From the blog

What developers with ADHD want you to know stackoverflow.blog
For this followup post, we spoke with two Stack Overflow software engineers with ADHD about their experiences being diagnosed as adults, taking medication, and communicating about their ADHD at work.

Self-healing code is the future of software development stackoverflow.blog
Developers love automating solutions to their problems, and with the rise of generative AI, this concept is likely to be applied to the creation, maintenance, and the improvement of code at an entirely new level.

How to keep your new tool from gathering dust stackoverflow.blog
If you’re thinking about rolling out a new tool to your team, you should also be thinking about how to get colleagues and management on board, how to embed that tool in your everyday workflows, and how to assess whether it’s working as it should. Tech that solves human problems needs humans to participate in those solutions.

MosaicML: Deep learning models for sale, all shapes and sizes (Ep. 577) stackoverflow.blog
Ben and Ryan talk with Jonathan Frankle and Abhinav Venigalla of MosaicML, a startup trying to make deep learning and generative AI efficient and accessible for everyone.

Dev Tool Focus: gitStream (pull request labels and routing) promotion
Reviewing pull requests is not…fun. But it can be more efficient with the use of gitStream’s novel workflow automation that adds custom labels (ex. Estimated review time) and even assigns code experts (better than CODEOWNERS). Try gitStream today for free!

Interesting questions

Has there ever been a C compiler where using ++i was faster than i++? retrocomputing.stackexchange.com
It’s the whole reason ++C was created.

How did the shift from constructed mathematical objects to modern mathematics occur? hsm.stackexchange.com
When mathematicians switched from “impossible to solve” to “the solution is impossibility.”

Is there a general theory of intelligence and design that would allow us to detect the presence of design in an object based solely on its properties? philosophy.stackexchange.com
Consider the microchip: Without knowing the purposes of a chip, it’s difficult to investigate its structure.

False proofs that look correct cs.stackexchange.com
Perilous proof pitfalls present ponderous programming puzzles.

Links from around the web

Tech debt metaphor maximalism apenwarr.ca
Tech debt is a metaphor for financial debt, and this essay extends that metaphor out to its logical extreme.

What’s new in CSS – WWDC23 developer.apple.com
Check out the new layout and typography features in CSS!

The case of the two billion characters long string giodicanio.com
Weird things can happen when you misinterpret a string pointer, but Assembly can help!

Rotate your file funct.app
If you’ve ever wanted to send a file securely, here’s a useful tool that’ll help you do so. Check out the handy little FAQ to see how it works!

Spending hours searching for answers at work? Find them faster in Stack Overflow for Teams. Get it free!

The post The Overflow #182: Self-healing code appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

More on our AI future: building course recommendations and a new data platform stackoverflow.blog
Our senior data scientist goes deep in talking about how we built our course recommendation engine.

CEO Update: Paving the road forward with AI and community at the center stackoverflow.blog
With all the significant changes in the industry, one thing has remained the same: companies are committed to driving productivity and efficiency throughout their organizations, and we continue to help our customers and community deliver both.

Building a safer community: Announcing our new Code of Conduct stackoverflow.blog
Since we last updated our Code of Conduct in 2019, the world has shifted dramatically. Hear from our VP of Community as we dive into our newest updates to the Code of Conduct.

This product could help build a more equitable workplace (Ep. 575) stackoverflow.blog
Today’s guest is Ilit Raz, founder and CEO of Joonko, which aims to build a more equitable workplace by automating the recruitment of diverse talent from underrepresented communities.

Is the document data model right for building your next app? promotion
The flexibility of the document model lets you shape data at every stage of development and benefit from the best structure that fits your needs. Watch on-demand “Intro to Data Modeling” to learn design patterns and use cases for the document model.

Interesting questions

Do stars become more metal-rich as they evolve? astronomy.stackexchange.com
It takes a big star to make real heavy metal.

Can you be fired for refusing to lie? law.stackexchange.com
Liar, liar or you’re fired?

Code readability or easy-to-debug? softwareengineering.stackexchange.com
Why not both? Both is good.

Would sending audio fragments over a phone call be considered a form of cryptology? crypto.stackexchange.com
Using pig latin might be more secure.

Links from around the web

Using the Y-axis to maintain focus and attention www.chrbutler.com
When you’re displaying information, you want to anchor the most important stuff just right.

useHooks usehooks.com
React is ten years old now. If you’re still getting the hang of it, here’s a great resource for modern hooks that you can use (that’s a pun).

Big tech’s biggest bets (or what it takes to build a billion-user platform) www.matthewball.vc
Here’s a deep dive into what the big tech companies decide to work on and the challenges they face when they do.

Email addresses are not primary user identities ntietz.com
A lot of software treats email addresses as immutable, forever entities, when that’s simply not true. Here’s a case study of how this can go wrong, and how you should handle emails in your applications.

Join a live webinar to learn the proven strategies for getting adoption and buy-in of new tools so that your team will use them to collaborate and be more productive. Register now!

The post The Overflow #181: More on our AI future appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

How to use marketing techniques to build a better resume stackoverflow.blog
If you want to get the attention of a employer, marketing has the techniques to get you there.

Modern work requires attention. Constant alerts steal it stackoverflow.blog
Attention—the time and freedom to focus—is your team’s most valuable resource.

For those who just don’t Git it (Ep. 573) stackoverflow.blog
Pierre-Étienne Meunier, creator and lead developer of open-source version control system Pijul, joins the home team to talk about version control, functional programming, and why OCaml is a source of French national pride.

How the creator of Angular is dehydrating the web (Ep. 574) stackoverflow.blog
Miško Hevery, creator of Angular and longtime Googler, tells Ben about building the future of web applications in his new role as CTO of Builder.io.

Gamification is a secret weapon when developing APIs promotion
The only constant is change – a company that built a global network by integrating into financial institutions, even before the world wide web was invented, shares how they’re rallying their development teams around an API first approach.

Interesting questions

How to convince management that not all software tools should be internally made? workplace.stackexchange.com
Do you want to be a tools company or is there some other product you’d like to ship?

How do we know the expansion of the universe is not centered around our position? astronomy.stackexchange.com
Discouraging main character syndrome on an astronomical scale.

References on how to interpret significant but dubious results (i.e. small numbers, plus borderline p-value) stats.stackexchange.com
Neither significant nor not significant but a secret third thing.

Can you DDOS a human brain? worldbuilding.stackexchange.com
Five people talking at once in a meeting should do it.

Links from around the web

How companies use dark patterns to keep you subscribed pudding.cool
Sometimes services make it difficult to unsubscribe using less than user-friendly UI techniques.

Eight annoying A/B testing mistakes every engineer should know posthog.com
A/B testing and feature flags are great for determining which features you’re going to release (and how)…if you do them right!

Partnering for a stable web youtu.be
The great browsers of today are working together to establish if a given API is safe to use on your website.

How not to add AI to your product www.fillout.com
AI is incredibly cool…but make sure it actually adds value to your product.

Spending hours searching for answers at work? Find them faster in Stack Overflow for Teams. Get it free!

The post The Overflow #180: The battle for your attention at work appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

Keep ‘em separated: Get better maintainability in web projects using the model-view-controller pattern stackoverflow.blog
MVC is an old pattern, but it’s still relevant to web apps.

Stung by OWASP? Chatting with the creator of the most popular web app scanner (Ep. 570) stackoverflow.blog
Simon Bennetts, founder and project lead of OWASP ZAP, joins the home team to talk about how he came to create the world’s most-used web app scanner, why open-source projects need long-term contributors, and how recent AI advancements could introduce new security vulnerabilities.

Great code isn’t enough. Developers need to brag about it (Ep. 571) stackoverflow.blog
On this episode we chat with Dagna Bieda, a career coach who specializes in helping developers and engineers level up their careers. She shares why developers should promote the value of their contributions, how soft skills can make or break a coding career, and why a moment of burnout inspired her to start coaching.

Automate your pre-merge workflow for dev efficiency promotion
Are your pull requests getting stuck in review? This workshop will help you create organization-wide code review automation with programmable workflows and policy as code to unblock the merge process and improve development efficiency, quality, and security. Register now!

Interesting questions

Apollo: what was the big deal? space.stackexchange.com
Pfft, first man in space. My kid could do that.

Does a rock falling down a hill perform computation? philosophy.stackexchange.com
And it can run Doom, too.

Why is my dryer radioactive? physics.stackexchange.com
Time to find out what the half life of socks is.

What is the ideal apocalypse for raising well adjusted children? worldbuilding.stackexchange.com
Parenting books have gotten out of hand these days.

Links from around the web

How to debug browser redirects dodov.dev
Redirects are tough to discover and debug because they’re subtle and instantaneous. Here are some good methods for working with them!

The 11ty Bundle 11tybundle.dev
If you’re looking to try out the 11ty web framework, this massive collection of resources makes it easier for you to get started!

Design and navigation considerations when building multi-platform applications  platform.uno
If you’re building for more than one platform, you have to consider how your applications will look across every screen your users see.

jQuery 3.7.0 released: Staying in order  blog.jquery.com
Believe it or not, jQuery still lives on, is updated, and remains one of the most popular libraries to this day.

Spending hours searching for answers at work? Find them faster in Stack Overflow for Teams. Get it free!

The post The Overflow #179: Brag about your code appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Productivity is definitely top of mind, but whether productivity can be measured is an open question. Many organizations, however, have been measuring how fast their teams ship fixes and features to your customer, which is usually called development velocity. Google devised the DORA metrics to put concrete numbers to this abstract concept. 

There are a lot of factors that affect development velocity: CI/CD pipelines, code quality, developer experience, and more. In this article, I want to discuss that last one, as real velocity means solving the problems that haven’t yet been solved. Hard problems need focused, sustained attention from developers. This attention—the time and freedom to focus—is your team’s most valuable resource.

We often describe working with focused attention as a flow state. As described in the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a flow state allows one to become fully engaged and focused on the task at hand. It leads to better results and greater happiness. But it can only happen when you have the attention to focus fully on whatever it is that lies before you. 

Why can’t we focus at work?

The contemporary workspace, whether in-person or remote, is full of demands on your attention. We have chat programs, email inboxes, and project management apps all throwing notifications our way. In offices, you have other people tapping you on the shoulder and creating general noise (and woe betide those in open offices). Working remotely avoids some of these, but places the entire communication burden on chat and email applications with their little red notifications. These apps promise asynchronous communications, but that doesn’t always happen in practice.

On top of that, we regularly juggle multiple tasks simultaneously. Our attention is pulled in multiple directions, regardless of whether you live an inbox zero life or not. Flow states require sustained attention over time, and our days get chopped into pieces by interruptions and meetings. Researchers at UC Irvine found that on average, office workers switched tasks or were interrupted about every three minutes. Recovering from those interruptions could take workers up to 20 minutes to get back to where they were. In fact, these interruptions could cost individuals up to six hours every day. 

When we have multiple demands on our attention, we try multitasking—splitting our spotlight or shifting it rapidly to focus on the many tasks that come our way. The truth is, we’re bad at multitasking. There’s a mental cost to switching tasks, and that cost translates to up to 40% more time to complete the tasks. Small errors of inattention slip in—typos, missed cues, and quickly forgotten details. Even trying to do only two things at once can mean you do both badly. 

All these interruptions can lead to greater stress and anxiety. Depending on the task, productivity may not suffer, but interruptions may cause us to work faster, which leads to greater time pressure, frustration, and stress. It takes more effort to complete the same amount of work with interruptions in the mix. In the longer-term, enduring regular interruptions—up to 85 per day—can cause decreased job satisfaction and burnout. 

Stress and anxiety form a feedback loop. Both can cause attentional problems, like difficulty concentrating. Without the ability to pay attention to what you’re working on, you may forget steps or not remember solutions that you’ve found. Anxiety has been linked to memory lapses, and if you are constantly forgetting information you’ve received from those chat messages that interrupt people, you may end up interrupting your coworkers over and over. 

It turns out that those coworkers you interrupt are usually the most senior employees at a company. They’ve been there the longest, they have the most historical knowledge about processes and tools. And they suffer the greatest number of interruptions from their coworkers. 

There are no notifications in heaven

Let’s back up. It’s pretty easy to complain about what’s terrible, but harder to imagine what the better world looks like. 

In Flow, Csikszentmihalyi talks about optimal experience as one in which the individual has control over their moment-to-moment experience, bringing their consciousness into a state of order. What makes us miserable about our current state of constant interruptions is that it destroys our control. Our attention is not under our command; instead, it ends up being at the mercy of notification on top of notification, multiple applications chiming for attention. Wrangling them under your control seems to be the root of the solution. 

To do good work during your day, you need some time where you aren’t doing work. Downtime is essential to reducing stress, avoiding burnout, and maintaining a healthy brain. But as we’re all working from home more, work creeps into our home life. Our phones are filled with the same notifications as our work computers except that they can reach us at any hour. You can—and probably should—mute and ignore these notifications after hours; some chat programs set working hours during which notifications will be sent. 

Our always-on work culture doesn’t always let us ignore notifications, even if it isn’t your turn to monitor incident alerts. Many governments have started passing right-to-disconnect legislation to allow employees to ignore any work-related communications that come after working hours. At the very least, we can have control over what we do in our free time. 

But what about within the workday? There are ways to recover some measure of control over the attention of your day. You can use “timeboxing,” where you place a meeting on your calendar that is just for you, a time where everyone understands that you will not respond to notifications. You can be disciplined about statuses and notification settings, indicating when you are available and when you are not. But these techniques only try to manage notifications; what if you could reduce them?

In the end, we may want to rethink why we have notifications in the first place, same as some companies are doing with meetings. Every email, every chat notification is an invitation to collaborate and share information. This is great! Collaboration is a force multiplier that increases employee effectiveness. But notifications are synchronous; they demand attention right now. Better collaboration lets all stakeholders come to the table when they are ready, either scheduled so they can plan around it or asynchronous so they can address it when they have the attention to give it. 

A quieter, more focused workspace

We needed to stay productive by working in the ways that add value instead of reacting to pings, dings, and shoulder taps. That’s mostly writing code, supporting infrastructure, collaborating on solutions, and sharing our hard-won knowledge. One of the reasons that chat apps (and email, to a lesser extent) drain so much of our attention in modern workplaces is that they have become the central application in our workflow, especially for those last two items. Chat apps are immediate; they want your attention right now.

