A newsletter by developers, for developers, curated by Cassidy Williams and the Stack Overflow team. 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.
You must have hit 88mph in your DeLorean, because this week we're taking you back. And by "back" we mean back to school. Whether you or someone in your life is learning to code, we've got everything you'll need for back to school ready for you on the blog. We aren't sending you back alone though. Our very own Stack Overflow developers are joining you, and they have plenty of tips and tricks to share for student developers. Plus, we asked Jeffrey van Gogh from the Kotlin Foundation to go back in time on the pod to tell us all about the evolution of the Kotlin language and how it goes beyond just Android. XX Great Scott! Those aren't the only blasts from the past we have for you this issue. From the web, we have a look back on original home computers and ye olde robots from history. Claude Code is getting in on the nostalgia too—we have a story on resurrecting old QIC-80 tapes using AI. But don't get too trusting of AI, now. We've got a question from the gaming site on double-crossing quest givers. Learn from them and you might keep yourself from getting Ex Machina'd. Speaking of fighting AI overlords, we've also got a story from the web on how one tech writer is "poisoning the well" of his article data. XX Alright, get into the DeLorean, it's time to go back to the future...or at least the present. Once you get those 1.21 gigawatts of lightning on yourself, be sure to check out our pod episode with Kylan Gibbs from Inworld on implementing AI for consumer goods like gaming. Plus, there's no time like the present to ponder the existence of free will, if cats would be our natural predators if we were five-inches tall, and if a working clock that is occasionally wrong is really the opposite of a broken clock, metaphorically speaking. We've got the answers for you, here and now, down in the links below.
This week, we're talking a lot about open-source, and remembering what MJ said—if you want to make the world a better place, take a look at some open-source code and make that...CHANGE! We've got two open-source founders on the pod this week. We're joined by the creator of Svelte, Rich Harris, to talk about web frameworks and their dirty little secrets. Plus, the creator of NumPy and SciPy, Travis Oliphant, also sat down with us to chat about the development of Python as a data science tool. And if these two convos don't have you itching to join in on the open-source fun, we have a story from the web about the millions of one-person open-source projects in the world that will surely light a fire under you. XX And we're looking to be the change we want to see, too. On the blog, we shared how we're making a better future for our communities with part one of how we moved our public sites to the cloud. And for a little inspiration, we've also got a pod episode with Darko Mesaroš, Principal Developer Advocate at AWS, about the history of technologies and breakthroughs that made software development more powerful. And if you're a leader thinking about making that change on your teams, we've got a blog about the power of continuous learning at work. XX Looking for more? We've got everything you could want, like stories from the web about German Strings and uncertainty, or questions on metaphysics and orange sharks. Links are all down below.
We're keeping it light this week...and by light, we mean we're pondering our existence and thinking about AI defense robots. That's light in a sort of "light as air" way, right? On the pod Nathan Michael, CTO at Shield AI, answered our burning questions, like if they're building terminators for the government. We've also got Tuhin Srivastava from Baseten on the pod to share with us about how AI is transforming the GPU game. If either of those have you worrying a bit about the future, maybe it'd be a good time to hop over to our Philosophy sites to read the answer to this questions: Why is life considered worth preserving? XX Okay, we'll lighten up. If you're thinking about the future in a more career-oriented way, we've got a blog piece for you on how great architects keep their ideas in order through documents. Plus, Morgan Stanley is thinking about the future as a chance to upskill their people through experiential learning, as shared with us by Senior Learning Specialist Christina Dacauaziliqua on Leaders of Code. And at the very least, the future is bright here at Stack Overflow—our latest research roadmap outlines how we're keeping our community strong this fall. XX See, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. It's like discovering the alternate ending to our favorite princess movie wasn't made up in our head, like one user did on the Movies site. Even a NEET of 15 years can find hope for fruitful employment, like another user did on the Workplace site. We've even got busy beaver hunters still trying to find that infinitely large sixth number, even if it would be impossible to write down. And if you're still feeling a bit pessimistic, just know that every bubble will pop, and you can always buy a burner phone. Both those stories, and the rest of them, are down in the links below.
