Ryan Donovan Journalist Profile

Articles

A look under the hood: How (and why) we built Question Assistant

1 month ago | stackoverflow.blog | Derek Cheng |Caroline Thomas |Ryan Donovan

Last year we released Staging Ground to help new question-askers get feedback on their drafts from experienced users in a dedicated space before their question is posted publicly on Stack Overflow. We’ve since seen measurable improvements in the quality of questions posted; however, it still takes time for a question to get human feedback and make it through the full Staging Ground process.
How AI is Changing the Future of Hiring

Jan 8, 2025 | wonderlic.com | Ryan Donovan

Despite decades of innovation and digital transformation, the hiring process remains stubbornly inefficient. As a result, resumes pile up, great candidates slip through the cracks, and hiring timelines stretch longer than they should. However, AI and the future of hiring are starting to change that story. It’s helping organizations uncover insights, simplify tasks, and make better use of their time and resources.
Failing fast at scale: Rapid prototyping at Intuit

Jan 8, 2025 | stackoverflow.blog | Ryan Donovan

On today’s episode, Ben and Ryan chat with Himanshu Sharma, Staff Software Engineer at Intuit, about their processes for rapid prototyping. Rapid prototyping has a deep history at Intuit, starting from their very first product design. They talk about how that process went notes on a scratch pad at a kitchen table to a repeatable and reliable process baked into the culture of an organization the scale of Intuit.
5 Ways AI is Making Hiring Faster and Smarter

Jan 7, 2025 | wonderlic.com | Ryan Donovan

In today’s competitive job market, speed and precision are everything. Companies face mounting pressure to hire the best candidates quickly while ensuring fairness and quality in their selection process. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a powerful ally, reshaping how organizations approach hiring. From automating initial candidate screenings to predicting future performance, AI is making recruitment faster, smarter, and more efficient.
WBIT #2: Memories of persistence and the state of state

Jan 7, 2025 | stackoverflow.blog | Ryan Donovan

On the second episode of We’ll Be In Touch, Kyle interviews his former co-worker Jon Miller, Staff Software Engineer at Polly. Jon helped plant the seed for this podcast series, and now he gets his turn in the interview chair. They cover a wide range of topics, from Jon’s entry to software engineering from user interface design, the troubles you run into by not encapsulating your business logic, and the benefits of planning asynchronously before scheduling a meeting.
In Rust we trust? White House Office urges memory safety

Dec 31, 2024 | stackoverflow.blog | Ryan Donovan

[Ed. note: While we take some time to rest up over the holidays and prepare for next year, we are re-publishing our top ten posts for the year. Please enjoy our favorite work this year and we’ll see you in 2025.]Is the programming language you use to write software a matter of national security? The US White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD) thinks so. On February 26, they issued a report urging that all programmers move to memory-safe programming languages for all code.
Breaking up is hard to do: Chunking in RAG applications

Dec 27, 2024 | stackoverflow.blog | Ryan Donovan

[Ed. note: While we take some time to rest up over the holidays and prepare for next year, we are re-publishing our top ten posts for the year. Please enjoy our favorite work this year and we’ll see you in 2025.]As you go deeper down the rabbit hole building LLM-based applications, you may find that you need to root your LLM responses in your source data.
Can a programming language implement time travel?

Dec 23, 2024 | stackoverflow.blog | Ryan Donovan

[Ed. note: While we take some time to rest up over the holidays and prepare for next year, we are re-publishing our top ten posts for the year. Please enjoy our favorite work this year and we’ll see you in 2025.]Traveling through time is a pretty common science fiction trope, so much so that there are differing theories as to what happens if you go back in time and affect the past. While time travel has made for some entertaining movies and books, there’s been little success in the real world.
AI agents that help doctors get paid

Dec 13, 2024 | stackoverflow.blog | Ryan Donovan

On this episode, Ben and Ryan chat with Dan Parsons, co-founder and Chief Experience Officer at Thoughtful AI. He’s on a mission to fix improve the U.S. health care system, using AI to simplify how providers get paid by insurance companies. They cover the difficulties in navigating legacy systems that don’t have great interfaces, how humans might not be the best users of computers, and why patching a broken system is the first step in fixing it.
How to use network path monitoring to optimize your network’s performance

Dec 11, 2024 | bmc.com | Ryan Donovan

With more employees working remotely from different locations and using various devices and internet providers, the task of network monitoring and resolving network issues has become increasingly complex. The diversity in connection points and application use means IT teams must navigate a range of challenges, from inconsistent internet quality to poor remote endpoint access.