Changing workflows is hard; I’ve seen how developers work in the absence of processes and  it’s all in the chat channels. Implementing a new process is hard; the chat workflow works, albeit in a way that isn’t great for some of our other work. We’ve seen the impact that the Stack Overflow community has had on programmers around the world, and have tried to replicate that for organizations with Stack Overflow for Teams. Of course, we have integrations with many of the major chat programs; think of it as using the Strangler Fig pattern to change workflows. 

There are plenty of other productivity applications that are looking to move the relevant workflows into spaces that are less attention hungry. They have integrations to your favorite chat app too. Of course, the risk here is that your app becomes absorbed in the chat app workflow instead of moving you away from it. 

Ultimately, the problems of attention drain have cultural solutions. You can get the right tools to support that culture, but there’s two questions that an organization needs to answer: (a) How do you collaborate? and (b) How do you share knowledge? So long as the answers to these involve some analogue or digital version of tapping a coworker on the shoulder to get their attention, we’ll remain distracted and constantly trying to get back to the context we had before our interruptions.

The post Modern work requires attention. Constant alerts steal it appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

Stories from our survey: Salary in the time of pandemic stackoverflow.blog
Salaries for developers surged over the past few years, but those gains weren’t even distributed globally.

How do we get a tech team to make a big technical change? stackoverflow.blog
It takes more than technical chops to implement big changes.

Read the docs? We prefer to chat with them (Ep. 568) stackoverflow.blog
Cassidy and Ceora talk with Astro creator Fred K. Schott and Cloudflare’s Brendan Irvine-Broque and Michael Hart about the intersection of open source and AI.

A conversation with the folks building Google’s AI models and I/O releases stackoverflow.blog
Paige Bailey, lead product manager for generative models at Google, breaks down where the company’s AI is heading.

Expert support, on demand promotion
Imagine having a direct line to over 150 senior cloud architects for any cloud-related question or issue you encounter. With thousands of cloud questions and issues resolved, DoiT is your gateway to world-class cloud expertise.

Interesting questions

Why would lsof /dev/video0 be insufficient to check what processes are using the camera? unix.stackexchange.com
Only if you’re using the computer labeled “Abby Normal.”

Dropping malicious packets as close to the source as possible networkengineering.stackexchange.com
TIL the internet backbone exists in the same way that the public square does: conceptually, not actually.

What’s this dark pattern for placing an expensive product next to an even more expensive product to make it appear cheaper? ux.stackexchange.com
Get the silver widgets. They are way cheaper than the gold ones.

What is the theory behind using the 14th Amendment to ignore the debt ceiling? politics.stackexchange.com
Not since high school social studies classes have we Americans had to be familiar with so many amendments.

Links from around the web

Chromium blog: An update on the lock icon blog.chromium.org
The lock icon used to be necessary to show that a website was using a secure connection. Now that it’s the norm, is it time to change?

The intersectionality of web performance adactio.com
It’s not just business that is positively impacted by good web performance.

See this page fetch itself, byte by byte, over TLS subtls.pages.dev
This page looks simple, but it gives you an appreciation of the web’s history and the work that makes it possible.

A backup of historical proportions computerhistory.org
A deep dive into the history of archival anxiety.

Spending hours searching for answers at work? Find them faster in Stack Overflow for Teams. Get it free!

The post The Overflow #178: Chat with your documentation appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

On this episode of the podcast, we talk to Mauricio Linhares, senior software engineer at Stripe, about the pain of migrating monoliths to microservices, defining zero-tier systems, and why plugging all your servers into the same power supply is a bad idea. 

Episode notes: 

While Mauricio and team had to get back to bare metal, most programmers are headed in the opposite direction. It’s why MIT switched from Scheme to Python. 

At Stack Overflow, we’re familiar with what happens to websites during physical failures, like hurricanes. 

Connect with Mauricio on LinkedIn. 
Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner The Nail, who pinned a solid answer on the question, if->return vs. if->else efficiency.

TRANSCRIPT

The post Building zero tier systems on bare metal (Ep. 572) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

The 2023 Developer Survey is now live! stackoverflow.blog
We want to know about all the technology that makes you swoon and scoff.

AI isn’t the app, it’s the UI stackoverflow.blog
A realistic understanding of generative AI can guide us to its ideal use case: not a decision-maker or unsupervised agent tucked away from the end user, but an interface between humans and machines.

Don’t panic! A playbook for managing any production incident stackoverflow.blog
Knowing how to handle it when things break is more important, and practical, than trying to prevent things from ever breaking at all.

How to land a job in climate tech stackoverflow.blog
Climate tech is a niche industry and requires specific strategies to get a job in.

When AI meets IP: Can artists sue AI imitators? (Ep. 566) stackoverflow.blog
Ben and Ceora talk through some thorny issues around AI-generated music and art, explain why creators are suing AI companies for copyright infringement, and compare notes on the most amusing/alarming AI-generated content making the rounds (Pope coat, anyone?).

Train a music playlist recommendation engine promotion
A team of data scientists built a music recommendation engine that can scale to search over 4 billion user-created playlists. Read how they used MongoDB as part of a scalable ETL pipeline to train their deep learning model.

Interesting questions

Is it possible to have satellites (natural or not) orbit the same celestial object in different directions (clockwise, counterclockwise)? astronomy.stackexchange.com
Ah, the rebellious moons of Jupiter.

SQL Server with multiple databases (one per client) – what is the best security practice in terms of logins/users/permissions? dba.stackexchange.com
If one user can access all your separate databases, then they aren’t so separate, are they?

Would a satyr wear horseshoes? worldbuilding.stackexchange.com
Goat shoeing was originally the festival of Satyr-nail-ya.

What vulnerability is a math operation in an HTTP request trying to exploit? security.stackexchange.com
They’re trying to get your web server to do their homework.

Links from around the web

The web’s most important decision thehistoryoftheweb.com
Thirty years ago, the World Wide Web was made free for everyone, a decision that arguably changed…everything.

The interactive guide to rendering in React ui.dev
React’s rendering behavior is often misunderstood—on Stack Overflow, “why is React rendering?” yields over 8000 results. Here’s a deep dive to answer your questions!

Is perpetual motion possible at the quantum level? www.quantamagazine.org
Just what the MCU needed.

Wingspan design retrospective with designer Elizabeth Hargrave youtu.be
Wingspan is one of the most highly rated board games that’s come out in recent years. Come geek out about how it was made!

If you’re curious about our other products: How to get started with Stack Overflow for Teams.

The post The Overflow #177: The AI is the UI appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

Instantly verify your customers online with Open Banking APIs stackoverflow.blog
Want to make sure you’re not taking money from criminals? There’s an API for that.

The worst coder in the world tries an AI sidekick stackoverflow.blog
Look out, world! The worst coder is back and ready to create code he doesn’t understand.

Looking for job perks? How about saving the world? stackoverflow.blog
If you find yourself on the receiving end of a layoff—or feeling existential dread more generally—the timing might be right for a major life change.

Is this the AI renaissance? stackoverflow.blog
Paul van der Boor, Senior Director of Data Science at Prosus, talks about the world of generative AI, the power of collective discovery, and the gap between a shiny proof of concept and a product that people will actually use.

Get compliant without spreadsheets for SOC 2, GDPR, and more promotion
Compliance shouldn’t require countless hours and manual tasks. With 75+ integrations, Drata connects your tech stack to your framework controls—automating evidence collection and risk assessments. Request a demo and receive a special offer here.

Interesting questions

Two EXACTLY the same .jpg images with one image more than twice the file size of the other – Why? (PART 2) photo.stackexchange.com
When your metadata is as large as your data.

PhD advisor with apparent mental deterioration academia.stackexchange.com
In delicate situations that will affect your career greatly, ask for guidance from a higher power. Like the dean.

Is it possible to generate a file with a given sha256sum checksum? security.stackexchange.com
Sure, if you want to use the computing power of the whole world over the entire lifetime of the universe to reverse engineer it.

What dice do I need to display every integer up to X? codegolf.stackexchange.com
For folks who really like their six-sided dice.

Links from around the web

Container query units and fluid typography moderncss.dev
Fluid typography is when your font sizes are responsive to your screen size. This has historically been tough to achieve, but not anymore with modern CSS!

A completely non-technical explanation of AI and deep learning www.parand.com
If you’ve ever struggled to explain AI to your non-technical friends and family, here’s a great story-based approach.

The potentially dangerous non-accessibility of cookie notices www.smashingmagazine.com
Chances are you’ve seen a cookie consent banner somewhere on the internet. If you have to implement them yourself, keep in mind some of these tips to keep your sites accessible.

Five topics you should touch on during the recruitment process dev.to
Job hunting can be daunting, and sometimes you draw a blank when they ask if you have questions. Here are some topics to keep in your back pocket.

If you’re curious about our other products: How to get started with Stack Overflow for Teams.

The post The Overflow #176: Jobs that save the world  appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

Introducing Communities on Teams: where domain, practice, and community come together with purpose stackoverflow.blog
Communities on Teams is a new way to bring people and knowledge together within a specific topic or focus to share valuable resources and collaborate in meaningful ways.

Community is the future of AI stackoverflow.blog
To keep knowledge open and accessible to all, we must come together to build the future of AI.

We bought a university: how one coding school doubled down on brick and mortar (Ep. 561)  stackoverflow.blog
Paulo and Guilherme Silveira, brothers and cofounders of edtech platform Alura, join the home team for a conversation about polyglot programming, edtech, and the role of generative AI.

Ops teams are pets, not cattle (Ep. 562) stackoverflow.blog
Ops folks with knowledge are irreplaceable. Treat them like you need them.

Build an app capable of monitoring rocket launch data promotion
Even if you’re not launching space rockets, collecting and analyzing real-time data is essential to building smarter apps. Watch on-demand how MongoDB Atlas combines multiple capabilities into a single platform to analyze one million metrics per second.

Interesting questions

I am reviewing a very bad paper—do I have to be nice? academia.stackexchange.com
Professionalism and niceness are not the same thing.

If energy is relative, then how it can remain conserved? physics.stackexchange.com
Conserved and invariant aren’t the same thing.

Why was the Dominion v. Fox case tried in Delaware? law.stackexchange.com
“Fun fact: There are literally more corporations in Delaware than there are people.”

What are famous examples of “serendipity” in 20th century mathematics? mathoverflow.net
Right place, right time…right answer?

Links from around the web

To understand AI sentience, first understand it in animals aeon.co
Does AI have feelings or is it just gaming us?

A visual introduction to machine learning www.r2d3.us
If you want to learn more about machine learning and artificial intelligence, this beautiful visual intro is for you.

Node.js 20 is now available! nodejs.org
Time flies when you’re writing code. Node v20 was just released!

A list of programming playgrounds jvns.ca
This is a very handy list of places for you to code online without having to install anything on your machine.

If you’re curious about our other products: How to get started with Stack Overflow for Teams.

The post The Overflow #175: The coding school that bought a university appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

What’s the difference between software engineering and computer science degrees? stackoverflow.blog
While these two areas of study may seem very similar, they do have some differences.

Are meetings making you less productive? stackoverflow.blog
Developers view about half their meetings negatively. Can we find better ways to use that time?

Going stateless with authorization-as-a-service (Ep. 553) stackoverflow.blog
The home team welcomes Alex Olivier, cofounder and product lead at Cerbos, for a conversation about how to centralize business logic in a microservices environment, the value of stateless applications, and what’s under Cerbos’s hood.

Maximize Cloud Savings with DoiT promotion
AWS and Google Cloud customers are invited to an exclusive program designed to help tackle complex cloud issues. Focus on innovation while we help you save on cloud costs and avoid billing surprises. Learn how to get started.

Interesting questions

Is it okay to hard-code table and column names in queries? softwareengineering.stackexchange.com
How often to you change your table and column names but not the structure?

Does the law make exceptions for good samaritans? law.stackexchange.com
For those of us whose legal education comes from the back half of Law and Order.

My employer’s “401(k) contribution” is cash, not an actual retirement account. What are my options? money.stackexchange.com
Go for the old school 401(k) and stuff it in your mattress.

How much louder was a Napoleonic era cannon than a musket? history.stackexchange.com
Loud enough that when Napoleon met his Waterloo, it could be heard over 300km away in London.

Links from around the web

Open source is fueling the future of nuclear physics github.com
You don’t really associate “openness” with “nuclear fusion,” but that’s changing!

New on the web: How to detect disabled JavaScript in CSS www.stefanjudis.com
Though very few people disable JavaScript these days, it’s good to be able to detect that. And now, you can do it in CSS!

React, visualized react.gg
This is a great free visual introduction to React that illustrates its fundamental concepts in a beautiful way!

Building webhooks into your application: Guidelines and best practices workos.com
Webhooks are a common way for devs to receive events from your apps, but they can be tougher to implement than you might think.

If you’re curious about our other products: How to get started with Stack Overflow for Teams.

The post The Overflow #174: This email could have been a meeting appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

A common refrain you’ll hear these days is that servers should be scaled out, easy to replace, and interchangeable—cattle, not pets. But for the ops folks who run those servers the opposite is true. You can’t just throw any of them into an incident where they may not know the stack or system and expect everything to work out. Every operator has a set of skills that they’ve built up through research or experience, and teams should value them as such. They’re people, not pets, and certainly not cattle—you can’t just get a new one when you burn out your existing ones. 

On this episode of the podcast—sponsored by Chronosphere—we talk with Paige Cruz, Senior Developer Advocate at Chronosphere, about how teams can reduce the cognitive load on ops, the best ways to prepare for inevitable failures, and where the worst place to page Paige is. 

Episode notes:

Chronosphere provides an observability platform for ops people, so naturally, the company has an interest in the happiness of those people. 

If you’re interested in the history of the pets vs. cattle concept , this covers it pretty well. 

Previously, we spoke with the CEO of Chronosphere about making incidents easier to manage. 

We’ve covered this topic on the blog before, and two articles came up during our conversation with Paige. 

You can connect with Paige on Twitter, where she has a pretty apropos handle. 

