Before jumping into the details, I first want to thank everyone who worked to come up with our updated Code of Conduct. I appreciate the amazing efforts of our staff, led by our Trust and Safety Manager, Cesar, and Senior Community Manager, Bella_Blue, who steered this effort. I particularly want to recognize the collaboration from the Stack Exchange moderators and community members who provided their feedback over the last few months. 

While we are confident that the updates to the Code of Conduct are a step in the right direction, we also acknowledge that it is not a magical solution that will instantly enhance the quality of discourse across the network. We understand that conflicts and disputes may still arise, and trolls will continue to exist. However, the Code of Conduct will equip us with the necessary tools to remind each other to treat one another with respect and clearly outline our expectations, expressing our vision for a respectful and healthy community.

While we encourage everyone to review the entire Code of Conduct, below are some background and key highlights: 

Dedication to constant improvement

We last updated our Code of Conduct in 2019, and since then, the world has shifted dramatically. Our updated Code of Conduct provides specific guidelines on things like dangerous iconography and harmful political speech, as well as helps ensure conversations around things like public health remain evidence-based. We firmly believe that growth and progress go hand in hand. As we evolve and adapt to the ever-changing landscape, ensuring that our Code of Conduct remains relevant and applicable to the community is a top priority. 

In addition to this commitment to constantly improve the applicability of the Code, we are tracking upcoming regulatory pressures globally (notably from Brazil and the EU), and it is imperative that we reflect those potential requirements in our Code of Conduct.

What to expect from our updated Code of Conduct

Our updated Code of Conduct includes our mission statement, details our expectations for users, and provides details into what is unacceptable behavior as well as instructions on how to report such behavior. You can expect links to a comprehensive set of guidelines that reflect our core values and address the evolving needs of our community. We have thoroughly reviewed and refined the document to ensure it provides clear and actionable guidance for all users.

Enhancing user experience and safety

The Code of Conduct strives to enhance the user experience and ensure the safety of every individual who engages with our platform. Our Code of Conduct includes measures to combat harassment, hate speech, and other forms of inappropriate content, empowering us to create an environment that fosters respect and inclusivity. 

A collaborative effort

A Code of Conduct is a handshake agreement between users and the company and is a collaborative effort that involves the invaluable insights of the community. We have actively engaged with moderators and the community, seeking their perspectives and expertise. Their contributions have been instrumental in shaping this update, ensuring that it reflects the diverse needs and voices of the community.

Thank you for being an integral part of our journey as we continue to evolve, improve, and uphold our shared values. Stay tuned for more updates and announcements as we work together to create a world-class experience for everyone in the Stack Overflow community.

The post Building a safer community: Announcing our new Code of Conduct appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Over nearly 15 years, Stack Overflow has built the largest online community for coders to exchange knowledge, a place where anyone with an internet connection can ask or answer questions, free of charge, and learn from their peers. Stack Overflow for Teams, our enterprise SaaS product, is trusted by over 15,000 organizations to serve as their internal knowledge bases. With the recent advent of dramatically improved artificial intelligence, many industries are wondering how technologies like ChatGPT will change their business. For software development, the answer seems more immediate than most. Even before the latest wave of AI, a third of the code being written on popular code repositories was authored by an AI assistant. 

Today, sophisticated chatbots, built on top of cutting edge large language models (LLM), can write functional code for a website based on nothing more than a photo of a rough sketch drawn on a napkin. They can answer complex queries about how to build apps, help users to debug errors, and translate between different languages and frameworks in minutes. At Stack Overflow, we’ve had to sit down and ask ourselves some hard questions. What role do we have in the software community when users can ask a chatbot for help as easily as they can another person? How can our business adapt so that we continue to empower technologists to learn, share, and grow?

It’s worth reflecting on an important property of technological progress. The Jevons Paradox shows us that, as innovation allows us to do more, we settle on a new normal, moving the goal posts for what we expect of people and organizations, then competing to see who can find new ways to pull ahead of the pack. For knowledge work, as the cost of an action diminishes, we often do more of it. Abstracting away repetitive or tedious tasks frees technologists up to make new discoveries or progress innovation.

If new AI systems make it possible to create software simply by chatting with a computer, my prediction is that, far from the job of programmer disappearing, we’ll end up with millions of new software developers, as workers from fields like finance, education, and art begin making use of AI-powered tools that were previously inaccessible to them. We are enthusiastic about welcoming this next generation of developers and technologists, providing them with a community and with solutions, just as we have for the last 15 years. We’ve got a dedicated team working on adding GenAI to Stack Overflow and Stack Overflow for Teams and will have some exciting news to share this summer.

I’m not alone in thinking AI might lead to an explosion of new developers. I’ve heard similar sentiments expressed recently by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, by Geoff Hinton, the godfather of the neural network approach that produced today’s AI revolution, and by Stephen Wolfram, a pioneer across computer science and mathematics. Each sees in today’s AI the potential for the loss of certain jobs, yes, but also, if history is a guide, a future in which a great variety of more highly skilled work becomes available to an even larger group of people. Just as tractors made farmers more productive, we believe these new generative AI tools are something all developers will need to use if they want to remain competitive. Given that, we want to help democratize knowledge about these new AI technologies, ensuring that they are accessible to all, so that no developers are left behind. 

I talk to developers of varying experience levels all of the time, and I’ve been hearing anecdotes of novice programmers building simple web apps with the help of AI. Most of these stories, however, don’t begin and end with an AI prompt. Rather, the AI provides a starting point and some initial momentum, and the human does additional research and learning to finish the job. The AI can debug some errors, but is stymied by others. It can suggest a good backend service, but often can’t solve all the points of friction that arise when integrating different services. And of course, when a problem is the result not of instructions from a machine, but human error, the best answers come from other people who have experienced the same issues. 

For more experienced programmers, AI will be an amplifier of their existing skill, making them more ambitious in their projects. The result, as Jevons would predict, is that they spend more time with AI, but also more time creating new ideas, researching new topics, and asking new questions that had not occurred to them before. They feel empowered to reach farther beyond their traditional skillset and to push the boundaries in terms of the kind of work they want to take on.

We are excited about what we can bring to the fast moving arena of generative AI. One problem with modern LLM systems is that they will provide incorrect answers with the same confidence as correct ones, and will “hallucinate” facts and figures if they feel it fits the pattern of the answer a user seeks. Grounding our responses in the knowledge base of over 50 million asked and answered questions on Stack Overflow (and proprietary knowledge within Stack Overflow for Teams) helps users to understand the provenance of the code they hope to use. We want to help coders stay in the flow state, allowing them to create with the latest tools with the confidence that they will be able to document and understand the provenance, source, and context of the code being generated. 

Community and reputation will also continue to be core to our efforts. If AI models are powerful because they were trained on open source or publicly available code, we want to craft models that reward the users who contribute and keep the knowledge base we all rely on open and growing, ensuring we remain the top destination for knowledge on new technologies in the future.

AI systems are, at their core, built upon the vast wealth of human knowledge and experiences. They learn by training on data – for example open-source code and Stack Overflow Q&A. It is precisely this symbiotic relationship between humans and AI that ensures the ongoing relevance of community-driven platforms like Stack Overflow. Allowing AI models to train on the data developers have created over the years, but not sharing the data and learnings from those models with the public in return, would lead to a tragedy of the commons. It might be in the self-interest of each developer to simply turn to the AI for a quick answer, but unless we all continue contributing knowledge back to a shared, public platform, we risk a world in which knowledge is centralized inside the black box of AI models that require users to pay in order to access their services. 

As the AI landscape continues to evolve, the need for communities that can nurture, inform, and challenge these technologies becomes paramount. These platforms will not only offer the necessary guidance to refine AI algorithms and models but also serve as a space for healthy debate and exchange of ideas, fostering the spirit of innovation and pushing the boundaries of what AI can accomplish.

Our thesis on community as the center of a safe, productive, and open future for AI also offers some exciting prospects for our business. Stack Overflow for Teams, our enterprise, private version of Stack Overflow, helps to power a community-driven knowledge base inside of 15K+ organizations like Box, Microsoft, and Liberty Mutual. Decades of institutional knowledge, shaped and curated by subject matter experts and experienced teams, allows the employees at these organizations to more easily collaborate, improving productivity and trust. 

Incorporating generative AI technologies into the organizations using Stack Overflow for Teams will allow us to layer a conversational interface on top of this wealth of information. We believe this could lead to tremendous productivity gains: from new hires being able to onboard more quickly, to speed up developer workflows, as users are able to quickly ask questions and retrieve answers tapping into the company’s history, documentation and Q&A.

The example above is just one of many possible applications of GenAI to our Stack Overflow public platform and Stack Overflow for Teams, and they have energized everyone at our company. We’ll be working closely with our customers and community to find the right approach to this burgeoning new field and I’ve tasked a dedicated team to work full time on such GenAI applications. I’ll continue to share updates through channels such as my quarterly CEO blog, but I’ll be back in touch soon to announce something big on this topic. In the meantime, thank you to our community and customers for continuing to help us on our mission to empower the world to develop technology through collective knowledge.

The post Community is the future of AI appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

I love the anniversary celebrations on the platform because it’s an opportunity to connect a bit deeper with some of the moderators and community members on the network. As in past quarters, I’m always blown away by the depth and breadth of knowledge across all of the sites on Stack Exchange. So here’s a little spotlight on five of those communities: 

English Language Learners

English Language Learners Stack Exchange (ELL) has a unique history. They are actually an offshoot from another one of our Stack Exchange sites, English Language and Usage (ELU). While ELU is geared towards linguists and etymologists, ELL is a site geared towards people whose first language is not English. As one of the ELL moderators, Laurel, pointed out, “Even though the site is a sister site of ELU, it’s really come into its own. The top participants are different and they have their own norms.” 

Moderator David Siegel mentioned, “We do much less referencing old posts than other sites. We get a lot of questions about mixing tenses. We have perennial topics and not perennial answers.”  Resources for Learning English is an older post that community member, ColleenV, is really proud of the community for maintaining and updating over the years. The community is also fond of canonical posts, including What’s perfect and how to use it and How it works vs How does it work. ColleenV also points out that, “ Interacting with learner’s questions can sometimes offer insights about English to native speakers. Many of our questions are about things that native English speakers just know intuitively, but don’t really know the why behind it.” 

The moderators are really proud that this is a community that goes out of their way to help others. It’s really easy just to look at questions and answers, but if you’re poking around on ELL it’s worth taking a look at the comments too. Community members tend to leave different possibilities and alternative suggestions there to help question askers out and get to the core of the problem they are trying to solve. 

Magento 

Magento Stack Exchange is a Q&A community for people who use the e-commerce platform Magento. Magento happens to be an open source ecommerce tool, so as moderator Sander Mangel put it, “the community needed to rely on each other when the product launched.” Moderator Marius chimed in, “Magento appeared out of nowhere and was different, architecture and code-wise.” One can even become a Magento Certified Developer. 

When the site was going through the Area 51 process, the word was spread to people using the Magento product so they’d join and help with asking and answering questions. A lot of the early members are still active. The community is still going strong with an average of 18K visitors a day. Marius attributes the continued participation on the site to the continued evolution of the product and also experienced users going back to find answers to actions they don’t use as frequently. “People probably go to the deep dark corners of the site and find new things. Sometimes people may forget. I searched once and found the perfect answer and found out that it was from me.” 

Sander Mangel also pointed out that the continued high traffic is also in part to junior developers who are using Magento for the first time. “They are the new generation of community members.” As moderator, Amit Bera put it, “ Everyone is connected to each other. That’s the good thing about Stack Exchange. We’ve connected people around the world.”

Reverse Engineering

Reverse Engineering Stack Exchange started as a subreddit. The community there was finding that the quality of posts and replies wasn’t what they were hoping for. Several community members, including Rolf Rolles, who’s a well-known reverse engineering expert, took an application to Area 51. Moderator Igor Skochinsky shared that Reverse Engineering SE is now the place for questions to be asked and answered, while the subreddit is mostly for sharing blog posts and news related to reverse engineering. 

For those not familiar, reverse engineering is the act of dismantling a product or object to understand how it works. The community is a good balance of both professionals and hobbyists. You can find out everything from where to get malware samples to analyze to what PLT/GOT is. 

Moderator 0xC0000022L shared that since there is prerequisite knowledge needed to ask meaningful questions, the community tries to counterbalance that barrier to entry by welcoming new members with comments and guiding them on how to best improve their questions.

The current moderator team is comprised of community members 0xC0000022L, Igor Skochinsky, and julian. They are extremely grateful to former moderators Peter Andersson, asheeshr, and Ange as well as the larger community for all of their contributions over the years. 

Sustainable Living 

If you are looking to reduce your carbon footprint, then Sustainable Living Stack Exchange is the place to go. Moderator LShaver describes the community as eclectic. “If you look through our top questions and answers, you’ll see that we’ve got some folks who are experts in forestry and homesteading, others with a keen eye for data analysis, some electronics experts, and of course, some programmers (since this is Stack Exchange!).” 

LShaver also points out that some of the best answers on the site lay out multiple ways to solve a problem, balanced arguments for each alternative, and even edge cases where a less obvious choice may be the best one. How effective is turning a car’s engine off while standing at a traffic light and does a dishwasher save water in the long term. 

Indeed, you’ll find the answers to your burning questions on recycling, solar-power, composting, and so much more. LShaver said, “ What makes me proud of the community here is that so many of our questions come from folks who have heard some things about sustainability but want to dig deeper to make more informed choices. And the answers consistently come from people who have thought deeply about these things and want to pass on that knowledge in a way that’s backed by data and sound logic.”

Tridion 

While Tridion Stack Exchange just turned ten, the community is much older than that. Moderator Nuno Linhares shared that the history of the community and the Tridion product go hand in hand.” It is a 25-year-old community. One of the early content management systems. The community is mostly developers who worked with the product.” 

The community was originally formed as a forum. A number of the members there were also active on Stack Overflow. They realized over time that they had enough content to be their own site, and when Area 51 opened up, they were excited to have the community more firmly embedded in the Stack Exchange network. A number of those founding community members were also Tridion MVPs. 

While some of the early community members are still here, Nuno Linhares shared that new members joining the community is what has helped sustain the site during its first decade. “The transition that we’ve seen with the new generation of developers. We were a small, tightly knit group, and once we were on Stack Exchange, we grew, and new people were asking intelligent questions we hadn’t thought of before.” Questions about SDL’s Digital Experience Accelerator (DXA) have been popular since the beginning and new questions continue to be posed. 

While each of the communities on the Stack Exchange network is unique and has their own audience and community norms, Nuno Linhares summed it up beautifully when he said this of Tridion, “If you know developers, you know they are passionate.” Developer engagement is what made this community special. You were talking directly with the source and having deep conversations with the source.” All of the communities on Stack Exchange are made of passionate subject matter experts who want to share their knowledge and learn from other experts. That spirit is something I’m always humbled by. 

To our communities celebrating their first decade on Stack Exchange, we all raise a glass to you. 

The post Five Stack Exchange sites turned ten years old this quarter!  appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

$21,303 to Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) 

Doctors Without Borders is an independent, global movement providing medical aid where it’s needed. 

$12,139 to Electronic Frontier Foundation 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. 

$7,679 to Girls Who Code

Girls Who Code aims to support and increase the number of women in computer science by equipping young women with the necessary computing skills to pursue 21st-century opportunities.

$7,182 to International Rescue Committee

The International Rescue Committee responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people to survive and rebuild their lives. 

$5,697 to UNICEF

The United Nations Children’s Fund provides long-term humanitarian and developmental assistance to children and parents in developing countries 

We would like to thank everyone who has helped create or maintain the community knowledge base. It’s our pleasure, at this time of year, to make these financial contributions on behalf of the volunteer moderators, who give freely of their passion, time, and leadership in the communities that make up the Stack Exchange network. This is just one more way in which we can, together, have a positive impact on the world—online and offline.

The post Stack Gives Back 2022! appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Before we share some fun highlights from the event, we want to give a big thank you to this year’s Winter Bash 2022 sponsor, Splunk. Splunk delivers full-stack visibility across infrastructure, applications, and business services across any environment in real time. Thanks, Splunk, for the support!

Each year, the staff looks forward to gathering stats, discovering highlights, and seeing the fun things our site members do with their hats. This year was no exception, so let’s hop on it.

The team pulled out all the stops this year and created 47 hats – to see a full list of hats and how to earn them, check out this community-created list. We felt extra sneaky, so 26 were secret hats, while 21 were non-secret hats. 2cool4skool and I Voted were the most widely earned hats across the board, with 2cool4skool being distributed 797,834 times and I Voted distributed 200,845 times. We gave out a total of 1,477,208 non-secret hats and 424,735 secret hats across 1,063,300 profiles. Wow, that’s a lot of hats!

The least awarded hats this year were Cubed Away (4 users), Squared Away (12 users), and Running Up That Hill (12 users). 

Each year, the effort to top our leaderboard is intense, and this year was no different in that regard. Kudos goes to U13-Forward and CDJB for collecting all 47 hats! Congratulations are also well deserved for Vickel (with 46 hats), James Risner, (with 45 hats), and double-beep (with 45 hats).

We’ve celebrated Winter/Summer Bash for a while now, but it never ceases to amaze us how some members get into the top 5 of the leaderboard for consecutive years. Extra congratulations go to U13-Forward, Vickel, and double-beep, for being in the top five three years in a row!

At the close of the event, 70,448 users were wearing hats and 336 of these users were wearing different hats on different sites. If you’d like to check out more exciting tidbits about Winter/Summer Bash 2022, all of our public stats for the event can be found on this page. 

Also, a special shout out to the community members who participated in the chat room to puzzle out all of the secret hats (and the Sparkles the Unicorn puzzle). There were over 6,000 messages over the course of Winter Bash!

Before we sign off, it’s become a tradition to share some of our favorite avatar and hat combinations shared in the yearly Show off your hats! post on Meta Stack Exchange.

From RDK, we have Albert Einstein quite literally being Albert Einstein:

From adiga, we have a low power situation and the mood we all feel in this situation:

Last but not least, we have hkotsubo giving us the perfect reason to climb a mountain:

We had a lot of fun creating Winter/Summer Bash 2022, and we hope you enjoyed participating. Thanks to everyone for making this a spectacular event once more, and we hope you have a wonderful 2023!

