Stack Overflow Blog

code-for-a-living April 20, 2020

Brush up your COBOL: Why is a 60 year old language suddenly in demand?

The suddenly strained unemployment systems often run on a 60-year-old programming language, COBOL. So, how can you learn it, make big bucks, and save lots of state agencies that need new code to deal with all the new government stimulus programs?

Charles R. Martin

community April 20, 2020

How the pandemic changed traffic trends from 400M visitors across 172 Stack Exchange sites

The world has changed a lot in the last three months. As we adjust to this new reality, we are seeing interesting new traffic trends and community efforts across our network of sites.

Ben Popper Director of Content

Wooden figures standing in a circle facing each other

the-loop April 16, 2020

The Loop: Feedback Frameworks

After speaking with subject matter experts, we decided to take a step back. In this post, we list and organize our methods of feedback into a matrix. The goal is to offer a clear framework to follow and to identify areas that could use bolstering with alternative methods.

Sara Chipps Director of Public Q&A

code-for-a-living April 15, 2020

Reading the spec: COVID-19 Contact tracing from Apple and Google

Culture and science are happening in real-time during the worldwide COVID-19 epidemic, which means that Apple and Google are working together in collaboration with health and governmental organizations and rapidly publishing specifications and standards.

Paul Ford

code-for-a-living April 13, 2020

Socializing with co-workers while social distancing

As we increase our social distancing efforts and have fewer people around us, building connections and socializing becomes ever more important for our mental health. We spend a lot of time at work and a decreasing amount of time socializing outside of it, so turning some of that work time into a social time can serve two purposes. For it to be effective, though, you can’t just push socializing initiatives alone.

Ryan Donovan

newsletter April 10, 2020

The Overflow #16: How many jobs can be done at home?

This week, we're going deep on dark mode, balancing code quality with deadlines, and rolling your own chat apps.

Ryan Donovan

community April 9, 2020

The Unfriendly Robot: Automatically flagging unwelcoming comments

Unfriendly comments are an issue in our system because of the effect that their tone has on their recipient’s and future readers’ willingness to contribute to Stack Overflow. The solution to these issues isn’t to argue about circumstance or intent. The only remaining option is to work on the comments themselves.

Jason Punyon and Kevin Montrose

company April 8, 2020

Q2 Community Roadmap

Back in February, we shared our Q1 Community Roadmap with you. In that post, we described our four roadmap themes which will continue throughout the year. In our commitment to provide transparency, we will continue to share our roadmaps each quarter. So without further ado, here is our Q2 Community Roadmap: Q2 2020 April May…

Teresa Dietrich

code-for-a-living April 6, 2020

A practical guide to writing technical specs

Writing a technical spec increases the chances of having a successful project, service, or feature that all stakeholders involved are satisfied with. It decreases the chances of something going horribly wrong during implementation and even after you’ve launched your product.

Zara Cooper

newsletter April 3, 2020

The Overflow #15: Dark mode!

April 2020 Welcome to ISSUE #15 of The Overflow, a newsletter by developers, for developers, written and curated by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams. We weren’t kidding, this newsletter runs weekly from here on out. And this week, we’re doubling our podcast output, building models of molecules at home, and comparing Class vs.…

Ryan Donovan