Congrats to Stellar Question badge winner Bruno Rocha for asking How can I read large text files line by line, without loading them into memory?, which at least 100 users liked enough to bookmark.  

The post Ops teams are pets, not cattle (Ep. 562) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

The people most affected by the tech layoffs stackoverflow.blog
Overall, these layoffs are a body blow to diversity in tech, not just slowing but actually reversing hard-won gains.

“Data-driven” decisions aren’t innovative decisions stackoverflow.blog
If you want to innovate new solutions, you can’t rely on data about existing solutions.

From cryptography to consensus: Q&A with CTO David Schwartz on building blockchain apps stackoverflow.blog
Imagine a world where you own your digital purchases instead of license them.

From Smalltalk to smart contracts, reflecting on four decades of programming (Ep. 551) stackoverflow.blog
We chat with Dean Tribble about his journey from Xerox PARC to blockchain CEO.

Put your best work on display! promotion
Showcase your skills and build an online resume with .ME, the most personal domain name. Check if your FirstNameLastName + .ME combination is available and check out lots of developer-specific tips and resources for building your online presence.

Interesting questions

SQL as a means of avoiding “releases” softwareengineering.stackexchange.com
On monkey patches and cowboy coding…

Can you travel around the world by ferries with a car? travel.stackexchange.com
Who’s up for a road trip?

Is RAM wiped before use in another LXC container? security.stackexchange.com
What did the containers say to RAM when overprovisioning? Just so we’re not on the same page…

Do I really need plural grammatical number when my conlang deals with existence and uniqueness? conlang.stackexchange.com
There are many language without formal plural.

Links from around the web

Accessibility for designer: where do I start?  stephaniewalter.design
This is an amazing collection of accessibility resources for the projects you might be building!

Buying a bicycle using Playwright maciekpalmowski.dev
We’ve all wanted to buy one of those limited-edition items that sell out immediately…here’s how one dev took matters into his own hands.

CSS creator Håkon Wium Lie interview by Evrone evrone.com
This is a fascinating interview with the creator of CSS on his journey into the web.

A guide for building open-source communities blog.vaunt.dev
Open-source communities have been around for years. Here’s a breakdown of how to attract contributors, build infrastructure, and iterate on your own.

If you’re curious about our other products: How to get started with Stack Overflow for Teams.

The post The Overflow #173: From Smalltalk to smart contracts appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

At the beginning of the year, Shopify took drastic steps to reduce their meeting burden. They automatically canceled all meetings of three or more people, a total of around 12,000 calendar series and events that would have taken up roughly 322,000 person hours. Chaotic and drastic? Maybe. But as Kaz Nejatian, Shopify’s COO and VP product wrote in the email announcing the change to employees, “We’ve unleashed the ‘chaos monkey’ before and have always come away faster—faster at shipping, at making great decisions, at getting to results and impact. No one joined Shopify to sit in meetings.”

Chances are that no matter where you work, you didn’t join that company for the meetings. You wanted to build software. But the meetings became part of that, and the more senior you are, the more meetings you probably get asked to attend. 

In this article, we’re going to take a look at the productivity impact of meetings, reevaluate why we have meetings at all, and consider ways to make meetings better (or avoid them altogether). 

One third of meetings are unnecessary

Unless we’re actively multitasking during a meeting (which humans do badly), we’re blocked from other parts of our work: writing code, debugging processes, or designing new features. So if we’re asking for our coworkers’ time, that time should be spent productively. Professor Thomas Fritz of the University of Zurich ran several studies about how software developers perceive their own productivity across their activities. Perceptions across all three studies found that developers view slightly more than half of their meetings negatively. For more from Prof. Fritz, check out our recent podcast with him:

Plenty of things about meetings can make attendees feel they’re wasting their time: guest lists that spiral out of control, overwhelmingly negative participants, and meeting participants who stray off-topic. Otter.ai and Stephen G. Rogelberg, Professor of Organizational Science, Management at UNC Charlotte, found that developers in bad meetings report feeling “frustrated” and “annoyed.” Even good meetings can turn bad if run poorly. 

In that same study, they found that developers see about one-third of all meetings as unnecessary—they want to decline 31% of meetings, but only nix 14%. Worse yet, bad meetings not only affect how developers feel about their jobs, they cost organizations money—an estimated $25,000 per employee per year. You can estimate how much any given meeting costs your company with this calculator. And that’s just the direct costs of the meeting, regardless of how disruptive it is to the rest of a developer’s day. 

Meetings don’t happen in a vacuum; often they happen back-to-back with other meetings. Microsoft’s Human Factors Lab found that back-to-back meetings cause a great deal of stress and make people worse at meetings. 

This wasn’t just a subjective perception. They strapped an EEG cap that measured brain waves to 14 volunteers and either set them up with four consecutive meetings or four meetings with a ten minute meditation break in between. They found that back-to-back meetings caused stress to build up and caused attendees to lose focus and engage worse over time. Surprisingly, one of the biggest sources of stress came from the transition between meetings, as participants tried to switch gears without adequate time. 

These factors combine to drag down the company as a whole. In a study of 20 organizations in manufacturing sectors, Simone Kauffeld of Technische Universität Braunschweig and Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock of the University of Amsterdam found that bad meeting behaviors were associated with lower levels of market share, innovation, and employment stability. A company that doesn’t have meeting discipline may soon find their best employees fleeing to greener pastures as their balance sheets slowly drift into the red. 

All these downsides to meetings may make you wonder why we have meetings at all. 

Wait, why do we have meetings at all?

Obviously, nobody schedules a meeting to torture their coworkers. Meetings are the standard tool for collaboration in companies, ways to find consensus and make a decision, share knowledge, or brainstorm solutions—essentially, they are pop-up communities of practice. Get everyone in a room and talk it out. 

The Harvard Business Review quotes an unnamed pharmaceutical executive who sums up the pro-meeting bias that many people in leadership positions hold: “Our abundance of meetings at our company is the cultural tax we pay for the inclusive learning environment that we want to foster…and I’m OK with that. If the alternative to more meetings is more autocratic decision-making, less input from all levels throughout the organization, and fewer opportunities to ensure alignment and communication by personal interaction, then give me more meetings any time!”

In fact, these are all things that I’d wager every one of us wants from a job. We may lionize the enlightened dictator CEOs of the past, but those who attract praise for their decisive style are a perfect example of survivorship bias. Those successful autocratic leaders still need to inspire and motivate their workforce to do the work behind their decisions. If you’ve ever worked for a determined and bull-headed leader who gave orders instead of direction, then you know how painful it is to work in a culture without collaboration. 

Many people see reluctance to attend meetings or outright rejection of a meeting as an insult. They hold the attitude of our mystery pharma exec: by rejecting the meeting, you are rejecting an opportunity to collaborate. For one person, maybe that meeting would have been better as an email—you want something done, so send me the requirements/brief so I can do the thing. But another person may see the meeting as a way to feel out an idea, to get a better solution by working with an expert—you. 

Those meetings that come during points in the software development lifecycle when collaboration is most important—planning, designing, and setting scope—end up being the ones that feel the least disruptive. At these moments, meetings aren’t taking you away from other work; they are the work. Without all stakeholders coming together and determining what needs to be done, engineering orgs would be coding solutions blind. 

Finding ways to have better meetings (or skip them altogether)

But let’s put some big asterisks on “all stakeholders” and “what needs to be done.” The right attendees can make a meeting feel productive for everyone. “I have heard in our studies that there are often meetings that have a lot of participants yet require only a few,” said Professor Fritz. “In my opinion, the most important part of a meeting is to take the time and reflect on who is really necessary for a meeting and even examine whether or not I should participate, and provide an environment in which it is OK to make that decision yourself.” Everyone at the meeting should have a sense of what to do next: Only 56% of participants leave meetings knowing what actions they need to take.

If you need to call a meeting, the research suggests that you need to be a good steward of the meeting, same as you would any other project. More than half of SurveyMonkey participants say two things would make meetings better: a clear agenda and a short meeting time. All participants can improve meetings by being direct, clear, and communicating in a way that leads to a decision. While we all have different communication styles, understanding which ones work best for video calls can make those better, too. 

When meetings happen can also make a huge difference in whether people see them as valuable or not. One of the big changes that came with Shopify’s meeting-ageddon was that Wednesdays became meeting-free and Thursday had a block allocated for meetings of 50+ people. In a statement, Nejatian said, “Uninterrupted time is the most precious resource of a craftsperson, and we are giving our people a no judgment zone to subtract, reject meetings, and focus on what is most valuable.”

As the Human Factors Lab research above showed, breaks between meetings are absolutely necessary. But they also found that days without meetings improve overall collaboration, which is the whole reason we have meetings in the first place. And Professor Fritz and his students found that self-reported productivity declined if a developer had more than two meetings in a day. 

All this research is a great excuse to have fewer meetings. Meetings will still occasionally be necessary, but limiting them improves developers’ lives. Dropbox uses a framework to identify when something needs a meeting that they call the 3 Ds: decisions, debates, and discussion. These are the business actions that need people to collaborate in order to get them done. Everything else can be served in other ways. 

It’s worth thinking about how we can use other tools to take the place of those meetings we call reflexively. Status check-ins like the standup meeting have traditionally been served by actual meetings where everyone reports the status of their projects one at a time. But if companies genuinely want to embrace remote options (and preferably, asynchronous working), there are plenty of tools that will let you do that without turning on your camera. Better yet, there are tools that can automate status updates for you. 

Especially for companies with remote options, finding ways to replace the visibility of office life can make a lot of the pushes for video meetings moot. Working in public as much as possible can help share information across teams and give everyone access to the company’s domain experts. Greater transparency reduces the need for meetings, which can build trust and improve overall morale. When we spoke with the folks at 84.51° about how they use Stack Overflow for Teams, Michael Carrico, director of data science, told us, “It’s a way to help spread institutional knowledge through that entry point person and make connections. Otherwise it would have been seen as more intrusive to directly ping or email somebody.”

Meetings, especially post-pandemic as more people have gone remote, have become the de facto way we collaborate, and it’s making us all more stressed, less productive, and worse at actually collaborating. 

There is hope, but it takes thought, care, and the right tools. We have meetings for genuinely good reasons, but they take a toll on us and our organizations. You don’t have to nuke the calendars from orbit, but finding alternative ways to collaborate will win out in the end. And if you’re interested in improving our overall understanding of meetings, providing the data we need to change company cultures for the better, well Professor Fritz would like to speak to you. 

The post Are meetings making you less productive? appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

Building a collaborative asynchronous work environment stackoverflow.blog
Fully embracing a remote workplace means letting everyone work when they want to work.

From Web2 to Web3: How developers can upskill and build with blockchain stackoverflow.blog
Why web3 is here to stay and how developers can build killer dApps.

The next gen web browser has no tabs, only spaces (Ep. 549) stackoverflow.blog
Ben and Cassidy sit down with The Browser Company to talk about reimagining the web browser—and the way we use the internet.

Put your best work on display! promotion
Showcase your skills and build an online resume with .ME, the most personal domain name. Check if your FirstNameLastName + .ME combination is available and check out lots of developer-specific tips and resources for building your online presence.

Interesting questions

What is this famous example of the absurdity of English spelling? english.stackexchange.com
Further proof that English is three languages in a trench coat.

Gravity assist as energy source sustainability.stackexchange.com
What goes up must be able to charge your phone.

Told it’s “my responsibility” to find coverage for shifts scheduled during previously-approved vacation time workplace.stackexchange.com
In fact, it is your manager’s responsibility to find coverage for shifts during approved PTO.

Liability for releasing AI into the “wild”? law.stackexchange.com
No matter how smart it is, you’re still liable for malware you create. Just ask Miles Dyson.

Links from around the web

Bicycle – Bartosz Ciechanowski ciechanow.ski
We take for granted how bicycles “just work” when we ride them…and this is a great reminder of the cool physics behind them!

The ultimate guide to image optimisation calibreapp.com
When you start to think about web performance, most of the time, optimizing your images comes first and foremost!

Scientists created a new recyclable plastic not made from crude oil  www.sciencealert.com
There’s a new plastic in town. Maybe this could help improve recycling!

Dark patterns in UX design—Which ones are the most deceptive? www.uxpin.com
As you build, you’ll want to stay away from the patterns that trick your users.

If you’re curious about our other products: How to get started with Stack Overflow for Teams.

The post The Overflow #172: The path to async work appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Right now, plenty of people are building businesses on social media platforms, on streaming platforms, and on market platforms that they don’t control. That platform can make the rules in any way they want and remove access at any time. That means founders are potentially one step away from losing their livelihood. The same goes for consumers buying from these platforms: if you lose access to your account, there goes all your purchases. As it turns out, you were licensing everything, not buying it. 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Ripple CTO David Schwartz about the promise that decentralized trust and distributed consensus has for software development—and for more transparency in ownership. 

Episode notes:

Cross-border payments, while they might not be the sexiest app, are one of the best product-market fits for blockchains. 

Learn more about Ripple at their home page. 

Check out the documentation to learn more about building on the XRP Ledger. 

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner, asmeurer, for their answer to What does `S` signify in SymPy? 

TRANSCRIPT

The post From cryptography to consensus: Q&A with CTO David Schwartz on building real-world blockchain apps (Ep. 557) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

What’s different about these layoffs stackoverflow.blog
As the discouraging news continues, we revisit how our core community of developers has been experiencing the layoffs—and explore what sets this economic situation apart from previous dips and busts.

Who builds it and who runs it? SRE team topologies stackoverflow.blog
Ad-hoc SRE principles can get you on the right track, but if you want to sustain it long-term, you’ll need organizational structure.

Your tech toolbox: The middle ground between tech chaos and rigidity stackoverflow.blog
Do you solve new problems the same way because it’s already done? Or do you go with a new approach that offers more benefits?

Moving up a level of abstraction with serverless on MongoDB Atlas and AWS stackoverflow.blog
Storage isn’t where you’ll run up costs; spending engineer time on sorting out low-level issues is.

What our engineers learned building Stack Overflow (Ep. 547) stackoverflow.blog
Charles “Cobih” Obih and Radek Markiewicz of the Stack Overflow platform team join Ben and Ryan to talk about changes to the inbox and what it’s like to build Stack Overflow’s public platform.

