This week, my fellow Stack Overflow data scientist David Robinson and I are happy to announce the publication of our book Text Mining with R with O’Reilly. We are so excited to see this project out in the world, and so relieved to finally be finished with it! Text data is being generated all the time around us, in healthcare, finance, tech, and beyond; text mining allows us to transform that unstructured text data into real insight that can increase understanding and inform decision-making. In our book, we demonstrate how using tidy data principles can make text mining easier and more effective. Let’s mark this happy occasion with an exploration of Stack Overflow text data, and show how natural language processing techniques we cover in our book can be applied to real-world data to gain insight.

Another academic year has recently ended, bringing with it a new season of graduations to celebrate and a new crop of freshly-minted graduates entering the software industry. The 2017 Stack Overflow Developer Survey provides context and data for understanding developers who are just entering the workforce compared to more experienced developers. Let’s use this year’s survey results to gain a deeper understanding of these new graduates.

Computer programmers, IT specialists, and hackers are often depicted in popular works of fiction, from books, movies, to TV shows. On the 2017 Developer Survey, we asked respondents about depictions of what it’s really like to be a programmer. This was one of my favorite questions on the survey this year, and analyzing these results has been quite the glimpse into the opinions of our community.

For me, the weekends are mostly about spending time with my family, reading for leisure, and working on the open-source projects I am involved in. These weekend projects overlap with the work that I do in my day job here at Stack Overflow, but are not exactly the same. Many developers tinker with side projects for learning or career development (or just for fun!) and at Stack Overflow, we support all types of technologies, from professional to hobbyist. Whenever people are working, we’re available to answer their questions. But what languages tend to be asked about on weekends, as opposed to weekdays?

The 2017 Stack Overflow Developer Survey opened last week, and we on the Data Team are looking forward to analyzing the survey results to better understand our developer community. I am particularly interested in women in tech, for probably obvious reasons, and recently I explored last year’s survey data to see what we can learn about women developers.