
How we’re making Stack Overflow more accessible
Read Dan’s blog post about the process of making Stack Overflow more accessible.We followed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), with a few exceptions. For example, we chose to measure color contrast using the Accessible Perceptual Contrast Algorithm (APCA). We quantified the accessibility of our products using the Axe accessibility testing engine.Our accessibility dashboard helps our internal teams and the community track the accessibility of our products: Stacks (our design system), the public platform (Stack Overflow and all Stack Exchange sites), and Stack Overflow for Teams (including Stack Overflow for Teams Enterprise products). We also implemented robust accessibility testing and made those rules open-source in a comprehensive package you can find here.Shoutout to user Beejor for an excellent answer to the question What is the largest safe UDP packet size on the internet?.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
9 Aug 202428min

Unpacking the 2024 Developer Survey results
Read the blog post or dive into the results of our 2024 Developer Survey.A few highlights to get you started: most popular technologies, most admired and desired programming languages, feelings about/use of AI coding tools, and what we know about the global developer community. Speaking of our developer community, Stack Overflow user Frank earned a Stellar Question badge by wondering How to use C++ in Go.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
6 Aug 202423min

How developer experience can escape the spreadsheet
Cortex is an internal developer portal that cuts noise and helps devs build and continuously improve software. Explore their docs or see what’s happening on their blog.Cortex is also hiring, so if you’re an engineer who wants to work on these kinds of problems, check out their careers page.Connect with Anish on LinkedIn or X.Ganesh is also on LinkedIn and X.Shoutout to Alex Chesters, who earned a Great Question badge with How to count occurrences of an element in a Swift array?. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
2 Aug 202428min

How Stack Overflow fends off scraping bots
As Josh explains, DDoS attacks aim to take down a website, while bot scrapers try to gather as much data as possible without getting caught.Josh Zhang is a staff site reliability engineer (SRE) at Stack Overflow. Connect with him on LinkedIn.ICYMI: In 2022, Josh wrote an article for our blog about how Stack defends itself against DDoS attacks.Stack Overflow user Serge Ballesta won a Lifeboat badge for answering What does |= mean in c++.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
30 Juli 202421min

On the web, data doesn’t define us. It creates us.
Jannis Kallinikos is a coauthor of Data Rules: Reinventing the Market Economy (MIT Press, 2024) with Cristina Alaimo, which lays out a framework for a new social science focused on the socioeconomic changes driven by data. You can read an excerpt from Data Rules on our blog here.Explore more of Dr. Kallinikos’s work.Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner Ebrahim Ghasemi for answering What is the structure of an application protocol data unit (APDU) command and response?See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
26 Juli 202420min

The problem with the tech debt mindset
Chelsea Troy defines technical debt and maintenance load in her blog post, “Stop saying ‘technical debt.’”Learn more about technical bankruptcy in this blog post, “Monitoring debt builds up faster than software teams can pay it off.”Joel Spolsky’s classic blog post on avoiding rewriting code from scratch – Things you should never do, part I.Technical debt as explained by Ward Cunningham, who coined the term.Code as an asset, a conversation from Hacker News.Middleware is the “software glue” that provides services to applications beyond those available from the operating system. Ratpack framework is a toolkit for creating high performance web applications.React is a front end javascript library.jQuery is a JavaScript library designed to simplify HTML.Questions about functional programming.User shout out! Nikoksr received the lifeboat badge after answering a question related to math.pow.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
23 Juli 202424min

Java, but why? The state of Java in 2024
You can connect with Lenny Primak at Flow Logix, X, LinkedIn, Github, or Mastodon. Got questions about Java? Check out the site.Apache Groovy is a Java programming language. Virtual Threads reduce the effort put into writing and maintaining code as well as observing high-throughput concurrent applications.Apache Shiro is an open-source security framework that can do authentication, authorization, cryptography, and session management. Jakarta EE, or Jakarta Enterprise Edition, is a suite of services that helps developers write enterprise applications for the Java platform. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
19 Juli 202426min

The framework helping devs build LLM apps
LlamaIndex is a data framework for building LLM applications. Check out the open-source framework or get started with the developer community, LlamaHub.Looking for a deeper understanding of RAG? Start with our guide.Wondering how to import `SimpleDirectoryReader` from LlamaIndex? This question has you covered.Jerry Chen is a partner at Greylock. Connect with him on LinkedIn.Read Jerry Liu’s posts on the LlamaIndex blog or connect with him on LinkedIn.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
16 Juli 202434min