Claim your FREE .app or .dev domain from Porkbun promotion
Porkbun is a refreshingly different domain name registrar offering an oddly satisfying experience. If you’re a developer or designer, get your FREE .app and .dev. domain. This offer is an ideal home for your next project. Claim your free domain today!

Interesting questions

How fast does a pineapple need to fly to kill? worldbuilding.stackexchange.com
“I came here to chew bubblegum and shoot pineapples and I’m all out of bubblegum.”

Is it logical to seek revenge? philosophy.stackexchange.com
Imagine if a Vulcan and a Klingon had a baby, then asked a question on Stack Exchange.

How to protect the code from being ‘rephrased’ by AI to avoid license limitations? opensource.stackexchange.com
Until the courts say otherwise, machine translation of a copyrighted work is still translation.

Computer is frying all USB devices that are connected superuser.com
Officer! Arrest that computer! It’s a murderer!

Links from around the web

Lessons from linguistics: i18n best practices for front-end developers shopify.engineering
Internationalization matters, and linguistics can help you do it right.

10 years of Electron  www.electronjs.org
Electron celebrated its 10th anniversary this month! Have you built anything with it?

Command-line fu www.commandlinefu.com
Sometimes you just come back over and over again to the same handy command-line tools. Here’s an awesome resource of thousands of them!

This mirror reverses how light travels in time spectrum.ieee.org
Physics is dang cool, and this project reflects that (get it?).

If you’re curious about our other products: How to get started with Stack Overflow for Teams.

The post The Overflow #171: The tech toolbox appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

Can Stack Overflow save the day? stackoverflow.blog
Tell us how Stack Overflow helped you and enter to win a limited edition key cap!

Building an API is half the battle: Q&A with Marco Palladino from Kong stackoverflow.blog
API gateways, service mesh, and GraphQL, oh my!

Visible APIs get reused, not reinvented stackoverflow.blog
How open API specifications can help developers—and computers—understand your APIs.

Developers think AI assistants will be everywhere, but aren’t sure how to feel about it stackoverflow.blog
The things we expect to succeed aren’t always the things we’re hoping to see more of.

Need help scaling your company growth? promotion
For startups and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) working to expand their customer base, revenue, and standing in their industries, adopting a DevSecOps platform is one move that can help make all of that growth happen.

Interesting questions

Did mechanical hard drives often malfunction in high-elevation places such as Bogota? retrocomputing.stackexchange.com
It depends on whether the hard drive had helium in it or not.

How are the banks behind high yield savings accounts able to pay such high rates? money.stackexchange.com
Maybe they lose money on every account, but make up for it in volume!

What are the benefits of tracking solved bugs? softwareengineering.stackexchange.com
Those who forget history are doomed to reintroduce bugs in prod.

What happens if you carbonate ethanol? chemistry.stackexchange.com
Who wants a round of burptinis?

Links from around the web

From gaming with your eyes to coding with AI: New frontiers for accessibility github.com
Accessibility is forging new frontiers in every industry thanks to open-source contributions!

Adventures in time: Debugging a daylight saving bug alextaylor.ca
We still have to deal with daylight savings time, so timezone bugs will never die.

The first version of your favorite digital products www.theversionone.com
If you’re ever feeling down about how your project doesn’t look that great from the start, here’s a fun little site showing what “Version 1” of some of your favorite services looked like!

Moving from Vue 1 to Vue 2 to Vue 3: A case study of migrating a headless CMS system www.smashingmagazine.com
Handling migrations within long-term projects can be tough, and this is an interesting deep dive into how one team did it.

If you’re curious about our other products: How to get started with Stack Overflow for Teams.

The post The Overflow #170: Wary about AI assistants appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

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

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with Andrew Davidson, SVP Products at MongoDB, about how they’re turning a database into a fully-managed service that developers can use in a more natural way. Along the way, we discuss how the cost bottleneck has moved from the storage media to developers’ minds, how greater abstractions can enable developers, and how to get insights from production data faster. 

Episode notes

Try MongoDB Atlas on AWS for free.

You can get started with MongoDB Atlas directly from the AWS Marketplace. 

If you’re at a startup, you can take advantage of their special offer for startups. 

The community edition of their classic database is available to download as well. 

If you’re looking to learn a thing or two before diving in, check out MongoDB University. 

Our thanks to Great Question badge winner Derek 朕會功夫 for asking How can I reverse an array in JavaScript without using libraries? You know the rarest kung fu of all: asking great questions. 

TRANSCRIPT

The post Moving up a level of abstraction with serverless on MongoDB Atlas and AWS (Ep. 552) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

Five Stack Exchange sites turned ten years old this quarter! stackoverflow.blog
High fives to a Stack Exchange milestone for English Language Learners, Magento, Reverse Engineering, Sustainable Living, and Tridion!

After the buzz fades: What our data tells us about emerging technology sentiment stackoverflow.blog
Developers expect AI assistants to be everywhere soon, but they aren’t necessarily happy about it.

“Move fast and break things” doesn’t apply to other people’s savings (Ep. 544) stackoverflow.blog
Christine Ryu, Engineering Lead at fintech platform Flourish, joins the home team to talk about how technology is transforming finance for everyone from big banks to individual consumers.

From writing code to teaching code (Ep. 545) stackoverflow.blog
After 37 courses and half a million students, a former developer reflects on his journey to instructor.

MongoDB Atlas University Course promotion
Learn how to deploy a global, multi-cloud database with MongoDB Atlas. Get hands-on experience creating and deploying a database with this free course.

Interesting questions

Protect public project from potential patents opensource.stackexchange.com
Check out the concept of defensive publishing, which is the legal equivalent of posting “First!”

Does the Earth constantly lose mass? astronomy.stackexchange.com
It loses a tiny amount as air escapes and astronauts leave flags on the Moon. But none of this is the Moon’s fault.

Did courtiers of antiquity hold in their pee or did they have common commodes available in the king/queen’s court? history.stackexchange.com
To pee or not to pee, that is the question.

How to politely decline a take-home test task? workplace.stackexchange.com
That depends: do you want the job or not?

Links from around the web

Emergent abilities of large language models www.assemblyai.com
If you’ve heard the term “large language model” (or LLM) a lot lately, you’re not alone. Here’s a look at how new capabilities emerge as the LLM scales <em>without changing the algorithm</em>.

How to become a DevOps engineer: An untimed guide www.theopalblog.com
DevOps is a huge space with a ton of opportunities. If you’re interested but unsure how to get started, this is a great guide for you.

Why you need to know your site’s performance plateau (and how to find it) www.speedcurve.com
When do your website performance metrics plateau?

Data Reliability Engineering Conference drecon.org
Stack Overflow’s own director of reliability engineering, Ellora Praharaj, will be speaking at DRE Conference. If you can’t make it in person, check out the virtual option!

If you’re curious about our other products: How to get started with Stack Overflow for Teams.

The post The Overflow #169: Fear the Frankencode appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

With so many companies offering API products, it can be hard to get your particular APIs discovered and used by the developers who need them most. You might have the best, most useful solutions out there, but if you’re relying on the digital equivalent of foot traffic for discoverability, it might as well not exist. And if an API solution can’t be found, then someone else is going to reinvent it. 

On this sponsored episode, we chat with SmartBear API Technical Evangelist Frank Kilcommins about the growing challenges of API visibility and how to outsmart the invisibility trap with the right development strategies and tools. 

Episode notes:

Kilcommins suggests you can get better visibility for your APIs with SmartBear’s new free API exploration tool. 

Open specifications like the Open API Initiative help make your endpoints easier to understand—both by humans and computers. 

Connect with Frank Kilcommins on Twitter and LinkedIn. 

Congrats to Stack Overflow user WorstCase, who asked five well-received questions on five separate days and earned themselves a shiny new Curious badge.

The post Visible APIs get reused, not reinvented (Ep. 549) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

We spoke with Marco Palladino, CTO and co-founder at Kong, all about APIs past and future and what engineers need to do once their API endpoint has been built.

We’ve edited this conversation for clarity. This Q&A is also available as a video. 

Ryan Donovan: How did you get involved in the world of APIs?

Marco Palladino: When we started our journey with APIs, we started with an idea in 2009 to build an API marketplace like Amazon but for APIs. We imagined a world where APIs would be the main foundation block for every application that anybody creates in the world. In 2009, that was just about to get started, so people were asking us, “What is an API?” We built our first business called Mashape, which was an API marketplace. If the world runs on APIs, then we need to have a marketplace for APIs. That product was the beginning of the Kong journey, because the Mashape marketplace didn’t work very well for us but the technology we built was very good in this new microservices and API world. We built it for ourselves and we open sourced it, so we extracted it and we pivoted into Kong as part of a transition we made in 2015. 

RD: That’s very much ahead of the game. You must be excited about the innovations in Jamstack these days. 

MP: Yeah, I mean there’s innovations that are happening pretty much across the board. Now in my space, which is the API space, what we’re looking at is APIs as fundamentally running pretty much every digital experience we can think of. 83% of the world internet traffic today runs on APIs. APIs are powering everything, as we all know, in our daily lives, in every category and every industry that we normally interact with.

RD: What makes a good API?

MP: Well we should think of APIs as user interfaces, except the user is a developer. Good APIs are easy to use, easy to understand, and not convoluted, and fundamentally they provide a nice abstraction on top of the service or the data that we want to access through the APIs. The ones that are bad are the ones don’t have any of these properties. They’re ugly, they’re hard to use, they’re inconsistent. There is no documentation whatsoever, therefore, it’s hard to consume them and hard to test them and debug them. 

Ultimately, the criteria that separates the good APIs from the bad APIs is the consumption. At the end of the day, APIs are as valuable as the consumption that we’re able to create on those APIs. And if these APIs are not being consumed, it doesn’t matter how good the service is or the data is that’s behind that API. If the API is not being consumed, that API, quite frankly, is useless. 

RD: Do you have an opinion on the various architecture styles or frameworks like the REST versus GraphQL, or even SOAP from back in the day?

MP: It’s funny to see the evolution of API protocols over time. We started with SOAP, but some in the audience may think we started earlier than that with CORBA. APIs as a concept have permeated our industry since forever. 

Now with SOAP APIs, we have the emergence of web service for the first time. SOAP APIs were notoriously hard to use, hard to consume, very verbose, and so when mobile came out in 2007-2008, everybody needed to create mobile applications. It turns out that consuming RESTful APIs is a much easier endeavor, and we can leverage most of our existing knowledge and clients to be able to do that so we don’t need to have specialized SOAP clients to consume those APIs. 

The problem is, as the number of APIs increases over time, it becomes very computationally and network expensive to make lots of requests to all the RESTful APIs that we have. So we started to see new patterns emerge, like GraphQL, which allow us to essentially get multiple responses for multiple APIs in one request and one response. That allows us to save in bandwidth which is very important, especially for mobile, and also improve the latency because we’re not sending 50 requests across all the APIs but only one request. In GraphQL, the gateway is going to be responsible for aggregating all those other responses. 

GraphQL is obviously one of those trends, but we’re seeing a lot more. Internally especially we’re seeing adoption of GRPC, where we want to use faster protocols that do not require computationally intensive serialization and deserialization in JSON. We’re seeing events being used as a way to create asynchronous microservices by propagating state changes in the data, not via a service-to-service synchronous requests, but an asynchronous event that we can store in a log collector like Kafka. We’re seeing that APIs were SOAP only for a very long time, then REST came in, and then now it is many different protocols depending on the use case and the requirements that you have.

RD: When we’re talking about a large number of APIs, we’re usually talking about microservices. How do gateways, service meshes, and other architecture-level applications help manage microservice overload?

MP: Building an API is half of the job. Once we have an API, we need to expose the API and govern how we want these APIs to be consumed, either internally or externally. There’s lots of controls that we have to build in the API infrastructure that allow us to manage access to or revoke access, monitor and capture analytics, document the API, and create an onboarding flow for the API. All of these complimentary use cases are critical for that API to be successful. Having an API sitting somewhere does not mean that API will be successful. This is very important at the edge where we want to expose our API to partners, to a developer ecosystem, to mobile applications. 

We want to have that whole product journey to the API to be very nice. APIs are products in a way, right? So we have to treat them with the same lifecycle that we treat every other product. How do we version them? How do we decommission them? How do we make them better? API gateways are great at this. API management is a function that allows us to productize an API, either externally or internally, and it allows us to create all these flows and highways to the consumption of the API. Now some of these APIs are going to be consumed internally within the applications themselves—so not across different applications, but within the application itself. There we don’t need to have this higher level management of the API, but what we need is a lower level that’s faster, lower level network management of the API, and that’s where service mesh comes in. 

With service mesh, we can reduce and remove that extra hop in the network that we would have by having a centralized ingress. We can remove that and go from service to service via a sidecar model in such a way that we make that performance much quicker because there is less networking hops we need to do, as well as it allows us for a more fine grain, lower level management of the underlying networking. This allows us to implement zero trust. It allows us to implement observability. It allows us to implement across data centers, across cloud failovers. If you experience problems in one cloud, we can automatically redirect to the other cloud. Now the reality is we need both. We need to have a service mesh to create this underlying network overlay that’s secure, that’s reliable, that’s observable, and then some of these APIs we want to expose at the edge or to another team or another application. That’s when API management comes into the picture to provide all those other capabilities. So the way I see it, these are complementary technologies.

RD: What’s the security risk with lots of APIs?

MP: Yeah, as a matter of fact, APIs are the biggest attack vector for pretty much every product that anybody is creating these days. Every product runs on top of those APIs, so APIs become a great source of problems if we do not secure them properly. Security means many things in the world of APIs. Security means securing the protocol and the underlying transport, so we want everything to have an identity and we want everything to be encrypted over a secure HTTPS connection in the case of RESTful APIs. 

We want to secure access to the API, so we want to make sure that we can create tiers of access for those APIs. We can assign clients and consumers to these tiers in such a way that we can control who consumes the APIs, but we can also then apply specific rules to a specific tier of consumers, such as, “This type of consumer can make x number of requests per second, but this other tier cannot.” There is a third level of security where we are looking at all the traffic that anybody’s making through our APIs and trying to identify patterns that are suspicious, for example, a developer trying to send random fields to an API to see if it breaks or not. Every attacker is going to be exploring and using APIs in ways that were not intended in such a way that they can find a vulnerability. Being able to detect these types of traffic patterns becomes very important to identify suspicious behavior.

