Gil Feig, co-founder and CTO of Merge, joins the show to explore Merge’s approach for reducing third-party APIs to a single call, the complexities of and need for data normalization, and the role that AI and MCP plays in the future of API functionality.

Episode notes:

Merge connects you to any third-party system for fast, secure integrations for your products and agents.

Connect with Gil on LinkedIn and X.

Shoutout to user Abhijit for winning a Lifeboat badge on their answer for Complex numbers in python.

TRANSCRIPT

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In the second part of this two-part Leaders of Code episode, Peter O'Connor, Director of Platform Engineering, and Ryan J. Salva, Senior Director of Product at Google Developer Experiences, dive beyond AI hype to explore the shifts reshaping how engineering teams operate and scale. From the critical role of documentation quality in AI workflows to the cultural transformations needed for successful adoption, Peter and Ryan discuss the deeper implications of integrating AI into modern software development practices.

The discussion also:

• Explores how poor documentation creates problems as AI systems learn and repeat mistakes, making high-quality documentation essential for successful AI integrations.
• Covers how consistent tools and processes become more important when using AI, and why leaders should prioritize helping teams learn and experiment with AI tools instead of just measuring productivity.
• Offers practical advice for leaders on how to create environments where developers can learn and build confidence with AI tools.

Notes:

• Listen to Part 1 of the conversation here.
• Connect with Peter O’Connor and Ryan J Salva.

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Ryan sits down with Marco Palladino, CTO of Kong, to talk about the rise of AI agents and their impact on API consumption, the MCP protocol as a new standard for agents, the importance of observability and security in AI systems, and the importance for businesses and entrepreneurs to leverage opportunities in the agentic AI space now.

Episode notes:

Kong is an all-in-one API platform for AI and agentic workflows.

Marco previously joined the podcast in 2024.

Connect with Marco on Twitter.

Congratulations to user Mark for receiving a Lifeboat badge for their answer to Visual Studio Code: Expand the horizontal bar for scrolling tabs.

TRANSCRIPT

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Ryan welcomes Pia Nilsson, GM for Backstage and head of developer experience at Spotify, to discuss the evolution and adoption of Backstage, the impact of AI on dev experience, and how Spotify approaches platform engineering and standardization to help teams solve for specific needs.

Episode notes:

Backstage is an open-source IDP by Spotify that reduces everyday friction, cognitive overhead, and operational toil for developers.

We previously talked to the Backstage team in 2022.

Poor Ryan. If only he had Backstage at his last job.

You know what makes Backstage even better? Our Stack Overflow for Teams integration.

Connect with Pia on LinkedIn.

Markus Pscheidt gets today’s shoutout for winning the Populist badge with their answer to Dynamic tag values for the Counter metric in Micrometer.

TRANSCRIPT

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Jeff Hollan, director of product at Snowflake, joins Ryan to discuss the role that data plays in making AI and AI agents better. Along the way, they discuss how a database leads to an AI platform, Snowflake’s new data marketplace, and the role data will play in AI agents.

Episode notes:

Snowflake provides a fully-managed data platform that developers can build AI apps on.

We’re happy to have Stack Exchange data available on the Snowflake Marketplace.

Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Congrats to Timeless for throwing a Lifejacket to Using pandas to read HTML.

TRANSCRIPT

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Ryan welcomes Sebastian Gierlinger, VP of Engineering at Storyblok, to talk about how headless content management systems (CMS) fit into an increasingly componentized software landscape. They run through the differences between headless and traditional CMS systems (and databases), prototyping and security concerns, and how a team building distributed systems can get that precious velocity by decoupling their content from its rendering.

Episode notes:

Storyblok provides a headless CMS they say is made for humans but built for the AI-driven era.

Want to learn more about CMS design? Check out other pieces we’ve done with CMS providers Drupal and Builder.io.

Connect with Sebastian on LinkedIn or Twitter.

Congrats to Populist badge winner Răzvan Flavius Panda for dropping an amazing answer on How do I change the maintenance database for Postgres?.

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Ryan chats with  Karen Ng, EVP of Product at HubSpot, to chat about Model Context Protocol (MCP) and how they implemented it for their server for their CRM product. They chat the emergence of this as the standard for agentic interactions, the challenges of implementing the server and integrating it with their ecosystem, and how agentic AI has affected work at Hubspot.

Episode notes:

Hubspot is a customer-relationship management (CRM) platform that aims to help businesses grow.

MCP is an open-source protocol for connecting AI agents to external systems, originally developers at Anthropic.

Connect with Karen on LinkedIn.

Virtual hi-five to Rob Truxal for asking What is the purpose of "pip install --user ..."? and garnering themselves a Stellar Question badge.

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Ryan welcomes Geraint North, AI and developer platforms fellow at Arm, to dive into the impact of GenAI on chip design, Arm’s approach to designing flexible CPU architectures, and the challenges of optimizing large language models at the chip level for edge devices.

Episode notes:

Arm is a global compute platform that allows the world’s leading technology companies to innovate and deliver AI experiences.

Arm just announced their Lumex CSS Platform, which provides a complete compute subsystem platform for mobile and desktop providers to enable efficient AI workloads.

Connect with Geraint on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Lifejacket badge winner I.sh., who won the badge for answering How to take screenshot on failure.

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