The Stack Overflow Podcast

Building a global engineering team (plus AI agents) with Netlify

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 [https://www.linkedin.com/in/dglawson/]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].

Keeping the lights on for open source

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 [https://www.chainguard.dev/] 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 [https://assemble.chainguard.dev/event/2991fca2-5be2-48cb-a8b9-132ab575cd51/summary].  Connect with Dan on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/danlorenc/]. Congrats to user Andreas Grapentin [https://stackoverflow.com/users/885605/andreas-grapentin] for winning a Lifejacket badge for their answer to Nested if-statement in loop vs two separate loops [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12224132/nested-if-statement-in-loop-vs-two-separate-loops]. TRANSCRIPT [https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/03/17/keeping-the-lights-on-for-open-source/] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].

Open source for awkward robots

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 [https://openmind.com/]’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 [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jan-liphardt/] and GitHub [https://github.com/jliphard]. This week’s shoutout goes to user Sean [https://stackoverflow.com/users/5351721/sean], who won a Lifejacket badge for their answer to Creating the simplest HTML toggle button? [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76837048/creating-the-simplest-html-toggle-button]. TRANSCRIPT [https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/03/12/open-source-for-awkward-robots/] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].

Even the chip makers are making LLMs

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 [https://developer.nvidia.com/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 [https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/nvidia-nemotron-v3] page or at NVIDIA GTC [https://nvda.ws/3NVv7OT] on March 16-19.  Connect with Kari on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/karibriski/]. Congrats to user The4thIceman [https://stackoverflow.com/users/2038801/the4thiceman] for winning a Populist badge on their answer to How to Center Text in Pygame [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/23982907/how-to-center-text-in-pygame]. TRANSCRIPT [https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/03/10/even-the-chip-makers-are-making-llms/] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].

Building brains for bulldozers

Ryan chats with Kevin Peterson, CTO of Bedrock Robotics, about the evolution of self-driving technology and why robotics is now advancing; how real data is still relevant but simulation becomes essential for scale; and the future of robotics in addressing labor shortages and enhancing productivity. Episode notes: Bedrock Robotics [https://bedrockrobotics.com/] creates technology that upgrades existing heavy equipment, enabling autonomous operation for construction machinery.  Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-peterson-a783612/] and Twitter [https://x.com/kevinmpeterson1].  Congrats to user charlie [https://stackoverflow.com/users/20734823/charlie] for winning a Necromancer badge [https://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/17/necromancer] on their answer to Linking Rust application with a dynamic library not in the runtime linker search path [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40602708/linking-rust-application-with-a-dynamic-library-not-in-the-runtime-linker-search]. TRANSCRIPT [https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/03/06/building-brains-for-bulldozers/] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].