Ryan Donovan

Ryan Donovan helps run editorial for the Stack Overflow blog. He's spend over 15 years as a technical writer embedded in software development teams across multiple industries. He lives in New York City and hopes to meet your dog some day.
code-for-a-living December 31, 2021

700,000 lines of code, 20 years, and one developer: How Dwarf Fortress is built

Dwarf Fortress is one of those oddball passion projects that’s broken into Internet consciousness. It’s a free game where you play either an adventurer or a fortress full of dwarves in a randomly generated fantasy world. The simulation runs deep, with new games creating multiple civilizations with histories, mythologies, and artifacts. I reached out to him to see how he’s managed a single, growing codebase over 15+ years, the perils of pathing, and debugging dead cats. Our conversation below has been edited for clarity. 
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newsletter December 10, 2021

The Overflow #103: Does modern parenting require spyware?

Welcome to ISSUE #103 of The Overflow! This newsletter is by developers, for developers, written and curated by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams. This week: Get your metrics straight to speed up product delivery, eat your cereals to found civilization, and dazzle ‘em with animated website entrances. From the blog The four engineering metrics…
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newsletter November 26, 2021

The Overflow #101: Invest in your favorite developer

Welcome to ISSUE #101 of The Overflow! This newsletter is by developers, for developers, written and curated by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams at Netlify. This week: QA for deep learning pipelines, getting efficient with summation formulas, and finding the point where a table is too big. From the blog Building a QA process for your…
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