The Overflow #65: Building a Covid vaccine websites on maternity leave

Welcome to ISSUE #65 of the Overflow! This newsletter is by developers, for developers, written and curated by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams at Netlify. This week: Infrastructure as code, modeling UI states at OkCupid, and an update from our head of product, community, and engineering. 

From the blog

State of the Stack: A new quarterly update on community and product stackoverflow.blog
Teresa Dietrich leads Product, Community, and Engineering at Stack Overflow. She will be posting quarterly updates laying out key accomplishments and future goals.

Infrastructure as code: Create and configure infrastructure elements in seconds stackoverflow.blog
IaC allows developers to supply IT environments with multiple lines of code and can be deployed in a matter of minutes (in contrast to manual infrastructure, which can take hours if not days to be deployed).

Podcast 320: Covid vaccine websites are frustrating. This developer built a better one. stackoverflow.blog
Who needs a database? With just an S3 bucket, the Chrome Network Tab, and some very big JSON files, this developer built a website that aggregates vaccine availability from dozens of corporate and government websites. 

[WATCH NOW]: Learn Why GitLab’s DevOps Platform Stands Out promotion
Collaborate. Automate. Secure. See how GitLab stands out from other solutions and the benefits of built-in CI/CD as a part of a complete DevOps platform.

Interesting questions

Why don’t currents due to revolution of electrons add up? physics.stackexchange.com
Do you know your bound currents from your free currents?

Can an inverter through a battery charger charge its own batteries? electronics.stackexchange.com
Don’t invest in a perpetual motion machine just yet. 

What does the mortar and pestle in the Safari address bar icon indicate superuser.com
It depends what language you’re reading it in.

I’ve disabled both my keyboard and mouse drivers. How do I turn them back on?  superuser.com
Like leaving your keys inside your car. But worse.

Links from around the web

What does 100% mean in CSS? wattenberger.com
What do percentages mean in CSS? It 100% depends on how you use them!

Memory leaks in Node.js applications: How to debug them on Heroku blog.sqreen.com
Memory leaks in Node.js can lead to heaps of trouble. Here’s a great deep dive on how to take care of them.

Modeling UI states in a React form component using a finite state machine tech.okcupid.com
The OkCupid team used finite state machines to power some of the UI changes that affect over 50 million users.

The best font loading strategies and how to execute them css-tricks.com
When you’re putting custom fonts on your websites, it’s all about reducing the time it takes to load, while maintaining how flashy they look.

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