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The Overflow

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.

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Issue 255: Developers love clean code. Documentation, not so much

This week: Chatting with the guy responsible for building the Call of Duty game engine, focusing the James Webb Space Telescope, and implementing a technical solution to help with amnesia.

Issue 254: Will prompt engineering replace software development?

This week: Data ownership in the AI world, 100 ways to visualize the same dataset, and how old is too old for Narnia.

Issue 253: How to get your kids into coding (according to an 8-year-old)

This week: How one of the creators of React is rethinking IDEs for the AI era, what to do about a client who keeps changing the password to the website you’re trying to build, and how linear programming can identify money laundering.

Issue 252: AI's tragedy of the commons

This week: Why documentation is vital software infrastructure, making it easier for subject matter experts to contribute to your knowledge base, and tips for safely walking a dog while riding a bicycle (hint: maybe don’t).

Issue 251: The LLM brain drain problem

This week: What launching rockets teaches you about hardware observability, why Jupiter spins so fast, and what you learn by interviewing 100 DevTools founders.

Issue 250: How to train your self-driving car at home

This week: Training autonomous vehicles, the science behind frozen seawater, and disappearing domains.

Issue 249: Prompt engineering is now software development

This week: AI-native development, self-driving cars, and how to improve your developer portfolio.

Issue 248: Where AI tools are working

This week: The mystery of masked self-attention, the thirst of an AI company, and the superpower of simplicity.

Issue 247: Elevating the search experience

This week: Taking a look at the tech stack that powers multimodal AI, the first rule of machine learning, and whether it’s possible to build a world without sound.

Issue 246: A great way to get value from AI coding tools

This week: Why generating tests is a good use case for AI coding tools, how to tell your manager that you might retire early if you don’t get a raise, and why your company needs junior devs.

Issue 245: The hidden cost of speed

This week: The safest way to store a password in a database, the cost of coding first and asking questions later, and what happens when you touch an AM radio tower with a pickle.

Issue 244: Where does Postgres fit post-AI?

This week: Making LLMs’ default architecture more effective, identifying a mystery pipe, and one of the largest technical migrations in history.

Issue 243: Battling ticket bots

This week: Decoding the decoder-only transformer architecture, why external contractors probably shouldn’t manage internal teams, and speeding up your webpage before it even loads.

Issue 242: Navigating cities of code

This week: Navigating with Norris numbers, how to handle a difficult interview situation, and why Nintendo won the video game graphics war without trying.

Issue 241: Accessibility by design

This week: Improving a 40-year-old developer tool, how candid to be when leaving a team, and a legal framework for regulating AI.

Issue 240: Tools to make developers happier

This week: Developer experience beyond the spreadsheet, what to do when your coworkers are Big Brothering you, and why the creator of jQuery uses React and Typescript.

Issue 239: Dev Survey results are in!

This week: The results of our 2024 Developer Survey are in; what makes Agile more, well, agile; and a guide to building complex Chrome extensions.

Issue 238: Are ghost jobs haunting your career search?

This week: The framework helping developers build AI apps, how compilers recognize complex patterns, and the oldest known recording of a human voice.

Issue 237: Making it easier for new users to ask questions

This week: How data are reshaping society, whether infinity is a real number, and why “wifi” is so hard to spell.

Issue 236: In code review, no one can hear you scream

This week: Dealing with code review anxiety, the ethics of multitasking while working remotely, and the math of card shuffling.

Issue 235: Explaining generative language models to (almost) anyone

This week: A framework for understanding generative language models, best practices for loaning money to a friend, and useful but overlooked developer skills.

Issue 234: The real 10x developer

This week: The real 10x developer, outlawing password managers at work, and fixing the two-page login.

Issue 233: GenAI can’t build your engineering team

This week: How customer feedback shaped OverflowAI, how to stop scrolling when you should be working, and how to hack your score in ’24.

Issue 232: Introducing Staging Ground, a better way to ask your first question

This week: Chunking data for RAG applications, how to start developing an existing project in Git, and a new feature to make asking questions on Stack Overflow easier for newcomers.