The post The Winter/Summer Bash 2022 Hat Cafe is now closed! appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

To help kick off the new year with a bit of joy, we’re thrilled to announce it’s time for our annual Winter Bash. Winter Bash (or Summer Bash, for those of you in the upside down) is a fun end-of-year event that’s been a community tradition for over a decade. From December 14 to January 4, we’ll reward you for participating in the community. When you ask, answer, vote, edit, and chat, you’ll earn hats or other accessories for your avatar.

First, we’d like to introduce this year’s Winter Bash 2022 sponsor, Splunk. Splunk delivers full-stack visibility across infrastructure, applications, and business services across any environment in real time. Thanks, Splunk, for the support!

Although we’ve kept the name Winter Bash for our yearly event, we haven’t forgotten our fellow technologists in the southern hemisphere, who are enjoying warmer weather. Just use the “Winter/Summer” toggle on the bottom left of the landing page to change the season to Summer!

The team has been hard at work this year to bring you a smorgasbord of hats to ensure your profile is sporting the latest in Winter Bash fashion. We’ve reimagined some past favorites and added some delightful new hats. But it’s not just the hats themselves we’ve revived and re-envisioned… we’ve done the same with the triggers and have some new secrets waiting to be discovered.

How will you discover those secrets and add hats to your collection? It’s easy! Do what you already do best: participate on the site by asking good questions, providing good answers, voting, commenting, and exploring all Stack Exchange sites! You may be surprised at all the nooks and crannies you discover.

When you complete a challenge, you’re awarded its respective hat. Hats can be worn on your profile image by using our hat tool (details below). 

Winter Bash 2022 runs from Wednesday, December 14th, 21:00 UTC to Wednesday, January 4th, 21:00 UTC.

Here’s a step-by-step guide to getting and wearing your first hat:

1. Be active on Stack Exchange! Post answers, comments, or questions. If you just want to play around with hats, find a good post and upvote it—that’ll get you your first hat

2. Click on any hat in the snowflake menu to go to your wardrobe. (You can also access this by going to your profile and clicking the hat icon!)

3. Select the hat you want, use the handles to customize it to your liking, and save it to show off across the network.

If you want to learn more, please visit the Winter Bash FAQ page!

Happy Winter Bashing to the Stack Exchange community. We wish you luck in your adventures! 

P.S. If Winter Bash isn’t your cup of tea this year, as always, Winter Bash has a prominent opt-out option. We understand you may prefer to keep your Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange experience free of distractions. You can opt out of Winter Bash by choosing “No hats for me, please” from the Winter Bash menu at the top navigation toolbar.

The post Hat’s out of the bag! Join us for Winter/Summer Bash 2022!  appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Genealogy & Family History 

We’re a community made up of enthusiasts and experts who are interested in building their skills and sharing their knowledge on issues surrounding genealogy, family history, and microhistory. We tackle everything from the practical: When documenting location, should current or historical place names be used? to the personal: How do I encourage older folk to provide information? If you are looking for information or a place to share your insights on DNA, palaeography, or census records, there’s a place for you here. 

Robotics 

For some, robotics may conjure images of Rosey from the Jetsons or Robby from Forbidden Planet. However, our community is not about sci-fi robots. We’re a place for professional robotic engineers, hobbyists, researchers, and students to share their knowledge and learn from one another. We’re where you would go to find out about why Mars rovers have those weird wheels or to get help tuning your PID loops. If you need to determine DH parameters  or debug your ROS nodes, we’ve got you covered. We’re also the place to learn or share your knowledge on everything from mobile robots to arduino. 

ExpressionEngine® Answers 

Ten years ago, ExpressionEngine developers came together to vote for a Stack Exchange site where we could ask and answer technical questions related to the software we used every day on our projects. The goal was to create a place where we could support each other and to build a public archive of solutions to common and not so common problems. Since the launch of the ExpressionEngine Stack Exchange site, over 12,000 questions have been asked and the top question, related to migrating between environments, has been viewed over 9,000 times. The community curates answers to everything from lists of resources for Expression Engine developers and users and what parse order is. Kudos to everyone who helped bring this website to fruition!

Politics 

Politics Stack Exchange can answer everything from What are the powers of the British Monarch to why doesn’t the IRS make taxes simple? However, Politics Stack Exchange isn’t a place to promote political opinions; we try to keep the site unbiased and interesting for all. Our site is a place to get serious answers about political questions. We handle simple topics like What is a Hung Parliament?, as well as highly contentious topics like Why are so many Americans against Obamacare?  We can provide you with answers to the most specific and niche questions and you might learn a little something about international law in the process. Come exercise your internet right to vote and explore the often confusing and tangled web of politics.

Anime & Manga 

We’re anime and manga; unlike some of the rest of our sister sites we tend not to take ourselves too seriously and are just here to have fun and enjoy ourselves. Come to our site to experience your own epic adventure as guided by our community. We have a lot of questions already—definitely over 9000. You’ll get started with the foundations of anime and manga and get to know a bit more about what makes the cast of characters you’ll encounter so vibrant and diverse. You may wander off the main road for a lighthearted side trip or two. But we’re here to help you grow and expand your knowledge along the way. If you’re interested in exploring more, come join us for an unforgettable adventure. 

Once again congratulations to these five communities on their ten year anniversaries. This is our final Stack Exchange Network anniversary celebration of 2022. We look forward to celebrating more milestones next year. I think a little site called Stack Overflow is turning fifteen in 2023. Let the merriment continue.

The post Five Stack Exchange sites are celebrating their ten year anniversaries in Q4 2022! appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

The Ask Wizard provides step-by-step instructions to first-time askers to ensure they can create high-quality questions from the start. 

How does the Ask Wizard work?

Automatically displayed for first-time question-askers, the Ask Wizard is split into several steps, each of which provides instructions to help make sure questions are high quality and benefit the entire Stack Overflow community. 

The steps are eventually combined into a thoughtful, Stack Overflow ready question. Check out these screenshots to see how the Ask Wizard is organized and works to help you create a great question. 

How do question-askers benefit from the Ask Wizard?

We’ve heard from both new and existing Stack Overflow users about the challenges of asking high-quality questions on our sites. With the Ask Wizard, we’re simplifying question-asking by including many of the best practices we’ve heard from the community on how to ask a good question. 

We’re hoping that asking a question can turn from a potentially intimidating experience into one that is more approachable and even fun. 

How does the Community benefit from the Ask Wizard?

The Ask Wizard will improve the quality of questions on our site and help avoid duplicate questions from being asked on Stack Overflow. 

After testing the Ask Wizard, we also found it improved question completion rates and reduced the percentage of questions that were deleted. 

Ultimately, the Ask Wizard will lead to better questions and overall site experience for the entire community. 

How do I get started with the Ask Wizard?

The Ask Wizard will be automatically displayed to first-time question-askers on Stack Overflow. Experienced askers can also toggle it on or off and create questions through the Ask Wizard.

How can I learn more about the Ask Wizard?

To learn more about the Ask Wizard feature, check out this Help Center article. 

Let us know what you think about the Ask Wizard on Meta or by commenting below.

The post Introducing the Ask Wizard: Your guide to crafting high-quality questions appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

When VonC found out he had passed this storied mark, did he celebrate? Was it meaningful?

“I think it was meaningful to me mum,” he quipped, slipping a faux-British accent on top of his natural French one. “It was absolutely a non-event for me.”

The rest of us, however, are pretty impressed by his score. So how did one of the newest millionaires stack up this impressive total? His explanation is a humble one: he wanted to learn more about technologies and be of service to people who might not have the same access as he does. 

We spoke with VonC about the early days on Stack Overflow, what drives him to answer several questions every single day, and what we can all do to better serve the one hundred million visitors who come to Stack Overflow each month. 

The last of the Stack Overflow Beta users

When VonC first got into computer programming, he would search for answers to his coding questions on BBS forums. By the time he found Stack Overflow, he’d been in the software industry for over ten years. That was back during the Beta period—in fact, VonC might be one of the last folks to get a Beta badge, posting his first question on September 14, 2008, two days before the Beta period ended and the Beta badges were handed out. 

Like a lot of new users, VonC had trouble with his first answer. He put together a question and tried to provide as much context as possible, but it was promptly downvoted without him knowing why. His initial reputation started at -1 and remained that way for years until we refactored how reputation was managed in our database. Then his initial reputation was set back to 1, just like everyone else. 

Stack Overflow was vastly different in those early days. This was the time before comments; you could only post answers to questions, not provide feedback or request more information. “I remember vividly that the culture of the site was very much in flux and in definition then,” said VonC. 

Early participants could garner a lot of upvotes through open-ended questions, things like “What’s the best freeware log file visualization tool?” (Ed note: Viewing this link requires 10k reputation as it has been deleted) Today, these questions would be closed, but back then, open questions with debatable, subjective answers were all the rage. VonC even earned his first gold badge (and second) for answers to one of these questions (Ed. note: Also deleted, so earn that rep to view them). But once the community decided on what was too subjective for Stack Overflow, the definition of a good question solidified.  

Still, VonC’s path to a million reputation is paved with very few questions: slightly more than twenty (some have been deleted since). Instead, he was learning about new software and gaining mastery by answering questions. “I was using Stack Overflow to introduce myself to new technical topics, mainly Git and the Go language, plus Docker and Kubernetes,” he said. 

At the time, he was managing terabytes of data on a very large version control system in IBM Rational ClearCase, software initially released in 1984. He came across questions about Git and Mercurial, version control systems that were distributed, which ClearCase is not. The first Git question he came across was about cloning the full repository locally to enable access to the full history without querying a server. “I was actually laughing at that notion because it was completely strange to me to clone the full history,” said VonC. “But actually, it is how we are working nowadays.”

To learn more about Git, he dove into answering questions. For the first few, he didn’t even install Git; instead, he compared the documentation to the question and wrote answers based on his understanding of the docs. When that answer got accepted, it told him that there might be something to this Git: it’s intuitive enough for him to answer questions accurately without using the software and works as the documentation would have you expect. 

VonC took the same approach when evaluating Scala. He’d check out the new Scala questions, compare them to the available documentation, and write answers. After a little more than 200 answers, he decided that Scala wasn’t for him: “I understood it well enough to realize that it was not a good match for me and my skills.”

Motivated to serve

For the first few years, VonC used Stack Overflow to learn new technologies. He couldn’t get the hang of properly asking questions, but he still wanted to learn more about the tools and languages he used. It required a mindset shift—answering questions as a way to learn—but he found it very effective. For folks looking to use his method, he recommends trying to get the Necromancer badge by creating excellent answers on old questions. This includes answers to older questions where there are new solutions due to features being added to software. 

Over time, though, another motivation emerged: to help the community. VonC answers several questions every day. After years of this, it’s no surprise that he can’t think of a favorite question. Instead, his favorites are those that may not have a high view count, but have helped someone who doesn’t have the same access to technical expertise where they live. 

“Before Stack Overflow, I was looking for expertise in order to help me in my career,” said VonC. “What Stack Overflow provides you is the ability and the opportunity to interact and access the knowledge of so many specialists. My mindset has shifted where not knowing something is no longer a fear for me. Not knowing is my basic state, but for questions from students around the world, I will go deep in on a topic and I will find out for them.”

That spirit of service comes from his background as an IT support specialist. In his work calls, he tries to establish a rapport: who are you, what’s not working, what do I know that might help? On Stack Overflow, his instinct is to provide the same help to people struggling to ask good questions. Where many may just vote to close and delete, VonC tries to jump into a chat with them. 

Now that he’s built up some expertise in Git and other topics, he freely admits that his activity on Stack Overflow helps his career. He’s a contractor, so the company in charge of finding him work can offer him as an expert and point to his activity on the site as proof. “One of my motivations to answer questions every day on Stack Overflow was to have a complement to my resume to showcase,” he said. “‘One million reputation’ isn’t completely meaningful because they don’t know exactly what that means. But I say I’ve answered tens of thousands of questions around version control systems, and they understand.”

Privileges for millionaires

As someone who has been around Stack Overflow since it left Beta, VonC seemed like a good person to ask about the changes he’d make to the site if he were suddenly elevated to benevolent dictator for life. No surprise—his suggestion was about the experience of asking questions. 

His first answer was promptly downvoted without comment, and that experience has stuck with him. In his own practice, instead of immediately downvoting and voting to close, VonC invites the question asker to a chat to try to clarify their question. But users below 20 reputation can’t use the chat function, so he can’t give them feedback. These are the users most likely to be scared off by harsh initial experiences. “Users with one million—sorry, [puts finger to lip à la Austin Powers] one million reputation—should be able to invite any users to chat,” he suggests. Of course, one million rep might be a bit too high of a bar, but the suggestion stands. 

VonC concedes that the speed of closing subpar questions has made the site very healthy in terms of content quality. “Any content that is not exactly like the community wants is very quickly removed—not just closed, but completely removed,” he said. “In that aspect, it’s healthy. In terms of dialogue, that’s where it is a bit dodgy because of issues between the new users and long-time users.”

We’ve definitely heard these comments before, so we created the Staging Ground, where new users can learn how to best ask questions. 

Come for the expertise, stay for the community

VonC has been around the site so long that he’s starting to recognize other members by their answers. He notes one user who operates in the Git and version control space with him who will drop a thoroughly researched answer days after the question was asked, complete with footnotes. “Sometimes the footnotes have footnotes, that’s the kind of depth that this user brings to their answers. It’s clearly not somebody who will be the fastest gun in the west.” It’s the kind of answer that makes Stack Overflow Q&A pages valuable to thousands of knowledge-seekers years after the initial asker has solved their problem. 

But VonC has never seen his own participation as a way to show off. Obviously, he’s leaving a record of his knowledge for all to see, but he remains motivated by the urge to help others. VonC hopes to be of even greater service to the community in the future. The reputation points and credibility are nice, but he hopes to be able to give greater rewards to high performers, especially those in working with technological deficits. 

In the end, VonC’s million-rep total shows that one of the best ways to thrive is to be of service to your community. And as the platform for that community, we’re always trying to learn and grow from our members so we can fulfill our vision of being the most valuable destination for the world’s current and next generation of technologists. 

The post How to earn a million reputation on Stack Overflow: be of service to others appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Saves expands upon our original Bookmarks feature and offers a new suite of tools to help you better organize and access your favorite content on Stack Overflow and across all Stack Exchange sites. 

What can I do with Saves?

• Save questions and/or answers from Stack Overflow or any Stack Exchange network site
• Locate all your saved content within your profile page
• Create and manage custom lists to better organize saved content
• Create private notes on saved posts to collect thoughts, remind yourself why you saved a post in the first place, or draft responses
• Use the “in:saves” search operator to display your saved content 

Why should I use Saves? 

Saves is a great tool for organizing useful content you plan to revisit. We found that some users will search for the same question over and over.  For example, if there is an excellent example of a code snippet in an answer, simply save this content so you can revisit it at another time and skip the search engine. 

Keep your saved content organized in custom lists so you can more easily and quickly identify your saved content; some examples of lists include “Best practices”, “Duplicates”, and “Programming”. 

Within your saved content, create private notes to collect thoughts, remind yourself why you saved a post in the first place, or draft responses to questions or answers.

How are Saves different from Bookmarks? Why change the name?

Since Saves provides even more functionality than Bookmarks, we wanted to make sure this was reflected in what we called the feature.

Unlike Bookmarks, Saves let you favorite BOTH questions and answers. Previously, only questions could be bookmarked.  

In addition, your saved content, custom lists, and private notes are only visible to you and are not accessible to other users. 

There is also a new dedicated tab for Saves prominently displayed on your profile page, so you can easily access your saved content for later. 

How do I get started with Saves?

Saves is now available on Stack Overflow and across all Stack Exchange sites. 

To get started, when logged into your account:

1. Select to the left of the question or answer you want to save.
2. Click into your profile by selecting your profile picture on the top navigation bar.
3. Select the Saves tab to view your saved content, create lists, and add private notes.

In addition, after saving a post, you can select “Manage” in the pop-up message to add the content to a specific list and create private notes. 

How can I learn more about Saves?

To learn more about the Saves feature, check out this YouTube video and Help Center article. 

Let us know what you think about Saves on Meta. 

The post Meet Saves: the tool to help you organize your favorite content on Stack Overflow  appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Stack Overflow has been around for nearly 15 years and has become an ever-evolving encyclopedia of knowledge created and curated by a community of technologists. We’ve always been focused on helping technologists learn, and this year, for the first time, we’re launching a program to work with university students on campuses. 

Why are we launching this program? 

We want to learn how you engage with our site, get your input on what we can improve, and work out how to evolve Stack Overflow as a learning tool for the next generation of technologists. We will also offer the opportunity to pursue interesting challenges and earn rewards.

To help us with this effort, we’re recruiting our first cohort of Student Ambassadors. These ambassadors will represent us on campus, partner with us to bring more of their classmates on board, and take a leadership role in completing challenges, earning rewards, and helping us plan what future semesters will look like. For this semester, we’re partnering with Major League Hacking (MLH), which has a terrific track record of working with students from a wide range of schools. For now, we are working just with schools that have an MLH presence, but will be exploring options for how to expand in the future.

So, what do I need to do as a Student Ambassador?

The basic ask of you is simple. Sign up to be a Student Ambassador, create a Stack Overflow account (if you don’t already have one), and help us host some free pizza nights on campus where students will learn about our platform. Really, it is that simple.

These events will be part of the MLH Pizza Fund. You can use the pizza nights for study sessions, project work, or hackathons—it’s up to you. For every student you recruit to attend the event or sign up for our public platform, we’ll add on extra treats like soda and dessert.

Now, these pizza nights aren’t the only thing we’re doing this semester. If you want to go further, we’re partnering with MLH on three week-long hackathons. Teams that participate get to hear from our engineering staff and can earn rewards for completing various challenges. We’re planning to give away lots of t-shirts and stickers, and for those feeling lucky, raffle off the chance to win your own copy of The Key.

OK, so you can earn pizza and snacks, you can take part in challenges, and you can learn from our engineers. What else can Student Ambassadors do with us this semester? 

For teams that complete challenges during the hack weeks, we’ll shout you out on the Stack Overflow blog, podcast, and newsletter, which collectively reach over three million developers each month and will be featured for a day across every Stack Overflow Q&A page. If you can’t attend any of the three hack weeks but still want to take on a challenge, we’ll work with you to try and find a time for your team to participate this semester. 

