The Overflow #54: Talking crypto

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.

Need speed? Automate your incident response with xMatters promotion
Nothing’s more important than a great customer experience, but sometimes services get disrupted. xMatters helps teams resolve incidents fast before impacting customers. Try for free and see why millions trust xMatters.

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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