RD: What’s the most work you’ve seen a single API do? (the largest number/volume of processes behind it)

MP So I’ve seen it all. There’s different types of APIs. There are APIs that are high frequency so there’s lots of value to those APIs, but fundamentally each response is not as valuable so we can afford to lose some of that traffic because it doesn’t really matter. For example, I’m sure that Twitter has lots of API requests whenever somebody wants to open a tweet or send a new tweet. It’s not a big deal if somebody cannot see a tweet; they can just retry. That is high volume but low value for each transaction. 

Then there are low volume but high value transactions, for example, when we send a tax return using one of those tax return services. We are never going to use that app and that service ever throughout the year but that one time that we’re going to be submitting our report, and that request happens once a year for each user but it’s very high value. So in my experience working with enterprise organizations and customers, Kong today is the most adopted API gateway in the world in the open-source community, but we also work with great enterprise organizations around the world that are building their API infrastructure on our technology. And I’m seeing all of these use cases so it’s very hard to pinpoint a specific one, but I’ve seen responses of gigabytes of data. So you make one request, you get gigs back, you get this huge response back. I’ve seen APIs taking days to be processed because those APIs probably should have been replaced with a job queue system. There’s pretty much everything out there. 

RD: For those high-value APIs, how do you ensure reliability without sort of duplicating effort? 

MP It’s very important to provide the right API infrastructure. This is why building an API is only half of the job. The other half is to make sure that these APIs are reliable. How do you make them reliable and secure? Well, we need to build that for every API that we have. And there is a series of things that have to happen to make sure that APIs are reliable, but first and foremost, reliability intended as security that has to be in place. Reliability intended as low latency and performance, we need to be able to trace the full stack of our requests to determine where potential bottlenecks could be located in such a way that we can fix them. And then there is reliability intended as being able to measure the API response status codes and response parameters in such a way that we can detect those types of anomalies and then act upon them. For high-value APIs that are low frequency, we’re working with customers where every 500 error is an open investigation that may take two or three weeks to be resolved, because they cannot lose any API request because it would create harm in their reputation and to the final end user. There are different levels of reliability that we want to achieve. 

Being able to also replicate our infrastructure across multiple clouds and multiple regions in such a way that we can tolerate unpredictable failures in the underlying infrastructure becomes very important. When we have lots of APIs, it’s very hard to think of these problems on an ad hoc basis for each one of these APIs and it becomes much easier to provide this reliable infrastructure for APIs to the whole organization in such a way that we can cater to everything that’s creating APIs and not just a subset of it.

RD: In the next five to ten years, how will the ways that software services talk to each other change?

MP I am speaking with customers that are telling me in the next five years they’re going to be creating more APIs in the organization than all the APIs they’ve created up until now. So what we’re going to be seeing in the next ten years is an incredible amount of scale. And scale is both exciting and frightening. Scale is exciting because it allows us to build faster and better, and this is why we’re adopting APIs. APIs allow us to turn every product and every silo into a platform. There is lots of value in that because we can build products faster on top of that, we can create ecosystems that are much more efficient, like partner ecosystem across the globe. There is lots of business value in that scale that we’re going to be creating, but there is also a requirement to have the right infrastructure in place so that that scale can be enabled in the first place. If we are not making the application teams that are building all of these APIs extremely productive whenever they ship a new API, then the application teams are going to be worrying about all these complementary concerns that they shouldn’t be worrying about. That’s not their job. So it’s very important that as we prepare for this type of scale we make sure that the application teams are builders of APIs but not builders of infrastructure. We want them to be consumers of infrastructure and builders of APIs. 

RD: Was there anything else you wanted to touch on before we sign off?

MP No, this has been a fantastic conversation. APIs are fundamentally changing and shifting the way we think of software. The way I see it, APIs are providing us the opportunity to create an assembly line of software where you pick and choose different pieces like an assembly line, and put them together to ship new applications in a better way, in a faster way. They are fundamentally changing how we are building software in the digital world. So thinking about APIs really is thinking about the future of the business, because without an API vision there is not going to be a business vision that is going to be successful, because that business vision has to rely on an API to be successful. So it’s becoming very strategic for every organization these days.

The post Building an API is half the battle: Q&A with Marco Palladino from Kong appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

Why governments need open source more than ever stackoverflow.blog
We face larger-than-life challenges in our world. Maybe open source’s wisdom of the crowds can help solve them.

Stop saying “technical debt” stackoverflow.blog
Everyone who says “tech debt” assumes they know what we’re all talking about, but their individual pictures differ quite a bit.

Announcing two new Collectives on Stack Overflow: R Language and CI/CD stackoverflow.com
Collectives have expanded to include areas of practice. Learn more and find out how to join the R Language and CI/CD Collectives today.

How Intuit democratizes AI development across teams through reusability stackoverflow.blog
They found success in a blended approach to product development—a marriage of the skills and expertise of data, AI, analytics, and software engineering teams—to build a platform powered by componentized AI.

The open-source game engine you’ve been waiting for: Godot (Ep. 542) stackoverflow.blog
Juan Linietsky, cofounder and lead developer of the Godot Engine, joins the home team for a conversation about what led him to create an open-source game engine, how open source is shaping game development, and the well-worn path from playing video games to learning to build them.

Integrate videos into your product within minutes, not months promotion
What’s the best way to handle and deliver video on your website, app, or software? We take care of all aspects of the video pipeline. Quickly encode, securely host, and reliably deliver videos worldwide via our global CDN. Don’t waste time and endure the hassle of integrating multiple providers.

Interesting questions

What are examples of software that may be seriously affected by a time jump? serverfault.com
In case you need to write an OS for a time machine.

Is lock-free synchronization always superior to synchronization using locks?  stackoverflow.com
“There’s only one rule: when in doubt, use a lock.”

Is email scraping still a thing for spammers? security.stackexchange.com
The classics never die.

How to react to a student’s panic attack in an oral exam? academia.stackexchange.com
Lots of thoughtful answers here, but not among them: having your own panic attack to make them feel less alone.

Links from around the web

A guide to accessible form validation www.smashingmagazine.com
Accessibility goes beyond complying with standards. You never want your users to get stuck!

The future of touch: Researchers uncover physical limitation in haptic holography techxplore.com
There are limits to the virtual world, but maybe by knowing them, we can overcome them.

Writing an effective tech spec  yougotthis.io
Figuring out what you’re going to build and how is just as important as building itself!

Why is building a UI in Rust so hard? www.warp.dev
Rust is a very loved, speedy language. What are the cons?

If you’re curious about our other products: How to get started with Stack Overflow for Teams.

The post The Overflow #168: Other words for technical debt appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Writing code that runs without errors—and without all the bugs that only show up when the program runs—is hard enough. But teaching others to write code and understand the underlying concepts takes a deeper understanding. Now imagine doing that for 37 courses. 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, Ben and Ryan talk with Bharath Thippireddy, a VIP instructor at Udemy who has taught more than half a million students. We talk about how he went from a humble Java developer to one of Udemy’s top instructors (and a budding movie star!). Along the way, we discuss whether Java or Python is better for beginners and how to balance theory with syntax. 

Episode notes:

Like a lot of today’s content creators, Bharath got his start posting videos on his Youtube channel in 2012.

Today, you can find all of Bharath’s courses on his Udemy page.

You can find out more about Bharath from his website or connect with him on LinkedIn. 

Udemy is one of our launch partners for our online course recommendations. 

Congrats to Lifeboat badge winner desertnaut for their answer to What is the meaning of exclamation and question marks in Jupyter Notebook?.

TRANSCRIPT

The post From writing code to teaching code (Ep. 546) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

Developer with ADHD? You’re not alone. stackoverflow.blog
Is there a connection between programming and ADHD? And could it be that people with ADHD are particularly well-suited to programming careers?

Are clouds having their on-prem moment? stackoverflow.blog
While public cloud usage continues to grow, an increasing number are also moving to on-prem private clouds (sometimes even owning and operating their own hardware).

How edge functions move your back end close to your front end stackoverflow.blog
Serverless functions have made computing seamless and fast. But for worldwide audiences, you need to get closer to your user to overcome latency.

Authorization on Rails (Ep. 540) stackoverflow.blog
Sam Scott, cofounder and CTO of Oso, joins the home team to talk about what makes authorization a challenge, the difference between authentication and authorization, and what zombies taught him about web development.

Shorten the distance between production data and insight (Ep. 541) stackoverflow.blog
On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Stanimira Vlaeva, Developer Advocate at MongoDB, and Fredric Favelin, Technical Director, Partner Presales at MongoDB, about how a serverless database can minimize the distance between producing data and understanding it.

Accelerate Your API Testing promotion
High quality. Fast. Cheap. In the ideal scenario, dev and testing teams work to deliver high-quality applications; on schedule, under budget, and error-free. Check out this e-book to learn about best practices you should add when you are API mocking.

Interesting questions

What’s the correct way to do pair programming? softwareengineering.stackexchange.com
“There isn’t just one perfect way to do this. But doing it only because we’re supposed to do it is definitely wrong.”

What is the origin of “in the zone” or what “zone” is this about? english.stackexchange.com
You ever get so good at something that Rod Serling started narrating it?

Quitting instead of accepting Performance Improvement Plan? workplace.stackexchange.com
Quitting is actually the same thing as not accepting in this case.

How much slower was the 286 in protected mode? retrocomputing.stackexchange.com
Move over slow TV; here comes slow computing!

Links from around the web

Last baseline alignment web.dev
All major browser engines now support the latest CSS feature, last baseline alignment!

Why your consciousness depends on the low-entropy early universe psyche.co
The laws of physics suggest that a “time-reverse twin” is possible. What the heck is that?

How I broke into a bank account with an AI-generated voice www.vice.com
Generative AI is all the rage these days, and the more we experiment with it, the more we have to be careful about what is real and what isn’t.

Keys to an accessibility mindset www.smashingmagazine.com
Accessibility can seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be!

If you’re curious about our other products: How to get started with Stack Overflow for Teams.

The post The Overflow #167: Programmers and ADHD appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

Coding 102: Writing code other people can read stackoverflow.blog
Bootcamp may have taught you to write code that works. But the next level is to write code that works with other people.

Serverless scales well, but most databases don’t stackoverflow.blog
The benefits that come from serverless computing can be lost if you have to spend your time provisioning hardware for your database.

Monitoring debt builds up faster than software teams can pay it off  stackoverflow.blog
Today, it’s easier than ever for a team to monitor software in production. But it’s also easy to build up a lot of tech debt around monitoring.

You don’t have to build a browser in JavaScript anymore (Ep. 538) stackoverflow.blog
What’s new in Next.js 13, how growing demand for front-end applications has made the React codebase “ginormous,” and what’s required to support a sustainable community of open-source contributors.

A Beginner’s Guide to Getting Started in DevOps promotion
Get practical information about what DevOps is and how a collaborative culture will benefit your work and company. GitLab’s detailed list of resources and real-world examples provides you with opportunities for continuous learning.

Interesting questions

Is there a hash function that’s more expensive for an attacker than for the server? crypto.stackexchange.com
If you really want to season your hash, include both salt and random peppering.

Should serialization and deserialization be “atomic” transactions? softwareengineering.stackexchange.com
As in, either it works or it blows up.

How did the generic masculine emerge? linguistics.stackexchange.com
This is about noun and adjective forms, not basic bros.

Malicious code somehow hidden with whitespace? security.stackexchange.com
An actual code ninja spotted in the wild.

Links from around the web

Why does 0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004? jvns.ca
Floating points, love ’em! …sometimes.

An engineering leader’s guide to tackling change leaddev.com
Change may be constant, but that doesn’t make it easy. The right engineering leader should have a plan to work with change!

The modern web’s underrated powerhouse github.com
CSS is an ever-evolving language that is a core building block of the web—and an underappreciated one!

How inevitable is the concept of numbers? writings.stephenwolfram.com
Numbers have been a core part of our culture since the beginning of recorded history. But are they inescapable?

If you’re curious about our other products: How to get started with Stack Overflow for Teams.

The post The Overflow #166: Writing code for other people appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Modern networked applications generate a lot of data—every business wants to make the most of that data. Most of the time, that means moving production data through some transformation process to get it ready for the analytics process. But what if you could have in-app analytics? What if you could generate insights directly from production data?

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Stanimira Vlaeva, Developer Advocate at MongoDB, and Fredric Favelin, Technical Director, Partner Presales at MongoDB, about how a serverless database can minimize the distance between producing data and understanding it.

Episode notes:

Stanimira talked a lot about using BigQuery with MongoDB Atlas on Google Cloud Run. If you need to skill up on these three tools, check out this tutorial. 

Once you’ve got the hang of it, get your data connected with Confluent Connetors. 

With Atlas, you can transform your data in JavaScript. 

Connect with Stanimira on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

Connect with Fredric on LinkedIn. Congrats to Stellar Question winner SubniC for Get name of current script in Python.

TRANSCRIPT

The post Shorten the distance between production data and insight (Ep. 541) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

The nature of simulating nature: Q&A with IBM quantum computing research stackoverflow.blog
We chat with Dr. Jeannette (Jamie) Garcia, Senior Research Manager of Quantum Applications and Software at IBM Quantum, about their 433 qubit quantum computer and what the real-life applications of quantum computing are today.

Three layers to secure a software development organization stackoverflow.blog
This affects the individual developer writing insecure code, the engineering team blindly trusting their dependencies, and the organization thinking that their best bet is to roll their own security controls.

Engineering’s hidden bottleneck: pull requests stackoverflow.blog
CI/CD needs a CM—continuous merge—to get the SDLC moving smoothly.

The AI that writes music from text (Ep. 535) stackoverflow.blog
The home team discusses why it seems like everybody needs subtitles now, the AI that generates music from text, and a list of open-source data engineering projects for you to contribute to.

Introduction to Data Modeling Virtual Event with MongoDB promotion
Uncover the most important factors to consider when setting up your data model in MongoDB. Learn more by attending MongoDB’s free webinar on February 22nd at 11am ET.

Interesting questions

What do you do when you’re stuck? mathoverflow.net
When you’re missing a piece in a math proof, add it as an assumption and continue.

