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.
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.
We just flew back from the HumanX conference, and boy are our arms tired...from holding a microphone to interview so many interesting folks about AI. We've dropped the first interview from the conference, and forgive us, it's a self-link. Our CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar talks all about our place in the AI landscape and what we found interesting over the three days at the conference. -- Naturally, we're sharing a greater bounty in this newsletter. Want to know about building a mobile framework, tracing errors with AI, and the best way to fine-tune your data strategy? We've got you covered. -- So what's the rest of the Stack Exchange network, perhaps the world at large, talking about these days? Trained crows, the speed at which the days get longer, and the definitions of font and printer. As a closer to this meal, please enjoy a little dismantling of the worry that AI and vibe coders are going put you terminal jockeys out of business.
We've been in full swing lately, and we have a ton of exciting things for you to check out. First up, a look at how developers caught between caring for kids and aging parents are managing to keep focused on their work and use software to help with that. Next, take a look under the hood of our sweet new Question Assistant. Finally, our very own Eira May got up close with agents at TDX 2025, and she's unpacking what all that means for developers. / For those who prefer to listen, we've got a ton of goodies. Check out our very first episode of Leaders of Code, a new podcast that pairs one of our leaders with a tech leader at another organization. In the good ol Stack Overflow Podcast, we've got conversations about startups trying to combat climate change and a terminal built to use AI to bypass man pages. Curious crawlers will find a collection of clickables. Want to destroy the Milky Way? We've got you. Hide data using getters? Done. Build a calculator entirely out of wood? You absolute lunatic, we can help.
As you read this, your humble narrator will be at the HumanX conference talking to leaders in the world of AI. Whether we like it or not, AI is becoming a key part of the technological landscape. This week, we feature two conversations with people building real AI solutions: optimizing models for edge devices and using specialty models for translation and beyond. We do have other non-AI material for you. The podcast welcomed a blog contributor for a conversation on secure coding, what it takes to secure a Canadian election, and the legal ramifications of being a lousy CISO. Plus, our Teams product has shiny new features and we're excited to tell you about them. Never fear my intrepid knowledge explorers, there are plenty of goodies from the Stack Exchange network and beyond! Is the Earth dodging the Moon? Can you learn HTML and CSS from a game? Can a catch-all email domain be abused by bad actors? Can SQLite be abused to handle concurrency? And more.
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we are on the cusp of Spring, so we're thinking about the growth and change coming in the future. The weather is getting slightly warmer, brave flowers are budding, and the snow is melting. For Stack Overflow, we're thinking about how we can grow and change to keep our public community vibrant in the face of an AI present. To that end, we had a Q&A with some of our leadership team over YouTube. If you missed it, we've got a quick recap that touches on all the possibilities that we're mulling over. Of course, we're also talking about AI: how testing can benefit and the variations of LoRA. And if you want to share your views on AI instead of reading and hearing ours, we're running a survey on using open-source AI. We also have a collection of curated curiosities for you, surfaced by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams. If you want to build a pipe organ, get your tiny gecko friend honest work (or poach them from their current position), or configure Git the way core Git developers do, we've got you covered.
This week: keeping software development both fast and safe, breathing something other than air, and how your morning coffee changes your brain.
This week: we're gearing up for an AMA with our CEO, growing paranoid over our Linux kernel's knowledge of Microsoft tech, and celebrating the return of the pebble.
This week: Feature flags in theory and in practice, the world’s best mirror, and biohacking a broken heart.
This week: The organizations to which Stack gave back in 2024, what you can do when your open-source plugin is repackaged as commercial code, and the UX of login codes.
This week: The oft-forgotten soft skills developers need, decoding macrodata refinement, and the challenges icon-only buttons represent for screen readers.
This week: Why AI apps need quality data now more than ever, the specifics of state sales tax, and the principles of accessibility that should guide your design decisions.
This week: Streamlining medical billing with AI, how to think about time, and the etymology of “Jingle bells, Batman smells.”
This week: Code quality for mobile apps, what’s wrong with your PR process, and whether public computers are rife with malware (spoiler: probably).
This week: The app that helps you fight for your data privacy rights, the right way to think about p-values, and old-school JavaScript.
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.
This week: Data ownership in the AI world, 100 ways to visualize the same dataset, and how old is too old for Narnia.
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.
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).
This week: What launching rockets teaches you about hardware observability, why Jupiter spins so fast, and what you learn by interviewing 100 DevTools founders.
This week: Training autonomous vehicles, the science behind frozen seawater, and disappearing domains.