Essays, opinions, and advice on the act of computer programming, from Stack Overflow.
Visit stackoverflow.blog → RSS feedOn Hacker News Nov 2016 – Jul 2026
Software Engineering 39Career & Management 18Tech Industry & Business 17Society, Policy & Culture 16Programming Languages 7Tools & Productivity 5
We recently showed that, based on Stack Overflow question visits, Python has a claim to being the fastest-growing major programming language, and that it has become the most visited tag on Stack Overflow within high-income countries .
The tools themselves are new and their capabilities are in constant flux. If your kitchen knife kept changing shape, weight, and edge, you’d have to relearn it every time; that’s a hard tool to build trust in. But it also points to a flaw in how you use that tool, the process around it, and the way the tool reinforces…
This is a key moment in our company’s history, as the whole world is dealing with significant uncertainty. Know that you are not alone. We are facing this situation together. Our goal is to stay focused on living our core values and actively connect with teammates, our community, and our customers.
Big news! We’re looking for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. I’m stepping out of the day-to-day and up to the role of Chairman of the Board. Stack Overflow has been around for more than a decade. As I look back, it’s really amazing how far it has come. Only six months after we had launched Stack Overflow, my co-founder…
Today, we launched the Stack Overflow Salary Calculator , a tool that allows developers and employers to find typical salaries based on experience level, location, specific technologies, and education. We did this because we believe developers should be empowered with more information around job searches, careers, and…
We've been working hard for months , and today the Developer Survey results for 2019 are live. This year marks the ninth year we’ve published our annual Developer Survey, and nearly 90,000 developers took the 20-minute survey earlier this year.
Update (May 23, 2019) : The affected 184 public network users have been notified via email.
You read documentation and tutorials to become a better programmer, but if you really want to be cutting-edge, academic research is where it's at.
We take a detailed look at a hacking incident that gave a user unauthorized access to our code and data.
JavaScript UI frameworks and libraries work in cycles. Every six months or so, a new one pops up, claiming that it has revolutionized UI development. Thousands of developers adopt it into their new projects, blog posts are written, Stack Overflow questions are asked and answered, and then a newer (and even more…
There was a time where it seemed like we barely even needed to talk about this: Joel had won the argument , the Internet agreed that private offices were the future, and only incompetent management (or a tight budget) was still putting developers in cubicle farms. A glorious future lay before us.
April Fool's may be over, but once we set up a system to react every time someone typed Command+C, we realized there was also an opportunity to learn about how people use our site. Here’s what we found.
In order to get the most performant site possible when building the codebase for our public Stack Overflow site, we didn’t always follow best practices.
Moving into a management role may be a rewarding step in your career, but you should know about the things you're leaving behind.
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?
Paul Graham's Hacker News is a great website to find interesting programming links and sane discussion. The site reflects a sort of post- Reddit sensibility; the design of HN was directly intended to address the shortcomings of programming.reddit.com from someone very much on the inside (Reddit was a Paul Graham Y…
Spaceflight, from the beginning, has depended on computers – both on the ground and in the spacecraft. SpaceX has carried it to a new level. We recently spoke with Steven Gerding, Dragon’s software development lead, about the special challenges software development has for SpaceX's many missions.
For some companies who have already made the change years ago, it won’t be an issue. However, there’s a whole range of companies who won’t be making the change anytime soon, for a number of reasons. What does this change mean for companies heavily utilizing the language, particularly those who may not be ready to…
How you can use micro-commits to effectively apply the Strangler Fig pattern.
In order to get the most performant site possible when building the codebase for our public Stack Overflow site, we didn’t always follow best practices.
While there are many resources to help programmers write better code—such as books and static analyzers—there are few for writing better comments. While it's easy to measure the quantity of comments in a program, it's hard to measure the quality, and the two are not necessarily correlated. A bad comment is worse than…
Check out a cool project that leverages Stack Overflow Data and Google's Cloud AI to predict what tags would work best on Stack Overflow questions.
Distributed work may hold the key to creating forward thinking metropolises.
Absent a time machine, telling others how to avoid my mistakes is the best I can do.
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…
NoSQL was the next big thing in system architecture in 2011, but overall interest in it has plateaued recently. What is NoSQL, what does it have to do with modern development, and is it worth implementing in your project?
Code quality affects the mental state of a programmer, communication within their team, and the incentives attached to their work. Improve your code and you can improve your organizational health and competence as a whole.
Which dependencies should be present in your code base? This article suggests an answer to that question.
A question on Stack Overflow’s Software Engineering site caught our attention recently. It tries to come to terms with the impact of scrum on developers' ability to do a great job. The claim is a bold one: Scrum is turning good developers into average ones. Could that be true?