How to get better at taking constructive criticism? workplace.stackexchange.com
It’s not about you, it’s about your job.

Is it possible to tell the difference between a young star that is just “big” and an older red giant? physics.stackexchange.com
The color gives it away.

How can lossless compression ever exist? softwareengineering.stackexchange.com
You can losslessly compress some of the inputs some of the time, but you can’t compress all the inputs all of the time.

Links from around the web

Reinventing search with a new AI-powered Microsoft Bing and Edge, your copilot for the web blogs.microsoft.com
Will Bing move on up in search engine popularity with the new AI changes?

How to build a magazine layout with CSS grid areas www.smashingmagazine.com
CSS Grid can be challenging to work with, but it’s powerful!

It’s the future — you can stop using JPEGs daniel.do
The future of images is here. Check out the new formats!

Writing an effective tech spec yougotthis.io
Understanding what to build and how to build it is some of the most challenging work in software engineering. Here’s a great chat about doing just that!

If you’re curious about our other products: How to get started with Stack Overflow for Teams.

The post The Overflow #165: Your new favorite band is an AI appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

Is software getting worse? stackoverflow.blog
With all the advancements in software development, apps could be much better. Why aren’t they?

CEO update: Eliminating obstacles to productivity, efficiency, and learning stackoverflow.blog
It was a busy and successful quarter, so although our first CEO update of 2023 takes place in a fundamentally different environment than the first of 2022, our optimism for the future has not changed. It’s simply joined by a dose of pragmatism.

Announcing more ways to learn and grow your skills stackoverflow.blog
Now you can discover relevant online courses from Pluralsight® and Udemy® on Stack Overflow.

What do the tech layoffs really tell us? (Ep. 533) stackoverflow.blog
The home team convenes to talk about how tech layoffs are reshaping the industry, where to look for software engineering jobs beyond tech, the brain-computer interface that speeds up communication for people experiencing paralysis, and Ben’s million-dollar game idea (free for the stealing).

A faster, easier, and more flexible database-as-a-service. promotion
Couchbase Capella DBaaS is flexible, full-featured and fully managed – with built-in access via K/V, SQL and full text search. It’s blazing fast, yet surprisingly affordable. Try Capella today for free.

Interesting questions

How can a grain of sand be “spaghettified” when nearing a black hole?  physics.stackexchange.com
This is all speculation since we can’t really run experiments with black holes.

Does the meme “breakfast is the most important meal of the day” come from a 1944 cereal marketing campaign? skeptics.stackexchange.com
Breakfast is so important that it’s mentioned in foundational religious texts.

What’s the rationale behind allowing sudo -u root but disallowing `sudo -u ` security.stackexchange.com
Welcome to policy jungle, we’ve got confusing rules. You can impersonate any user you like, so long as you got root.

Does a query that is suspended due to an ongoing ASYNC_NETWORK_IO cause blocking? dba.stackexchange.com
As a senior engineer would say: “It depends.”

Links from around the web

World Wide Web – Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org
The World Wide Web is the world’s dominant software platform. Do you know its history? Did you know it once even had a logo?

Easy SVG customization and animation: A practical guide www.smashingmagazine.com
Customizing and animating SVGs can be intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be.

The State of WebAssembly – 2022 and 2023 platform.uno
WebAssembly has come a long way! Take a look at where it’s been and where it’s going.

Refraction, dispersion, and other shader light effects blog.maximeheckel.com
We all like pretty lights! There’s a whole lot to learn about them, and this blog touches on the nitty gritty details of shaders (and more) in the browser.

Three must-listen podcasts for software developers medium.com
Finally, forgive us the self link, but we can’t help it when folks put our podcast in such fine company.

A blast from the past: Most developers believe blockchain technology is a game changer.

The post The Overflow #164: Is software getting worse? appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

With companies taking a long look at developer experience, it’s time to turn that attention on the humble pull request. The folks at LinearB took a look at a million PRs — four million review cycles involving around 25,000 developers — and found that it takes about five days to get through a review and merge the code. CI/CD has done wonders getting deployments down to a day or less; maybe it’s time for continuous merge next. 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we chat with COO Dan Lines and CEO Ori Keren, co-founders of LinearB, about why PRs are the chokepoint in the software development lifecycle, uncovering and automating the hidden rules of review requests, and their free tool, gitStream, that’ll find the right reviewer for your PR right now. 

Episode notes: 

So why do reviews take so long? Context switches, team leads who review everything, and the bystander effect are top contenders.

Dan and Ori hope their gitStream tool can reduce the time PRs take by automating a lot of the hidden rules for reviews. Check it out at gitstream.cm or linearb.io/dev.

Dan Lines hosts his own podcast: Dev Interrupted. Check out this episode with Stack Overflow’s very own Ben Matthews.  

Connect with Dan Lines and Ori Keren on LinkedIn. 

Shoutout to Rudy Velthuis for throwing a Lifeboat to the question Why should EDX be 0 before using the DIV instruction?

TRANSCRIPT

The post Engineering’s hidden bottleneck: pull requests appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

We spoke with Dr. Jeannette (Jamie) Garcia, Senior Research Manager of Quantum Applications and Software at IBM Quantum, about their 433 qubit quantum computer and what the real life applications of quantum computing are today. 

The Q&A below has been edited for clarity. If you’d like to watch the full conversation, check out the video of our conversation. 

Ryan Donovan: How did you get into quantum computing?

Jamie Garcia: I am actually a chemist by training—I hold a PhD in chemistry. I came to IBM because I was very interested in some of the material science work that was going on there at the time and started doing some research in that space. I think most experimentalists will tell you if you get a weird outcome from an experiment, one of the first things you need to do is try to figure out why, and that involves a lot of the theory. I was running down the hallway to talk to my computational colleagues to help elucidate what was going on in my flask that I couldn’t actually see.

As a part of that process, I got very interested in computation as a whole and the simulation of nature and trying to use computation towards that end. I realized that there were some real challenges with using classical computers for certain reactions. I would ask my colleagues and they would tell me it was impossible. And I was like, why ?

RD: Can you give an example?

JG: For me, they were surprising examples—small molecules that were really reactive.

You think of radicals, for example, that wreak all sorts of havoc in our bodies, but also turn up in batteries too, which I was studying at the time. The reaction was so high energy and there were so many different things that had to happen with the chemistry that classical computers couldn’t model it even though they were small molecules. It’s just O2 size. 

When I was at Yorktown Heights one day walking down the hallway, I saw one of my colleagues had a poster and it had chemistry on it, which caught my eye. You don’t see that all that often at IBM . It turns out that he was using quantum computers to study a certain property of a molecule.

It stopped me in my tracks, and I realized this is a whole new tool for chemistry. Now we’ve expanded beyond chemistry. We’re looking at all sorts of different things, but that was what got me hooked and interested from the very beginning. 

RD: We’ve talked to a few folks in quantum computing, but I think it’s valuable to kind of get the basics here. What exactly is a qubit?

JG: A qubit is our analog to a classical bit. At IBM we use superconducting qubits. These have to be cooled down to around 15 millikelvin. You may have seen photos of our big dilution refrigerators that cool our qubits down to that level. They’re made out of superconducting materials. 

What you’re doing when you’re programming a qubit is you’re using the materials properties of those superconductors, you’re able to move electrons into different energy states. That basically allows you to program a quantum computer. One of the biggest challenges is keeping them in those states. And I have a feeling we’ll talk about that. 

RD: Especially with your material science background.That seems like that’s a big part of the ball game.

JG: But they’re fundamentally a kind of different beast too, because we’re now using and leveraging quantum mechanics to program the qubits and the quantum computers and be able to perform algorithms on them. So it has a different flavor to it than a classical bit.

In fact, you can use quantum mechanical properties such as superposition and entanglement. Those are new knobs to turn when you’re thinking about algorithms. In certain instances, it can be complementary to classical devices. But it really is a whole new area to explore.

RD: I’ve heard that cubits aren’t exactly stable. You have them super cooled and are trying to keep them in this particular state. To produce one qubit, do you need a lot of redundancy and error correction?

JG:When we’re talking about 433 qubits, it’s all on one chip, right? So when you program them, a lot of times, we leverage two qubit gates where you need to entangle two qubits together.

You set it up and map your circuit onto the qubits in a very specific way in order to get an answer. Now, the stability piece that you’re referring to—qubits are inherently sensitive. We have to cool the qubits that we use down to 15 millikelvin because of exactly what you said.

You’re trying to basically hold the qubit in this state for as long as possible so you can run the calculation that you need to run. Basically, you need to have enough time to perform the gate operations for your circuit. 

Qubits are susceptible to noise. Sometimes we know where that noise comes from and sometimes we don’t. When we think about how we arrange the qubits on the chip, we’re doing it in a way that minimizes noise most of the time. We use what’s called a heavy hex architecture. That limits the crosstalk between qubits to minimize the noise so you’re able to have as long coherence times as possible to run the circuits and do a practical calculation within hours, not in a lifetime. 

We’ve also developed a lot of other techniques to manage the noise. Error correction is something that our teams are working towards and developing out the theory for certain error correction that will include having a fault tolerant device and error rates low enough that we can actually run some of those codes.

But we’re also looking at error mitigation, which leverages classical post-processing methods and can capture the noise regardless of whether we know where it comes from or not, to be able to account for the noise and then correct for it so that we can get out as accurate results as maybe even in an error corrected regime.

There’s active research ongoing and software tools that are being developed so that we can leverage these techniques as they are developed in real time and use them for our applications research and run algorithms and circuits that are interesting to us.

One of the things that we’ve recently released, which you can actually access through Qisket runtime is something called probabilistic error cancellation. What this essentially does is when you run a circuit, it runs the inverse of certain parts of the circuit, and you effectively are able to learn where the noise is that way. Then the post post-processing divides it into smaller circuits and you can pull it all back together and account for the noise.

There are opportunities for machine learning, certainly. We’re thinking very seriously about how AI and quantum intersect. Especially since we just announced our System Two and the plans for that. We’re thinking very carefully about how all these things will play together and where AI can help quantum and where quantum can help AI.

RD: What’s the rough equivalent of 433 qubits to classical computing?

JG: This is a tough question to answer. We think of the qubits in terms of state. If you just do a rough back of the envelope calculation, people will usually say it’s two to the n. So two to the 433 [states] is a lot. Huge. I think two to 275, that’s more than the number of atoms in the universe. So it’s absolutely massive. 

But there’s a lot of nuance that goes into that, especially when we’re talking about actually programming a quantum computer and using it to look at a chemistry problem or a problem in finance or anything like that. In addition to that, you have to take into account the noise that you have present in the system.

So it’s hard to say about what the computing power today is of a device that has 433 qubits. If you project out to where someday we have error rates that are as close to zero as possible, then that’s where you start talking about this two to the n and harnessing the power of the universe. You know, all these things.

That’s the potential that it brings to us in terms of compute. 

RD: That two to the n is what exactly? 

JG: It’s basis states.

You can use the examples of molecules. Water might use somewhere around 14 qubits. If you have 14 qubits, then that’s 10 to the four classical bits, right?

You can calculate it out that way. But again, there’s a lot of nuance here. We need to carefully consider the types of problems that quantum will be good for. It’s not necessarily all the same problems that you can think of classical being good for. That’s my caveat, but it kind of gives you a rough idea.

RD: Some crypto algorithms are trying to be quantum safe, while others like Shor’s Algorithm are uniquely suited for quantum computing. Why is that?

JG: Shor’s is an algorithm that is in that long-term error corrected regime, right? You would need to use error correction for it. A lot of the famous algorithms that you’ve heard of that show exponential speed up with quantum computers, typically what we’re talking about are in that regime. There are some algorithms that are famous for chemistry, like quantum phase estimation.

That said,we’re, we’re doing a lot to bring bring algorithms closer to near term and error mitigation—and maybe even error mitigation combined with error correction—in these early days will allow us to start solving problems that I don’t think we would’ve thought that we would’ve been able to solve before as early as as this. 

Shor’s algorithm definitely leverages quantum devices that have these sort of ancilla qubits. When you think of the back of an envelope calculation for what you would need to be able to run Shor’s algorithm or crack RSA or something like that, you’ll see numbers that are in the millions of qubits. You have to account for that overhead that comes with the error correction. 

The asterisk is we’re doing things earlier than we thought. I think that that’s part of the reason that we’re talking about quantum safe now. We don’t know what the timeline is exactly, but we do have methods to address this that are available today. For example, our zSystems are quantum safe systems already. It’s definitely something to start considering now. If you had asked me the same question like two years ago, I would’ve said that’s so far away.

And now I’m like, Hmm. Start planning now.

RD: What other tasks or applications is quantum computing suited to?

JG: We think about it in three big buckets. The simulation of nature is one of them. That includes not just molecular simulations, but physics falls into this category. Material science falls into this category. You can think of this as being a space that’s interesting because nature is quantum mechanical. So if you are then leveraging a device that is also quantum mechanical—there’s some obvious connection there. In addition to that,there’s been theoretical proofs that show that there should be at least more than polynomial speed up possible with quantum computers with certain problems such as dynamics, energy states, ground states, and things of that nature. 

The second category is generally mathematics and processing data with complex structures. This is where quantum machine learning comes in. We talked about Shor’s and factoring. That fits into this category. There are algorithms that have been shown for quantum machine learning that imply that there should be an exponential speed up possible in certain cases.

We try to focus on these two areas in particular we think hold a lot of promise because they have this greater than polynomial potential associated with them for using a quantum computer. Those are really obvious areas to look at. 

The last category is search and optimization. So Grover’s falls into this category. These are areas that we don’t necessarily have theoretical proofs yet that there could be super polynomial speed up or greater than polynomial or exponential speed up. But we know that it promises probably somewhere around quadratic, maybe more. We’re still researching and looking, so you never know what you’re gonna find. 

There are certain algorithms like amplitude estimation and amplification that we think could act as accelerators for the other two areas that I talked about. Regardless of what kind of speed up, we would expect that it could still help in these other areas as well.

You can imagine it’s almost two to the n number of use cases that map onto those areas and it encompasses a lot of different things. We’re exploring a lot of different areas with partners and coupling it and tying it to things that are really valuable and hard classically.

