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Issue 330: We've got a Heap of news for you

Call us old-fashioned (and we know you do), but we think that software developers and engineers are better than AI at coding. That’s why we’re honoring the minds and work of the people with The Heap, our new software engineering blog written for the community, by the community. And we’re standing on business this week by dedicating this entire newsletter to engineering and software excellence.

Besides The Heap, we’ve got conversations with some of the best and brightest minds in today’s technological landscape. Braze’s Jon Hyman joined us on Leaders of Code for a chat about engineering leadership in the age of AI, and how the last 15 years at Braze helped him transform his team to AI-first in just a few months. We’ve got conversations with Neo4j’s Philip Rathle on knowledge context for AI agents, Honeycomb’s Christine Yen on observability in the new world of AI-assisted SDLC, and Resolve AI’s Spiros Xanthos on the importance of retaining human intuition in codebases even when AI writes most of the code. Plus, our very own Josh Zhang is here to answer all our questions on cloud computing (even the dumb ones).

And isn’t answering your heaps of questions what Stack does best? Outside of The Heap, our community is sharing knowledge on everything from AI and artistry to the heat of the sun, food supplies on sunken ships, and how to survive a plane crash if you wear glasses. Plus, we’ve got a heap of stories from around the web on tokenmaxxing, rendering the sky, and what time it is exactly in Italy. Don’t let your stack overflow—head down below because we have that and so much more ready for you this week.

From the blog

No Dumb Questions: What is cloud computing and why is everyone doing it?

In this No Dumb Questions, Phoebe is joined by Stack Overflow’s tech lead for the infrastructure team, Josh Zhang, to learn about the cloud, compute, and data centers.

Observability and human intuition in an AI world

In this two-for-one episode recorded at HumanX, Ryan is first joined by Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb, to discuss how AI compresses the software development lifecycle, making observability about capturing the right telemetry. Then, Spiros Xanthos, founder and CEO of Resolve AI, shares with us how AI coding increases code volume but decreases human intuition, making production operations harder than ever.

How Braze’s CTO is rethinking engineering for the agentic area

Jon Hyman, co-founder and CTO of Braze, shares how he's led the company's engineering organization over nearly 15 years of growth — and how they transformed into an AI-first team in just a few months.

Connecting the dots for accurate AI

At HumanX, Ryan is joined by Philip Rathle, CTO at Neo4j to discuss what knowledge context means for AI agents, how limitations like stale training data make the model-only approach to agents a bad fit for enterprise environments, and how Graph RAG raises the bar for accuracy and reduces context rot by combining vectors with a knowledge graph so agents are more targeted and connected.

Introducing the Heap, the software engineering blog for everyone

If you’ve got something you’ve been dying to share with the Stack Overflow community but don’t quite have a place to share it, we've got you.

Interesting questions

Was there food and fuel remaining in the wrecks of Erebus and Terror on the Franklin expedition?

Just like in your office, someone was hoarding all the good coffee on the HMS Terror.

I feel guilt and anxiety for having used AI in my writing and cannot enjoy it as my own work

Every good writer is a little guilty about something (see: Ernest Hemingway).

Flight oxygen mask with eyeglasses

One less thing I have to worry about next time I fly.

Why is the Sun made of plasma if its surface temperature is only 6000 K?

“Shut up about the sun!”

Links from around the web

What is Date::ITALY?

Okay, but can anyone tell me when Mercury is in retrograde during the Julian Method of the Gregorian Calendar?

Postmortem: TanStack npm supply-chain compromise

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we need external security researchers.

On rendering the sky, sunsets, and planets

Oh, this would go crazy in the Metaverse.

Amazon employees are "tokenmaxxing" due to pressure to use AI tools

Does there come a time when you’ve eaten too much of your own dog food?

Spending hours searching for answers at work? Find them faster in Stack Internal. Get it free!