This week, we've got quite a few interesting chats for you—and no, we don't just mean GPT-5. Chat on Stack Overflow is getting a big revamp, and we're sharing the first look of what's to come. On the pod, Wenjing Zhang and Caleb Johnson from LinkedIn's engineering teams chatted with us about semantic search and AI for job seekers. We're fans of Vue.js over here; all our marketing sites use it. For the Vue-heads like us out there, be sure to give our chat with Evan You about the future of Vue a listen. XX If you're not tired of reading the word "chat" yet, we've got a story from the web on parasocial relationships and how they affected the GPT-5 update. Speaking of AI updates, they've got us wondering: is Claude going to be smarter than us soon? We've got a link covering the IQ scores for different AI models, so if you're curious, you can see how you rank. But don't worry, even if the bots got into MENSA before you, we've got another piece to remind you that you're still funnier than them, and isn't that what really matters? XX If the IQ of your favorite LLM has you motivated to get your knowledge up, we've got plenty of factoids and answers for you this week. We'd like to see a bot come up with a creative answer for why there was a child at the Jurassic Park dig site or think of something really funny to laser engrave on a spaceship. Learn about both and more at the links below before AI gets there first.
Let's address the elephant in the room: yes, vibe coding is happening, and there's not much we can do to stop it. Wherever you land on the optimist-pessimist spectrum for AI-generated code, we've got stories for you. Optimist Quinn Slack from Sourcegraph joined the pod to talk AI coding in enterprise environments and how he imagines these tools are going to change the software engineering lifecycle. If you're looking for the downer side of the spectrum, read about the misadventures of the worst coder on our team, who tried to build something purely off vibes, only for it to be a mess of security issues. Don't worry, no data was hurt in the making of her app. XX If you're yearning for the early days of computers, when vibe coding was just a sci-fi dream, check out our pod with early adopter of Python and developer advocate Paul Everitt, who dives into the history of Python and what makes its community special. Then, go even further back in time and read a story from the web on the (surprisingly spicy) history of teletext around the world. If that cures your nostalgia, you can come back to the present and figure out with the rest of us how to fight AI slop...with more AI slop, probably. XX But if you need a break from thinking about the past and future of the internet, that's all right too. We've always got helpful answers for you. Why do your dishes smell so bad? Who should you ask to help you move this weekend, your taller or shorter friends? Do you sound exciting or neurotic when you add twenty exclamation points to the end of your paragraph?!!!! It's all covered in the links below.
It's that time of year again: the results of our 2025 Developer Survey are live. If you were taking bets with your friends on what the top programming languages would be this year, it's time to go see if you're a winner. Or, if you're more of an auditory learner, we spoke with Erin Yepis, our Senior Analyst, about all the juiciest bits from this year's results. XX Got your winnings in hand? Good, because we've got more for you. Mahir Yavuz, Senior Director of Engineering at Etsy, joined the podcast to talk the unique challenges of their marketplace. On Leaders of Code, Anirudh Kaul and Paul Petersen from U.S. Bank sat down with our very own Jody Bailey to dive into how traditional institutions like banks are navigating this new world of AI technology. And on the blog, we've got a story on imposter syndrome and AI usage, just in case those big bucks you just won from your bet is making that flare up for you. XX And of course, we've got plenty of tales, oddities, and answers from around the internet. Have you seen the video of someone saving a PNG image to a bird, or the story on creating digital fireflies at home? Elsewhere, there's a windy saga of a person who feared he was automating himself out of a job, but was eventually promoted to CTO. He should probably talk about job security with the author of one of our other links, who got hired by a company after he was unable to submit a PR just so he could fix it himself. Check them all out below.
Which will you be? The good news is we've got ways for you to be both. We don't mind being like Smokey Bear this week by saying, "Only you can stop climate change...through more efficient code." Ryan Panchadsaram, co-author of Speed and Scale, is on the pod to share ways developers can help save the world by lowering emissions. If you're feeling more like a cowboy, though, Confluent's AI Entrepreneur in Residence Sean Falconer dove into the wild west of AI standards with us. Or if you're looking to be a hero on your platform team, we've also got a story on continuous discovery, the superpower of platform engineering. But if you're not feeling like hopping on a horse or saving the universe, we still have plenty for you to dive into, from big numbers to type systems to touch screens. We've got stories on why Legos are better for kids than iPads, and why humans are better for writing than LLMs. Plus, you can read about how thinking too big was a big waste of time for one developer. And as always, we're sharing answers to the questions you didn't even think to ask. Like, is my favorite pizza place running an illegal business by giving me 50% off for a review? What is the name of that beautiful chunk of carbs from the World Book Encyclopedia? How is the word skulduggery even real? Check them all out in the links below.
