Engineering

Keep tabs on what our engineering team is working on.

community March 30, 2017

Stack Overflow Unveils the Next Steps in Computer Security

At Stack Overflow, keeping your information safe is our top concern. And as a community with over 40 million people each month, it has to be: Our success has made us a frequent target of attacks. Computer security is always evolving. Passwords are “what you know.” Smart cards are “what you have.” We decided to…
Avatar for Kaitlin Pike
Marketing (Former)
company March 9, 2017

Does Anyone Actually Visit Stack Overflow’s Home Page?

Yesterday we were amused to see this post on Reddit’s sysadmin forum: Our architecture lead Nick Craver looked into this and gave a great answer, including that about 29% of the previous day’s Stack Overflow traffic was to the home page. From his perspective as a system administrator, that’s exactly the right analysis. Nick’s team…
Avatar for David Robinson
Data Scientist (former)
company February 14, 2017

How Stack Overflow Redesigned the Top Navigation

You may have noticed that we’re sporting a new look today. We launched this update today as part of a series of changes supporting our core mission: Make developers’ lives better. In the past year, we fully integrated our by-developers, for-developers Jobs product. We added a whole new content type — Documentation — to help…
Avatar for Kurtis Beavers
Product Creative Director (former)
company January 30, 2017

Developers without Borders: The Global Stack Overflow Network

A while back I encountered a developer who shared a story of a positive experience on Stack Overflow. He’d asked a question late one Sunday on Labor Day weekend, and been delighted that he’d quickly gotten multiple responses. He said he was impressed that someone else in San Francisco was also “burning the midnight oil,”…
Avatar for David Robinson
Data Scientist (former)
community January 11, 2017

The 2017 Stack Overflow Developer Survey is Now Live

We’re back for another edition of the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, the largest and most comprehensive survey of software developers on earth. Every year, we include questions about your favorite technologies, coding habits, and work preferences, as well as how you learn, share, and level up as a developer. Want to see how you stack…
Avatar for Kevin Troy
company December 15, 2016

You Can Now Play with Stack Overflow Data on Google’s BigQuery

If you’ve ever wanted to get a statistic about Stack Overflow or your favorite Stack Exchange site, you may have used our Stack Exchange Data Explorer, aka SEDE. (This is separate from our regular “data dumps” meant for researchers and others who want to work with large chunks of the content.) Launched in 2010, SEDE…
Avatar for Kaitlin Pike
Marketing (Former)
engineering November 29, 2016

Stack Overflow – Counting Developers with Providence

Capturing developer trends data For the last two years, we have contributed data on developer trends across Europe to The State of European Tech Report, created by Atomico and Slush. The way we captured the developer trends data changed this year as we rebuilt our data analysis platform called Providence. Providence is our machine learning…
Avatar for Kevin Troy
engineering May 3, 2016

Stack Overflow: How We Do Deployment – 2016 Edition

We’ve talked about Stack Overflow’s architecture and the hardware behind it. The next most requested topic was Deployment. How do we get code a developer (or some random stranger) writes into production? Let’s break it down. Keep in mind that we’re talking about deploying Stack Overflow for the example, but most of our projects follow…
Avatar for Nick Craver
Architecture Lead - Former
culture April 27, 2016

A Pluralistic Meeting

Running a good meeting is the FizzBuzz of management – for a manager, it should be nearly effortless. Attendees should leave gratified that it was time well spent. In the context of servant leadership, it’s our job as managers to ensure that our time together meets this high bar. Optimize for presence Meetings are synchronous…
Avatar for Matt Sherman
Engineering Manager (former)
engineering April 26, 2016

An Optimization Exercise

Nick Craver tweets out snippets of the Stack Overflow code base occasionally. About a week ago he showed off a ContainsToken method which has been tuned for performance. This set off a little bit of a benchmarking contest. My final attempt (which is among the fastest) ended up using a lot of tricks, which I…
Avatar for Kevin Montrose
Team Lead, Data - Former
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