That’s key, right? If something’s really easy classically, you could argue why look at quantum for it. Something that’s hard classically is where we think that quantum can lend some kind of advantage or some kind of speed up. In the long run, those are the areas that we’re exploring.

RD: Speaking of hypothetical use cases, have you seen the TV show Devs?

JG: No, what was the use case?

RD: Simulating the past and future.

JG: Oh my goodness. Okay…Well, there is prediction, right?

RD: Sure. I mean, simulating nature, right? 

JG: No, it’s not that far.

RD: Okay. Oh, no.

Because you are helping people process quantum jobs, are there any adjustments they need to make for their algorithms or data to be suitable for quantum computing?

JG: It depends on how you want to use quantum computers, right? A lot of our discussions are around—as we’re pointing to the next generation of these quantum-centric supercomputing centers and where you really have classical HPC next to a quantum device—how do you best leverage the workloads between those?

There’s a lot of things that we’ve been thinking about in terms of how you ideally would approach a problem. How would you set it up in such a way that you have the right parts of the problem being addressed classically and then other pieces with a quantum computer.

But the algorithms that we do and the circuits that we run are inherently different from classical ones. Again, it really comes down to how you divvy up the problem, and which pieces you want to put where. At a very high level, that’s what would need to be taken into consideration.

Something to point out here is that quantum computers aren’t big data types of devices. That’s another area that we think that there’s a lot to be done from the classical standpoint. But if you want to look at something that has a high complexity, high interconnectivity, or is by virtue dynamic, those are the kinds of things that the quantum computer handles really well.

If you were to run something on a quantum computer, you want to make sure that it’s the right circuit that’s going into it and the algorithm that you’re using.

RD: Is there anything else you wanted to cover that we didn’t talk about?

JG: In general, thinking about the different use cases and the different areas is really important to do as a field, right? This is a very multidisciplinary area, and we need to have folks that are coming from all points of view. Whether it’s software development, engineering, architects, and even those that are on more of the classical side.

Learning about quantum and bringing that lens has really pushed us forward in a truly unique way for this field. It has to do with the fact that it’s an emerging area. It’s all hands on deck and we’re all kind of learning together. 

The post The nature of simulating nature: Q&A with IBM quantum computing research appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

AI applications open new security vulnerabilities stackoverflow.blog
Your ML model and AI-as-a-service apps might open new attack surfaces. Here’s how to mitigate them.

Comparing tag trends with our Most Loved programming languages stackoverflow.blog
And how does learning to code play into these stats?

How chaos engineering preps developers for the ultimate game day (Ep. 531) stackoverflow.blog
In complex systems, you usually want to minimize chaos. Unless you’re trying to find weak spots. In that case, chaos is your friend.

The less JavaScript, the better (Ep. 532) stackoverflow.blog
Convert unused JavaScript into lightweight HTML…oh that feels so good.

JetBrains Space On-Premises Is Out promotion
A complete and secure software development platform, fully managed on your side. It provides Git hosting, code reviews, CI/CD, packages, issue tracking, team chats, and fully integrates with JetBrains IDEs. Start with a free plan for up to 10 users.

Interesting questions

Why is NaCl so hyper-abundant in the ocean? earthscience.stackexchange.com
And with so much of it sloshing around, how come our rivers aren’t turning salty?

How large would a tree need to be to provide oxygen for 100 people? worldbuilding.stackexchange.com
Like people, trees are most productive in middle age.

Do cows get blown through the air by tornadoes?  skeptics.stackexchange.com
Does this mean the movie <em>Twister </em>isn’t scientifically accurate, only scientifically awesome?

I announced my resignation…and was completely ignored. What to do? workplace.stackexchange.com
When you stop coming in to work, they might get the hint.

Links from around the web

How to optimize your code reviews  github.com
Code reviews are one of your biggest opportunities for knowledge-sharing!

Dreamy blur yuanchuan.dev
Want to recreate a photo effect? Why use a photo editing software when you can use CSS?

Hello, PNG! www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk
You’ve seen PNGs all over the internet. But did you know that their specification was updated as recently as a few months ago?

Why we all need subtitles now www.youtube.com
Sound engineering has changed, which has changed how we hear words on the big (and little) screen.

A blast from the past: CSS in SVG in CSS: Shipping confetti to Stack Overflow’s design system.

The post The Overflow #163: Most Loved vs. most questions appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

Microsoft Azure joins Collectives on Stack Overflow stackoverflow.blog
There’s now a destination on Stack Overflow for all things Azure.

Minimizing the downsides of dynamic programming stackoverflow.blog
Dynamic languages allow for a lot of flexibility in typing — sometimes too much. Here’s how to add some guardrails to your code.

How Intuit improves security, latency, and development velocity with a service mesh stackoverflow.blog
There are lots of interesting features a mesh can automatically add to service architecture.

Flake it till you make it: how to detect and deal with flaky tests (Ep. 528) stackoverflow.blog
But it works on my machine at least half the time!

Need SAML auth? Use WorkOS promotion
WorkOS makes it fast to build enterprise features like SAML &amp; SCIM. Integration is a breeze with beautiful API docs and SDKs. Join hundreds of companies using WorkOS—including Vercel, PlanetScale &amp; Webflow—and make your app Enterprise Ready today.

Interesting questions

When was the term ‘directory’ replaced by ‘folder’? retrocomputing.stackexchange.com
It changed to reflect the way using computers evolved.

Is every feature of the universe logically necessary? philosophy.stackexchange.com
You’ll want to sit down for this one, hence, a chair.

How can I handle kids telling me extremely boring stuff?  parenting.stackexchange.com
Listen, don’t blame this on kids. Anyone talking to you about playing video games in detail is boring.

Was the shot-on-the-ISS movie “The Challenge” ever released or is there a release date?  space.stackexchange.com
It’s not on the schedule yet. They don’t have any more space.

Links from around the web

Why not document.write()?  csswizardry.com
Using document.write() will almost always work in the browser, but it’s not recommended.

SSSVG: An Interactive SVG Reference fffuel.co
SVG is a deep technology to learn. Here’s a great reference guide to help you along the way.

What kind of bots are posting in the fediverse? botwiki.org
As the fediverse grows, the bots have found their way in as well.

A blast from the past: How to prevent scope creep when managing a project from home.

The post The Overflow #162: The great testing flake off   appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

In complex service-oriented architectures, failure can happen in individual servers and containers, then cascade through your system. Good engineering takes into account possible failures. But how do you test whether a solution actually mitigates failures without risking the ire of your customers? That’s where chaos engineering comes in, injecting failures and uncertainty into complex systems so your team can see where your architecture breaks. 

On this sponsored episode, our fourth in the series with Intuit, Ben and Ryan chat with Deepthi Panthula, Senior Product Manager, and Shan Anwar, Principal Software Engineer, both of Intuit, about using self-serve chaos engineering tools to control the blast radius of failures, how game day tests and drills keep their systems resilient, and how their investment in open-source software powers their program. 

Episode notes: 

Sometimes old practices work in new environments. The Intuit team uses Failure Mode Effect Analysis, (FMEA), a procedure developed by the US military in 1949, to ensure that their developers understand possible points of failure before code makes it to production. 

The team uses Litmus Chaos to inject failures into their Kubernetes-based system and power their chaos engineering efforts. It’s open source and maintained by Intuit and others. 

If you’ve been following this series, you’d know that Intuit is a big fan of open-source software. Special shout out to Argo Workflow, which makes their compute-intensive Kubernetes jobs work much smoother. 

Connect on LinkedIn with Deepthi Panthula and Zeeshan (Shan) Anwar.If you want to see what Stack Overflow users are saying about chaos engineering, check out Chaos engineering best practice, asked by User NingLee two years ago.

TRANSCRIPT

The post How chaos engineering preps developers for the ultimate game day (Ep. 531) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

Beyond Git: The other version control systems developers use stackoverflow.blog
Our developer survey found that 93% of developers use Git. So what are the other 7% using?

Stack Gives Back 2022! stackoverflow.blog
Let’s start the year on a high note! We’re excited to announce our 14th Stack Gives Back.

Taming multiple design system with a single plugin stackoverflow.blog
Intuit shares their platform-based approach to managing a design system and how they’re using AI to keep the brand consistent.

From CS side project to the C-suite (Ep. 525) stackoverflow.blog
Find out why your users were rage clicking, once and for all.

Beginner’s Guide to Getting Started in DevOps promotion
Get practical information about what DevOps is and how a collaborative culture will benefit your work and company. GitLab’s detailed list of resources and real-world examples provides you with opportunities for continuous learning.

Interesting questions

What type of abrasive grit was used to grind lenses for telescopes? hsm.stackexchange.com
How accurate do you want your Galileo cosplay to be?

Why was there a minimum height for astronauts? space.stackexchange.com
Just like rollercoasters, astronauts need to “be this tall” to ride.

Travel in western Ukraine: how safe / unsafe is it? travel.stackexchange.com
A traveler asks about seeing the beauty in the world in a time of war and violence—what’s the right thing to do?

CPU temperature often reaches 100°C unix.stackexchange.com
Idea: let your CPU boil water for your tea (just kidding, don’t try this at home).

Links from around the web

Furby 1998 source code: David Hampton, Wayne Schulz archive.org
If only there was a way to relive the 90s via code…oh wait, there is! Now if someone could code some flannel CSS themes.

3D in CSS garden.bradwoods.io
This is a fun, handy guide to visualizing 3D concepts in CSS!

Implementing CSS style inheritance in React Native www.builder.io
Styling certain things doesn’t always work in React Native. But with the right know-how and some CSS cascading magic, this case study shows how to fix the problem.

Facts and Figures 2022: Latest on global connectivity amid economic downturn www.itu.int
Being on the computer all day means that we spend a lot of our lives in bubbles (and take internet access for granted). Here are some mind-expanding statistics about the digital divide.

A blast from the past: How developers can be their own operations department.

The post The Overflow #161: Git isn’t the only game in town appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

At a SaaS company like Intuit that has hundreds of services spread out across multiple products, maintaining development velocity at scale means baking some of the features that every service needs into the architecture of their systems. That’s where a service mesh comes in. It automatically adds features like observability, traffic management, and security to every service in the network without adding any code. 

In this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Anil Attuluri, principal software engineer, and Yasen Simeonov, senior product manager, both of Intuit, about how their engineering organization uses a service mesh to solve problems, letting their engineers stay focused on writing business logic. Along the way, we discuss how the service mesh keeps all the financial data secure, how it moves network traffic to where it needs to go, and the open source software they’ve written on top of the mesh. This is the third episode in our series with them.

Episode notes:

For those looking to get the same service mesh capabilities as Intuit, check out Istio, a Cloud Native Computing Foundation project. 

In order to provide a better security posture for their products, each business case operates on a discrete network. But much of the Istio service mesh needs to discover services across all products. Enter Admiral, their open-sourced solution. 

When Intuit deploys a new service version, they can progressively scale the amount of traffic that hits it instead of the old version using Argo Rollouts. It’s better to find a bug in production on 1% of requests than 100%.

If you want to learn more about what Intuit engineering is doing, check out their blog. Congrats to Great Question badge winner, HelpMeStackOverflowMyOnlyHope, for asking Detect whether input element is focused within ReactJS

The post How Intuit improves security, latency, and development velocity with a service mesh appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

The Winter/Summer Bash 2022 Hat Cafe is now closed! stackoverflow.blog
We had fun celebrating Winter/Summer Bash 2022, sponsored by Splunk, with you all! While we’ve closed our cafe, let’s look at a few highlights and hat-wearing avatars that brought us joy this holiday season.

Getting your data in shape for machine learning stackoverflow.blog
Machine learning uses data structures that don’t always resemble the ones used in standard computing. You’ll need to process your data first if you want efficient machine learning.

The future of software engineering is powered by AIOps and open source stackoverflow.blog
Hear how Intuit is using AI to help its dev teams ship faster.

From life without parole to startup CTO (Ep. 522) stackoverflow.blog
Ever wondered what it’s like learning to code from an XML file of raw Stack Overflow data?

Ask Me Anything Live Virtual Event with MongoDB on January 18th promotion
Want to learn more about MongoDB, but aren’t sure where to begin? Are you familiar with MongoDB Atlas, but still have questions? Join MongoDB for an Ask Me Anything (AMA) Live Virtual Event on Wednesday, January 18 at 11am EST. Register today and ask away.

Interesting questions

How long would humanity survive if a sudden eternal night occurred? worldbuilding.stackexchange.com
For preppers looking for a bigger challenge.

What’s the difference between “detonate” and “explode”? ell.stackexchange.com
Depends on whether the bomb is the subject or the direct object.

Computers chess programs: Does hardware or software matter more? chess.stackexchange.com
Is it more important to play chess well or quickly?

What’s the difference between a bare metal hypervisor and an operating system? cs.stackexchange.com
Are you looking to support a human or a virtual machine?

Links from around the web

How we improved our documentation medusajs.com
Treating documentation as a product is not always intuitive, but it’s important for creating better software

The 80s are back, baby eyeondesign.aiga.org
Neon, tight typing, and more: designs inspired by 1980s advertising are on the rise!

Seven scientific discoveries from 2022 that may lead to new inventions www.smithsonianmag.com
Science is incredible! Check out some really cool discoveries that might change how we live in the future.

Top Pens of 2022 on CodePen codepen.io
The top 100 Pens of 2022 are out!

A blast from the past: Incremental Static Regeneration: Building static sites a little at a time.

The post The Overflow #160: Looking back at Hat Cafe 2022   appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

SPONSORED BY INTUIT

Any large organization with multiple products faces the challenge of keeping their brand identity unified without denying each product its own charisma. That’s where a design system can help developers avoid reinventing the wheel every time, say,  a new button gets created 

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Demian Borba, Principal Product Manager, and Kelvin Nguyen, Senior Engineering Manager, both of Intuit. We chat about how their design system is evolving into a platform, how AI keeps their brand consistent, and why a design system doesn’t have to solve every use case. 

Episode notes

Treating a design system as a platform means providing a baseline of tokens—colors, typography, themes—and allowing developers to deviate so long as they use the right tokens. 

