The Overflow #159: Our top blog posts (part 2)  

Welcome to ISSUE #159 of The Overflow! This newsletter is by developers, for developers, written and curated by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams. Happy new year everybody! Here’s the five most popular articles from last year as well as fresh questions and links about hot new technologies like COBOL and Assembly language!

From the blog

You should be reading academic computer science papers stackoverflow.blog
You read documentation and tutorials to become a better programmer, but if you really want to be cutting-edge, academic research is where it’s at.

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 Resignation is here. What does that mean for developers? stackoverflow.blog
Nearly three years into the pandemic, many Americans are still reevaluating their relationship with work.

Picture perfect images with the modern <img> element stackoverflow.blog
You may not think about images as part of your web dev work, but they can affect your web app’s performance more than any other part of your code.

Why the number input is the worst input stackoverflow.blog
Think that web form has got your number? If you used input type=“number”, you may be surprised to find that it doesn’t.

Accelerate business success with Developer Experience Engineers promotion
Ensure developers have the right tools, processes, and environment to maximize productivity and create the greatest business value possible.

Interesting questions

What is the purpose of hiding spam links in some obscure forum posts? security.stackexchange.com
Consider them offerings to the mighty search engine gods.

Would a machine learning classifier algorithm be able to determine whether a number is odd vs even? stats.stackexchange.com
If by “machine learning” you mean “divide by two” then sure.

References for the complexity of the COBOL language retrocomputing.stackexchange.com
You want proof, eh? Don’t all the articles complaining about it count?

Feeling burnt out and like I need to leave but feeling guilty as there’s no one to replace me workplace.stackexchange.com
To thine own self be true. Especially when a company is overworking you.

Links from around the web

The joys of home-cooked apps blakewatson.com
Building something for yourself is the often most satisfying thing to do, because you are your own customer!

Taking the stress out of design system management www.smashingmagazine.com
Design systems can get unruly, but there’s ways to tame that.

A book teaching assembly language programming on the ARM 64 bit ISA. github.com
If you want to try your hand at assembly language programming, perhaps now’s the best time!

Finding language in the brain thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
The combination of neuroscience and linguistics is a powerful, and somewhat new field. Language isn’t only math…but it’s pretty close.

A blast from the past: Testing software so it’s reliable enough for space.