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.
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.
This week: AI-native development, self-driving cars, and how to improve your developer portfolio.
This week: The mystery of masked self-attention, the thirst of an AI company, and the superpower of simplicity.
This week: Taking a look at the tech stack that powers multimodal AI, the first rule of machine learning, and whether it’s possible to build a world without sound.
This week: Why generating tests is a good use case for AI coding tools, how to tell your manager that you might retire early if you don’t get a raise, and why your company needs junior devs.
This week: The safest way to store a password in a database, the cost of coding first and asking questions later, and what happens when you touch an AM radio tower with a pickle.
This week: Making LLMs’ default architecture more effective, identifying a mystery pipe, and one of the largest technical migrations in history.
This week: Decoding the decoder-only transformer architecture, why external contractors probably shouldn’t manage internal teams, and speeding up your webpage before it even loads.