Oh, and one last thing. Students who join us will get access to an instance of Stack Overflow for Teams. Think of it like your own private Stack Overflow, a place to ask questions about this program, learn more about MLH or upcoming hackathons, or simply share knowledge with other students. 

Thanks for taking the time to consider our Student Ambassador Program. For now, we’re working with schools that have an MLH presence on campus. If you have a campus club or are planning a hackathon that you think would be a good fit, please apply through the Student Ambassador website or email me directly (bpopper@stackoverflow.com) and we’ll get in touch to discuss what’s possible in future semesters. 

The post Stack Overflow is launching a Student Ambassador Program. Here’s how to apply. appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

It’s been a busy quarter for the company, too. We celebrated a handful of big milestones over the last three months. We added a new Chief Technology Officer, Jody Bailey, to our leadership team, announced Stack Overflow for Teams entering the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, launched exciting initiatives like Staging Ground, and released insights from this year’s Developer Survey. In our annual survey, we turn to the developer community to learn about what is important to them, what they want to learn, and what trends will impact the future of tech. This year, we compiled responses from over 73,000 developers all over the world. A huge thank you to everyone who shared their experience with us. I learned a lot from this year’s survey results, some of which I unpack below.

Context is key

This year’s Developer Survey insights included some surprising findings. Median salaries increased about 23% between 2021 and 2022. Interestingly enough, some of the oldest languages command the highest salaries. Why? Context is key. Some of the world’s largest organizations, from financial institutions to NASA, rely heavily on older languages because they still serve as foundational infrastructure.

As people get jobs at large organizations, learning older languages will provide them the context they need to code, evolve, and innovate in those environments. This all got me thinking about the low-code, no-code movement, and particularly AI-powered programming assistants like GitHub’s Copilot. There are lots of benefits to low-code platforms. More specifically, it makes building technology more accessible to so many people. As we look towards the future, we’ll see more people developing technology than ever before, but the need for context will undoubtedly remain consistent.

No-code tools aren’t actually without code, code is just not required to use it. People learn coding languages and frameworks as they build, because without context, technology will break. Similarly, code suggestion tools, trained on billions of lines of code, will still always require verification and confirmation (just like copying and pasting code found online). At some point, not learning the fundamentals is going to catch up with developers relying on shortcuts. Developers that make the choice to learn will rise to the top.

Fueling the next generation of coders

Just as the ways people build technology are transforming, the way everyone is learning is shifting as well. Over 70% of developers learn to code from online resources, up 10% from 2021. With more people learning as they build, it’s even more essential to make learning resources accessible at every stage of someone’s learning journey. Getting people the answers they need when they need them. At Stack Overflow, we call it real-time or just-in-time learning.

As we welcome hundreds of thousands of people to Stack Overflow’s public platform every month, we recognize we have to continue to invest in making it welcoming and inclusive. Over the last few months, we started working on new projects like Staging Ground to improve the onboarding experience for those new to the public platform and increase the quality of first questions. Testing and research is showing positive signs that this will help coach new users in how to ask great questions while also ensuring that other members of the community taking on some of the burden of coaching and onboarding new members have the tools to do so.

It’s been almost a year since we launched Collectives on Stack Overflow, which connects developers with technology maintainers and experts to get verified answers. One year later, engagement for users that join a Collective increased about 30% across associated tags. The latest Collective, WSO2, launched in June.

Learning at work

Opportunities to learn and grow are critical to retaining talent. Over 50% of developers say opportunities to learn are important to them when evaluating current and future employers. This is one of the reasons we have a Learning & Development budget for every single Stack employee that can be used for everything from online courses to in-person conferences. (We’re hiring, too.) The Developer Survey also revealed that nearly half of all respondents report that knowledge silos prevent them from getting ideas from across the organization and that waiting for answers to questions often causes interruptions and disrupts their workflow.

One of the costs of lots of questions is that nearly half of respondents spend more than 30 minutes a day answering questions, some more than an hour a day. Frequently, these are questions already asked and answered previously. For a team of 50 developers, that can add up to 278-568 hours of time just answering questions per week.

Similar to the public platform, we’re continuing to invest in ways to ensure we’re helping people get the answers they need when they need them at work. We saw a 229% increase in Microsoft Teams integrations within the Business tier of Stack Overflow for Teams in 2021. Today, 60% of professional developers are using Microsoft Teams or Slack. Our deep integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams, in addition to joining the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, reduce disruptions and help technologists stay in a flow state.

​​We also introduced an Enhanced Dashboard for Stack Overflow for Teams that gives users a more holistic view of how the knowledge sharing and collaboration platform is utilized within their organization. The new dashboard uncovers what tags are utilized most (or least), what questions and articles have been viewed the most, what this information means in terms of focus areas for your organization, and more. You can use these insights to understand where your organization has potential knowledge gaps, friction points, or opportunities to provide focused training.

Learning at Stack Overflow

Every three months, we take time to reflect on what worked, what didn’t work, where we need to double down, and where we need to focus as a company. While we’re incredibly fortunate to experience growth and success, it’s also a time for us to learn from others. We are continuing to grow our team and take advantage of available talent. As I mentioned earlier, if you’re interested in learning about any of our open roles, please visit our careers page.

As a company, we reserve time to reflect on how we’re empowering learning within our own organization. Learning, to us, is not limited to technologies and tools. Stackers, myself included, gathered for a guest talk from stress and self-care expert Alicia D. Reece, GLAAD board member and inclusion expert Ashley T. Brundage, as well as panels featuring our own Stackers on the topics of allyship, the Asian and Pacific Islander experience, and more. Hearing stories from Stackers and external guests helps us continually learn from those around us and better position us to create tools and features that are inclusive and accessible to all.

There is so much work to do, and we have an enormous opportunity at Stack Overflow to influence a more inclusive and diverse tech industry. The way the public platform is democratizing knowledge and Stack Overflow for Teams is doing the same within companies is just the beginning. Scaling subject matter experts across organizations and the broader internet while removing barriers of entry for technical learning is how we’ll win, together.

The post Always learning appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

The Workplace 

While many people browse Stack Exchange at work, the Workplace has the unique distinction of also covering all things work related. Professionalism may be the name of the game, but how do you handle coworkers who have a thing or two to learn in that area? What if you want to bring a literal rubber duck to the office? And how do you approach that all-important question of asking for a raise? The Workplace is there to help you navigate those tricky situations. And hey, it’s not goofing off when it’s Workplace-related, right?

Windows Phone

We’re a question and answer site for users of smartphones running any version of Windows, up to the latest Windows 10 Mobile. If you have a question about your Windows phone’s hardware or software, this is the place to ask it. We’ve helped people figure out everything from how to take a screenshot with their phone to troubleshooting on Windows 10 ISO. 

Chemistry 

At ten-years young, Chemistry isn’t collecting any rust, but if we were, we would know how to reduce it. Whether your question is about color, phase, or touch, about organic or inorganic stuff, practically, experimental or just purely theoretical, we might have the answer for you. Is a negative pH level physically possible? We’re positive our community knows. So don’t let your brains explode searching for an answer…And no, you cannot (practically) dissolve a body with hydrofluoric acid. (Thanks bromine and barium!) 

Chess

Many Stack Exchange users love a good game now and then, and it’s no wonder that they regularly check out our community. We can help you improve both your in-person gameplay and your self-made chess engine. We cover everything from how chess has managed to remain a competitive sport to which opening moves are the most aggressive. If you’re interested in the history, present, or future of chess, visiting Chess Stack Exchange is definitely the right move. 

Raspberry Pi 

The first Raspberry Pi—SOC based, credit card sized single board computers—were sold on Ebay in January, 2012; the model 1B was officially released the next month. Stack Exchange’s site dedicated to the Pi fielded its first question in June that year. An explicit goal of the Pi’s inventers was to encourage the learning of programming and electronics among young would-be computer scientists at minimal expense. Our community has answered everything from if Raspberry Pi is suitable to run 24/7 to setting up networking with a static IP address. Sharing significant overlap with the Electrical Engineering and Unix & Linux sites, as well as Stack Overflow proper, part of the mission of the Raspberry Pi exchange is to serve as a gateway for these new users to the wider world of SE and all it offers. 

Russian Language

Our site’s mission and purpose is straightforward. We’re a Q&A community dedicated to Russian language and its usage. Whether you want to know about cases or punctuation, we’ve got you covered. If you need help finding vocabulary words for different animals or why some words have a positive or negative connotation, we can help you with that too. 

Islam

As the fastest growing religion in the world, people are curious and ask a lot of questions about Islam. Many do not know or have not understood the true message of Islam, and others have been misinformed. Muslims and non-Muslims alike have gained tremendously from this site. We welcome you to visit this site, ask questions, or if you are knowledgeable, answer other people’s questions. We have thoughtful responses to every burning question including if listening to music is halal. This site belongs to all of us. We are waiting for you to visit. May The Lord have mercy upon all humans.

We celebrate sites that have turned 10 every quarter. Keep your eyes peeled for another tribute later this year. In the meantime, continue to browse and engage with the 170+ sites on the Stack Exchange Network. You’ll learn something new everyday and you may find you’ll have the opportunity to share your expertise too.

The post Celebrating the Stack Exchange sites that turned ten years old in Spring 2022  appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Given this history, it’s only natural that WSO2 is joining Collectives on Stack Overflow. Collectives are subcommunities on Stack Overflow focused on a specific platform or ecosystem and defined by tags associated with an organization’s technologies. You will find answers from subject matter experts, relevant resources and information (including questions, recommended answers, technical articles, and bulletins), and a leaderboard to see where you rank based on your contributions. 

Any user with a Stack Overflow account can join the WSO2 Collective. It brings together experts from within its organization and the Stack Overflow community to share knowledge and collaborate on topics like ‘wso2’, ‘wso2-identity-server’, ‘wso2-api-manager’, and ‘ballerina’. Top contributors can be selected by WSO2 as Recognized Members, users recognized by the company for their contributions and trusted to help nurture the Collective by responding to questions, collaborating on articles, and recommending answers.

“The developer community has long been the focus of WSO2. The products and projects we’ve built over the years all had the same goal: to enable development efforts across many industries,” said AJ Danelz, Head of Developer Relations at WSO2. “Collectives supports our goal of fostering a healthy community through open collaboration and feedback to help each developer—as well as our teams—continue to improve.”

The information and resources developers need to build with WSO2 technologies have historically existed across numerous forums, help centers, and other avenues. “Centralizing our communities’ communication is important,” said Danelz. “We want to meet developers where they are instead of making them come to us. Collectives on Stack Overflow gives us the tools necessary to foster a community without demanding anything in return.”

Going forward, the WSO2 Collective will serve as a dedicated, centralized space to collaborate on the organization’s technologies. “We want to ensure our users can find the help they need, and that will inform others. We intend to focus our public interaction around Stack Overflow questions and plan to leverage the visibility our Collective provides to grow and recognize community members who are contributing.”

WSO2 also looks forward to using its Collective as a space to discuss Ballerina. “Ballerina is a new language built for the modern cloud-native application. The team made the programming language 100% open-source with all parts of the project developed openly at https://github.com/ballerina-platform.” says Danelz. “Ballerina is the only modern cloud-native programming language that provides features for easily using, combining, and creating network services for the cloud.”

Digital transformation remains a focus for businesses worldwide, and developers are building and innovating with WSO2’s API-first software to meet the demand. “Across WSO2 products, we execute more than 18 trillion transactions, expose more than 200,000 APIs, and manage over 1 billion identities every year. Developers are behind every one of those stats,” says Danelz. “We will continue to foster our relationship with the community by improving the tools and resources they need. By enabling community, the community can enable itself. Stack Overflow is where developers go to learn and grow, and we look forward to further empowering users through our Collective.”

The post WSO2 joins Collectives™ on Stack Overflow appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

April Fools’ is usually a popular time for us, and this year was no different. Compared to an average Friday, we saw 6% more unique visitors to Stack Overflow. Plenty of you have been asking what the most popular filters were. Well, we’re here with answers. We’ve also got some extra data around the prank, so let’s dive in!

The good, the bad, the three-dimensional 

For those who missed it, a quick recap of this year’s prank: Users coming to the site during the prank window were subjected to one of eight themes randomly. Instagram has them, so we wanted to get hip to what the kids are into. The themes ranged from tech favorites (Windows 3.1 and Terminal) to nostalgic (Frisa Lank and MariOverflow) to illegible (Top Secret and 3D Glasses). Users could change the themes with a selector at the bottom.

The themes were truly random. All of them except 3D Glasses were loaded about the same number of times (more on that later). Some users were happy with the theme they drew—96% of people who randomly drew either Bookface, Frisa Lank, MariOverflow or Windows 3.1 left that theme enabled. However, if they saw the 3D Glasses theme, only 67% of users kept it around. 

955,815 users changed their theme at least once. On average, users changed themes six times. Most people cycled through all of the new themes—median time per theme was between three and five seconds—before getting back to the classic Stack Overflow theme. Of those that picked a new theme, Bookface was the most popular, but people kept Windows 3.1 on the longest. Hot Dog Stand, a nostalgic take on the famously ugly Windows 3.1 theme of the same name, had the shortest average enabled time with 2.8 minutes. Only 5% of users left it on. Don’t discount the power of the familiar.  

The Frisa Lank theme was an internal and fan favorite. The vast majority of the Stackers who voted in our very informal poll guessed that it would be the most popular overall and longest enabled. We were wrong on all accounts. The tech heads beat out the rainbow sticker crowd this time. 

The 3D Glasses theme came in for scorn early and often. Users called it “nauseating” and “one of the dumbest things I’ve seen in a long time.” The offset text gave some people a sense of vertigo, so we took it out of the randomized default rotation. For first-time visitors, it was enabled for the shortest amount of time and by the least number of people who drew it. But for people who had gone through other themes, it still beat out Hot Dog Stand and Top Secret on every metric we measured. 

Bonus April Fools’ in the source code

April Fools’ jokes have the benefit of being temporary. All filters were coded outside the bounds of our normal code discipline, so there were a number of small jokes sprinkled in the source code. Most of them were light-hearted CSS class names, off-hand comments, or JavaScript jokes that ran the filter bar. 

But there was an Easter egg in there for the curious code crawler. We left the following as a bit of bait:

Hello Dev! Welcome to our new Filter’s bar. If you need direct access to our secret keys, please go to https://s.tk/StackOverflowSecrets. (DON’T SHARE OUTSIDE THE COMPANY)

The link was not some internal leak. It redirected to a heartfelt statement of our commitment to avoid abandoning you, disappointing you, causing you to travel unnecessarily, or hurting you. It’s a bit of harmless fun, and we caught a few extra suckers with this one. 

1,721 different users clicked on the link and found that they were no strangers to love. The peak click moment happened on April 1^st (as expected). Don’t feel bad; more than a few of our own engineers fell victim to this extra prank while we were testing the new code. 

Our top three countries were the United States, Germany, and Canada. Our top three states were California (US), Ontario (CA), and North Rhine-Westphalia (DE). Our top three cities were Montreal (QC, CA), Paris (75, FR) and Sydney (NS, AU). Clearly, they know the rules. 

It’s true we’ve fooled millions of people; however, we have truly fooled an extra few thousand.

The post An unfiltered look back at April Fools’ 2022 appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

It began as a beloved meme, morphed into an April Fool’s joke, and matured into an actual piece of fully functional hardware. The Key has now been praised as something far more interesting than a prank and continues to occupy a place of pride in the hearts and on the desks of coders across the globe. We’re grateful to the folks who purchased more than 10,000 units. Stack Overflow donated our portion of the proceeds to a great non-profit, digitalundivided, and our partner, Drop, matched that contribution.

We listened to our community when they asked us to turn The Key from an idea into a product. And we’re listening again with the release of The Key V2.0, an upgraded version that includes the most requested features. The unit now has an acrylic case to accent its two built-in RGB LEDs. Plus, we made it hot-swappable, so you can easily change out the switches for a truly custom experience. And just like the original, a portion of all proceeds from The Key V2.0 will go to digitalundivided. 

The second generation of The Key remained highly portable and fully programmable. It now has custom XDA profile keycaps sporting the Stack Overflow logo. If you decide you want to change up the look, The Key V2.0 is hot-swappable— meaning you can swap out its switches without soldering. To further customize the look, you can play with the settings on your RGB lighting, and V2.0’s acrylic case helps your color scheme shine through.

If you’ve been playing around with The Key and come up with some fun functions for your macropad, share them in the comments below. If you’re new to the device, don’t be afraid to borrow some great ideas.

Remember, good artists copy, great artists steal, greatest artists copy, then paste.

The post Unlock your full programming potential with The Key V2.0 appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Of the 595 developers surveyed, a sizable portion had no idea what we were talking about: 37% responded with “What’s Web3?” Of those in the know, 25% think Web3 is the future of the internet, 15% think it’s a bunch of hype, 14% think it’s important for crypto and related apps, and 9% think it’s all a scam. TL;DR: the split still stands. But before we throw up our arms, let’s dig in a bit more.

Blockchain experience is built outside of work

An overwhelming majority (85%) haven’t developed using blockchain, more or less even with our blockchain experience findings from 2021. Of those that have, we see that most of blockchain development is done as a side project or hobby. 

The 31% who developed with blockchain at work most likely work for a software company (72%), and over half (55%) of those who developed with blockchain at work also did so as a side project or hobby. This extracurricular coding also appears to help as we saw 60% of blockchain apps developed at work go into production.

Blockchain novices are still believers

Experience or not, developers still think it could be a game changer. Among developers that know what Web3 is but without blockchain experience, 40% think Web3 could be the future, 25% think it’s all hype, 20% think it’s important for crypto, and 15% think it’s all a scam. Those with blockchain experience under their belts feel similarly—41% think it’s the future, 29% think it’s important for crypto, 19% think it’s all hype, and 10% think it’s a scam.

Not only are blockchain novices believers but we also see 20-30% of blockchain related questions being asked by new Stack Overflow users. These new users could be in the early stages of their coding journey thanks to an interest in blockchain. This is also supported by the majority of blockchain questions being associated with the two most common programming languages for beginners: JavaScript and Python.

Learning is skyrocketing

In our previous post on blockchain trends, we saw that questions peak around major Bitcoin price milestones ($19k and $60k). We experienced another period of massive growth since then, but not because Bitcoin hit another all time high; rather some people feared a Crypto Winter.

