The Overflow #180: The battle for your attention at work

Welcome to ISSUE #180 of The Overflow! This newsletter is by developers, for developers, written and curated by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams. This week: the version control system that uses patch algebra, the proof that we are not the center of the universe, and the dark patterns that keep you paying subscription fees.

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.

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