January 2020
New year, new-sletter! Welcome to ISSUE #8 of The Overflow, a newsletter by developers, for developers, written and curated by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams of React Training. You can read more about it here. This week, we talk to a Veteran Who Codes, wonder what the heck dark matter is, and calculate the math of knots.
From the blog
This veteran started a bootcamp for people who went to bootcamp stackoverflow.blog In 2014, Jerome Hardaway started Vets Who Code, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching US military veterans how to code within the JavaScript ecosystem: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Git, CLI, node.js, webpack, React, Gatsby, and GraphQL. To date, 250 veterans have graduated from the program. This cohort has gone on to find jobs in the industry across 37 states in the US. It’s 100% free to the veterans admitted into the program, 100% remote run, and 100% supported by donations.
Podcast: The Director’s Cutts stackoverflow.blog This week, we have an interview with Matt Cutts, the administrator of the United States Digital Services. Cutts is a former Google engineer who led up the search giants webspam team. These days the work he and his team do impacts everything from veteran's services to tax fraud prevention. Check out our conversation on how software developers can make a big impact on how well government works for its people.
Interesting questions
Found a good question or answer? Share it with the hashtag #StackOverflowKnows. We’ll include our favorites in the future.
How can I prevent C++ guessing a second template argument? stackoverflow.com Dear compiler, quit trying to play Sherlock and stop deducing further template arguments.
Why isn't TDD more popular in universities? softwareengineering.stackexchange.com Should computer science students be required to learn more about software engineering?
Is there any evidence that dark matter interacts with ordinary matter non-gravitationally? physics.stackexchange.com Figuring out what the heck dark matter actually is could be a doomed endeavor. But the threat of failure is what makes science so exciting.
Is it a good idea to have logic in the equals method that doesn't do exact matching? softwareengineering.stackexchange.com Turns out, you can define equality however you want. At least in programming.
Links from around the web
The most hearted of 2019 codepen.io One of our favorite yearly wrap-ups to check out are the most hearted Pens on CodePen. Take a look at the list for 2019!
JavaScript Visualized: the JavaScript Engine dev.to You've used it, but have you thought about it? Here's an awesome visualization article of how the JavaScript engine works under the hood.
How strong is your knot? news.mit.edu The math of knots is fascinating. There's a new mathematical model about their stability, how cool is that?
Building a self-contained game in C# under 8 kilobytes medium.com Check out this really in-depth article on building a super tiny snake game in under 8kb. It's amazing what determined people can do!
A Response to Hello World doxsey.net This is a really neat article that emphasizes how a minimal program doesn't mean a performant program. Lots of learning here!
Generative Placeholders generative-placeholders.glitch.me Tired of the same boring images as your placeholder images? This site gives you generative art instead. Plus, it’s open source. (via Stefan Bohacek)
Most popular Twitter bots botwiki.org We know Twitter has a lot of bots. Here’s the 30 most popular pure bots (sadly, @Horse_ebooks was disqualified for not being entirely a bot). (via Stefan Bohacek)