Welcome to ISSUE #106 of The Overflow! This newsletter is by developers, for developers, written and curated by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams. While we are on holidays this week, please enjoy the first half of our top ten blog posts of the year, the final podcast of 2021, and the fallout of the Log4J vulnerability.
From the blog
Sequencing your DNA with a USB dongle and open source code stackoverflow.blog It takes the most exquisite measurements you can imagine, recording the changes in current associated with different bits of DNA.
Best practices for writing code comments stackoverflow.blog While it’s easy to measure the quantity of comments in a program, it’s hard to measure the quality, and the two are not necessarily correlated. A bad comment is worse than no comment at all. Here are some rules to help you achieve a happy medium.
Best practices can slow your application down stackoverflow.blog In order to get the most performant site possible when building the codebase for our public Stack Overflow site, we didn’t always follow best practices. One of our more controversial posts.
“This should never happen. If it does, call the developers.” stackoverflow.blog If there is one thing developers like less than writing documentation, it’s responding to unnecessary escalations.
Fulfilling the promise of CI/CD stackoverflow.blog When people say “CI/CD,” they are only talking about continuous integration. Nobody is talking about (or practicing) continuous deployment. AT ALL. It’s like we have all forgotten it exists. It’s time to change that.
Podcast 402: Teaching developers about the most lightweight web “framework” around, VanillaJS stackoverflow.blog How teaching beginners can highlight the concepts that you’ve internalized too much.
Learn the Truth About Tracing [Free on-demand webinar] promotion Spend an hour with us and learn: why infinite cardinality and real-time analytics are vital for operating modern applications, how tracing and APM make this possible, why developers and operations prefer microservices, and more.
Interesting questions
Does a server need a GPU? serverfault.com You may not need that GPU, but you’ll probably get it anyway.
Is it bad practice create “alias” variables to not use globals or arguments with long names in a method? softwareengineering.stackexchange.com Keeping variables relevant for the locals is generally good practice.
Links from around the web
Why are so many software developers quitting their jobs? javascript.plainenglish.io Are you one of the many developers looking for a new position or entirely new career?
The internet runs on free open-source software. Who pays to fix it? www.technologyreview.com Sometimes, with free software, you get exactly what you pay for.
Hunting tech debt via org charts bellmar.medium.com What kinds of tech debt your org has may depend on which department calls the shots.
Where do you put spacing on design system components? ericwbailey.design When you’re building out a design system, do you just move things around until they “look right”?
Onboard, organize, and bring your team up to speed in a jiffy. Try Stack Overflow for Teams.