16-19.  Connect with Kari on LinkedIn. Congrats to user The4thIceman for winning a Populist badge on their answer to How to Center Text in Pygame. TRANSCRIPT See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.