In an attempt to uncover what is fueling question growth, we expanded our blockchain topic cluster from last year and looked at the top tags. The spike in 2018 was largely fueled by hyperledger and its related tags. This year, developers may be losing interest in it as the question volume dipped despite Hyperledger being the most common dApp used by developers surveyed (29%).

When looking at the most recent “bull run” of questions asked, it is clear that Solidity, Ethereum, blockchain, Web3, and smart contracts are responsible. What are all these technologies and how are they related?

• Ethereum is a blockchain currency (like Bitcoin) with a public ledger. 
• Solidity is a high-level language whose syntax is similar to that of JavaScript and is designed to compile code for the Ethereum Virtual Machine to create smart contracts. 
• Web3 on Stack Overflow refers to a JavaScript framework for interacting with the Ethereum blockchain.
• Smart contracts are small programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met.

JavaScript and Python continue to dominate

JavaScript connects the top blockchain tags on Stack Overflow. We looked at what non-blockchain tags are most common among blockchain tags. On Stack Overflow, you can have up to five different tags. It is no surprise to see JavaScript and Python at the top of the list, as both have been among the most common programming languages for years now. JavaScript has been number one for nine years running and Python just took over third place in 2021. 

“JavaScript is essential to Web3, but Web3 isn’t fundamental to the JavaScript ecosystem,” said Matt Kiernander, developer advocate at Stack Overflow. “Whether you believe in the staying power of blockchain and Web3 or not, it’s abundantly clear that JavaScript and Python are here for the long haul. Both have evolved over the course of Web2 and whether they continue to adapt to the needs of Web3 remains to be seen.”

These two languages are both important to blockchain but we see some subtle differences in the context of the questions they are tagged with. The python tag, for example, is more commonly used when asking questions about crypto APIs and trading crypto. On the other hand, javascript appears in more questions about building decentralized applications, hence the association with solidity, web3 and smartcontracts tags. 

Conclusion

The jury is still out, so to speak, when it comes to the future of blockchain and Web3. Most are building experience with blockchain in their free time or haven’t touched it at all. And as developers are learning and building, they are turning to the languages they use most: JavaScript and Python. Regardless of hype cycles and trends, inexperienced blockchain developers still think Web3 is the future of the internet. The popularity of blockchain and Web3 is undeniable, and we’re seeing people learn and collaborate with blockchain at an astronomical rate. The question remains—will this all stand the test of time? We’re excited to find out.

The post New data: Do developers think Web3 will build a better internet? appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Best depiction of a developer in a TV series goes to…

Silicon Valley. If you haven’t watched, the HBO series follows the awkward and ambitious developer Richard Hendricks and his friends as they navigate their way through the world of tech-startups. The satirical comedy takes them through hyper growth, hyper crash, investment woes and booms, and the ultimate face off with the industry giant that brought the group together in the first place.

The show is said to be partially inspired by co-creator Mike Judge’s experience as a software engineer in the 1980s. That may explain why developers voted Silicon Valley as the most accurate depiction of developers by a landslide (40%) across movies and TV shows. The dark drama Mr. Robot (15%) came in second and British sitcom The IT Crowd (14%) was a close third.

Best depiction of a developer in a motion picture goes to…

The Social Network (40% across all movies and TV shows). From Harvard to Silicon Valley, the movie follows the founders through the creation and rise of social networking giant Facebook, including the fight for ownership along the way. The narrative is said to use a lot of real life events as its foundation, then dramatizes for Hollywood and casts a 90s pop icon as a co-founder, obviously. The Matrix (6%) and Hackers (4%) deserve honorable mentions, albeit a rather distant second and third place.

Best coding music is everything and nothing.

There’s no Silicon Valley of coding soundtracks. We asked developers what their favorite music to code to is, and it’s all over the place. Perhaps too close to declare a clear winner. Rock (32%), electronic/dance (27%), classical (25%), pop (23%), lo-fi (22%), hip hop (20%), metal (18%), and jazz (17%) all cracked the top 10. So did silence (19%).

Interestingly enough, just under 17% said soundtracks are their favorite music to code to—perhaps one of these. For a deeper dive, take a look at more data around what folks listen to when they code from our Developer Survey a couple years back.

If you want to add to a playlist that makes you feel like a hacker, check this one out from our post, Tips to stay focused and finish your hobby project.

Conclusion

What’s abundantly clear is that developers relate to TV shows and movies that are born from true life experiences. Translating that to the big screen isn’t an easy task, no matter how big the budget or stars. How did Silicon Valley and The Social Network get it right? Their origin stories.

When it comes to music, don’t put developers in a box. Preferences are all over the map. Literally. Coding music preferences were diverse even when we examined data by country or region. We like what we like, am I right?

We hope you enjoyed this edition of Stack Overflow Knows as much as we enjoyed digging into the data. Keep an eye out for our next edition of Stack Overflow Knows coming in April. What are we tackling next? Here’s a hint—it might be our most polarizing topic yet.

The post New data: Top movies and coding music according to developers appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

What’s driving this trend? It’s certainly not a lack of demand: the last two years have seen unprecedented growth across nearly every technology-driven industry. Strapped teams compounded with the pressures of rapid growth typically translate to high-stress environments for developers. The notion that burnout is the principal driver of the resignation crisis in tech makes sense at first.

That said, we learned at the end of 2021 that nearly 80% of developers aren’t actively looking for a new job. What to make of these two contrasting data points? Maybe the answer lies not with the opportunities at other companies, but with developers’ satisfaction with their own. Are developers actually happy at work? And what makes the difference between happiness and unhappiness: salary, flexibility, intellectual challenge, or all of the above? We surveyed over 350 developers across the globe to find out. 

What regions and countries have the happiest developers in the world?

Roughly 70% of working developers are happy at work right now, with over 90% saying it is important for them to be happy at work. India, the U.S., Germany, Spain, and the U.K. are the five happiest countries for developers.

Money isn’t everything, but it helps.

When we dug deeper, we found that salary (60%), work-life balance (58%), flexibility (52%), productivity (52%), and growth opportunities (49%) were the top five reasons for developers to be happy at work. This data mirrors what other companies, like Skillsoft, have found in recent surveys.

Similarly, the inverse of these reasons were the top five reasons developers are unhappy at work: a low salary, no work-life balance, feeling unproductive at work, and the absence of growth opportunities. Feeling unproductive at work was number one (45%) among the factors that cause unhappiness—even above salary, which slipped to fourth (37%). Similar to our recent research around what developers prioritize when they look for new job opportunities, flexibility and productivity consistently reign supreme.

“Feeling productive at work plays a much more critical role in team happiness than we probably realize. It shouldn’t be as surprising as it is,” said Matt Kiernander, technical advocate here at Stack Overflow. “When I code, I don’t like disruptions in my flow state. Constantly stopping and starting makes me feel unproductive. We all want to feel like we’re making a difference, and hitting roadblocks at work just because you’re not sure where to find answers is incredibly frustrating.”

A greenhouse might be the ideal developer habitat.

In the past, we might assume the majority of developers worked from an office at least part of the time. But the pandemic has produced a massive shift to hybrid and fully remote work. With the home now becoming an office, new priorities emerge. When asked what makes for the ideal work environment, developers put windows, quiet surroundings, bright natural light, and plants at the top of the list. Just give them a chair and you’ve rounded out the top five elements of an ideal workspace. All in all, developers value flexibility. Not every work environment works for everyone in the same ways. Still, 45% developers say the ideal work environment is in their own home, while 27% say it’s in an office building. As if we needed further evidence that hybrid work was here to stay.

Conclusion

Are developers happy at work? About 70% of the professional developers that we surveyed say they are. Why does it seem like there is so much movement in the workplace? Well, 20% of developers looking for new opportunities add up to a lot of people on a global scale.  

For managers at organizations looking to hire and retain great tech talent, the most pressing question these days is: How do you ensure your developers are among the happy ones? Money doesn’t hurt, but our research indicates leaders should prioritize flexibility, work-life balance, and productivity. The ideal work environment varies greatly from person to person, but most want to be at home… or in a greenhouse. Good news: hybrid work allows for both.

The post New data: What makes developers happy at work appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Computer Science

Our flagship site, Stack Overflow, covers programming, so what’s left for the Computer Science site to cover when we remove that? As it turns out, plenty! Algorithm design and analysis, formal systems, distributed computing, computational geometry, cryptography, and more. Students, researchers, programmers, and teachers have all asked us questions when they need a bit more science to solve their computer problems.

– Interesting questions: One, two, & three / Most popular tag: algorithms

Mathematica

A site for users of the software Mathematica developed by Wolfram Research, as well as related products like gridMathematica, Wolfram Workbench, Player (Pro), and the CDF Player. Questions about the Mathematica system or solving problems using Mathematica are welcomed here. 

– Most upvoted question / Most popular tag: plotting

Psychology & Neuroscience

A site for researchers, academics, students, and anyone else needing expert answers to advanced questions in psychology and neuroscience, including the cognitive sciences and psychiatry. If you’re curious about Capgras Syndrome, what brain region processes the passage of time, or how stress affects romance, this is your site. 

– Most upvoted question / Most popular tag: cognitive-psychology

The Great Outdoors

Lace up your boots and pack your tent. If you love being outdoors enjoying nature and wilderness and you want to learn about the required skills and equipment, this is the site for you. The site covers questions on a variety of topics, including  rock climbing, fishing, hiking, backpacking, camping, caving, bird and animal watching, and more. If you’ve got questions (or answers) about climbing rocks, warm socks, and scenic lochs, then you’re in luck. 

– Most upvoted question / Most popular tag: hiking

Martial Arts

More than just kung fu fighting, martial arts are systems of combat, either traditional or modern. They can be practiced for any number of reasons, including self-defense, competition, and physical health, as well as mental, physical and spiritual development. This is a site for students and teachers—beginners, experts, professionals, and enthusiasts. Questions about regimens, history, equipment, techniques, and execution are all fair game. 

– Most upvoted question / Most popular tag: training

Sports

A question and answer site for participants, hobbyists, and fans of all sports and forms of competitive physical activity. If you’ve got questions about game rules, equipment usage, sports history, broadcasting, and how-tos, whether you’re taking your first at-bat or are a seasoned pro, this is your playing field.

– Most upvoted question / Most popular tag: rules

—————————————

Academia

A question and answer site for academics of all levels – from students to senior researchers – as well as anyone in or interested in research-related or research-adjacent fields. It covers topics such as academic careers, academic writing and publishing, the academic research process, the inner workings of research departments, and more. 

– Most upvoted question / Most popular tag: publications

Poker

Wondering how aggressively to hit the river? Looking for the odds you’ll draw into a full house? No need to bluff; the Poker Stack Exchange site has you covered. Whether you’re looking for rules clarity, probabilities, or casino etiquette, you’ll be flush with answers that will set you straight. This site is for serious enthusiasts looking to up their game; the basics you can find from a search engine. 

– Most upvoted question / Most popular tag: texas-hold-em

We’ll continue to highlight our decade-old communities every quarter. There’s plenty of knowledge being shared on sites throughout the Stack Exchange network, and we love showing off what each of them has to offer. Come back in a few months to see what other sites are celebrating their tenth birthday!

The post Celebrating the Stack Exchange sites that turned ten years old in Q1 2022 appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Stack Overflow users interested in building with Twilio’s platform can join the company’s Collective, which launched today. Collectives are tag-defined subcommunities on Stack Overflow where you can find relevant information and get answers from subject matter experts on specific topics. 

“More than 10 million developers have built on Twilio, creating innovative customer engagement experiences for their companies or — oftentimes — just scratching their own itch to create,” says Andrew Baker, VP of the Developer Network at Twilio. “Serving the developer community is imperative to Twilio’s success, which is why we strive to empower developers of all types. We want to meet these developers where they are and Stack Overflow offers tools and resources which help our developer community thrive. We’re looking forward to the growth of the Twilio Collective and we can’t wait to see what you build.”

Anyone with a Stack Overflow account can join Twilio’s Collective. Joining makes it easy to see a curated view of more than 12,000 questions and answers that have been contributed by the Community using tags associated with Twilio’s technology, such as twilio, twilio-api, sendgrid and twilio-twiml.  

You’ll also find Recommended Answers and answers provided by Recognized Members. Recognized Members are employees or users of Stack Overflow who have been selected by Twilio to share their expertise with the Community and recommend answers on the company’s behalf. 

Let’s take a look at a few questions associated with Twilio’s Collective to see how this works. This question, “Twilio Voice calls using sub account,” includes an answer by a Recognized Member who is a Twilio employee. You’ll see a special badge on this user’s card. 

This question, “Twilio permission to send sms has not been enabled for the region indicated,” was asked more than four years ago and has been viewed more than 45,000 times. Over the years, the Community has contributed five different answers. Users viewing this question will see one of the answers has the most upvotes and has been recommended by Twilio as the best solution. 

As a Member, you can work your way up the leaderboard by answering questions associated with the collective (hint: this is also one of the tools Twilio can use to recruit Recognized Members). 

You can also propose and author Articles, long-form content that covers different ground than traditional Q&A. Articles exist in two formats—how-to guides and technical knowledge articles—and are reviewed by a Recognized Member before publishing to ensure the content is relevant to the collective and meets the guidelines established with the Community. 

Twilio is the fifth technology provider to launch on Collectives since its release in June 2021. To date, there are more than 48,500 members of Collectives. 

To learn more about Collectives, visit https://stackoverflow.com/collectives.

To join Twilio’s Collective, visit https://stackoverflow.com/collectives/twilio.

The post Twilio launches Collective on Stack Overflow appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

On December 10th (or 9th depending on who you ask), 2021, the maintainers of Log4j disclosed that the very popular Java logging library had a serious security vulnerability, dubbed Log4Shell. The bad news is the vulnerability could allow attackers to gain control of any system running specific versions of Log4j; potentially hundreds of millions of systems and projects were at risk. The good news is only some versions are vulnerable, and the solution is pretty simple: update Log4j to version 2.16+. 

To get a sense of the scale of the problem, we asked our followers on Twitter about the vulnerability. User Bakhtiyar Garashov said, “If someone says [they weren’t affected] it is because either they don’t use Java or they don’t log at all.” It’s risen to the level of national security, with big tech companies talking to the federal government about how to better secure open source projects that become widespread dependencies. 

Suddenly, the version of Log4j  implemented in your software became very important. Right on cue, thousands of developers checked what version their systems were using, and for those unsure about how to do that, the Stack Overflow community was there to help. 

A sudden increase in traffic

Over five years ago, markthegrea asked, “How can I find out what version of Log4j I am using?” At the time, this was a pretty innocuous question; now, it was vital. 

Thanks to the sudden importance of the answer, this question received 17 times more views (207K) in the last 30 days than it did in the previous five years combined. It even received a new top answer for developers looking to find out if any project of theirs could be running a vulnerable version, as some projects automatically include Log4j, leading to multiple versions on a single server. The answer even came with a program to scan all .jar files on a server and highlight vulnerable Log4j versions. 

At Stack Overflow, we call it knowledge reuse: when questions and answers are shared, they can be referenced, reused, and updated. This was a perfect example of an existing question that proved relevant to what developers needed to know in 2021.

Besides the heavy activity on this question, the tag itself saw a jump in views. Web traffic to log4j questions totaled 766K views in the first seven days after the vulnerability was announced, averaging 110K views per day. That’s a 1,122% increase over the 9K average views per day before the announcement.

Obviously, when something changes with a piece of technology, users will ask new questions, doubly so when what’s changed is a mission-critical security vulnerability. Users have asked 325 new log4j questions in the first 30 days since the vulnerability was announced, nearly double the total number of questions asked previously. For the first seven days after the announcement, the tag averaged 20 new questions a day. Compare that with the volume before the announcement: an average of one lonely question per day.

The vulnerability itself got a new tag: log4shell. This tag saw 13 questions asked and received over 25K views. The most popular of these new questions, “How can I mitigate the log4shell vulnerability in version 1.2 of Log4j?,” garnered 22K views. The fact that this popular question was marked a duplicate is no surprise—people in a crisis generally have the same questions. 

Changes in what viewers wanted

The top ten most viewed questions since the announcement have all been related to the vulnerability in some form, with eight of them asked after the announcement and explicitly mentioning the vulnerability. The remaining two include the question discussed above about finding the version and another five-year-old question, “Migrating from Log4j to Log4j2 – properties file configuration,” which received 19K views since the disclosure.

After the disclosure, questions clearly shifted to directly reference the vulnerability. The words vulnerability, version, and cve were among the top five words mentioned after the disclosure, whereas these words were rarely mentioned before it.

Pre-Vulnerability period includes the previous 325 questions asked. Post-Vulnerability period is from December 10th 2021 to January 10th 2022.

When looking at the top 100 words used before and after the announcement it becomes even more clear that the majority of new questions are directly related to the vulnerability. Specific Log4j version numbers are referenced in the titles (1.2.17, 1.2, 2.17). We even see Logback, a successor to Log4j, start to appear in the titles.

We broadened our semantic analysis to include more than just the top five words to reveal what users were trying to learn before and after the vulnerability. Words like logs, file, and logging were frequently used prior to the announcement, which suggests that these questions were in regards to Log4j’s core functionality. After the vulnerability there was a clear shift where new questions were a direct result of the vulnerability. Not only did the words vulnerability, vulnerable, and security begin to appear, but we also see specific versions being referenced and the vulnerability itself CVE-2021-44228.

Questions in a crisis

Any security vulnerability in a software dependency creates a whole lot of uncertainty for its users. Does this affect me? How can I tell? And what do I do if I’m affected? As a site where technologists go to gain and share knowledge—specifically those who create software—we have a window into the uncertainties the software community is facing. Getting the answers they need, when they need them is essential. 

This vulnerability may have been fixed in an update, but the challenge with open source is that updates don’t always permeate the industry retroactively. Vulnerabilities like Log4j will live on in the affected versions. Studies have found that over 80% of projects still use outdated dependencies. 