This week, we're saying so long to the things of old...for instance, our final physical datacenter. Don't worry, we've got the complete story on The Great Unracking in New Jersey for you. And while our servers aren't nearly as old as dinosaurs, we're also crossing our fingers that we might say goodbye to fossil fuels after Kieran Furlong, the CEO of Realta Fusion, joined the podcast to explore the future of fusion energy. Plus, social scientist John Flournoy helped us wave goodbye to the old ways of measuring developer productivity and hello to the future of developer experience. Meanwhile, we've got stories from around the web about testing the bounds of your LLMs. AI has proved itself to be a good assistant for hacking, especially if it's hacking itself. But you don't need to worry (yet) about AI surpassing your human creativity; LLMs having their own spontaneous innovative thought are still just a daydream. So, to help you keep ahead of those dreamless machines, we've got a story on making your code better through mini proofs. And before we say goodbye to this week's newsletter, we've got a couple of age old questions about early Unix, when to use the word except, and whether you're supposed to eat the sprig of rosemary after a fancy steak dinner. All the answers are ready for you down below.
This week, we're ringing in a new era at Stack Overflow. We're fresh from WeAreDevelopers, where our CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar and CPTO Jody Bailey shared with the world the next chapter at Stack Overflow. New era, new us...but don't worry, we're keeping you right at the center of it. With a new era, you gotta have a fresh new look. And like a middle schooler starting a new year of school, we had to ask our friends (the community) to help us pick the best one. XX But we're not just looking forward; we're also looking back. We're throwing it back to classic movies, the original Transformers paper, and talking like a baby. On the pod, Illia Polosukhin, co-author of the "Attention Is All You Need" paper, joins us to give his thoughts on the evolution of LLMs. Meanwhile, some award-winning baby-talk innovators flexed their skills during our community Coding Challenges. Plus, we got the story on how student co-founders at Koel Labs are using films to innovate speech technology, which would be helpful for our dear user on the Academia site who's asking about reputable transcription services. XX Speaking of movies, what version of Star Wars were you watching at home as a kid? We've got a possible answer for you in this issue, plus a bit about RESTful APIs, desktop publishing, and more. Wanna build software quicker...or slower? Well, you probably don't want to do that second one, but we've got the stories for both at our links below.
This week, we're thinking about the unsimple things in life. For instance, what are we supposed to do with a "dream machine" when its dreaming turns into hallucinations? How are 256 electrodes placed on the brain able to create perfect speech? Can you replace several cables with a single fiber line and still have internet? Are Ghibli breads real, and if so, where can I get one? You know, just everyday ponderings. XX Over on the pod, Stack Overflow legend Jon Skeet joined us to impart some of the tech wisdom that garnered him a million rep points, including the complexities of timezones (very Y2K problem). Plus, Matt DeBergalis from Apollo GraphQL jumped on to to talk the evolution of API orchestration and what it means for modern development stacks. And if you too are pondering about those peskily unreliable "dream machines," you'll be excited to know there are ways to base those dreams in reality. XX And in a world of unsimple things, we'll leave you with a few overly simplified answers: Is using your brain REALLY better for coding than an LLM? (Yes.) What kind of exception should you be throwing in C++? (Trick question, you shouldn't all the time.) Will T.S. Eliot get me fired from Apple? (Almost.) If you want to know more, the full answers are down below. XX
This week, we're focused on problems. Secretly, this is also a solution week, because if we just piled on with new problems, geez, what a bummer email that would be. We all know data is becoming a bigger engineering problem, so the podcast talked to folks at Tobiko Data about how they are improving the data engineering toolbox. For those of you in hardware, you know the troubles that tariffs have caused—our other podcast this week talks to MiniProto, a company doing hardware prototyping in the US. XX AI (thought you'd escape it this week, eh?) claims to be a solution, but it often comes with its own problems. We chatted with Vish Abrams, chief architect at Heroku, about the problems with software that vibe coders aren't thinking about. For those of you adopting AI at work, we review our Leaders of Code conversation with the CTO of Cloudflare to figure out how to overcome AI adoption and implementation problems. XX Okay, enough with the problems already. Time for answers! Why were players singing in a NASA MMO? Whose fault are radio buttons? How can I apply to more jobs, theoretically getting me one job? How can we distinguish these smart robots from people on the internet? FYI, these are questions—answers are in the links.
