Loading…

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.

Email settings

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.

Issue 231: What developers really think of coding assistants

This week: How devs are using CodeGen tools, how to respond when a client does an unauthorized penetration test on your platform, and whether music can make food taste better.

Issue 230: The new dev survey is here!

This week: going behind the scenes with our enhanced search feature, trying to not get arrested for photographing seahorses, and squaring away all the ways to make CSS shapes.

Issue 229: Python for everyone

This week: pondering why a paltry percentage of GenAI projects makes it to production, exploring the limits of the object-oriented programming paradigm, and going back in time with the history of the world's first planetarium.

Issue 228: The future of APIs

This week: we've got big news with two new partnerships, exploring the circular reasoning behind gravity, and rewilding the internet.

Issue 227: Community research

This week: interviewing the creator of the most-widely deployed database, pondering why XML didn't catch on, and appreciating the elegance and function of the humble water fountain button.

Issue 226: Baby's first programming language

This week: Is tech generating a new bubble? Can you use LaTeX to put adorable little hearts on top of your "i" so everyone knows your love is imaginary? Will Pluto be mad if we find a new ninth planet?

Issue 225: LLM on LLM evaluation

This week: how to run data engineering without burning out your team, why they bothered with HTTP instead of just shipping HTML over FTP, and what happens when burnout hits farmers.

Issue 224: 10X devs, 0 jerks

This week: a year in the life of AI at Stack Overflow, crying in front of your thesis advisor, and the time zone of the moon.

Issue 224: 10X devs, 0 jerks

This week: a year in the life of AI at Stack Overflow, crying in front of your thesis advisor, and the time zone of the moon.

Issue 223: Long context

This week: pair programming with CodeGen assistants, whether using AI means you're smarter now, and when rain improves your Wi-Fi reception.

Issue 222: Generating bad code

This week: the data costs of observability, the legal consequences of not understanding your Miranda rights, and the benefits of scripting in the primary project language.