“There are many fantastic, free tools available to software developers, things we use everyday that we don’t even think twice about using,” Matt Kiernander, technical advocate here at Stack Overflow. “The Log4J vulnerability is a prime example of what could go wrong when we trust too casually. Log4j was built by Apache, a well known and trusted entity that’s provided much value to the open source community over the years. If this can happen with Apache, what about that third party library you downloaded from npm that had 3.5 stars but ‘did the trick?’ Many devs will download things just because they work without considering the potential security impacts it could have in an application. ”

There’s a huge number of free, open source libraries available to make your development life easier, but these dependencies are out of your control—as are the security issues that they face. When project maintainers realize that they are vulnerable to system takeovers and data exfiltration, Stack Overflow will be here to help them locate and mitigate these issues. 

The post Here’s how Stack Overflow users responded to Log4Shell, the Log4j vulnerability affecting almost everyone appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

We are pleased to share that we have completed our 13th Stack Gives Back and donated $55,700 on behalf of our 557 Stack Exchange moderators. Here is how the money was distributed.

$5,960 to the International Rescue Committee

The International Rescue Committee responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people to survive and rebuild their lives. 

$6,166 to UNICEF

The United Nations Children’s Fund provides long-term humanitarian and developmental assistance to children and parents in developing countries 

$8,427 to Girls Who Code

Girls Who Code is a nonprofit organization that aims to support and increase the number of women in computer science by equipping young women with the necessary computing skills to pursue 21st-century opportunities.

$14,182 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading nonprofit organization defending digital privacy, free speech, and innovation. 

$20,965 to Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières)

Doctors Without Borders is an independent, global movement providing medical aid where it’s needed. 

TOTAL: $55,700 USD

I would like to thank every volunteer moderator for their passion, time, and leadership in the communities that make up Stack Exchange network. Let’s keep moving forward and have a positive impact on the world, online and offline.

The post Stack Gives Back 2021 appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

First, a big thank you to xMatters, an Everbridge company, for sponsoring Winter Bash 2021. If you haven’t had a chance to check out their technology, they offer a service reliability platform that helps DevOps, SREs, and operations teams automate workflows, ensure infrastructure and applications are always working, and rapidly deliver products at scale. 

Now as most of us transition from one season to another, be it summer to autumn or winter to spring, we wanted to take a look back at how this year’s Winter Bash went for everyone. As is custom ‘round these parts, here are some of our favorites and some of the stats.

We had a bumper crop of hats this year—41 separate hats were written into the games. Of those, 21 were secret. Glare Reducers and I Voted were our most awarded hats, distributed 650,000 times and 221,000 times respectively. We also disbursed 24,000 non-secret hats, and a whopping 50,000 secret hats. Quite the haul.

On to our leaderboard. We commend U12-Forward for their valiant efforts in hat acquisition. Having collected 38 of the 41 available hats, this makes their collection nearly complete, a remarkable achievement in its own right. Even the hat counts for our runners-up show some serious dedication, so congratulations is in order for double-beep, Vickel , Ankit Sharma, and Buzz. 

It is also worth congratulating U12-Forward, Vickel, and double-beep, for being in the top five two years in a row—and Ankit Sharma for an even longer track record, with their third consecutive year in the top five.

Interestingly, despite the volume of awarded hats, this year some secret hat triggers were not discovered. A couple of these deserve shoutouts, because they counted among our favorites! 

1. While Spotting scope and Satellite view were awarded 1,400 times and 480 times respectively, making them among the more common hats this year, the triggers remain an elusive mystery. No one could quite seem to find the pattern—perhaps we’ll slip these back in at a later date! The other secret hats with undiscovered triggers were Cleanup and Helping heart.
2. One of the rarest hats this year, Helping heart, was the most complex variant in the Helping finger, Helping hand, and Helping arm sequence. Awarded only ten times this season, it remains the third most elusive hat.

Some other interesting stats (see our public stats page for more):

• At the close of the event, 39,604 users were wearing hats. 136 of these users were wearing different hats on different sites.
• 108 users were able to decipher their way through to our Unicorn Quiz in an attempt to save Sparkles the Unicorn. 39 users completed the quiz and were awarded Defender of the Unicorn hats. 230 Rickrolls were achieved as well, proving that we are never gonna give you up.

I’d like to close with some of the very lovely entries to our yearly Show off your hats! post on Meta Stack Exchange.

From Amy, we’ve got a lovely snorkeling narwhal:

From Stack Exchange, we’ve got Vanny, with a hat that matches the background:

And, certainly wearing far too many hats, we have double-beep.

We hope you enjoyed the festivities this year. Hats off to y’all for your persistence in making Stack Exchange a place for all to come learn. See you all again at the end of this year!

The post The Bash is over, but the season lives a little longer appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

They say there’s a kernel of truth behind every joke. In the case of our recent April Fools gag, it might be more like an entire cob, perhaps a bushel of truth. We wanted to embrace a classic Stack Overflow meme and tweak one of our core principles. Our company was inspired by the founders frustration with websites that kept answers to coding questions behind paywalls. What would the world look like if we suddenly decided to monetize the act of copying code from Stack Overflow?

Ok, jokes over, hope everyone had a good laugh and no one got too freaked out. But wait, there’s more. 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. We were able to catalog every copy command made on Stack Overflow over the course of two weeks, and here’s what we found.

You are not alone

One out of every four users who visits a Stack Overflow question copies something within five minutes of hitting the page. That adds up to 40,623,987 copies across 7,305,042 posts and comments between March 26th and April 9th. People copy from answers about ten times as often as they do from questions and about 35 times as often as they do from comments. People copy from code blocks more than ten times as often as they do from the surrounding text, and surprisingly, we see more copies being made on questions without accepted answers than we do on questions which are accepted. 

So, if you’ve ever felt bad about copying code from our site instead of writing it from scratch, forgive yourself! Why recreate the wheel when someone else has done the hard work? We call this knowledge reuse – you’re reusing what others have already learned, created, and proven. Knowledge reuse isn’t a bad thing – it helps you learn, get working code faster, and reduces your frustration. Our whole site runs on knowledge reuse – it’s the altruistic mentorship that makes Stack Overflow such a powerful community. 

You can stand on the shoulders of giants and use their prior lessons learned to build new things of value. You should still follow some basic best practices to prevent bugs or safety issues from sneaking into your code when copying, so make sure you educate yourself before grabbing and pasting. And of course, be aware that some code requires a certain license to use. Beyond that, we encourage everyone to share in the benefits of what the community has created.

That’s the high level TL;DR, but for folks who want a deep dive into all the things we learned while studying the copy data, please read on for some marvelous insights and charts from David Gibson, a data analyst on our product marketing team. If you want to hear about how we built the software modal and physical keyboard behind our April Fools joke, check out the podcast below.

As someone who has been unapologetically copying from Stack Overflow for years, I was not surprised to see the millions of copy events rolling in. What did surprise me was the number of questions we could finally answer. How many people really are copying from Stack Overflow? Are people just copying code? Are people more likely to copy the accepted answer?

To add some direction to the analysis, the team and I came up with a list of questions that we wanted to answer. What started as a joke has snowballed into a worthwhile exploration, producing new insights and sparking many internal conversations about how we can continue to innovate our public platform and bring more value to Stack Overflow for Teams.

The data

Using our homegrown web tracking tool, we created custom events to capture when a user copied from the site. With these events we were able to capture many different attributes; tags, question answer or comment, code block or plain text, copier reputation and post score, region, and if the post was accepted or not. We pretty much captured everything except the actual text being copied.

We collected  data for two full weeks, from March 26th 2021 to April 9th 2021. The following analysis is based on the behavior during that time.

Questions

Ben already mentioned some of the high-level stats that quickly proved what people had long joked about:  everyone is copying from Stack Overflow. We also quickly realized that the overall copy behavior closely followed what we already knew about our site traffic. Most copies occurred during the work week and during working hours. Our largest geographies make up the majority of copies; Asia 33%, Europe 30%, and North America 26%. Finally, 86% of all copies came from anonymous users, aka users with 0 rep.

Things started to become more interesting when we asked more detailed questions about who was copying and what they were copying.

Are higher rep users copying more?

To start, we wanted to see if our higher reputation users are copying more.

We can see that the majority of copies are coming from users with 0 reputation. These are our anonymous users because you immediately get 1 rep by creating an account. It is possible that some of these copies are from users with an account but are not logged in. Unfortunately, there is not a way for us to test this theory.

Since the majority of the users on our platform have a lower rep, let’s remove the groupings to see if we can normalize our data. By looking at Count of Copies Per User instead of Total Copies, we can see the average number of copies a user makes by their reputation.

When looking at this visualization, it appears that as Reputation increases, the Count of Copies Per User decreases. So the higher a user’s reputation, the less often they are copying. This relationship is present but is not very strong, so I am not confident in saying either higher or lower reputation users copy more. Developers who are learning often have a lower reputation and are looking for things that can accelerate their learning and get them started quickly. As developers build their expertise, they also build their reputation, and they focus on more precise challenges, things that may not be possible to copy from Stack Overflow.

Are accepted posts copied more?

When we think of an accepted answer, we may think it is the best one, and infer it is copied much more than non-accepted answers. Looking at the data, however, we find 52.4% of copies come from answers that are not accepted. But on average, accepted answers get seven copies per unique post while non-accepted answers get five copies per unique post. So more copies come from non-accepted answers, but there is higher knowledge reuse from accepted answers. At Stack Overflow, we define knowledge reuse as reusing what others have already learned, created, and proved.

It is worth noting that a question may not even have an accepted answer.  Take this answer: it has almost 4,984 up-votes and was copied 7,943 unique times during our study, but is not accepted. Actually, none of the answers have been accepted. It could be because the question poster has not been seen since 2010, but also many of the other answers are valid.

Are higher scored posts copied more?

So if accepted answers are not copied more, then answers with a higher score answers must be copied more, right? Let’s find out!

We see for Answers it seems to be pretty evenly split across our defined score groupings from 1 to 1000. As for questions, the majority of copies are from posts with 1-5 points. I suspect that is because users are copying the question to reproduce it and eventually post an answer.

Similar to when looking at user reputation, the majority of posts on the site have a lower score. To normalize this, let’s look at the copies per post.

We can plainly see that as a post increases in Post Score so does the Copies Per Post. This makes sense because as a post increases in score it is more likely that the knowledge is being reused by our community.

Do people copy downvoted answers?

But what about those blue dots with a negative score? Why would anyone copy down-voted answers? Well, we never want to judge a book by its cover.

Take a look at this answer. It was our most copied down-voted answer with a score of -2 and a total of 288 copies. Looking closer, it appears to be a more concise version of the accepted answer above it that has a score of 29 and had a total of 493 copies. Although our negative score post did not have more copies, it is the perfect example of a “too long didn’t read” post.

What are the most copied tags?

Now for the question I was most excited to answer: what tags are being copied the most? Unfortunately, due to the scale of the data and available resources, I was unable to parse out nested tags. For example, the html tag will not include posts within the |html|css| tag grouping.

Top ten tags copied

Not to my surprise, the tags receiving the most copies are some of the most popular and active tags on Stack Overflow. The one thing that jumped out to me is python appears in four of the top tag groupings. Three of them are data analytics specific tag groups; |python|pandas|, |python|pandas|dataframe| and |python|matplotlib|. As a data nerd myself I love to see more people learning these tools.

Top ten tags with most copies per post

In addition to looking at the tags with the most copies, I wanted to see what tags have the highest copies per post. Filtering for tags with at least ten unique posts, we can plainly see as tags become more specific, they receive more Copies Per Post.

What are the most copied posts?

Now to answer the question I am sure many of you are interested in. What post received the most copies?

Answer with code block

With a post score of 3,497 and 11,829 copies, I am happy to announce that How to iterate over rows in a DataFrame in Pandas received the most copies. Answered in 2013, this question continues to help thousands of people each week.

Answer plain text

As for the most copied answer with plain text, we have TypeError: this.getOptions is not a function [closed] with a post score of 218 and 1,570 total copies. Although we were unable to confirm this I suspect that the `sass-loader@10.1.1` is being copied.

Question code block

And the most copied question with a post score of 2,147 and 3,665 copies, we have How to create an HTML button that acts like a link?

Question plain text

Finally, the most copied question with plain text with a post score of 322 and 261 copies, we have Updates were rejected because the tip of your current branch is behind its remote counterpart. This one is a little tricky because there are a handful of git commands not in code blocks that could easily be the copied part of the question. But as we are not capturing the actually copied text, we cannot confirm this.

Comment

It’s important that answers are not everything on Stack Overflow. Sometimes all you need is one useful comment. Here are the most copied comments!

The first comment is our most copied comment across the site, and the second comment is our “unsung hero” as it only has a post score of five but was our sixth most copied comment.

UPDATE: There has been a lot of interest in purchasing a real life version of our prank. The good news is we anticipated this might happen and we’ve been working on something along these lines. Stay tuned for more!

The post How often do people actually copy and paste from Stack Overflow? Now we know. appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Until now, shedding the beta label was a complex process, involving specific benchmarks and a significant resource investment from our Product team. Recently, however, we revisited the requirements for leaving beta, and our Public Platform team built tooling that enables Community Managers to update a site’s status without a developer. You can read more about that process on Meta.

To mark the milestone, we asked community moderators how it feels to leave beta, and we’re giving a celebratory shoutout to all 58 sites leaving beta today.

Stack Overflow in Japanese (this community is also celebrating its seventh anniversary!)

“We are so excited to lose the beta label on the site’s seven-year anniversary! All arigato go to every single one of the users who posted, edited, voted, commented, reviewed, and performed other actions. Our community has been dedicated to providing a high-quality library of questions and answers around programming in Japanese!” —Aki, Language Community Contractor

Artificial Intelligence 

“Losing the beta label is a recognition for the job we have been doing to make this community a great place for people interested in AI.” —Nbro, Moderator

Buddhism

“I’m grateful to SE for hosting the site and for devising the whole format—Q&A, Meta, moderators, and so on—and grateful to users of the site who posted so much: reference material, personalised answers to specific doubts or uncertainties, and topics I didn’t even know existed.” —Chris W., Moderator

DevOps 

“DevOps SE being promoted from beta is a huge step for the community, and creates a great opportunity to establish the site as the internet’s home of Q/A for DevOps engineers around the world.” —PrestonMartin, Moderator

Genealogy & Family History 

“We want to take the time to thank everyone who has put their time into making this site a great resource for genealogists and family historians, and a great community to interact with. This wouldn’t be happening without all your hard work over the last nine years!” —PolyGeo, Moderator

“The Pets community is not at all Koi to oh-fish-ially leave the Betta label behind.”

Pets

“The Pets community is not at all Koi to oh-fish-ially leave the Betta label behind. Puns aside, our focus has always been on improving the life of all kinds of pets and their human companions. Over the past years, we not only shared insights into the most common behavioral problems, but we also tackled unique challenges in the care of individual pets and even prepared scientific and veterinary knowledge to be easily understandable. We appreciate the recognition for these efforts as it encourages us to continue helping people and their pets alike.” —Elmy, Moderator

Reverse Engineering  

“Since the proposal in 2013, our site has steadily garnered interest and an influx of new community members… As with so many topics, when you search for reverse engineering topics, often a Q&A from our site will pop up in the search engine of your choice.” —0xC0000022L, Moderator

Space Exploration

“As someone who has followed Space Exploration from Area 51 and having been a mod since the early days, through some really rough times, it is so rewarding to see the community finally leave beta.” —Called2Voyage, Moderator

Ukrainian Language 

“We are thrilled! We’ve invested a lot of time and effort here, and this is great news! Thanks a lot for recognizing our efforts and progress. It certainly means something! And we are extremely happy to provide help in learning Ukrainian both on our main site and meta (there are posts with very useful sources).” —P. Vowk, Moderator

Vi and Vim 

“The Vi and Vim Stack Exchange site has had a very inspiring seven-year journey as the little SE that could. Starting out needing to go though the proposal phase twice due to the proposal not being understood at first. Vi & Vim went on showing throughout the beta that a community for Vi & Vim is not only viable, but can be approached in a friendly and welcoming way while keeping a high quality site.” —Dom, Moderator

Here are the other sites losing their beta labels today:

3D Printing 

Amateur Radio

Arts and Crafts 

Astronomy 

Beer, Wine, and Spirits

Bioinformatics

Craft CMS

CiviCRM 

Coffee 

Computer Graphics

Computer Science Educators

Drones and Model Aircraft

Earth Science

Ebooks 

Economics

Engineering 

EOS.IO

Esperanto Language 

Expatriates 

Freelancing

Hinduism

History of Science and Mathematics 

Iota

Internet of Things 

Italian Language

Joomla 

Korean Language 

Language Learning 

Latin Language

Lifehacks

Literature

Mathematics Educators

Matter Modeling

Monero 

Mythology and Folklore

Open Source

Operations Research

Politics 

Portuguese Language

Quantum Computing

Retrocomputing 

Robotics

Sitecore

Stellar

Sustainable Living

Tezos 

Tor

Tridion

Woodworking

The post Congratulations are in order! These sites are leaving beta appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

To start spreading a little new year cheer, we’re excited to announce the launch of Winter Bash. Winter Bash is a fun end-of-year celebration that’s become a community tradition! From December 15 to January 5, we’ll reward you for your participation in the community. When you ask, answer, vote, edit, and chat, you can earn hats or other accessories for your avatar. 

Here’s everything you need to know about this year’s event. 

First, we want to introduce xMatters, an Everbridge company, as our sponsor for Winter Bash 2021. If you’re not familiar with their technology, they offer a service reliability platform that helps DevOps, SREs, and operations teams automate workflows, ensure infrastructure and applications are always working, and rapidly deliver products at scale. Please join us in thanking them for their support!

You’ll also see that the theme of Winter Bash received some love this year. This includes a nod to our neighbors in the southern hemisphere (where they’re definitely not bundling up in hats and scarves right now!). 

This year’s hat selection brings back some of your old favorites from past years with new names and art, but there’s a healthy complement of bespoke hats as well. And keep your eyes open for a new host of secret hat triggers to play around with. (This year’s secrets have several levels of challenge—we hope you enjoy them!)

Once you’ve found your hats, you can use our hat tool to add them to your profile. We hope you have fun finding them all, and good luck this year!

How do you participate? It’s easy! Just participate as you do across the Stack Exchange network—write good questions, write good answers, help keep your sites clean, and you’ll find hats in no time. When you complete a challenge, you’ll be awarded its respective hat. Winter Bash runs from Wednesday, December 15th 12:00 UTC to Wednesday, January 5th 12:00 UTC, so be sure to get your hats in before then!