This week, we're thinking about the changes taking place within venerable institutions. We talked with the Chair of the OpenJDK Governing Board, Georges Saab, about what the past five years have meant to a 30-year-old language. The biggie: new releases every six months with whatever's done instead of waiting to shove a massive feature-fest out every few years. Over on the Leaders of Code podcast, our CTO talks with Cloudflare's CTO about how the internet—and their jobs making it a better place—are about to get a little cray-cray in the next few years. XX We're also thinking about how to keep making things better, now and in the future. We've got a round table podcast with Stack Overflow's Trust and Safety team about how they put out dumpster fires that are inevitable in any user community. For those of you in the Zoomer generation (or trying to deal with them spotting bad vibes), we've a fantastic look at how this generation learns differently and how AI fits there. XX Fret not, pretty babies, we have a fat stack of fun facts for you to trot out at the next "Kid from Jerry McGuire look-alike contest." Did you know giant snails could have sieged medieval castles? But did you know Marvin Minsky created a framework for thinking about AI agents in 1986? But, but did you know you can spot a bad workplace pretty fast? Bonus: Yes, Mr. Goodwillie, we have your 1987 letter!
Before we get into the goodies, please take a look at our Developer Survey for this year (link in the footer). It's an annual tradition that builds on the results of previous years to track the tech, habits, and opinions of software technologists. There's more in there about AI this year, but frankly, there's been more AI this year too, and we want to know if it's becoming a part of your workflow or if it's just another hype cycle. XX Speaking of AI, we've got two conversations about AI and an article about the data behind it. First, we chatted with the DeepMind team about Gemini 2.5, that plucky little GenAI tool that's barnstorming all the leaderboards. On the other hand, we've got a chat with mad scientists chaining together open-source models, compute be damned. If you're in the model training biz, we'd like to talk to you about diversifying your datasets. XX Now for the newsletter equivalent of speed dating. Could Leia have saved all those Bothans from doom? Is your List of Despair really about the list? Could you maybe go a little easier on the reauth? And rewiring your brain with jams, bops, and power ballads.
This week, we're thinking safety first. Hear about how to defend your mobile app when the attacker controls your compiled code and the device it runs on. Find out how time travel debugging works in a deterministic simulation. Check out the banking engineering org that went all in on serverless. And a safe bet: the Developers Survey is open for your input. XX You'll still find a little bit about AI here too (certainly more in the links). Read about how real businesses are integrating AI agents into their workflow and getting those sweet sweet productivity gains. If you're out there building AI on Snowflake, we've partnered with them to make our public site data easier to integrate for everyone. XX As promised, there are a couple of dueling AI takes in the roundup. "AI skeptics are crazy" vs. "no measurable productivity gains from AI". Two takes enter, a million takes leave! Other ponderables include the perils of a Magic: The Gathering monoculture and a how one human learned the frustrations of machine learning.
And we want you to show us! The 2025 Develop Survey is now open, and we couldn't be more excited (for health reasons)! What are you and your fellow software engineers talking about? Are you talking about how the future of RAG systems is agents? Or how your favorite CRM system is building agents? We sure are! XX Okay, maybe you're not talking about agents. We've got other conversations and articles for you. Want to find out why understanding AI limitations will help you succeed? Or maybe you've got an e-commerce front end and you want the dish on the latest improvements. Perhaps you're one of those door-number-three types and would like some TypeScript-powered software to explain your gut biome. XX Maybe, just maybe, you're here to scroll through the questions and links that make you thinks. Check out how folks are handling AI-based cheating in workplaces and schools. Get boggled by the maximum number of cube faces you could see at any one time. Marvel at the ways that hawks are using human tech to hunt.
