February 2020
Welcome to ISSUE #10 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. In this week's newsletter, we get right to the the point on floating point numbers, live coding that rocks, and how containers changed the world.
From the blog
Podcast: Your Buddy is Typing stackoverflow.blog This week we sit down with Teresa Dietrich, Stack Overflow’s new Chief Product Officer. Teresa, a CMU grad and tech industry veteran, shares a story from her time at AOL: the day three little dots emerged without warning and turned their network upside down.
The live coding language that lets you be an actual rock star stackoverflow.blog Code on a screen is not likely to land you the legions of screaming fans that a sick guitar solo will. Unless you’re Sam Aaron, that is. He’s the creator of Sonic Pi, a live coding language for making music. It’s an open source project that he built which creates music from code in real time.
Interesting questions
Found a good question or answer? Share it with the hashtag #StackOverflowKnows. We’ll include our favorites in the future.
How is it possible there are UV photos while our eyes cannot detect UV waves? physics.stackexchange.com A UV camera is like playing light an octave lower.
What substances do humans consume that are caloric but contain neither protein, carb, nor fat? chemistry.stackexchange.com Well, without carb, protein, and fat, you’re just eating plant fiber like a panda.
Where did the free parameters of IEEE 754 come from? retrocomputing.stackexchange.com Take a deep dive into the history of everyone’s favorite data type, the floating point number, and where its odd specifications come from.
Does Tor help us to prevent ISP tracking? security.stackexchange.com For your traffic, Tor can hide what you’re sending and where, but not how much and when.
Does GDPR include UK customers, or not anymore? law.stackexchange.com Or do they need a GDPRexit as well?
Links from around the web
JavaScript libraries are almost never updated once installed blog.cloudflare.com Chances are, when you're setting up a project, you install the libraries you need, then never touch them again. This is an interesting analysis of the "set it and forget it" trend.
How to learn Flutter in 2020 herewecode.io Flutter is trending in the mobile dev world, but learning a language like Dart can be intimidating and tedious. Here's a great set of resources for getting up to speed.
The case of the 500-mile email ibiblio.org Here's an incredibly amusing story from the early 2000s, when email configurations were a little tougher to understand than they are today. Enjoy the laughs, and even better, enjoy your modern email client!
How containers changed the world dev.to "Containers" can feel like just an overused buzzword, especially if you don't use them or know how they work. If you'd like a great review on why they matter and how they increase dev productivity, this is the article for you!
Roles and relationships sarahmhigley.com It's easy to ride the accessibility train and think that as long as you're adding ARIA attributes and roles that you're in the clear. Here's a good overview of the relationships between different roles, and how you can properly set up your application's accessibility tree.