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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 205: Engineering thanks

This week: discussing inference-as-a-service on the edge, preventing your code form being used as training data, and writing clean code to reduce cognitive load on developers.

Issue 202: Accepted

This week: how and why developers are changing jobs, whether you can gamble with stolen money, and why text embeddings matter.

Issue 201: Rise of the coffeebots!

This week: what you need (besides AI) to improve productivity, forcing diplomats to pay back rent, and the downsides of mobile-first web design.

Issue 200: Reducing meeting blast radius

This week: how to integrate an AI tool into your existing workflow, advise PhD candidates smarter than you, and run neural networks in your browser.

Issue 199: Code every Zig

This week: Can infrastructure-as-code be made simpler? Why are blood iron measurements different in your right and left hands? Should academic disciplines have an expiration date?

Issue 198

This week: we're looking back at 15 years of Stack Overflow with a snazzy poster, thinking of critiquing our skip-level boss, and understanding why open source wins.

Issue 197

This week: an IDE built for multiplayer, a new antibiotic that hasn't hit clinical use, and an attempt at an open standard for accelerator programming.

Issue 196

This week: understanding what VC investors are looking for, when SOLID principles are on shaky ground, and why not everything should be lazy loaded.

Issue 195

This week: the dramatic conclusion of our cloud journey, the math behind a good toy train track, and the case against walled gardens.

Issue 194

This week: the first part of our saga of moving Teams to the cloud, the reason that programming languages usually delimit strings, and the end of the argument whether tabs or spaces are better.

Issue 193

This week: how to pay off tech debt by giving it numbers, why type systems stop at a level of expressiveness, and why one developer built a garbage collector for a language that doesn't need it.

Issue #192: Ask your data better questions

This week: sign up to get access to the new Stack Overflow search, future-proof proof that you're from the future, and fall in love with hard work.

Issue #191: Between product and engineering

This week: I/O-heavy operations on the edge, the earliest programs called AI, and happiness is a developer community called Laravel.

Issue #190: Long live the new search!

This week: hear from the Stackers building our AI features, consider whether LLMs suffer from an overestimation of their abilities, and test whether you can have multiple testing strategies at once.

Issue #189: OverflowAI!

This week: all about the AI features coming to Stack Overflow products, whether to jump into cold water or dip gradually, and how a 17th-century font made its way into the 21st.

Issue #188: Recognition for individual contributors

This week: real talk on hallucinations, the cultural implications of workplace hugs, and a spotlight on digital privacy.

Issue 187

This week: exploring the infrastructure and code behind edge functions, what makes someone a “real developer,” and the coolest library on earth.

Issue #186: Do large language models know what they're talking about?

This week: probing the intelligence of LLMs, responding to “work faster” feedback, and Ethernet turns 50.

Issue #185: The hardest part of software is requirements

This week: AI won't replace us until it can handle flaky requirements, steampunk inventors upgrade the battery, and a guide walks you through a career from junior dev to veteran.

Issue #183: Dev Survey on AI: Hype or not?

This week: The Developer Survey results are here, the advantages of public key cryptography over symmetric keys, and the reasons why AI won't fix accessibility.

Issue #182: Self-healing code

This week: how to make sure the tools you buy get used, when math got imagination, and why a string pointer error grew to two billion characters.

Issue #181: More on our AI future

This week: how we built course recommendations (and a whole new data platform), the stars of heavy metal, and the big bets of big tech.

Issue #180: The battle for your attention at work

This week: the version control system that uses patch algebra, the proof that we are not the center of the universe, and the dark patterns that keep you paying subscription fees.

Issue #179: Brag about your code

This week: chatting about OWASP ZAP, computing with rolling stones, and jQuery lives.