We're rocking the mad scientist vibe this week, experimenting in our labs (which sadly do not have enough flasks and beakers). This quarter's CEO update lays out how we're tinkering and toiling to evolve into every developer's third screen. From our researchers, we've got a roadmap update, which dives into the specific experiments that we're running and what we're trying to learn. You can even check out one of those experiments now: Coding challenges are live! XX Turns out that we aren't the only ones trying new ways of doing things. On the podcast, Ben and Eira talk to Christophe Coenraets, SVP of Developer Relations at Salesforce, about how AI agents are changing the CRM game. When you're talking about experiments, you need to talk about safety, too. Our second podcast this week features a conversation about durable execution and making sure your microservices aren't playing in hardcore mode. XX Enough about us—what's everybody else talking about? Well, some folks are looking at the ways that AI is changing how software is being built, while others are saying that real productivity gains come from boring old processes and tech. Yet other people don't want to leave their oven on for the 15 minutes it takes them to prep the recipe. Productivity comes in all sorts of flavors.
Sorry for the jump scare in the title, folks, but this week, we're taking big picture looks at AI and the software industry it supports (or destroys). On the blog, we have a look at the big bets being placed on AI companies and how this could shake out in the long term. For those big companies gobbling up small AI firms, are they ready for AI in revenue-generating production? We chat with Maryam Ashoori, the product leader behind IBM's watsonx. If you're looking to hear about something more fundamental, check out our podcast conversation with self-confessed observability nerd Henrik Rexed on breakpoint debugging in cloud-native applications. In the age of moving fast, does velocity actually measure an org's impact? We expand on our latest Leaders of Code podcast to explore real measures of development work. More? Well, our organic artisanal web crawlers have found a slew of lovely links. Is it true that a cat has the IQ of a toddler? How can you scale an impenetrable wall of jargon? What happened when Iceland moved to a four-day work week? Does your system need all that complexity or is it just complicated?
Here at Stack Overflow, we try to keep our community central to what we do. We've got a bunch of products, sure, but the public site has been the core, and we're kicking off efforts to align our brand—the idea of us we present to the world—with all the things we do. Check out the blog and meta post announcing it. To stick with the community theme, our community management department is giving you a peek into what they do all day. XX Besides that, we've had a busy week. Check out why Algorand thinks TypeScript is the best way to build on blockchains. COO of LinearB Dan Lines talks with Ben Matthews and Ben Popper about moving from development velocity to impact. The SO podcast learns about orchestrating microservices. For all you robots afraid we'd skip AI this week, worry not: we chat with Abby Kearns of Alembic about using AI and contact tracing techniques to find which 50% of your marketing budget is worthless. XX Around the network and the web, information is popping (do the kids still say that?). Is AI pushing people into messianic delusions? Do the Middle Earthlings know that Frodo actually botched the job? What do you call those without sin? And did network science predict the next pope?
Everybody talks about GenAI in terms of prompts and responses, but we're going to focus on the infrastructure and protections that make it happen. In the last of the HumanX podcasts, Ryan chats with SambaNova CEO Rodrigo Liang about reimaging the chipsets behind AI. We have a Q&A with Jack Berkowitz of Securiti about the liabilities—legal and otherwise—posed by bad data. We also chat about GenAI and the other kind of infrastructure—the physical kind used by utilities—with Greg Fallon of Geminus. xx We're also honing in on innovation itself, that mysterious X-factor that turns problems into solutions. Cameron Wolfe shares his take on GenAI's OG innovation, self-supervised learning, and why it made such an impact on natural language processing. In our latest Leaders of Code blog post, we expand on our conversation with Hilary Lanham, Head of Engineering Excellence at Lloyds Banking Group, to look at the ways that innovation puts money in the banks. xx Did you hear that the electrical grids of Spain and Portugal were offline for a whole day? Take a dive into induced atmospheric vibration, the suspected cause, in our Questions section. Plus! The grind of performance optimization! Bot farms shaping the narrative! And war! What is it good for besides technological advancements?
