Stack Overflow Blog

code-for-a-living October 5, 2020

Play the long game when learning to code.

Aspiring coders tend to take one of two types of learning approaches. The first involves trying to learn syntax as fast as possible. The second emphasizes understanding above all. It may take longer, but I hope to show how it's better in the end.

Daniel Chae

community September 30, 2020

The Loop-September 2020: Summer Bridge to tech for kids

In response to COVID-19 and its impact on SYEP, over 50 nonprofits and technology companies came together to design the Summer Bridge 2020 plan to continue the program. As one of Summer Bridge’s partners, Stack Overflow designed a workplace challenge to give students a taste of what it’s like to work in the tech industry and to give us a chance to learn more about how students engaged with our developer community.

Jon Chan Engineering Manager, Public Platform

code-for-a-living September 28, 2020

How Stackers ditched the wiki and migrated to Articles

In an effort to rethink how documentation works, we recently introduced Articles, longer-form prose that can sit side by side with shorter Q&A.

Ben Popper and Medi Madelen Gwosdz

careers September 23, 2020

What I learned from hiring hundreds of engineers can help you land your next role

Our CTO shares her process for selecting who to hire, and offers insight on how developers can position themselves for success.

Teresa Dietrich

code-for-a-living September 21, 2020

Nvidia has acquired Arm. What does this mean for the future of AI, edge computing, and the people who write software for these chips?

In a move that has significant implications for the tech industry, U.S.-based graphics chip maker Nvidia announced last week that it would purchase U.K.-based Arm Holdings from Japanese investment firm Softbank for $40 billion. For anyone programming for AI, data processing, or embedded systems, this could mean your data intensive applications will soon be running…

Nahla Davies

code-for-a-living September 16, 2020

Neural networks could help computers code themselves: Do we still need human coders?

The next big revolution in coding practice might be closer than we think, and it involves helping computers to code themselves. By utilizing natural language processing and neural networks, some researchers think that within a few years we can remove humans entirely from the coding process. If you work as a coder, you'll be glad to hear that they are wrong.

Nahla Davies

code-for-a-living September 9, 2020

Can one person run an open source project alone?

No matter how well-intentioned and free wheeling a project is, at some point, to succeed at scale, decisions need to be made and conflicts need to be resolved. But is a project managed best by a single person with the final say or through building consensus with a committee of several people?

Ryan Donovan

code-for-a-living September 2, 2020

If everyone hates it, why is OOP still so widely spread?

OOP has been wildly successful. But was the success just a coincidence? And can it still offer something unique in 2020 that other programming paradigms cannot?

Medi Madelen Gwosdz Content Strategist

code-for-a-living August 26, 2020

Kotlin 1.4 released to improve performance

Last week, JetBrains released Kotlin 1.4 to the programming community. The update added some new language features but also put a strong focus on improving quality-of-life and performance, especially when paired with JetBrains’s own IntelliJ IDEA IDE. Kotlin is a programming language best known as “Java without the warts.” It can compile both to Java…

Ryan Donovan

code-for-a-living August 24, 2020

Motoko, a programming language for building directly on the internet

To offer a seamless developer experience, we wanted to create a specialized programming language, called Motoko, that is designed to directly support the programming model of the Internet Computer, making it easier to efficiently build applications and take advantage of some of the more unusual features of this platform.

Andreas Rossberg

community August 20, 2020

The Loop, August 2020: Community-a-thon

Here at Stack Overflow, we recently held our first Community-a-thon event. We wanted our employees to learn more about the SE network and how it feels to use it so they can get a better sense of what it's like to be a user here.

Yaakov Ellis and Stephanie Cantor