There is no golden path anymore: Engineering practices are being rewritten
How do leaders ensure alignment, autonomy, and productivity as engineering practices continue to evolve?

How do leaders ensure alignment, autonomy, and productivity as engineering practices continue to evolve?
Ryan welcomes Illia Polosukhin, co-author of the original "Attention Is All You Need" Transformers paper and co-founder of NEAR, on the show to talk about the development and impact of the Transformers model, his perspective on modern AI and machine learning as an early innovator of the tech, and the importance of decentralized, user-owned AI utilizing the blockchain.
Ryan welcomes Matt DeBergalis, CTO at Apollo GraphQL, to discuss the evolution and future of API orchestration, the benefits of GraphQL in managing API complexity, its seamless integration with AI and modern development stacks, and how it enhances developer experience through better tooling and infrastructure.
Jon Skeet, the first Stack Overflow user with a million reputation, sits down with Ryan to share his wealth of knowledge on all things development: the deceptively simple but actually complicated problem of timezones, the importance of clear documentation for programmers, handling breaking changes and upgrading legacy systems, and the need for improved communication skills among developers.
Ryan is joined by Tobiko Data co-founders Toby Mao and Iaroslav Zeigerman to talk about the crucial role of rigorous data practices and tooling, the innovations of Tobiko Data’s SQLMesh and SQLGlot, and their insights into the future of data engineering with the rise of AI.
On this episode, Ryan chats with Vish Abrams, chief architect at Heroku, about all the work that needs to be done after you’ve vibe coded your dream app.
Ryan and Ben welcome Alex Malcoci, CEO and founder of MiniProto, to talk innovations in hardware prototyping, the evolving complexities of the global supply chain, the impact of the US-China trade war on manufacturing, and how automation in production could lead to new training programs for future engineers.
In this special episode, Ryan is joined by our Senior VP of Communities, Philippe Beaudette, and the Trust and Safety team at Stack Overflow to discuss maintaining platform integrity and managing user safety, handling complex issues like harassment, and how their team balances transparency and privacy online.
In this episode of Leaders of Code, Jody Bailey, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Stack Overflow, sits down with Dane Knecht, the newly appointed Chief Technology Officer at Cloudflare.
It’s Java’s 30th anniversary! Ryan welcomes back Georges Saab, Senior VP of Development for the Java Platform Group and Chair of the OpenJDK Governing Board, to reflect on Java’s changes over the last five years.
Ryan Donovan and Ben Popper sit down with Jamie de Guerre, SVP of Product at Together AI, to discuss the evolving landscape of AI and open-source models. They explore the significance of infrastructure in AI, the differences between open-source and closed-source models, and the ethical considerations surrounding AI technology. Jamie emphasized the importance of leveraging internal data for model training and the need for transparency in AI practices.
Ryan and Ben welcome Tulsee Doshi and Logan Kilpatrick from Google's DeepMind to discuss the advanced capabilities of the new Gemini 2.5.
Kathleen Vignos, VP of Software Engineering at Capital One, sits down with Ryan to explore shifting to 100% serverless architecture in enterprise, deploying talent for better customer experience, and fostering AI innovation and tech advancements in a regulated banking environment.
Ryan is joined by Jan Seredynski, Mobile Security Researcher and Pentester at Guardsquare, to talk about how you protect your app when the attackers control the code and the device it runs on.
Will Wilson, CEO and co-founder of Antithesis, joins Ryan and Stack Overflow senior director of engineering Ben Matthews on the podcast to discuss deterministic simulation testing, the pitfalls of chaos testing in an AI-driven world, and how testing can help developers deal with technical debt.
Ryan welcomes Glen Coates, VP of Product at Shopify, to dive into the intricacies of managing a developer-focused product, the challenges of backwards compatibility, and the implications of AI and LLMs in Shopify's development environment.
What challenges do organizations face when adopting AI, and why is understanding its limitations key to success?
Douwe Kiela, CEO and cofounder of Contextual AI, joins Ryan and Ben to explore the intricacies of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). They discuss the early research Douwe did at Meta that jump started the whole thing, the challenges of hallucinations, and the significance of context windows in AI applications.
Matthew McCullough, VP of Product for Android Developer Experience, sits down with Ryan to talk advancements in Android development, enhancing developer efficiency and reducing routine toil, and the application of Gemini AI models to improve software toolchains.
Ryan is joined by Jeremy Edberg, CEO of DBOS, and Qian Li, co-founder of DBOS, to discuss durable execution and its use cases, its implementation using technologies like PostgreSQL, and its applications in machine learning pipelines and AI systems for reliability, debugging, and observability.
Christophe Coenraets, SVP of Developer Relations at Salesforce, tells Eira and Ben about building the new Salesforce Developer Edition, which includes access to the company’s agentic AI platform, Agentforce. Christophe explains how they solicited and incorporated feedback from the developer community in building the developer edition, what types of AI agents people are building, and the critical importance of guardrails and prompt engineering.
Maryam Ashoori, Head of Product for watsonx.ai at IBM, joins Ryan and Eira to talk about the complexity of enterprise AI, the role of governance, the AI skill gap among developers, how AI coding tools impact developer productivity, what chain-of-thought reasoning entails, and what observability and monitoring look like for AI.
On this episode, Ryan chats with Henrik Rexed, Cloud Native Advocate at Dynatrace, about debugging cloud-based applications like you would a local app.
Ben Popper chats with CTO Abby Kearns about how Alembic is using composite AI and lessons learned from contract tracing and epidemiology to help companies map customer journeys and understand the ROI of their marketing spend. Ben and Abby also talk about where open-source models have the edge and the challenges startups face in building trust with big companies and securing the resources they need to grow.