Complexity is one of those things that computer science and software engineering has sought to reduce over time. No, don't laugh, I'm serious. While new techs may come in and make our lives messier, soon the industry turns its mind towards simplifications: standards, reusable components, platform-independent solutions, and so on. --- We've got a lot of conversations for you along those lines. In the latest Leaders of Code podcast, Ben Popper chats with Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow, and guests from Lloyds Banking Group about how to simplify and standardize a complex engineering org. On the main podcast, we have chats with the CEO of Dataiku about simplifying the data to genAI pipeline, and with Laly Bar-Ilan, Chief Scientist at Bit, about how they are using genAI to create reusable components, not code. --- And in the questions and links, we're dropping knowledge you didn't even know you needed. Is women and children first a discriminatory policy? Can you host your blog on a Wii? Are millennials also flat earthers? Would you buy a computer from a raccoon?
Every other week, it seems like somebody has a new AI-related take or buzzword, and the rest of us have to sort out whether it's worth learning about. Like agents; what the heck are they? Fortunately, we dug into that very question to see what lies beneath the hype. Agents, like a lot of software, help automate tasks—we're got a look at how much you can automate sysadmin tasks. Then, with all these AI agents running rampant in your system, you need to think about scale—in our latest Leaders of Code, Recursion's VP of engineering Maureen Makes does just that. xx As we've often promised and occasionally delivered, we have more for you besides AI. In the latest We'll Be In Touch, Kyle sits down with former Stacker Michael Stum to chat about WebAssembly, how he learned to code by tackling Stack Overflow questions, and more. Speaking of Stack Overflow (aren't we always?), our private version, Stack Overflow for Teams, has a new release for Enterprise users. xx Okay readers, lightning round <airhorn>. How do you tell HR that you're quitting because your desk is terrible? Why does Discord see through time? What can you learn from the failure of a startup? Will the CVE database disappear when its grants run out?
No matter where in the world you live, this newsletter is hitting your inbox free of tariffs. I mean, it's always free, and we've got some excellent freebies for you. We dropped the results of our survey on open-source AI, and it's got plenty of insights into how developers of all experience levels view the rise of open-source LLMs like LLaMa and DeepSeek. -- On the podcast side, we have two conversations recorded at the HumanX conference and one new Leaders of Code episode. We chatted with Amr Awadallah, CEO of Vectara, about how AI's going to give us that "I know kung fu" moment sooner rather than later. We serve up a conversation with a repeat customer, Tomasz Tunguz, about his theories (and his Theory Ventures) about the AI landscape. In Leaders of Code, our own Ellen Brandenberger chats with Maureen Makes, VP of Engineering at Recursion, about whether you can move too fast with AI. -- Did you know that the #! is called a shebang? Me either. Find out how it works with the Linux kernel in our links section. Want to know how dang wrong Jules Verne (and, frankly, everybody else in 1865) was about the Rocky Mountains? Check our questions. Dear reader, there's even more, so I'll get out of the way of your scroll wheel.
Hey, have you all heard of AI? I kid, I kid, but it's popular for a reason. This week, we cover all sorts of angles on the topic du jour in today's software industry. We chat with the CEOs of HumanX and Crunchbase about the state of the AI industry. We chat with the field CTO of GitLab about how AI best supports learning. We chat with folks at the HumanX conference about audio models and LLM governance. There's more to AI than just LLM, and we've got leads on that too. There's info on the new role web data will play in LLMs. Our friends at Intuit talk about an old-school AI technique they use to manage the NP-hard problem of scheduling appointments at scale. In other links, we've got the usual roundup of delicious info. Ponder the math of roasted meats. Remember one of the code breakers who helped stop the Nazis. Learn about the movement to develop web apps for local-first execution. And argue whether there were CRT displays that could refresh faster than 60Hz.
We talk a lot about AI and its effects on coders. The reality is that the keywords and syntax many of us use to activate software magic might not be as important in an AI future. In the latest Leaders of Code podcast, our CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar talks to GitLab Field CTO Lee Faus about why critical thinking might be the new must-have developer skill. There are plenty of harder tech skills that AI requires. Vector databases and embeddings have been the foundation of many GenAI advances, and we talk about it with Pinecone CEO Edo Liberty. On the other end of the AI spectrum, we talk about the thing that everybody is talking about now: agents. Deepak Singh, VP of Developer Agents and Experiences at AWS, breaks down whether these plucky little robots are ready for prime time. Meanwhile, have you ever thought about rewriting the C++ standard library? Me either, but we have a link to someone who did. Plus Go slices, random PC crashes, homophones gone wild, and translating an artistic perspective into math.