From the Network
philosophy.stackexchange.com

Is a screenshot of a picture the same picture?

New art school thesis just dropped.

english.stackexchange.com

"neither is" vs. "neither are"?

Neither are wrong.

meta.stackoverflow.com

Should we stop closing questions?

Promise we won’t close this one…yet.

stackoverflow.com

Is it possible to use a shebang to force a certain Python 3 version (e.g. python3.12 instead of python3)?

Didn't Ricky Martin answer this question years ago?

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What’s new at Stack Overflow: January 2026

For this first edition of the new year, we’re taking a step back to highlight some of the most impactful features shipped over the last year and how they can help you start 2026 strong.

Your 2025 Stacked: A year of knowledge, community, and impact

From tough questions to standout answers, your team built a lot in 2025. Your 2025 Stacked brings those contributions together in one shareable snapshot—celebrating the people, posts, and topics that defined your year in Stack Internal.

Latest articles
More Podcast
Around the web
potaroo.net

IP addresses through 2025

“Gretchen, stop trying to make IPv6 happen! It's not going to happen!"

seangoedecke.com

Software engineers should be a little bit cynical

If the idealists are all cynics and the cynics are all idealists, who’s driving this bus?

media.mit.edu

Your brain on ChatGPT

Your brain on drugs was a cracked egg. Your brain on ChatGPT is a cracked egg with an emdash.

mike.tech

The death of software development

Software development is dead…long live software development.

github.com

Lock picking robot

If the guys who stole the crown jewels from the Louvre had robots on their team, maybe they wouldn't have been caught so quickly.

hackernoon.com

The long now of the web: inside the Internet Archive’s fight against forgetting

Here's how the Internet Archive is helping us never forget all the embarrassing things you posted on Myspace.

dmvaldman.github.io

Training my watch to track intelligence

Smartwatches are getting...intelligent!

chrisgregori.dev

Code is cheap now. Software isn’t.

Anyone can code. Not anyone can craft great software.

oblomovka.com

AI psychosis, AI apotheosis

Who knew AI euphoria could feel so bad?

nik.art

The suck is why we're here

Being bad to get good is a human experience AI can't take away from us.

terriblesoftware.org

Life happens at 1x speed

The best things in life only happen at 1x speed (like reading this newsletter).

github.com

A philosophy of software design vs clean code

Uncle Bob and John Ousterhout go head-to-head to solve—well, nothing, they just keep arguing like always.

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Every week we’ll share a collection of great questions from our community, news and articles from our blog, and awesome links from around the web.

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Issue 313: A little something for every dev

It's issue 313 of the Overflow and we've got a little something for everyone in this one. Whether you're leading a tech team, on a tech team, or just coding for fun on the side, our pod is ripe for the picking with great interviews this week. The indomitable Scott Hanselman returned to the show to dive into the good, the bad, and the promising of vibe coding for developers. On Leaders of Code, IBM's CIO of Technology Platform Transformation Matt Lyteson joined our very own Jody Bailey to chat about what it takes for an enterprise like IBM to successfully adopt AI. Plus, David Yanacek, Senior Principal Engineer at AWS, told us all about AWS's origin story when we caught up with him at re:Invent. The blog is also crossing generational borders this week. Are you a veteran tech leader? Our top eight lessons from Leaders of Code is the read for you. Are you a recent grad trying to break it into the industry? We've got every tech story from 2025 you should know, ready for you on the blog. Are you someone more experienced, but still looking to learn? Check out how we're keeping Stack Overflow a great place to learn by fighting spam. And of course, we've packed this issue to the brim with stories and answers from our sites and around the web. Learn how to deal with a headstrong coworker or create a lock-picking robot. Figure out if reality could exist without logic and then explore the history of Internet Archive. Make your smartwatch really smart and then level up your hands. We have all of those ready for you in the links below.