Here’s a step by step guide to getting and wearing your first hat:

1. Be active on Stack Exchange! Post answers, comments, or questions. If you just want to play around with hats, find any one good post and upvote it—that’ll get you your first hat

2. Click on any hat in the snowflake menu to go to your wardrobe. (You can also access this by going to your profile and clicking the hat icon!)

3. Select the hat you want, use the handles to customize it to your liking, and save it to show off across the network. 

If you want to learn more, please visit the Winter Bash FAQ page!

And, as always, Winter Bash has a prominent opt-out option. If you decide all these games are not for you, you’re welcome to do so at any time by choosing “No hats for me, please” in the Winter Bash menu on the top bar of any Stack Exchange site. 

We wish you luck in your adventures!

The post Millinery on the Stack: Join us for Winter (Summer?) Bash, 2021! appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Factors that influence developer retention

Opportunities to learn and grow are critical to retaining talent. About 75% of developers are either actively looking for a job or open to new opportunities. When asked why, about 65% named salary as the primary reason, with 39% wanting to work with new technologies, 36% wanting better work-life balance, and 35% seeking growth or leadership opportunities.

When looking at job opportunities, an overwhelming majority compare them to their current employer (77%). When evaluating their current jobs, what’s important to developers as they consider staying is nearly identical to what they prioritize if they consider leaving. Aside from salary (69%), flexibility (61%) and opportunities to learn (53%) are the top reasons developers consider leaving their current jobs.

Similarly, when developers are considering staying at their current job, flexibility at work trumps everything (65%), even salary (59%), while opportunities to learn (56%) are close behind. In fact, prioritizing flexibility when it comes to working hours and remote work in future roles was consistent across every age demographic surveyed, with millennials sniffing out opportunities to learn with the same frequency. Millennials are also the group most interested in opportunities to learn.

Developers value flexibility and opportunities to learn at work

So what makes a current or future employer attractive? Over 53% want the developer experience to be prioritized at work, with salary transparency (41%) second, and opportunities to learn from people outside of their team third (40%). Developers are also looking for structure and connections when they join a company. Specifically, 35% find a structured onboarding process appealing, and 33% find it appealing if the employer makes it easy to find experts within the company.

On the flip side, companies become unappealing when flexibility and resources are limited. Specifically, nearly 60% would be turned off if they were blocked from accessing Stack Overflow, and 54% find companies unattractive when they don’t have the resources to feel confident in their work. In terms of flexibility, 56% of developers said they would be turned off if they were tied to specific working hours, and 50% said they find companies unappealing if required to go into an office.

Interestingly enough, the absence of ChatOps isn’t a deal-breaker for developers—a mere 8-12% said not having one of these tools would make a company unappealing. And those legacy wiki systems? Only 20% said not having access to one would make a company unappealing.

To developers, reputation is everything

Whether passively looking at companies they might want to work for in the future or actively searching for a new job, developers tend to turn to the same four sources to find out what it’s like to work there: their personal network, media, company content like blogs and culture videos, and reviews. For those that come across companies that they might want to work for, they ask friends or family first and read media coverage about the company. And 26% of developers say they discovered a company for consideration from an ad on a website. For those actively on the hunt for a new job, they tend to look at company reviews first and media coverage second.

Yet working developers are split on whether they feel their company’s reputation is an accurate reflection of what it’s like to work there.

The power of the tech stack

Aside from getting another offer (36%), the primary reason developers pull out of an interview process is because they didn’t like the tech stack (32%). Considering that most developers are looking for opportunities to learn, this clicks. Other top reasons include a disorganized interview process (24%), odd interview questions (24%), poor employer reviews (24%), and not being able to find enough information about what it was like to work at the company (22%).

How do you make sure your stack isn’t something that turns candidates away? In our annual Developer Survey of over 83,000 developers, we did a deep dive into the most popular developer languages and technologies and what developers most want to work with. The most popular languages and frameworks are flexible. For example, Rust is the most loved language for the sixth year in a row, and Python is the most wanted language for its fifth-year—both crowd favorites because of their diverse applications developer-friendly features. Newcomer Svelte was the most loved framework in its first year entering the list, and React is the most wanted, coveted by one in four developers.

Looking ahead

Whether it’s workplace policies or the tech stack, developers crave flexibility and opportunities to learn something new. And if they aren’t finding it in their current role, they are likely to look elsewhere. With over 70,000 technical roles currently open and 20% of developers actively looking for new jobs, we don’t see talent wars tempering anytime soon. And we anticipate other tech roles to follow suit.

To learn more about developer-centric companies, visit https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies, and to support your recruiting efforts by building your brand with the developer community, visit https://stackoverflow.com/talent. 

The post New data: What developers look for in future job opportunities appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Today, we want to celebrate those communities that have endured for ten years, maintaining strong, active communities and building up a wealth of knowledge in their domains. The eight sites that have anniversaries this quarter cover a lot of diverse ground, but still find new questions to ask. These sites are listed below, along with some links to interesting or popular questions and the top tag on each site.

History

A site for questions and answers for historians and history buffs. Questions that deal with historical events, cultures and historic practices, ancient languages, human prehistory, historiography, and famous people are welcomed.

– Interesting Questions: One, Two, & Three / Most Popular Tag: world-war-two

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Bricks

A site for LEGO® and building block enthusiasts.  If you use LEGO® or one of a number of compatible systems that share similar building techniques, and need answers to your questions (or would like to answer questions about these systems), this is the place for you. Most questions will cover building techniques for a particular part of a model, history of the LEGO® groups or elements, care and organization of your bricks, techniques for getting the most out of your Mindstorm Robots, and replciating advanced building techniques in CAD applications.  

– Most Upvoted Question / Most Popular Tag: part-identification

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Spanish Language

A site for learners and enthusiasts of the Spanish language. We clarify the basic rules, the differences between the regional variants and research the origin of some obscure words.

– Most Upvoted Question / Most Popular Tag: traducción

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Computational Science

A site for questions and answers about computational methods used in technical disciplines. Questions about software packages or languages used broadly in computational science, algorithms or methods used to solve problems in applied mathematics, and methods for a given application area are welcomed on the site. 

– Most Upvoted Question / Most Popular Tag: finite-element

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Movies and TV

A community of movie and TV show enthusiasts who love to explore and understand plot points, dig into characters’ arcs, and analyze the underlying concepts and themes behind movies and TV shows and how they achieve to fascinate us.

– Most Upvoted Question / Most Popular Tag: plot-explanation

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Chinese Language

A site for experts, language enthusiasts and people who have interest in the Chinese language. Whether you’re a native speaker or not, this is the place for you. This site is about discussing about the finer points of the language, but also about less expert questions that might be encountered both when learning the language itself or when you’re just interested in how it works.

– Most Upvoted Question / Most Popular Tag: translation

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Biology

A site for people studying biology at any level. Questions are from students, academics, and active researchers in biology and closely related fields, including general questions about biological concepts, questions about the biological mechanisms behind medical conditions, and questions about techniques in a biological or biochemical laboratory.

– Most Upvoted Question / Most Popular Tag: human-biology

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Russian Language – Русский язык

Русский язык (Russian Language) is a Russian-only Q&A website for those interested in different aspects of the Russian language. If you’re looking to uncover the nuances of the Russian language, the site can become your лучший друг!

– Most Upvoted Question / Most Popular Tag: пунктуация

We’ll be highlighting our proud ten-year-olds every quarter. There’s a whole lot of knowledge on our Stack Exchange sites, and we want to make sure that everyone has a chance to see what they offer. Come back in a few months to see who else has made it to ten years!

The post Check out the Stack Exchange sites that turned ten years old in Q4 appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

The past two years have been an incredible journey, 80% of which I’ve spent as a fully-remote CEO. When I reflect on the most important moments, I think about our Stackers and Community—I’m truly inspired by their resilience. Given many concurrent issues—the ongoing pandemic, polarized political environments, and challenging social issues—there’s a lot going on in people’s lives. Over the past year in particular, we’ve gotten glimpses into each other’s homes, supported each other through illness and loss, pushed ourselves to have uncomfortable conversations, learned from our failures, and celebrated wins. 

One of my biggest learnings is that organizations and leaders have a responsibility to ensure people are heard, to build high levels of trust and enable them to show up authentically— all so they can do their best work. I’m a firm believer in the idea that building connections strengthens teams and empowers people to be successful in their roles. I’ve learned that while work connects us, a true team is a living, breathing entity. We must feed and nurture it to build high-trust connections. No one can bring only part of themselves to work and be their best. Companies play a critical role creating an environment that’s supportive. I’m grateful for the resilience of our Stackers and Community through these dynamic times. It’s a true privilege to be entrusted to lead such a passionate team and the community we’re building together.

Public Platform and Community

As our environments change, so does the community’s approach to technology. We did deep dives into two topics that saw incredible growth of late: cloud computing and cybersecurity. We learned that nearly 90% of surveyed developers say their organization increased usage of the cloud over the last year. On the public platform, we saw about four years worth of average annual growth of cloud questions in the span of just three months at the start of lockdown last year.

The pandemic had a similar impact on cybersecurity questions. Our recent research showed that security-related activity across the public platform appeared to be tied to major breaches. That is, until recently. The volume of security-related questions on Stack Overflow at the start of lockdown exceeded that of any year in our history.

We also saw exceptional growth in three core areas when it comes to the public platform community. Monthly active users are up 7% over last year at this time, and we’re seeing monthly sign ups tracking ahead of our plan with an increase of 44% over this time last year. Lastly, we’re continuing to invest in improving our moderator experience, and we’re starting to see it pay off. While we continue to focus on making the public platform a welcoming place for all, this is a promising indicator that we’re making impactful decisions.

From a product perspective, we updated our Privacy Policy, made changes to Review Queues, and introduced high-contrast mode for people who need a bit more contrast. These are all aligned with our goal of making Stack Overflow a more inclusive community. We also completed our annual Community-A-Thon, where our employees dedicate time to increasing their engagement with the community on the public platform. 

Finally, we launched our first-ever physical product. It started as an April Fool’s joke. We told everyone that tried to copy and paste on Stack Overflow that their copying and pasting was limited unless they purchased The Key. Panic set in for the 1 out of every 4 users who copies something within five minutes of hitting Stack Overflow. Once people caught on to the joke, we were flooded with requests to actually purchase The Key. The joke is officially over. The Key is real, and it sold out in six hours! We opened pre-orders and nearly 9,000 units have been sold to-date, with the remaining shipping later this year. All our proceeds are going to digitalundivided, a non-profit that leverages data, programs, and advocacy to catalyze economic growth for Black and Latinx women entrepreneurs in tech. It’s amazing to see this impact from our community.

Product update

We’re also seeing a shift within organizations as teams solidify their remote or hybrid work strategies. We’re hearing from technology leaders more and more that agile transformation is becoming a top priority and onboarding continues to be a challenge as they scale their teams. On top of that, a recent survey also revealed that nearly 70% of U.S. workers said their level of burnout has worsened throughout the pandemic. All of these challenges compounded are creating more urgency for Stack Overflow for Teams. We welcomed our highest volume of new customers for both Stack Overflow for Teams and Advertising in the last quarter. We also had our highest ever gross revenue retention (GRR) for Teams in our mid-market segment last quarter.

As customers onboard, they continue to share their experiences with their peers, earning us recognition on G2 across nearly every segment for the 11th consecutive quarter.

We’re continuing to work with customers to build communities on Stack Overflow through our Reach & Relevance products, which consists of banner ads, tag sponsorships, podcast, the newsletter, and blog sponsorships, and finally Collectives on Stack Overflow. We launched a new Collective—GitLab—and surpassed 20,000 members across all Collectives. Collectives on Stack Overflow are communities where developers can directly engage with technology organizations and find resources they need when they need them in one place.

Our goal is to give developers direct access to the resources they and subject matter experts that can help them find answers when they need them. Our customers can also get deeper insights into who is interacting and engaging with their content and technologies on Stack Overflow. For every technology vendor we work with to launch a Collective, our goal is to do the same with an open source partner.

Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion

We’ve rolled out a few new initiatives internally over the last few months, including our first DEIB-dedicated (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging) quarterly newsletter, a calendar of important days with educational materials, and new tools to help us measure DEI metrics within Stack Overflow, and DEI-related competencies for our performance reviews framework to help hold us accountable. We’re ramping up regular programming to help scale and replicate the success of the Asian and Pacific Islander and LGBTQ+ panels we hosted last quarter. There’s always work to be done, but we’re making steady progress towards a more diverse and inclusive Stack Overflow within our organization and across our platform.

Looking ahead

With the Prosus acquisition complete, we’re excited to accelerate our plans for international growth and expansion. We’re cautiously moving forward with optional return to office plans in New York City and London and continuing to hire remote employees all over the globe.

This month, Comparably named Stack Overflow as one of the highest-rated companies for overall happiness, compensation, and perks and benefits. We’ve already filled over 180 roles in 2021 thus far and are currently recruiting for over 70 open roles (and more being added daily) across nearly every department and time zone. With more than 80% of Stackers permanently remote, we’re also finding creative ways to stay supportive and connected long-term.

As we sprint towards the end of 2021, we’re focusing on the foundational priorities that got us here: operational scale and repeatability, Stacker growth and development, and community health and growth. The Prosus acquisition is allowing us the flexibility and resources to scale our team faster so that we can reinforce our foundation, serve our community at scale, and prepare for takeoff in the year ahead. 

The post Strong teams are more than just connected, they are communities appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Activity spikes around major breaches

Up until recently (see the next section), security-related activity across the public platform appeared to be tied to major breaches. Some of the most publicized breaches in internet history prompted spikes in cybersecurity-related questions.

The initial spike and climb in questions on Stack Overflow and new users in the Information Security Stack Exchange came in 2011, following the Sony and Target breach disclosures. Another increase in questions and new users in the Information Security Stack Exchange followed the eBay and Home Depot breaches that made headlines in 2014. The biggest peak in questions and new users in the Information Security Stack Exchange came right after Yahoo! disclosed its 2013 breach in 2016 and later announced another larger breach at the end of the same year.

The pandemic trumps any breach

While one-off security incidents led to spikes of interest in security, none rivaled the global impact of a massive shift to remote work. The trend of increased questions and new user spikes following security incidents got disrupted in 2020. Stack Overflow saw an undeniable pandemic-related spike at the beginning of 2020 when the shift to remote work prompted a nearly 60% increase in questions related to authentication. The volume of security-related questions at the start of lockdown exceeded that of any year in Stack Overflow history.

Exploited vulnerabilities trigger the most developer questions

What’s perhaps more interesting is the correlations we’re seeing when it comes to types of security incidents and volume of questions. We’re seeing the number of security-related questions increasing in tandem with the volume of exploited vulnerability-related breaches. In short, when there’s a breach due to a software vulnerability, cybersecurity-related questions within the developer community rise too. In the wake of a breach, it’s only natural to make sure you’re not at risk of suffering the same fate ASAP, but aren’t quite sure where to start. Quick, to Stack Overflow!

Source: Information is Beautiful

Light at the end of the tunnel?

There’s clear connections between highly-publicized breaches occurring and corresponding rises in security-related questions and new users for the Information Security Stack Exchange. Exploited software vulnerabilities trigger the most developer questions on the public platform. Yet, the onset of the pandemic and the shift to remote work prompted a higher volume of questions on Stack Overflow than any breach in platform history.

The battle to protect against threat actors will never subside, but there is an optimistic takeaway to be found here. We’re seeing a culture of learning in action. While vulnerabilities are inevitable, developers shifted from just reacting to breaches to proactively trying to secure everyone during the move to remote work. When a security incident happens, the Stack Overflow community asks questions and looks for answers. And as we all know, learning starts with asking a question.

We’d love to know what you think. If you have a suggestion for what we should explore next, email us or share on social with the hashtag #StackOverflowKnows.

The post Shift to remote work prompted more cybersecurity questions than any breach appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Today, we want to celebrate those communities that have endured for ten years, maintaining strong, active communities and building up a wealth of knowledge in their domains. The six sites that have anniversaries this quarter cover a lot of diverse ground, but still find new questions to ask. These sites are listed below, along with some links to interesting or popular questions and the top tag on each site.

Cryptography

A site for questions and answers about cryptography. Most questions are about modern cryptography, and the site design reflects this. The site supports MathJax / TeX, as cryptography is based on mathematics. Many capable users can answer even the most technical questions. The site welcomes questions about topics such as post-quantum cryptography, cryptographic hash functions, and algorithms such as RSA and AES.

– Interesting Questions: One, Two, & Three / Most Popular Tag: encryption

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Signal Processing

A site with high-quality answers for practitioners of the art and science of signal, image, and video processing. Questions about theory, practice, algorithm recommendations and debugging, or conceptual topics are welcomed. 

– Most Upvoted Question / Most Popular Tag: image-processing

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French Language and Usage

A site for linguists, teachers, students, and anyone interested in the finer points of the French language. The site welcomes a variety of questions about French (including regional or dialectal variants). 

– Most Upvoted Question / Most Popular Tag: grammaire

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Christianity

A site for committed Christians, experts in Christianity, and those interested in learning more. You may ask questions about any area of Christianity. Your own beliefs do not not preclude you from asking questions, but all questions must be directly related to Christianity. Questions about the history of denominations, understanding the Bible from the perspective of a specific viewpoint, explanations of the beliefs and practices of a denomination or movement, and biblical basis for beliefs and practice are welcome. 

– Most Upvoted Question / Most Popular Tag: catholicism

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Bitcoin

A site for Bitcoin users and enthusiasts. If you have a question about how to use or accept Bitcoins, the Bitcoin network or protocol, the open-source Bitcoin client or other Bitcoin software, technologies or events that are applicable and relevant to the Bitcoin network and users of the Bitcoin currency in the past, present, or future, then this site is for you.

– Interesting Questions: One, Two, & Three / Most Popular Tag: bitcoin-core

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Linguistics

A question and answer site for linguists, language enthusiasts, and people who have some interest in how languages work. The questions could be about the evolution of aspects of language, the various theories used for understanding linguistic phenomena, morphology, syntax, phonology, and many other topics that come under the scientific study of language.

– Most Upvoted Question / Most Popular Tag: syntax

We’ll be highlighting our proud ten-year-olds every quarter. There’s a whole lot of knowledge on our Stack Exchange sites, and we want to make sure that everyone has a chance to see what they offer. Come back in a few months to see who else has made it to ten years!

