August 2020

Welcome to ISSUE #36 of the Overflow! This newsletter is by developers, for developers, written and curated by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams at Netlify. In the US, it’s the dog days of summer, which we imagine dogs are excited about. Read on for personal development nerds, creating secure voting systems to free cultists, and the languages who would be CSS.

From the blog

The Loop, August 2020: Community-a-thon stackoverflow.blog
To get all our employees familiar with what it’s like to be a Stack user, we recently held our first Community-a-thon. Stackers competed to ask and answer as many questions as possible across numerous topics. It was a major success, and we’re planning to do it again, so read on to learn the details.

Podcast 261: Leveling up with Personal Development Nerds stackoverflow.blog
A daring discussion about habit formation, maximizing your potential, and who the most powerful X-Men truly is.

Motoko, a programming language for building directly on the internet stackoverflow.blog
To offer a seamless developer experience, we wanted to create a specialized programming language, called Motoko, that is designed to directly support the programming model of the Internet Computer, making it easier to efficiently build applications and take advantage of some of the more unusual features of this platform.

Interesting questions

Found a good question or answer? Tweet us with the hashtag #StackOverflowKnows or email us at stackoverflowknows@stackoverflow.com. We’ll include our favorites in the future.

Can a radioactive atom be prevented from decaying if it’s in a REALLY strong chemical bond? physics.stackexchange.com
In the extended version of rock-paper-scissors, nuclear decay beats chemical bonds every time.

In code review, should I ask to do a refactor outside of the scope in a pull request softwareengineering.stackexchange.com
Leave code better than you found it. Within reason.

Saving one file format with a different file extension. JPG – PNG; MOV – MP4 superuser.com
Software doesn’t actually care about file extensions.

How could I make the results of a yes/no vote inaccessible unless it’s unanimous in the affirmative, without a trusted third party? security.stackexchange.com
How to vote to leave a cult without exposing yourselves.

Links from around the web

The Internet explained from first principles explained-from-first-principles.com
We use it all the time, but do we know how it works? Here’s a super in-depth look at how the internet functions at every layer.

Understanding React’s useRef Hook ui.dev
Refs are amongst the most misunderstood parts of React, and this article is interesting and helpful to get past any blockers you might have around them!

The languages which almost became CSS eager.io
Oh, what might have been! This is a fun article about the history of all the languages that were almost the styling language we know and love.

Go Concurrency Example – Let’s Build a Concurrent Download Manager – zero dependency youtube.com
Here’s a practical 20 minute screencast on how to build a download manager without any dependencies.

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