Welcome to ISSUE #130 of The Overflow! This newsletter is by developers, for developers, written and curated by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams. This week: UX research as cultural anthropology, the first operating system worthy of the name, and the Atom text editor sails off into the sunset.
From the blog
Remote work is killing big offices. Cities must change to survive stackoverflow.blog
If your office is where you live now, would you live in your old office?
The Great Decentralization? Geographic shifts and where tech talent is moving next stackoverflow.blog
Distributed work may hold the key to creating forward-thinking metropolises.
Want to be great at UX research? Take a cue from cultural anthropology (Ep. 451) stackoverflow.blog
The home team talks with designer, coder, and anthropologist Maggie Appleton about her path from academic ethnography to leading design at HASH, how she balances creative expression and usability in front-end design, and why UX researchers are really anthropologists by a different name.
See what's new in MongoDB, on demand for a limited time promotion
At MongoDB World, developers saw first-hand how MongoDB's developer data platform makes it easy to build and operate modern applications. Catch up on what you missed by accessing the recorded sessions from the event, now on demand and free.
Interesting questions
Online checker for plagiarism: How accurate are they? academia.stackexchange.com
Asking for a…uh…friend.
I feel more comfortable working from an office. Is this now a 'drawback'? workplace.stackexchange.com
Are we the baddies?
How does one become great at computer science mathematics? cseducators.stackexchange.com
The same way you become great at any other hyper-specialized field: "Study it for all your adult life and also have a lot of innate talent."
What was the first operating system to be called an "operating system"? retrocomputing.stackexchange.com
And did it constantly require security updates?
Links from around the web
Ultrasonic payments dev.to
Ultra...sonic? Charlie Gerard experiments with sending data from an offline device via inaudible sounds! It's actual magic.
The importance of truly owning our devices cheapskatesguide.org
We don't really "own"a lot of our devices anymore, but we should.
Don't sink your website with third parties www.smashingmagazine.com
Third-party resource requests can be significant. Here's a good run-down on strategies to reduce their impact on your user experience.
Sunsetting Atom github.blog
Many loved it over the years, but it's time to say goodbye to the Atom text editor once and for all.
A blast from the past: Getting started with contributing to open source