The post Check out the Stack Exchange sites that turned ten years old in Q3 appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Collectives

With the launch of its Collective, GitLab will continue to build on the collaboration that already exists with the community of developers and contributors using its platform.  

“Community is at the core of GitLab’s mission. With more than 1 million active license users and a contributor community of more than 2,400 people, we have a strong community aligned with our mission – to create a world where everyone can contribute,” said Brendan O’Leary, Senior Developer Evangelist at GitLab.

“GitLab’s Collective on Stack Overflow aligns with our mission. This new space will help us to expand our open source collaboration so contributors and developers can share and learn about version control, CI/CD, DevSecOps, and all-remote workflows. We believe the GitLab Collective will be a place where we can discover feedback and create opportunities for the GitLab community to contribute to Stack Overflow’s community.”

GitLab’s Collective is defined by a set of specific tags related to the company’s technology such as ‘gitlab’ and ‘gitlab-ci’. Users who join the collective can easily find the best answers and get in-depth technical product information about GitLab’s platform and application through how-to guides and knowledge articles. They can also see how they stack up on the leaderboard, and top contributors can be selected by GitLab as Recognized Members, users the company approves to respond to questions or recommend answers.  

We launched Collectives on Stack Overflow with Google Cloud and Go Language earlier this summer, and have already seen thousands of community members joining in. The contributions of the Collectives’ community, taken together, can help the millions of curious question askers who visit Stack Overflow, as well as users looking for a solution to a problem or a way to improve their skills. GitLab’s efforts to expand the pool of open source collaborators aligns with our mission, to empower the world to develop technology through collective knowledge. 

The post GitLab launches Collective on Stack Overflow appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

In the responses to my series of questions to the community on Meta Stack Exchange, a fairly consistent theme was a desire for more information more frequently, but also a desire to see how all the pieces fit together. How does the work of the Community Team, for instance, tie to work happening across the organization? I’m going to make a concerted effort over the next year to bring you more of that explanatory flavor.

A few months ago, I presented our roadmap for Q3, and Q4 was very… missing. So here’s the modified Q3/Q4 community roadmap:

Essentially, we’re taking on five new projects for Q4, and wrapping up a couple of stragglers from Q3.  We’ve also temporarily shelved a project (Mod Lifecycle and Tenure—the “emeritus” program) for want of the development resources that we need.  We’ll revisit it early in 2022.

Three of these projects are community-facing (my “standing offer,” the Mod Quick Start Guide, and the Winter Bash), but you will notice that the other two are specifically called out as research programs with no programmatic changes. For those programs, you will not see any changes in policy or practice—as it says, they are for our own research purposes only.  

Let’s take a look at the projects one by one:

• My standing offer: Today I released details to the mod teams (on their private team) about my “standing offer.” I am committing to meet with any mod team that wants to talk to me, and to discuss issues of importance for them or to update them on the work of the Community team. There are some pre-conditions: more details in the teams post. This project is being coordinated by the Curator Support team.

• Moderator’s Quick Start Guide: We envision that this will present practical advice on how to use moderation tools and moderation theory for a mod who’s just taking up this role. This is not envisioned to be a comprehensive handbook on moderation: it’s a concise version for a new mod who doesn’t have much time. This is also a Curator Support project.

• Winter Bash: We’ve already begun ramping up support for Winter Bash. This is a fun project that the team looks forward to each year. I can’t wait to see what they come up with this December. If you aren’t familiar with Winter Bash, check out last year’s post. This is a Community Operations team project.

• Research: Weighted Close Votes: Catija will be driving a project on whether or not to provide extra weight to votes to close and reopen when they are from certain contributors, or those meeting a particular set of qualifications – similar to gold tag badges and duplicate closures. The first question is whether we should do this or not and, if so, the second question is how. This is an information-gathering project so that we can talk about it in a data-driven way and will rely heavily on discussions and feedback from the community. This is also a Community Operations team project.

• Research: Dependencies on Chat: I’ve been amazed at the amount of things that are integrating into our chat systems. So we’re going to make a comprehensive list of systems that integrate to chat. This is everything from my team’s own escalation and work handling bots up to the Charcoal spam-fighting network’s systems. This project will be run by Slate, who is temporarily seconded to the Trust and Safety team for this project (which ordinarily would be run by Trust and Safety, but we haven’t quite completed the hiring and onboarding process for their new team members yet).

Project work like this ideally takes up about 20% of the team’s time. Most of the remaining 80% is taken up in handling tickets from mods, some regular ongoing work (the mod survey, onboarding new team members, interviewing, etc.), and providing internal consulting to the rest of the organization. 

So that’s the plan for Q4, and since it’s now done and published (and early at that!), I suppose that means it’s time to get started on planning for 2022! I welcome your feedback, of course, and any ideas that you have for 2022, either here in comments, in answers on Meta, or by email to me: [myfirstname] [at] stackoverflow [dot] com.

The post The Loop: Our Community department roadmap for Q4 2021 appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Cloud adoption skyrockets

The migration from localized to cloud computing has been accelerating for more than a decade, so perhaps it’s no surprise that 90% of respondents to our latest survey indicated that their companies increased usage of the cloud over the last year. It was a global phenomenon, with every region showing at least 75% of its participants growing their cloud adoption. While we know that the pandemic accelerated many aspects of digital transformation, we wanted to see if we could make an educated guess at exactly how big of a leap forward the worldwide lockdowns precipitated. 

So, how can we quantify this acceleration? Well, the response to our survey matched a trend seen in the activity on our public site. Before the pandemic, users were asking a little over 6,000 cloud related questions each month. The number of monthly questions related to the cloud grew by about 500 questions per year between 2018 and 2020. When lockdowns began across 100 countries in March of 2020, however, we saw an enormous spike, with average questions per month peaking around 8,000 by the end of that month and remaining near that level through the end of 2020. We saw about four years worth of our average annual growth, in other words, in the span of just three months. 

Because so many developers use Stack Overflow each week for work, we can look at this activity as a proxy for what was happening inside of companies around the globe. A massive uptake of new tools led to a tsunami of new questions, and this elevated level of collaboration on the platform lasted over a year. As we enter the final quarter of 2021, however, the tide is clearly ebbing, and total question volume is roughly where you would expect if the growth trend prior to the pandemic had held steady. There are currently over 250,000 questions about the top three cloud providers – AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud – across Stack Overflow.

What if COVID-19 never happened?

There is an obvious spike around cloud related tags in the early days of COVID-19. This is likely due to organizations transitioning to remote work. But what if none of this happened? By using historical data and a Bayesian structural time-series model we can predict what the count of questions asked on Stack Overflow would look like after February 2020 sans pandemic.

If there was no shift to remote work, we would have expected to see an average of 6.20K questions asked per month, totaling 111.52K from February 2020 to September 2021. Instead, we observed an average of 7.13K questions asked per month, totaling 128.35K. In relative terms, this is an increase of +15% which is likely due to remote work and unlikely to be due to random fluctuations.

Types of clouds

“Out of the box” public clouds appear to be the most common among developers.

Definitions

• Public clouds run on server architecture that’s delivered via the internet and shared across organizations. Multiple organizations can run on the same server hardware, which is referred to as multitenancy. Examples include AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
• Private clouds run on servers  dedicated solely to a single organization, whether the servers are on the organization’s premises (on-prem) or in a distant data center. Computing resources still grow and shrink according to need, but there are never two cloud instances on the same hardware. 
• Hybrid cloud is any environment that uses a combination of both public and private clouds. The definitions for hybrid clouds vary; some consider any system with two clouds of any type—two public clouds, for example—as hybrid, while others have defined it as a mix of cloud and on prem servers.

Just like we’re seeing hybrid work environments becoming the wave of the future, hybrid cloud environments are the most popular among respondents, particularly those working for large organizations. Smaller organizations are most likely to have used a public cloud, while larger organizations with 7500+ are most likely to have a hybrid cloud. Perhaps this indicates that startups are using public clouds to iterate and grow, while larger organizations look to move more of their data to more secure private or on premises servers.

Who’s developing for the cloud? 

We saw a fairly even split between those developing for the cloud (42%), and those who don’t (39%). When you combine those who do with those who want to (19%), however, developers interested in the cloud become a clear majority.

Those developing for the cloud are most likely doing it in a professional environment (73%). In contrast, very few are developing for the cloud as a student (3%). Not an unexpected result—cloud computing comes with recurring monthly charges, so hobbyists (22%) and students are less likely to have the resources to develop there. 

Conclusion

A massive digital transformation happening in such a short span of time is bound to bring new challenges. Recent research found that “…since early 2020, remote employees reported that skills involving cloud computing, cybersecurity, and data storage were most lacking in their daily routines. The report also found that most remote employees’ confidence to do their current jobs was down 13% from a year ago as office adjustments were made.” We hope those in need of help can find great questions and answers to support them on Stack Overflow. What kind of questions are visitors engaging with when it comes to the cloud? For curious readers, we included three of the most popular questions from the last year below.

The most viewed cloud questions in 2021

We already mentioned above that COVID-19 accelerated cloud migration, but what where people asking about? One way of answering that questions would be to look at the most viewed cloud related questions this year. Below we show the most viewed cloud questions for the top three cloud providers, Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services. 

Azure

Total Views: 166,719

The most viewed cloud-related question on Stack Overflow this year belongs to Azure, specifically Azure Virtual Machines. Although this question was asked over eight years ago, it continues to help developers every day.

Why am I getting “Cannot Connect to Server – A network-related or instance-specific error”?

Google Cloud Platform 

Total Views: 118,009

The most viewed Google Cloud Platform question is the perfect reminder that restarting your computer or, in this case, your server is always a viable option when troubleshooting.

error NG6002: Appears in the NgModule.imports of AppModule, but could not be resolved to an NgModule class

Amazon Web Services

Total Views: 84,930

For AWS, their most viewed question this year was asked less than 12 months ago. So while Azure’s most viewed question was asked eight years ago, this question is a reminder that if you are running into an error, you are probably not alone.

Composer detected issues in your platform: Your Composer dependencies require a PHP version “>= 7.3.0”

The post Pandemic lockdowns accelerated cloud migration by three to four years appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From this seed, an entire universe of Q&A sites blossomed, becoming the Stack Exchange Network. Some of these sites focused on topics closely related to software development, but many others centered on topics—cooking, parenting, home repair—that had nothing to do with computer programming, but fostered a devoted community of experts who built up tremendous libraries of knowledge in their particular field. Now we’ve got over 175 sites building individual libraries. 

Today we are celebrating a group of sites that passed their 10th birthday during the first half of 2021. They have helped millions learn new languages, repair their cars, and sharpen their skills at code review. If you have a favorite question, answer, or experience from one of these sites, please share it in the comments. We’ll add our favorites to the post.

One site that also has an anniversary but deserves a special mention is Area 51, which serves as the idea generator and incubator for the rest of the sites in the Stack Exchange network.

The post Celebrating the Stack Exchange sites that turned ten years old appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

We’re excited to continue working towards our existing goals and priorities with no changes to our focus on creating and maintaining a vibrant community and our core SaaS business model. With Prosus, we can accelerate plans and be even more ambitious about scaling our public and private platforms.

Over the last quarter, we revisited our mission statement to reflect our unwavering commitment to knowledge sharing and consolidated the many versions that have surfaced over the last several years into one:

Empower the world to develop technology
through collective knowledge.

We, and Prosus, understand that our commitment to spreading knowledge and building community is the engine of our success. Democratizing information is the only way to empower learners to develop the future of technology. We hope to further invest in the community so an even wider group can benefit from it – technologists in countries around the world who are all on their unique learning journeys.

Public Platform and Community

Q2 was a time of strong growth for our public platform. We saw more new accounts being created than ever, with April, May, and June trending at or above our highest levels from last year. Part of the credit here certainly goes to our public platform and community teams, which continue to push improvements to the user experience and work to ensure our sites are becoming more welcoming, inclusive, and diverse. But there are also macro trends at work. 

As we join Prosus’s edtech portfolio, we do so alongside companies like Udemy, Brainly, and Codecademy. The number of people around the globe seeking careers as software developers is increasing. So too is the number of professions, from finance to life sciences to climate studies, where writing code is not the primary task, but is fundamental in transforming those professions to become more automated and to drive innovation.  

As our community grows, we must continue to invest in supporting it. As I’ve outlined to all our employees, keeping the community at our center is a core value. We’re pleased to announce that we’ve recently hired a new VP of community, Philippe Beaudette. Philippe has a storied career, beginning in the days of AOL chat rooms, through the early days of Wikipedia, and most recently at Reddit. He brings a great wealth of experience in building safe, inclusive communities where users feel empowered to express their curiosity and share their knowledge. We’re thrilled that Philippe, with his deep community background, will be hyper focused on working closely with the community to help make the Stack Exchange ecosystem even more vibrant. You can read his blog post on our upcoming roadmap and listen to a podcast interview with him below.

Speaking of hiring, we have over 100 open roles across our company. If you want to be part of a high growth organization that works to accomplish a powerful mission at global scale, take a look and see if there is an opportunity available that speaks to you. 

Product

Q2 saw the launch of a new product, Collectives on Stack Overflow, which aims to increase value for our users, community, and clients by organizing Q&A and Articles around a certain technical topic, for example a programming language or cloud services platform. We had two great customers come onboard to help us launch this product: Google Cloud and Google’s Go Language, and we will be announcing many more Collectives in coming months. Our approach to development is product-led AND community-driven. By learning from and serving our community, we can be a force multiplier for companies that want to empower users of their technology. 

The two Collectives we’ve launched for Google Cloud and GOLang are reaching hundreds of millions of Stack Overflow users.

We’re excited for this new approach to organizing knowledge and community on Stack Overflow, and have already seen over 10,000 users sign up to follow our Collectives. I believe that Collectives will help our community to organize and share knowledge around clusters of technology, for example the wide array of development happening in the blockchain space. We recently ran a survey on this topic, and got some fascinating results. There are Stack Exchanges focused on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Cardano, Iota, EOS.IO, Tezos, and Monero. I’m sure more will emerge as this space continues to grow.

Collectives is part of our Reach and Relevance product offerings, and we’ve had an incredible start to this line of business in 2021. Earlier this year we combined our Advertising and Talent products under one umbrella. We moved away from discrete hiring to focus more on advertising and brand awareness. We are seeing tremendous traction in this space, with firms like AWS, JP Morgan Chase, and Accenture coming on board for brand awareness campaigns.

Just as there are an ever growing number of new users signing up for the public platform, there is a steady increase in the number of organizations that want to reach developers. Some are looking to hire great talent, others want developers to try their product, and others simply want developers to use their platform, tools, or ecosystem. We can help them do it all, and we do it while respecting developer’s privacy and avoiding invasive tracking.

As I’ve written before, Predictable and Reliable Financial Performance is one of our strategic priorities. In Q2 we introduced another new product, sponsored podcasts, and our content marketing business is on track to more than double in size over last year. Put together, Advertising and Collectives delivered an exceptional quarter, the biggest in the company’s history.

Q2 also saw continued traction towards our other strategic priority for 2021: Product-led Transformation. After our launch of our Freemium Teams tier in Q1, we saw a steady stream of thousands signups and users trying out the Teams product. From storied innovators like Xerox to rising unicorns like Doctlib, we continue to see an ever growing cohort of organizations leveraging Stack Overflow for Teams in a range of use cases to ultimately innovate faster through knowledge sharing and collaboration.

One key metric we focus on as we evaluate how our users see value in our Teams product is  something we call Knowledge Reuse. While the number of questions and answers added to a Team are meaningful, we believe the true value is best quantified by understanding how often users are able to quickly find a solution to the problem at hand. On our public site, we note how many people a particular user has reached with their answers. It’s incredible to realize that the contributions of an individual can help tens, even hundreds of millions of others learn and grow.

The same outsized impact happens within private Teams. At companies like Xerox, Doctolib, and Unqork, knowledge is reused hundreds of times a month. That’s hundreds of emails or chat messages avoided, time saved for the person asking the question and for their colleagues. 

One of our most viewed questions on Stack Overflow is a question that asks “What is a NullPointerException, and how do I fix it?” That was asked 12 years and 7 months ago. It has 31 different answers or solutions provided. That question has been viewed 3.2 million times. That’s 3.2 millions times that knowledge was reused. We have one piece of knowledge on our own internal instance that’s had more than 1,000 views in the past two years – How do I submit a Salesforce Case?

Another major impact Teams can have is to break down silos within an organization. Great solutions may not come from the teammate or department you expect. We continue to use Teams internally, where it helps us learn, share, and grow. There are great conversations happening across legal, marketing, sales, product, and engineering. Wisetech Global tells us that at their company all hands, Stack Overflow for Teams has been used to help discuss and debate the best ways to implement some of the company’s core mantras and values. “We have recently been running a program where we’re taking a number of the mantras that we hold dear in the business and we’ve been amplifying that to the global audience,” explains Ian Larsen, GM of software operations. “We’ve been using Stack Overflow for Teams as a discussion forum. It’s a place for people to raise questions, get additional clarity, or just discuss the nuances. So I think that has been great.”

Diversity & Inclusion

A year ago I made a commitment to include updates on our diversity and inclusion progress in these quarterly posts. We are making a significant investment in DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) at the company. We are compiling and preparing to share DEI metrics with employees, evolving our hiring practices, rolling out inclusion training to all employees, and we are in the process of hiring a Director of DEI to lead these efforts. We’ve also committed to a quarterly DEI newsletter compiled by our growing number of affinity groups collectively, which is launching this week.

Over the last three months, we’ve also hosted panels featuring employees and external experts open to the full company on issues and experiences facing our Asian & Pacific Islander community and our LGBTQIA+ community. Hearing shared and individual experiences was eye opening, and I truly believe learning about others’ experiences makes us a stronger, more thoughtful organization in the long run.

There is so much work to be done, but we’re continuing to take steps towards a diverse and inclusive culture that we believe sets the tone for the community we foster online.

Conclusion

As we look out to the second half of 2021, there are many big opportunities we are considering. How can we leverage the global scale of Prosus to expand our business and bring a broader cohort of users, from around the world, onto our public platform? How do we enable beginner developers to leverage Stack Overflow so they become engaged participants, not just casual visitors? What kind of strategic partnerships and alliances are possible with other edtech companies, leveraging our scale and their expertise so that Stack Overflow can offer a wider variety of options for finding solutions and learning new skills? 

