Welcome to ISSUE #170 of The Overflow! This newsletter is by developers, for developers, written and curated by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams. This week, find out what happens after you build your API, discover the effects of bubbles in your booze, and reminisce about the less-than-perfect first versions of today’s most popular sites. From the blog Can Stack Overflow save the day? stackoverflow.blog Tell us how Stack Overflow helped you and enter to win a limited edition key cap! Building an API is half the battle: Q&A with Marco Palladino from Kong stackoverf ..read more

Kenny Hearn, Fund Manager and Head of Research at SwissOne Capital, tells Ben about his path from traditional asset management to Web3 specialist and why he remains optimistic about the future of the market. Episode notes: In his role at SwissOne Capital, Kenny champions investments in Web3 and the metaverse. A writer on all things crypto since 2013, he’s a regular contributor to the US Chamber of Commerce. The collapse of Three Arrows Capital and FTX eroded investor trust in crypto, but Kenny remains “cautiously optimistic” about the market’s future. Connect with Kenny on LinkedIn or Twitter ..read more

Thanks to David Meyers, Principal Engineer at Flipp, for introducing me to this concept, normalizing it, and implementing it flawlessly. Raw startups are often chaotic and scattered. “Move fast and break things!” was repeated in the standups of hundreds of startup engineering orgs. Typically, startups tend to build monolithic systems to reduce friction in creating and changing features. As time goes on, the monolithic architecture begins to show strain, and almost inevitably begins to be broken up.  Teams begin to take ownership of the new services, usually adhering to Conway’s Law. Since ..read more

SPONSORED BY MONGODB The history of computing has been a story of moving up levels of abstraction: from hard-coding algorithms and directly manipulating memory addresses with assembly languages to using more natural language constructs in high-level general purpose languages to abstracting the hardware of the computer in cloud compute. Now serverless functions take that abstraction even further. We’ve made the algorithms that process data simple and natural; MongoDB wants to do the same for how we persist data.  On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Andrew Davidson, SVP ..read more

Charles “Cobih” Obih and Radek Markiewicz of the Stack Overflow platform team join Ben and Ryan to talk about changes to the inbox and what it’s like to build Stack Overflow’s public platform.  Episode notes: The inbox improvements were Radek’s graduation project. Not bad for a newbie.  Not everyone likes change, and the inbox change was no exception. So we looked into fixing that. Read about what our engineering team learned building and scaling Stack Overflow to support millions of users. Connect with Radek on LinkedIn.  Find Cobih on LinkedIn and Twitter. Longtime Stacker Ya ..read more

Site reliability engineering (SRE) can emerge as a bottom-up initiative to run services in an organization and grow into a successful practice fulfilling SRE principles. While ad-hoc SRE can help developers maintain code in production, to sustain the practice long-term, an appropriate organizational structure for SRE is needed. In this article, we explore SRE team topologies—ways to organize for SRE that stood the test of time.  SRE principles vs. SRE organizational structure To begin with, we need to distinguish between fulfilling the SRE principles and an organizational structure for SR ..read more

It’s an anxious time to work in tech. According to one count, more than 280,000 people were laid off from tech jobs in 2022 and the first two months of 2023. This is scary. People have lost their livelihoods. Thousands of people in the United States on H-1B work visas, along with their families, face deportation unless they can find another job within 60 days. Diversity gains in tech have been dealt a serious blow. These layoffs have spotlighted the tenuous and unsustainable situation the US immigration system creates for foreign-born workers; the disproportionate impact of tech layoffs on wom ..read more

Welcome to ISSUE #169 of The Overflow! This newsletter is by developers, for developers, written and curated by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams. This week: what developers think about cutting-edge tech, how to protect your open-source hardware specs from a commercial patent, and why large language models start understanding text. From the blog Five Stack Exchange sites turned ten years old this quarter! stackoverflow.blog High fives to a Stack Exchange milestone for English Language Learners, Magento, Reverse Engineering, Sustainable Living, and Tridion! After the buzz f ..read more

The home team unpacks their complicated feelings about AI, the Beyoncé deepfake that got kpop hopes up, and the pandemic’s ripple effects on today’s teenagers. Ben, the world’s worst coder, tells Cassidy and Ceora about building a web app with an AI assistant.  Episode notes: Our recent Pulse Survey showed how technologists visiting Stack Overflow feel about emergent technologies. The consensus is clear: AI assistants will soon be everywhere, and developers aren’t sure how they feel about that. Check out the podcast here or dive into the blog. Learn more about the emergent abilities of l ..read more

There’s a wonderful thing that happens to many of us who work at Stack Overflow. In casual social conversation, someone will ask where I work, or on the way home from the gym while wearing a Stack Overflow T-shirt, someone will stop me in my tracks. “Do you work at Stack Overflow?” they ask breathlessly. The answer is of course yes, and inevitably, the person’s eyes light up, and frequently there is a story that goes with that reaction. “You got me through my first coding bootcamp,” or “I always have a tab open to Stack Overflow when I’m at work.” The genuine excitement and enthusiasm is inspi ..read more