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Issue 241: Accessibility by design

Welcome to ISSUE #241 of The Overflow! This newsletter is by developers, for developers, written and curated by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams. This week: Improving a 40-year-old developer tool, how candid to be when leaving a team, and a legal framework for regulating AI.

From the blog

Accessibility by design: Building interfaces for everyone at Stack Overflow

How we took a proactive approach to making our sites and products accessible to all.

Unpacking the 2024 Developer Survey results

Ryan and Eira talk with Stack Overflow senior research analyst Erin Yepis about the results of our 2024 Developer Survey, which polled more than 65,000 developers about the tools they use, the technologies they want to learn, their experiences at work, and much more. Erin highlights what the survey reveals about devs’ favorite programming languages (JavaScript, HTML, Python), the rise of Rust, the popularity of embedded technologies (Raspberry Pi, Arduino), developer sentiment around AI, and why tech debt tops the list of developer frustrations.

This developer tool is 40 years old. Can it be improved?

Would updating a tool few think about make a diff(erence)?

Interesting questions

Feynman famously criticized the Space Shuttle program for not delivering any value to science. Did things improve in that regard since the 1980s?

“By this standard, virtually all research would be judged a failure.”

Why is transfer of heat very slow as compared to transfer of sound in solids?

Or why you can't defrost your dinner by yelling at it.

How much and how candid should my feedback be when leaving a team?

That depends on how many bridges you want to burn.

What's wrong with constructions like "Dragons are big, green, and eat people."?

Grammar is literally out of control.

Links from around the web

The curse of knowledge

Sometimes highly knowledgeable people are highly ineffective teachers.

The sneaky costs of scaling serverless

Serverless could be more expensive than you think.

The AI Act is here

The first-ever legal framework on AI attempts to address its risks while positioning the EU as a leader in AI legislation.

Is it time to version observability? (signs point to yes)

Observability is valuable...if you know what it is.


Onboard, organize, and bring your team up to speed in a jiffy. Try Stack Overflow for Teams.