Issue 312: Running and crawling your AI bots

We're all ears this week with three pods for your listening pleasure on everything from bots to ecommerce to ROI. Akamai data scientist Robert Lester joined us to talk about the rise in AI bots—surprisingly, they're not that much different from the search engine bots of ye olden days. Vanessa Lee from Shopify joined the show to discuss the AI renaissance and how it's changing personalized experiences in ecommerce. We've also got an episode with MongoDB's Pete Johnson this week on the secret sauce of AI ROI (spoiler alert: it's quality engineers), and why AI is not actually a job killer. If you'd like to give your weary ears a rest, we've got plenty of stories for you from all over Stack Overflow and the web. We're scanning both ends of the timeline: check out our retrospective of the biggest updates to Stack Overflow from 2025 and a look forward at our plans for our much-beloved Q&A site in the New Year. All of these updates have us feeling pretty giddy, like the AI euphoria feeling one of the pieces this week is all about. But not everything in this issue is about the shiny and new—we've also got the age-old battle of software design vs clean code, slowing things down to 1x speed, and the joy of being terrible at something as a beginner. Now that your eyes and ears are open, we've got a few questions for you. How loosely do you define "free software"? Can you hear that really low sound or is it just us? Does our smile look phalanx-like to you...should we go see a dentist about that? If you need answers, we have all of them and more in the links below.

Issue 311: Your line on information in the new year

Can you believe you haven't read an Overflow since last year? Fine, fine, we'll keep our corny jokes about "not showering since last year" in 2025. We're closing out our top ten blog countdown with five more stories for you on everything from documentation to vibe coding to the Developer Survey. One of the biggest reads of the year for our community was a blog written by our CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar and our CPTO Jody Bailey on this new era at Stack Overflow, which feels particularly fitting for all the "new year, new me" posts you're probably seeing on social media. You can check that one out on the blog—plus other top posts from the year like a technical look at how we built Question Assist and why documents are a software architect's best friend. Speaking of new year, new era, new you, if you're looking to start your 2026 off right, we've got everything you need. Want to become a better developer? Check out our conversation with LaunchDarkly's Tom Totenberg about the software corners you should definitely not be cutting. Want to build a better community? We spoke with MIT and Stanford professor Alex "Sandy" Pentland on how you can use AI to do just that. Want to be disaster prepared or have fun with web development again? We've got two stories from the web that get you started on all such self-improvement endeavors. And what list of New Year's resolutions would be complete without "get smarter" on it? Our bevy of questions and answers is the best place to start. Where else could you learn about the safety of decade-old honey, exploding synthetic gloves, or the fastest way to make thousands of files at once so you can bulk delete them? Ah, only in the Overflow. All of that and much more is in the links below.

Issue 310: The top ten Stack Overflow blogs of 2025

What luck for our 310 issue to land on the 31st! If you're practicing your numbers in preparation for the New Years' countdown, we're right there with you. We're counting down the top ten Stack Overflow blogs of 2025, and this week we've got the first five for your holiday reading pleasure. From popping the AI bubble to the ick you get from slop to the losing employment battle Gen Z is having against bots, this year's blogs dug deep into the economic, cultural, and technical shifts caused by AI in 2025. And don't worry, we wrote about stuff besides AI. Rounding out the first five of our countdown are the Great Unracking of our last physical datacenter, and a piece on making your codebase better by making your code coverage worse. If you're in more of a listening mood, you're in luck because the pod stops for no holiday. We're joined by former Stack Overflow board member Anil Dash for a conversation on how AI is normal and should be treated as such. We also spoke with Dan Ciruli from Nutanix about the delicate dance between VMs and Kubernetes in cloud-native environments. From around the web, we've got a piece on when we can expect quantum computing to be scalable (apparently it's imminent), one dev's reflection on a year of vibe coding, plus the disproving of the old developer proverb, "If you're as clever as you can be when you write your code, how will you ever debug it?" Wait, is that 2026 I see on the horizon? Let's countdown the end of this issue the way we always do—with some questions. 5...What would Aristotle say about Cliff's Notes? 4...Will people believe me if I say the reason I don't understand advanced math is because its notation is not standardized? 3...What does "technically sound" mean? 2...Why won't my pirated disc of Brat work on my mom's 1999 CD player? 1...Happy New Year! Until next year, we have all those answers and so much more down in the links below.