Ryan Donovan, Stack Overflow Blog

code-for-a-living December 2, 2019

Preventing the Top Security Weaknesses Found in Stack Overflow Code Snippets

Last week, we told you about research that found a number of security vulnerabilities in code snippets in Stack Overflow answers, and how some of those flaws had migrated into actual, real-live Github projects. Today, we’re following up on the top eight error types that research highlighted and suggesting ways to avoid making the same mistakes.

Ryan Donovan

code-for-a-living November 26, 2019

Copying code from Stack Overflow? You might paste security vulnerabilities, too

Copying code itself isn’t always a bad thing. Code reuse can promote efficiency in software development; why solve a problem that has already been solved well? But when the developers use example code without trying to understand the implications of it, that’s when problems can arise.

Ryan Donovan

code-for-a-living November 18, 2019

The Interactive News Platform for Everyone

Journalists have an uneasy relationship with technology. On one hand, journalism at the highest levels still focuses on print distribution, a technology hundreds of years old. On the other hand, even the Gray Lady has a snazzy mobile app and stories custom made for virtual reality. Traditional news outlets are increasingly discovering the power of…

Ryan Donovan

code-for-a-living November 7, 2019

Looking to understand which API is best for a certain task? A new study uses Stack Overflow data to rank them

But if you could collect and analyze the opinions posted within the comments and questions, you could start to get a bead on the aggregate sentiment, sort of a Yelp for technology. That’s just what Gias Uddin, now a Senior Data Scientist at the Bank of Canada, looked at for his PhD thesis at McGill University. Along with his PhD supervisor, Foutse Khomh, Associate Professor at Polytechnique Montréal, determined a method to mine opinions on APIs and libraries from questions and comments posted on Stack Overflow.

Ryan Donovan

newsletter November 1, 2019

The Overflow Newsletter #3 – The 36 pieces of code that changed history

We chat about programming with ADHD, our most embarrassing programming mistakes, and spacecraft navigation.

Ryan Donovan

code-for-a-living October 30, 2019

Why Sencha is moving its support forums to Stack Overflow

One way to scale support for a product is to invest in the community already asking and answering questions about your technology on Stack Overflow.

Ryan Donovan

code-for-a-living October 25, 2019

The puzzle masters behind Facebook’s Hacker Cup explain how they craft questions

We go behind the scenes with two developers who create the coding questions for the annual Hacker Cup.

Ryan Donovan

newsletter October 18, 2019

The Overflow Newsletter for October 18th, 2019

The Overflow newsletter #2: The podcast is back, AI on infinity, and an intro to Kubernetes

Ryan Donovan