Welcome to ISSUE #54 of the Overflow! This newsletter is by developers, for developers, written and curated by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams at Netlify. While we are off for the holidays, we still have some sweet newsletter presents to give: your digital identity and you, dealing with sudden bursts of errors, and the secret origin story of the hero known only as C.
From the blog
How digital identity protects your software stackoverflow.blog Digital identity is the online representation of a person, organization, or a machine, and it is what gives us access to the data we use daily. Here’s a brief overview of identity, why it’s vital to information security, and why you should know more about it
Podcast 297: All Time Highs: Talking crypto with Li Ouyang stackoverflow.blog If you want to understand what’s going on with Bitcoin, chat with someone who understands finance and software with equal precision.
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Interesting questions
Why should ‘boneheaded’ exceptions not be caught, especially in server code? softwareengineering.stackexchange.com Detecting a problem with a crash is better than letting the program continue with an undetected error.
What spectral type of star has an absolute magnitude of exactly 0? astronomy.stackexchange.com What, having a star with an absolute magnitude of roughly zero not good enough for you?
Is there a general solution to the problem of “sudden unexpected bursts of errors” in software? softwareengineering.stackexchange.com Your code should both execute gracefully and fail gracefully.
What is the difference between pressing Alt+Tab and Ctrl+Alt+Tab? superuser.com One of them offers you greater Ctrl over window selection.
Links from around the web
Writing a fully unit testable android app dev.to Android was not exactly set up with unit testing in mind, but you still can do it! Here’s a guide for setting up a “blueprint” for yourself to get your projects set up for success.
“A damn stupid thing to do”—the origins of C arstechnica.com The creators of the C language never dreamed it would become as popular as it did. The history of it is fascinating (and also funny).
Font Family Reunion: Compatibility tables for default local fonts. fontfamily.io Here’s a nice and easy way to look up a system’s default fonts for all of your CSS needs. Think “Can I Use” but for fonts.
The Node.js best practices list (December 2020) github.com This repo is a summary and curation of the top-ranked content on Node.js best practices, growing and updated every week. Definitely worth a bookmark!
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