Alongside a company-wide push towards greater AI usage, Intuit’s design system team is beginning to leverage AI to help developers make better design decisions. As an example, they’re including typeahead functionality to suggest possible solutions to design decisions. 

The team is using a Figma plugin to manage a lot of the heavy lifting. Their presentation at Config 2022 built a lot of excitement for what’s possible. 

Congrats to RedVelvet, who won a great question badge for The most efficient way to remove first N elements in a list? 

Find Kelvin and Demian on Linkedin. 

TRANSCRIPT

The post Taming multiple design systems with a single plugin (Ep. 526) appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

Microsoft discontinued VSS in 2005, coincidently the same year as the first release of Git. While technology has shifted and improved quite a bit since then git has come out as the dominant choice for version control systems. This year, we asked what version control systems people used, and git came out as the clear overall winner. 

But it’s not quite a blow out; there are two other systems on the list: SVN (Apache Subversion) and Mercurial. There was a time when both of these were prominent in the market, but not everyone remembers those days. Stack Overflow engineering has used both of these in the past, though we now use git like almost everybody else.

This article will look at what those version control systems are and why they still have a hold of some engineering teams. 

Apache Subversion

Subversion (SVN) is an open-source version control system that maintains source code in a central server; anyone looking to change code accesses these files from clients. This client server model is an older style, compared to the distributed model git uses, where changes can be stored locally then distributed to the central history (and other branches) when pushed to an upstream repository. In fact, SVN build on historical version control—it was initially intended to be a mostly compatible successor to CVS (Concurrent Versions System), which is itself a front end and expansion to Revision Control System (RCS), initially released way back in 1982. 

This earlier generation of version control worked great for the way software was built ten to fifteen plus years ago. A piece of software would be built as a central repository, with any and all feature additions merged into a trunk. Branches were rare and eventually absorbed into the mainline. Important files, particularly large binaries, could be “locked” to prevent other developers from changing them while you worked on them. And everything existed as directories—files, branches, tags, etc. This model worked great for a centrally located team that eventually shipped a release, whether as a disc or a download. 

SVN is a free, open-source version of this model. One of the paid client-server version control systems, Perforce (more on this below), had some traction at enterprise-scale companies, notably Google, but for those unwilling to pay the price for it, SVN was a good option. Plenty of smaller companies (including us at the beginning) used centralized version control to manage their code, and I’m sure plenty of folks still do, whether out of habit or preference. 

But the ways that engineering organizations work has changed pretty drastically in the last dozen years. There is no longer a central dev team working on a single codebase; you have multiple independent teams each responsible for one or more services. Stack Overflow user VonC has made himself a bit of a version control expert and has guided plenty of companies away from SVN. He sees it a technology built for a less agile way of working. “It does get in the way, in term of management, repository creation, registration, and the general development workflow. As opposed to a distributed model, which is much more agile in those aspects. I suspect the recent developments with remote working will not help those closed environment systems.”

The other reason that SVN grew less used was that git showed how things could be better. Quentin Headen, Senior Software Engineer here at Stack Overflow, used SVN early in his career. “In my opinion, the two biggest drawbacks of SVN are that first, it is centralized, which requires a the SVN server to be up for you to commit changes. If your internet is down, you can’t commit at all. Second, the branching is very heavy. Once a branch is created, you can’t delete it (if I remember correctly). I think there is a command to remove, but it stays in history regardless. Git branches are cheap and can be deleted easily if need be.”

Clearly, SVN lost prominence when the new generation of version control arrived. But git wasn’t the only member of that generation. 

Mercurial

Git wasn’t the only member of the distributed version control generation. Mercurial first arrived the same year as Git—2005—and became the two primary players. Early on, many people wondered what differences, if any, the two systems had. When Stack Overflow moved away from SVN, Mercurial won out mostly because we had easy access to hosting through Fog Creek Software (now Glitch), another of our co-founder Joel Spolsky’s companies. Eventually, we too gave in to Git. 

Initially, Mercurial seemed to be the natural fit for developers coming from earlier VC systems. VonC notes, “It’s the story of VHS versus Betamax.”

I reached out to Raphaël Gomès and Pierre-Yves David, both Mercurial core developers, about where Mercurial fits into the VC landscape. They said that plenty of large companies still use Mercurial in one form or another, including Mozilla, Facebook (though they may have moved to a Mercurial fork ported to Rust called Eden), Google (though as part of a custom VC codebase called Piper), Nokia, and Jane Street. “One of main advantages of Mercurial these days is its ability to scale on a very large project (millions of commits, millions of files). Over the years, companies have contributed performance improvements and dedicated features that make Mercurial a viable option for extreme scale monorepos.”

Ry4an Brase, who works at Google and uses their VC, expanded on why: “git is wed to the file system. Even GitHub accesses repositories as files on disk. The concurrency requirements of very large user bases on a single repo scale past filesystem access, and both Google and Facebook found Mercurial could be adapted to a database-like datastore and git could not.” However, with the recent release of Git v2.38 and Scalar, that advantage may be lessened. 

But another reason that Mercurial may stay at these companies with massive monorepos is that it’s portable and extendable. It’s written in Python, which means it doesn’t need to be compiled to native code, and therefore it can be a viable VC option on any OS with a Python interpreter. It also has a robust extension system. “The extension system allows modifying any and all aspects of Mercurial and is usually greatly appreciated in corporate contexts to customize behavior or to connect to existing systems,” said Gomès and David.

Mercurial still has some big fans. Personally, I had never heard of it until some very enthusiast Mercurialists commented on an article of ours, A look under the hood: how branches work in Git. 

babaloomer: Branches in mercurial are so simple and efficient! You never struggle to find the origin of a branch. Each commit has the name of its branch embedded in it, you can’t get lost! I don’t know how many times I had to drill down git history just to find the origin of a branch.

Scott: Mercurial did this much more intuitively than Git. You can tell the system is flawed when the standard practice in many workflows is to use “push -f” to force things. As with any tool, if you have to force it something is wrong.

Of course, different developers have different takes on this. Brase doesn’t think that Mercurial’s branching is necessary better. “Mercurial has four ways to do branches,” he said, “and the one that was exactly like git’s was called ‘bookmarks’, which the core developers were slow to support.  What Mercurial called branches have no equivalent in git (every commit is on one and only one branch and it’s part of the commit info and revision hash), but no one wanted that kind.” Well, maybe not no one. 

Mercurial is still and active project, as Gomès and David attest. They contribute to the code, manage the release cycles, and hold yearly conferences. While not the leading tool, it still has a  place. 

Other version control systems

In talking to people about version control, I found a few other interesting use cases, primarily around paid version control products. 

Remember when I said I’d have more on Perforce? It turns out that several people mentioned it even though it didn’t even register on our survey. It turns out that Perforce has a strong presence in the video game industry—some even consider it the standard there. Rob Oates, an industry veteran who is currently the senior director of technology and partnerships at Exploding Kittens said, “Perforce still sees use in the game industry because c video game projects (by variety, count, and total volume of assets) are almost entirely not code.”

He gave four requirements that any version control system would need to fulfill in order to work for video game development: 

1. Must be useable by laypersons – Artists and designers will be working in this system day-to-day.
2. Must lock certain files/types on checkout – Many of our files cannot be conceptually or technically merged.
3. Must be architected to handle many large files as the primary use case – Many of our files will be dozens or hundreds of megabytes.
4. Must avoid degenerate case with delta compression schemes – Many of our large files change entirely between revisions.

Perforce, because of its centralized server and file locking mechanism, fits perfectly. So why not separate the presentation layer from the simulation logic and store the big binary assets in one place and the code in a distributed system that excels at merging changes? The code in video games often depends on the assets. “For example, it would not be unusual for a game’s combat system to depend on the driving code, the animations, the models, and the tuning data,” said Oates. “Or a pathfinding system may depend on a navigation mesh generated from the level art. Keeping these concerns in one repo is faster and less confusing when a team of programmers, artists, and designers are working to rapidly iterate on the ‘feel’ of the combat system.”

The engineers at these companies often prefer git. When they have projects that don’t have artists and designers, they can git what they want. “Game engines and middleware have an easier time living on distributed version control as their contributors are mostly, if not entirely, engineers,” said Oates. Unfortunately for the devs on video games, most projects have a lot of people creating non-code assets. 

Another one mentioned was Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC). This was a Microsoft product originally included in Team Foundation Server and still supported in Azure DevOps. It’s considered the spiritual successor to VSS and is another central server style VC system. Art Gola, a solutions architect with Federated Hermes, told me about it. “It was great for its time. It had an API, was supported on Linux (Team Foundation Everywhere) and tons of people using it that no one ever heard from since they were enterprise devs.”

But Gola’s team is actively trying to move their code out of the TFVC systems they have, and he suspects that a lot of other enterprise shops are too. Compared to the agility git provides, TFVC felt clunky. “It requires you to have a connection to the central server. Later versions allow you to work offline, but you only had the latest version of the code, unlike git. There is no built in pull request type of process. Branching was a pain.”

One could assume that now that the age of centralized version control is waning and distributed version control is ascendant, there is no innovation in the VC space. But you’d be mistaken. “There are a lot of cool experiments in the VCS space,” said Patrick Thomson, a GitHub engineer who compared Git and Mercurial in 2008, “Pijul and the theory of patch algebra, especially—but Git, being the most performant DVCS, is the only one I use in industry. I work on very large codebases.”

Why did Git win?

After seeing what the version control landscape looks like in 2022, it may be obvious why distributed version control won out as the VC of choice for software developers. But it may not be immediately obvious why Git has such a commanding share of the market over Mercurial. Both of them first came out around the same time and have similar features, though certainly not one to one. Certainly, many people prefer it. “For personal projects, I pick Mercurial. If I was starting another company, I’d use Git to avoid having to retrain and argue with new hires,” said  Brase.

In fact, it should have had an advantage because it was familiar to SVN users and the centralized way of doing things. “Mercurial was certainly the most easy to use and more familiar to use because it was a bit like using subversion, but in a distributed fashion,” said VonC. But that fealty to the old ways may have hurt it as well. “That is also one aspect which was ultimately against Mercury because just having the vision of using an old tool in a distributed fashion was not necessarily the be best fit to develop in a decentralized way.”

The short answer why it won comes down to a strong platform and built-in user base. “Mercurial lost the popularity battle in the early 2010s to Git. It’s something we attribute in large part to the soaring rise of GitHub at that time, and to the natural endorsement of Git by the Linux community,”  said Gomès and David.

Mercurial may have started out in a better position, but it may have lost ground over time. “Mercurial’s original fit was a curated, coherent user experience with a built-in web UI,” said Brase. “GitHub gave git the good web UI and coherent couldn’t beat the feature avalanche from Git contributors and the star power of its founder.”

That feature avalanche and focus on user needs may have been a hidden factor in pushing adoption. Thomson, in his comparison nearly fifteen years ago, likened Git to MacGyver and Mercurial to James Bond. Git let you scrape together a bespoke solution to nearly every problem if you were a command-line wizard, while Mercurial—if given the right job—could be fast and efficient. So where does Thomson stand now? “My main objection to Git—the UI—has improved over the years (I now use an Emacs-based Git frontend, which is terrific), whereas Mercurial’s primary drawback, its slow speed on large repositories, is still, as far as I can tell, an extant problem.”

Like MacGyver, Git has been improvising and adapting to fit whatever challenges come its way. Like James Bond, Mercurial has its way of doing things. It works great for some situations, but it has a distinct point of view. “My favorite example of a difference in how git and Mercurial approach new features is the `config` command,” said Brase. “Both `git config` and `hg config` are commands to edit settings such as the user’s email address. The `git config` command modifies `~/.gitrc` for you and usually gets it right. The Mercurial author refused all contributions that edited a config file for you. Instead `hg config` launched your text editor on `~/.hgrc`, saying ‘What is it with coders who are intimidated by text-based config files? Like doctors that can’t stand blood.’”

Regardless, it seems that while Git feels like the only version control game in town, it isn’t. Options for how to solve your problems are always a plus, so if you’ve been frustrated with the way it seems that everyone does things, know that there are other ways of working, and commit to learning more. 

The post Beyond Git: The other version control systems developers use appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.

From the blog

You should be reading academic computer science papers stackoverflow.blog
You read documentation and tutorials to become a better programmer, but if you really want to be cutting-edge, academic research is where it’s at.

Remote work is killing big offices. Cities must change to survive stackoverflow.blog
If your office is where you live now, would you live in your old office?

The Great Resignation is here. What does that mean for developers? stackoverflow.blog
Nearly three years into the pandemic, many Americans are still reevaluating their relationship with work.

Picture perfect images with the modern <img> element stackoverflow.blog
You may not think about images as part of your web dev work, but they can affect your web app’s performance more than any other part of your code.

Why the number input is the worst input stackoverflow.blog
Think that web form has got your number? If you used input type=“number”, you may be surprised to find that it doesn’t.

Accelerate business success with Developer Experience Engineers promotion
Ensure developers have the right tools, processes, and environment to maximize productivity and create the greatest business value possible.

Interesting questions

What is the purpose of hiding spam links in some obscure forum posts? security.stackexchange.com
Consider them offerings to the mighty search engine gods.

Would a machine learning classifier algorithm be able to determine whether a number is odd vs even? stats.stackexchange.com
If by “machine learning” you mean “divide by two” then sure.

References for the complexity of the COBOL language retrocomputing.stackexchange.com
You want proof, eh? Don’t all the articles complaining about it count?

Feeling burnt out and like I need to leave but feeling guilty as there’s no one to replace me workplace.stackexchange.com
To thine own self be true. Especially when a company is overworking you.

Links from around the web

The joys of home-cooked apps blakewatson.com
Building something for yourself is the often most satisfying thing to do, because you are your own customer!

Taking the stress out of design system management www.smashingmagazine.com
Design systems can get unruly, but there’s ways to tame that.

A book teaching assembly language programming on the ARM 64 bit ISA. github.com
If you want to try your hand at assembly language programming, perhaps now’s the best time!

Finding language in the brain thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
The combination of neuroscience and linguistics is a powerful, and somewhat new field. Language isn’t only math…but it’s pretty close.

A blast from the past: Testing software so it’s reliable enough for space.

The post The Overflow #159: Our top blog posts (part 2)   appeared first on Stack Overflow Blog.