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The Overflow #169: Fear the Frankencode

Coder to instructor, no thanks to take home tests, and DevOps tips

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Welcome to ISSUE #169 of The Overflow! This newsletter is by developers, for developers, written and curated by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams. This week: what developers think about cutting-edge tech, how to protect your open-source hardware specs from a commercial patent, and why large language models start understanding text.

From the blog

Five Stack Exchange sites turned ten years old this quarter! stackoverflow.blog High fives to a Stack Exchange milestone for English Language Learners, Magento, Reverse Engineering, Sustainable Living, and Tridion!

After the buzz fades: What our data tells us about emerging technology sentiment stackoverflow.blog Developers expect AI assistants to be everywhere soon, but they aren’t necessarily happy about it.

“Move fast and break things” doesn’t apply to other people’s savings (Ep. 544) stackoverflow.blog Christine Ryu, Engineering Lead at fintech platform Flourish, joins the home team to talk about how technology is transforming finance for everyone from big banks to individual consumers.

From writing code to teaching code (Ep. 545) stackoverflow.blog After 37 courses and half a million students, a former developer reflects on his journey to instructor.

MongoDB Atlas University Course promotion Learn how to deploy a global, multi-cloud database with MongoDB Atlas. Get hands-on experience creating and deploying a database with this free course.

Interesting questions

Protect public project from potential patents opensource.stackexchange.com Check out the concept of defensive publishing, which is the legal equivalent of posting “First!”

Does the Earth constantly lose mass? astronomy.stackexchange.com It loses a tiny amount as air escapes and astronauts leave flags on the Moon. But none of this is the Moon’s fault.

Did courtiers of antiquity hold in their pee or did they have common commodes available in the king/queen’s court? history.stackexchange.com To pee or not to pee, that is the question.

How to politely decline a take-home test task? workplace.stackexchange.com That depends: do you want the job or not?

Links from around the web

Emergent abilities of large language models www.assemblyai.com If you’ve heard the term “large language model” (or LLM) a lot lately, you’re not alone. Here’s a look at how new capabilities emerge as the LLM scales <em>without changing the algorithm</em>.

How to become a DevOps engineer: An untimed guide www.theopalblog.com DevOps is a huge space with a ton of opportunities. If you’re interested but unsure how to get started, this is a great guide for you.

Why you need to know your site’s performance plateau (and how to find it) www.speedcurve.com When do your website performance metrics plateau?

Data Reliability Engineering Conference drecon.org Stack Overflow’s own director of reliability engineering, Ellora Praharaj, will be speaking at DRE Conference. If you can’t make it in person, check out the virtual option!

If you're curious about our other products: How to get started with Stack Overflow for Teams.

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