The completion of our deal with Prosus isn’t the only exciting news I get to share today. Today we published our annual Developer Survey. It contains many fascinating insights, but one in particular stood out to me. For the rising cohort of coders under the age of 18, online resources like videos, websites, and blogs are more popular than books and school combined, a statistic that doesn’t hold for any of our other age cohorts. Overall the developer profession is full of new joiners, with more than 50% indicating they have been coding for less than a decade, and more than 35% having less than five years in the trade.

So much of what drives us is the desire to empower this new generation of developers and technologists. The resources available to us through this acquisition and the continued growth of our product and public platform give me great confidence that we will continue to unlock new potential, and that we will grow Stack Overflow into an enduring global brand with a vibrant community that continues to empower the world to develop technology through collective knowledge.

The post Communities are a catalyst for technology development appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

This year’s survey was a little different than ones in years past. We opened our 2020 survey in February, and by the time we got around to publishing the results, the reality of work and daily life had shifted dramatically for people around the globe. The pandemic continues to exert a strong influence on the shape of our economy and society, so we tried to keep this year’s survey shorter and focused on things outside the traditional office.

We learned a lot about the way developers learn. For the rising cohort of coders under the age of 18, online resources like videos and blogs are more popular than books and school combined, a statistic that doesn’t hold for any of our other age cohorts. Overall the developer profession is full of new joiners, with more than 50% indicating they have been coding for less than a decade, and more than 35% having less than five years in the trade.

Roughly a third of respondents responded to our question on mental health. This is twice the percentage that offered feedback in 2020 and may reflect the growing awareness of mental health’s importance and the impact of the ongoing pandemic.

Another trend that may be linked to the pandemic is work status. We see a greater percentage of respondents working part-time or in school, while those indicating full time employment decreased. This may reflect the effects of the pandemic, which saw workers from all industries stepping back and reevaluating their relationship to a five day work week and in-person employment.

As always, there were a few new languages on our leaderboards and some interesting shifts among the most Loved, Dreaded, and Wanted technologies. We also introduced a new insight to this section, measuring technologies developers have Worked With vs. Want to Work With. There are some very cool, interactive visuals showing the languages, databases, and frameworks that existing developers want to migrate towards. 

Be sure to check out all the data and insights from the full Dev Survey here. Beyond this annual event, we are expanding our research efforts and planning to run a number of smaller, more topically focused surveys throughout the year. We published one on blockchain technology earlier this year and have one about the cloud coming up soon. 

We recently updated our mission statement at Stack Overflow. As an organization, we strive to empower the world to develop technology through collective knowledge. Your contributions allow us to build and refine our knowledge of the developer community and the state of software. As always, we will make the data from the survey available to the public shortly, so stay tuned for information on how to download. Thanks for helping us to create this report, please enjoy and share, and we’ll see you again next year.

The post The 2021 Stack Overflow Developer Survey is here! appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

I’ve been working with online communities since the days of AOL chat rooms, and have held community roles at Wikipedia and Reddit. You can hear more about my experience and why I’m so excited for this opportunity in this recent podcast episode.

Ok, enough about me. I’m going to take you through what the Community Management and Public Platform teams accomplished in Q2 and what to expect during Q3.

Q2 2021 recap

Our Community Management team – directly supporting moderators, curators, and the general user base – is growing and changing! We’ve added two new community managers, have two more starting in August, and have moved one staff member (me) to a VP role. We’re also opening up two positions on Trust and Safety, the sub-team that investigates various threats to the site and behavioral issues. Check out the job posting and apply if you are qualified!

Q2 was a busy time for us. 

On the community project side, we completed a number of initiatives: we reset the community ads program, wrote guidance for mods about how to use the mod tools, and began research into reasons for closed questions. We also rewrote some mod templates that were unclear or outdated. The changes will be rolled out to the public platform soon. Along with projects handled largely by our team, we also supported a number of other initiatives throughout the company, such as the deployment of Collectives and the 2021 Dev Survey. Last but not least, after a successful launch last year, we’re excited to be supporting the 2nd annual “Community-a-thon” for staff right now.

Meanwhile, Public Platform, the product development team that builds features for Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange communities, accomplished the following in Q2:

• launched a crazy-fun April Fool’s prank that produced some interesting insights.
• wrapped up a multi-quarter initiative to make it easier for Community Managers (CMs) to manage moderator elections.
• released onboarding guidance to make it easier for both new and experienced users to understand how Review Queues, our system for handling problematic posts, work.
• continued product discovery on the issue of outdated answers on Stack Overflow by collecting and analyzing a data set of less-than-optimal answers.

Q3 2021 Community Management team roadmap

Below are the major initiatives we’ll be focusing on in Q3. 

Community Operations

Moving some support tickets to Community Ops

For the operations team, led by Rosie, one major piece of work that’s happening is that we’re taking over a large support responsibility. For the last half-decade or so, the Stack Overflow support team has been triaging and handling community support emails that really should be handled by community managers. It’s a decent sized lift — about 2,000 a month — and it will require that we update our existing templates as well. 

Three vote closure adaptation

We will also continue our experiments with the three-vote closure adaptation, which allows for three votes on a close/reopen task rather than the customary five. We ran a pilot program for this last quarter, and we’re into an analysis phase at this point, prior to making decisions about where and how to implement the adjustment.

Site life-cycle analysis

I know that many of you will be thrilled to know that we’re looking at site lifecycles – from the beginning of the nascent site in Area 51 through the beta process and into graduation as a “full” site. We’ll be trying to standardize some practices for sites to establish a clean and clear roadmap for new sites. We are also hoping to create a fair and repeatable process for evaluating sites that are in danger of being shut down.  This will include determining what the process should be for having their members join a similar community (while importing their questions and reputation there). A component of this work is evaluating sites that are currently flagged as “beta” and determining whether they should have that label removed.

Trust and Safety

New employee onboarding refresh

We’re updating a ton of documentation for new team members. The “ramp” time to get a new hire to become fully functional as a community-facing Stack employee is a long one, but history tells us that the better organized and carefully crafted the onboarding process, the easier onboarding is for new teammates. Trust and Safety work has traditionally not been an area of focus for us, so Cesar’s team will be helping to update the onboarding process to reflect their work and to give solid advice to those who join the company.

Closed question reasons 

The T&S team is also working on evaluating closed questions and the reasons why they are closed. They’re looking into whether it makes sense to standardize some options for this — for instance, should all sites have an option to close questions for a particular set of reasons? If so, what should those reasons be? What are the requirements to have a question reopened once closed under those reasons? Once this work is done, they will work to create a set of guidelines for closing that are standardized across the network.

Oh, and with a little bit of luck, we will onboard a couple of new community managers to this team as well. 

Curator Support

At the same time, the curator support team, led by Juan, will continue its focus on our moderators and power users. This quarter, they’ll be onboarding two new community managers, in addition to their standard work (mod surveys, swag, mod/staff quarterly meeting), so they will take on only one additional project: mod tenure (the emeritus program), which is a project that looks at the overall arc of tenure for moderators. It also looks at ways to honor those who have done excellent work for the communities they serve for some time who may wish to step down. 

This will likely form the corpus of a “moderator emeritus” program, one which will allow communities to recognize and honor those who have served as moderators, while also giving them a consistent and recognizable stable of mentors for new mods and new users. We will recognize these emeritus moderators with some icon similar to the diamond that mods wear today. They will also retain access to a more limited set of the moderator tools, to allow them to surge in and support existing moderators if needed, but also allow them a graceful transition out of the role.

Q3 2021 Public Platform roadmap

These are our top priorities for Q3.

Review queues

We are wrapping up the final phase of this longstanding project by making changes to how posts flow through the various queues. This includes:

• splitting up the First posts queue into First questions and First answers, so that experienced users can more easily evaluate the quality of new users’ posts.
• redesigning how closed posts become eligible for reopening.
• Making it easier for reviewers to take concrete actions in the First questions, First answers, and Late answers queues.

Outdated answers

We are continuing our product-discovery work on Stack Overflow answer quality by conducting experiments related to how we sort answers. We will be testing the effect of sorting by highest score vs. pinning the answer that the question asker viewed as most helpful to the top. This is a long-standing community request that we hope to finally address. We will also be exploring the concept of a Trending sort that weights recent votes more heavily than older votes.

New user onboarding

We are continuing product discovery on how to best guide new users through the process of successfully asking their first questions. We will experiment with the copy shown to new users when asking questions to help them learn about site mechanics and successfully complete their tasks. In addition, we’re conducting extensive research on different ways new users can engage with the Stack Overflow community and get the support and information they need to start off on the right foot.

Stacks editor alpha test

In Q1, we kicked off an alpha test to get feedback from the community on what is needed to bring a new editor experience to the network. Based on the feedback we received, we are making incremental progress on tackling bugs and feature requests.

….and straight on toward morning *

It’s going to be a very full quarter, and I’m particularly excited that in addition to the two new CMs recently hired, we’ll be adding four more to the team. We’re looking both inside and outside the Stack community for qualified candidates – as a reminder, we’ve got the job description and application posted, so please apply if you’re qualified!  

On a personal note, as this blog post is being published, I am finishing the first thirty days of my new role as VP of Community, and I want to particularly thank my team, the whole staff, but especially all the community members who have so patiently answered my questions and given me great ideas and feedback. I look forward to meeting many more of you!

^{* –}(with apologies to Chindraba).

Please note: we welcome your feedback on these roadmaps on meta.

The post The Loop: Our Community & Public Platform Roadmap for Q3 2021 appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Before I dive in, here are some key things to know:

• We’ve collected a lot of feedback from users and moderators on the site, as well as potential customers. We’ve spent over a hundred hours in 1-on-1 interviews with users and potential customers who have generously given their time to research sessions. We’ve also collected thousands of survey responses, and spent a lot of time reading through feature requests and feedback about past projects on Meta. 
• While we wanted a representative set of feedback, we had a focus on engaging with active, highly contributing Stack Overflow members and moderators. In particular we had a panel of 12 users and moderators who met with us consistently for the last year, and whose feedback has been invaluable.
• This isn’t the end of us collecting feedback – this is still a Beta release. We will continue iterating on these features based on new feedback and insights. I encourage you all to continue sharing feedback, and if you’re interested, to also opt-in to research participation in your email settings so my team and I can contact you for more detailed feedback.

Background and context

When the idea of companies having ‘public teams’ or ‘spaces’ was first brought up, my mind went to all the ways it could possibly go wrong. But I was also really curious about whether there was any genuine value that organizations could add for our users. So this sparked our first big research and design effort: a 5-day design sprint, attended by a wide range of teams from across the company; product management, community management, product design, engineering, data, product research, and more. 

While Stack Overflow needs paid products in order to operate, we want to do this by adding value to the community, not changing things for the worse. So we settled on the following mission statement for our design sprint: “How might we enable companies to build relationships with the Stack Overflow community in a way that improves Stack Overflow as a resource for developers?”

During the design sprint, there were a few things we settled on early:

• We should aim to not change the guidelines around what is on topic for Stack Overflow. This means we should be thinking about organizations who are technology providers, and who likely already have technologies with active tags on Stack Overflow.
• In order for organizations to add value, they would need to directly participate in Q&A in some form – not as a channel for customer support, but as a way for technology providers to share their knowledge in a productive way.
• While so much of our work has been focused on tearing down the barriers to entry for newer users, this would be an ideal project to also focus on where we can add features for more engaged users: what new ways could they participate?

We eventually came to a potential solution (Collectives) which we felt adhered to these criteria, and addressed our initial design sprint mission. The concept consisted of a few parts, including: badges on user cards for verified employees/topic experts, a way for technology providers to indicate an existing answer represented best practice, and some kind of page for an organization to showcase their relevant  tags and other pertinent information.

Early Feedback

The first time we researched these concepts with users (as part of the 5-day design sprint), we learned a lot. One common theme that emerged was that these concepts could help instill trust in an answer, help answer-seekers get to solutions quicker, and potentially help with the issues of outdated answers and identifying canonical answers when it came to duplicates. On the other hand we were cautioned to be careful with not changing things like sort order, so we wouldn’t hurt the democratised nature of the site. 

A couple of other highlights from these early research sessions included:

• When it came to verified employees/topic experts, our research participants saw value here, but only if we maintained relevance. It was critical that these badges were scoped; they should only appear when a user participated on tags which they actually had expertise in. We also got positive feedback about the fact this would be a great way to recognize members on the site who continually contribute their expertise to certain topic areas. On the flip side, we learned that the word ‘verified’ had the wrong connotations (thus beginning a near 18 month struggle for us on what to call this role, with at least 15 different potential names…). Verified reminded participants of social media, and we have no desire to become a social media platform.
• The idea of technology providers being able to mark existing answers on the platform as representing best practice was very popular in research. Some users pointed out that this could potentially be a useful way of designating a canonical answer when handling duplicates. Back then we were calling this concept ‘endorsed answers’, which was not a popular term, and one that non-native English speakers felt was particularly unclear (we weren’t having a good run with copywriting!). So we renamed this to ‘recommended answers’, and this is the one part of the concept that hasn’t changed significantly since our design sprint.

At the end of the design sprint, we were still just scratching the surface of what we needed to learn from Stack Overflow users. We had a million questions about how these features may help or hurt the community, what would make a good collective, what additional features might make this idea more complete, etc. So we began a series of what we called ‘research sprints’, which were essentially intensive blocks of focused research, aiming to address our biggest open questions and hypotheses.

Key findings: Articles

The appetite for longer form content was something we’d heard in the past, but also dug into as part of our research sprints. For example, 23.1% of responses to a survey we ran of visitors to Stack Overflow (n=1010) said they believed how-to guides would be a positive addition to the site. We also know that plenty of contributors have tried to make content that would really be better suited to an article fit into a Q&A format. Overall, the feedback we got through surveys and interviews was that, with the right guardrails, this could be a positive addition to the site.

Some users were cautious because of a project that we had sunsetted a few years ago called Documentation. There were several issues we heard about when it came to Documentation, but the ones brought up by our users most often were the influx of poor quality or repetitive content, as well as issues introduced by users unfairly being able to gain reputation. These were, of course, problems we were keen not to repeat. So that brought us to our first key decision on this feature: at the time of launch we are limiting Article creation to Recognized Members of a collective. However, we are planning on launching a review process where any member of a collective can submit Articles that will then be reviewed by the Recognized Members of that collective. 

In our customer research, something that we discussed was that in order to make this review process successful, customers should be clear about the type and style of Article that would make a good addition to the collective. Hopefully this should go some way to start addressing the first issue we saw with Documentation, helping to raise the bar quality-wise and ensuring that we aren’t just seeing repetition of existing help docs and documentation. 

The other factor when it came to quality was making sure voting was part of the mix. In our initial designs we only had an upvote-style button to signal good quality. But through research we heard that users didn’t want to see upvotes without downvotes. So we added a downvote option in, mirroring Q&A. Which brought us to the other problem we heard about with Documentation: reputation…

I’ll be honest in saying that rep was a topic we got extremely mixed reactions on. Nearly everyone we spoke to had a different take on how we should handle Article rep. So unfortunately, we haven’t found (and probably won’t find) a solution that everyone loves. Some users proposed a new bucket of rep for Article contributions, some encouraged us to offer more rep for Article creation to reflect the added effort it takes to write an Article, and others didn’t think rep should be part of the feature at all.

Key findings: Customer research

Another topic we discussed at length with users was how organizations would interact on the platform. We spoke to some who had attempted to facilitate developer support on Stack Overflow before, and to users who had seen these efforts unfold. Some of the key things we learned from these discussions were that participation from organizations still had to be deeply technical, not be promotional, and perhaps most importantly, we needed organizations to be consistently active to actually see a positive community impact.

This spurred several rounds of research with potential customer partners. We aimed to understand if they would be willing to make this kind of commitment, and if so, how we could facilitate ongoing participation with this initiative. 

This research led to two things. First, helping our team clearly understand what type of organization we wanted to work with: ones that would take the time to understand the site, ensure they were putting dedicated resources towards participation, and didn’t see it as purely an outlet for marketing. 

The second was that we would need to build out dashboards to help Recognzed Members target where to participate on the site. There’s obviously a million ways someone could contribute and we wanted to help make sure Collectives would enhance the community, and fill in the gaps. Part of the dashboards we designed include curated lists to help focus participation, e.g. one of the lists is ‘questions over 30 hours old without an answer’. We hope these curated dashboards will help our customers enrich their community on the site.

Key findings: Moderation

Besides customers and users, there was also another group we were keen to speak to: Stack Overflow Moderators. We were lucky enough to be able to consistently interview several mods throughout our discovery process. These interviews brought a unique perspective to our designs, and helped us consider rules, guidelines, and community health, as well as assess possible abuse vectors. 

Some key topics we covered with participating Stack Overflow moderators were how moderation of new features should be handled, and whether there should be any new rules. One big takeaway from these interviews was that the mod team should moderate the majority of new features, with the option to pull in a Community Manager from our staff where they feel appropriate. 

On the topic of new rules, we didn’t end up adding much. It was agreed that the new content types should still adhere to the existing Stack Overflow rules, licenses, and on-topic guidelines. However, the one thing we were encouraged to do was to provide our customers with guidelines and help docs to ensure their expectations about community norms and rules are set. We’ve done many demos and sessions with our launch customers, and have written several new help docs, and will continue adding to this as the product evolves.

There were dozens more topics we discussed in research, including: our ongoing saga with what to name the new roles and features, how to handle potentially off-topic questions, how to prevent vote fraud, assessing several new content types, possible incentives other than rep, notifications, and so much more. The time and energy that users and moderators have put into sharing their opinions and giving these concepts careful thought and consideration is amazing. If we had launched this initiative without any feedback it would have looked very different, and I am personally really happy about just how much we have learned from community members over the last year and a bit.

Check out the Go Language Collective and the Google Cloud Collective.

For those who want to understand what Product Research looks like at Stack Overflow: Through qualitative and quantitative research, we work to understand the needs, motivations, and pain points of the community and of customers to help guide the direction of our products. This is both in terms of what products should be built, but also how they should be executed. We see ourselves as advocates for the users, and often partner with Community Management, Product Management, Product Design, and Data.

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