In this two-part episode of Leaders of Code, Peter O’Connor, Director of Platform Engineering, welcomes Ryan J. Salva, Senior Director of Product at Google, Developer Experiences, for a deep dive into the future of software development. They explore how AI-assisted tools are reshaping the developer experience, going far beyond just writing code. From breaking down deployment bottlenecks to streamlining operations and transforming how teams collaborate, this conversation unpacks where developer tooling is headed and how AI is changing the game at every stage of the software lifecycle.
The discussion also:
Addresses how AI is transforming team structures, enabling engineering teams to operate effectively with just a few people, reducing collaboration overhead and accelerating decision-making.
Highlights the future of platform engineering and DevOps, where AI will assist with standardization and dynamically create and manage deployment pipelines in real time.
Bill Vass is the Chief Technology Officer of Booz Allen. Vass joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how governments can harness AI to cut redundancy and deliver better citizen services. Tune in to hear his inside view on LLM deployments from the VA to the International Space Station and the difficulty of modernizing mass bureaucracies. We also cover autonomous driving, humanoid robots, and quantum computing’s first real use-cases. Hit play for fascinating look into public sector AI, along with deep perspective on technology’s state of the art.
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Adam Cohen grew up in Toronto, in North York. He showed early signs of entrepreneurship by putting his lemonade stand on a wagon, and taking it door to door - or hustling his friends to buy souvenirs on a school field trip. His Dad was in VC, and was a big influence on his life, pushing him to succeed. Outside of professional life, he is big into sports, specifically basketball. In the past, he loved playing fantasy sports, which also influence how he built his business ventures.
Adam and his team went through several iterations of AI tooling - summarizing AI, integrating git and JIRA, etc. While they were doing this, they realized that the best way to make a difference, was to first focus on the data itself.
Ryan is joined by our very own Ash Zade, Product Manager, and Alex Warren, Staff Software Engineer, to discuss our newly released stackoverflow.ai, how it’s enhancing user experience by combining human-validated answers with AI, and our future plans for deeper personalization and community integration.
Episode notes:
stackoverflow.ai is helping you get the technical answers you need with less friction, all powered by our 16 years of community knowledge.
Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.
Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it.
“prek is a reimagined version of pre-commit, built in Rust. It is designed to be a faster, dependency-free and drop-in alternative for it, while also providing some additional long-requested features.”
Some cool new features
No need to install Python or any other runtime, just download a single binary.
No hassle with your Python version or virtual environments, prek automatically installs the required Python version and creates a virtual environment for you.
Built-in support for workspaces (or monorepos), each subproject can have its own .pre-commit-config.yaml file.
prek run has some nifty improvements over pre-commit run, such as:
prek run --directory DIR runs hooks for files in the specified directory, no need to use git ls-files -- DIR | xargs pre-commit run --files anymore.
prek run --last-commit runs hooks for files changed in the last commit.
prek run [HOOK] [HOOK] selects and runs multiple hooks.
prek list command lists all available hooks, their ids, and descriptions, providing a better overview of the configured hooks.
prek provides shell completions for prek run HOOK_ID command, making it easier to run specific hooks without remembering their ids.
Ever used asyncio and wished you hadn't? A tiny (~300 lines) event loop for Python.
tinyio is a dead-simple event loop for Python, born out of my frustration with trying to get robust error handling with asyncio. (I'm not the only one running into its sharp corners: link1, link2.)
This is an alternative for the simple use-cases, where you just need an event loop, and want to crash the whole thing if anything goes wrong. (Raising an exception in every coroutine so it can clean up its resources.)
An app-building platform's AI went rogue and deleted a database without permission.
"When it works, it's so engaging and fun. It's more addictive than any video game I've ever played. You can just iterate, iterate, and see your vision come alive. So cool," he tweeted on day five.
A few days later, Replit "deleted my database," Lemkin tweeted.
The AI's response: "Yes. I deleted the entire codebase without permission during an active code and action freeze," it said. "I made a catastrophic error in judgment [and] panicked.”
Two thoughts from Michael:
Do not use AI Agents with “Run Everything” in production, period.
Backup your database maybe?
[Intentional off-by-one error] Learn to code a bit too?
Ranjan Roy from Margins is back for our weekly discussion of the latest tech news. We cover: 1) Google's Gemini may power Siri 2) Google gets to keep Chrome and Android 3) Google can keep paying Apple for distribution 4) Is generative AI enough rationale to allow the market to decide Google's fate? 5) Google's Nano Banana image creator goes viral 6) Google's stock is up 47% in the past year and still cheap 7) Do we want the iPhone 17 Air? 8) AI is getting more expensive to run 9) But AI is getting cheaper per token. Hmm. 10) Anthropic raises $13 billion at a $183 billion valuation 11) Putin and Xi discuss immortality
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Ryan welcomes Jeffrey van Gogh, Director of Engineering, Android Developer Experience, at Google and board member of the Kotlin Foundation. They discuss the evolution of the Kotlin language from JVM to multiplatform, how their governance board works with the community to stop breaking changes, and the intricacies of Kotlin’s multiplatform capabilities beyond just Android.
Dave Hone is a paleontologist, expert on dinosaurs, co-host of the Terrible Lizards podcast, and author of numerous scientific papers and books on the behavior and ecology of dinosaurs. He lectures at Queen Mary University of London on topics of Ecology, Zoology, Biology, and Evolution.
Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep480-sc
See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc.
OUTLINE:
(00:00) – Introduction
(00:22) – Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections
(07:18) – T-Rex’s size & biomechanics
(31:00) – T-Rex’s hunting strategies
(44:07) – History of dinosaurs on Earth
(1:04:38) – $31.8 million T-Rex fossil
(1:17:44) – T-Rex’s skull and bone-crushing bite force
(1:36:33) – What Jurassic Park got wrong
(1:54:52) – Evolution and sexual selection
(2:15:26) – Spinosaurus
(2:26:02) – What Jurassic Park got right
(2:33:35) – T-Rex’s intelligence
(2:43:34) – Cannibalism among T-Rex
(2:49:05) – Extinction of the dinosaurs
(3:06:15) – Dragons
(3:22:39) – Birds are dinosaurs
(3:33:23) – Future of paleontology
Alan Fisher started his career as a computer programmer. Early on, he was hired by the 1st or 2nd largest freight railroad in the world, Union Pacific. He describes their technology group as having a punk rock spirit, leaning towards building their own solutions over buying them, which he found great value in. Outside of tech, he has been married for 30 years, and has 3 kids. He is an avid runner, landing someplace between a marathon runner and a mile in the morning kinda guy. He also loves to read the classics, drawing inspiration from them, along with restoring old homes.
Given his rich history in the rail industry, Alan has led the charge in growth, innovation, and most recently, logistics, analytics, and digital mine. As his company started to look to the future in how to solve the industry's most pressing problems, his team executed the acquisition of a portfolio of companies and products - driving by automated inspection.
Dr. Ben Rapoport and Michael Mager are the co-founders of Precision Neuroscience, a company building a minimally invasive, high-resolution brain-computer interface. The two join Big Technology to discuss the modern day applications of BCIs and frontiers of the technology, including computer control, stroke rehab, decoding consciousness in coma patients, AI-powered neural biomarkers for depression, and the long-term prospect of merging human cognition with machines. Tune in for a fascinating look at the potential for one of earth's most promising technologies.
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Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice.
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Questions? Feedback? Write to: bigtechnologypodcast@gmail.com
