From the Network
music.stackexchange.com

What is the absolute lowest musical note in the musical spectrum?

If the lowest possible music note is played and nobody hears it, was it ever really played at all?

opensource.stackexchange.com

Is the program free software if it respects all freedoms except for the first one?

A jailbroken free software is not a free software at all.

literature.stackexchange.com

How can a grin be "like a phalanx" in Gravity's Rainbow?

Soldiers, the enemy is making us uncomfortable. Deploy grins!

worldbuilding.stackexchange.com

What is the quickest way to introduce plate tectonics to Venus?

Got an extra planetoid?

Every ecommerce hero needs a Sidekick

Ryan is joined by Vanessa Lee, VP of Product at Shopify, to discuss how AI is a tech renaissance and how these new technologies are affecting the ecommerce world. They cover the development of Sidekick, their new tool, along with the general challenges of building AI tools, the importance of maintaining human oversight in AI, and what the future holds for personalized user experiences in ecommerce.

The Stack Overflow Podcast
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What’s new at Stack Overflow: January 2026

For this first edition of the new year, we’re taking a step back to highlight some of the most impactful features shipped over the last year and how they can help you start 2026 strong.

Your 2025 Stacked: A year of knowledge, community, and impact

From tough questions to standout answers, your team built a lot in 2025. Your 2025 Stacked brings those contributions together in one shareable snapshot—celebrating the people, posts, and topics that defined your year in Stack Internal.

Latest articles
More Podcast
Around the web
oblomovka.com

AI psychosis, AI apotheosis

Who knew AI euphoria could feel so bad?

nik.art

The suck is why we're here

Being bad to get good is a human experience AI can't take away from us.

terriblesoftware.org

Life happens at 1x speed

The best things in life only happen at 1x speed (like reading this newsletter).

github.com

A philosophy of software design vs clean code

Uncle Bob and John Ousterhout go head-to-head to solve—well, nothing, they just keep arguing like always.

medium.com

Attention is Bayesian inference

And for AI's next "magic trick," it's going to use Bayes' Theorem to write your next LinkedIn post for you.

mattwie.se

Using Hinge as a command & control server

"Babe, I promise I only have Hinge on my phone to distribute unassuming abstract expressionist pixel art."

ma.ttias.be

Web development is fun again

Really, debating whether AI helps or hurts web development is one of the funnest parts.

sparkbox.com

During Helene, I just wanted a plain text website

Disaster preparedness is sometimes as easy as a bulleted list.

linusakesson.net

Kernighan's lever

Pre-debug dev: "Who are you?" Post-debug dev: "I'm you but stronger."

lucumr.pocoo.org

A year of vibes

Maybe the point of vibe coding was the AI friends we made along the way.

scottaaronson.blog

More on whether useful quantum computing is “imminent”

"Everybody wants to know what I would do if I couldn't scale. I guess we'll never know." -quantum computing

borretti.me

I wish people were more public

Was this written by a people-person or a content scraping bot?

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Every week we’ll share a collection of great questions from our community, news and articles from our blog, and awesome links from around the web.

Read previous issues →

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Issue 311: Your line on information in the new year

Can you believe you haven't read an Overflow since last year? Fine, fine, we'll keep our corny jokes about "not showering since last year" in 2025. We're closing out our top ten blog countdown with five more stories for you on everything from documentation to vibe coding to the Developer Survey. One of the biggest reads of the year for our community was a blog written by our CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar and our CPTO Jody Bailey on this new era at Stack Overflow, which feels particularly fitting for all the "new year, new me" posts you're probably seeing on social media. You can check that one out on the blog—plus other top posts from the year like a technical look at how we built Question Assist and why documents are a software architect's best friend. Speaking of new year, new era, new you, if you're looking to start your 2026 off right, we've got everything you need. Want to become a better developer? Check out our conversation with LaunchDarkly's Tom Totenberg about the software corners you should definitely not be cutting. Want to build a better community? We spoke with MIT and Stanford professor Alex "Sandy" Pentland on how you can use AI to do just that. Want to be disaster prepared or have fun with web development again? We've got two stories from the web that get you started on all such self-improvement endeavors. And what list of New Year's resolutions would be complete without "get smarter" on it? Our bevy of questions and answers is the best place to start. Where else could you learn about the safety of decade-old honey, exploding synthetic gloves, or the fastest way to make thousands of files at once so you can bulk delete them? Ah, only in the Overflow. All of that and much more is in the links below.

Issue 310: The top ten Stack Overflow blogs of 2025

What luck for our 310 issue to land on the 31st! If you're practicing your numbers in preparation for the New Years' countdown, we're right there with you. We're counting down the top ten Stack Overflow blogs of 2025, and this week we've got the first five for your holiday reading pleasure. From popping the AI bubble to the ick you get from slop to the losing employment battle Gen Z is having against bots, this year's blogs dug deep into the economic, cultural, and technical shifts caused by AI in 2025. And don't worry, we wrote about stuff besides AI. Rounding out the first five of our countdown are the Great Unracking of our last physical datacenter, and a piece on making your codebase better by making your code coverage worse. If you're in more of a listening mood, you're in luck because the pod stops for no holiday. We're joined by former Stack Overflow board member Anil Dash for a conversation on how AI is normal and should be treated as such. We also spoke with Dan Ciruli from Nutanix about the delicate dance between VMs and Kubernetes in cloud-native environments. From around the web, we've got a piece on when we can expect quantum computing to be scalable (apparently it's imminent), one dev's reflection on a year of vibe coding, plus the disproving of the old developer proverb, "If you're as clever as you can be when you write your code, how will you ever debug it?" Wait, is that 2026 I see on the horizon? Let's countdown the end of this issue the way we always do—with some questions. 5...What would Aristotle say about Cliff's Notes? 4...Will people believe me if I say the reason I don't understand advanced math is because its notation is not standardized? 3...What does "technically sound" mean? 2...Why won't my pirated disc of Brat work on my mom's 1999 CD player? 1...Happy New Year! Until next year, we have all those answers and so much more down in the links below.

Issue 309: Your year Stacked

Don't let all those year in-review posts on your social media feeds fool you—we've got plenty of new stories for you this week. We just got back from AWS re:Invent, and we've got the skinny on all the new tech announced. Two podcasts, two different takes. First, our very own CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar and Director of Data Science Michael Foree joined us to discuss everything they heard and saw at the event. Corey Quinn, Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill and snark king, also sat down with us to debrief on all things re:Invent, from the new technology to the restaurants. If you're more of a reader than a listener, we have a full recap for you on the blog of everything you'd want to know from re:Invent 2025. Fine, we won't be a Scrooge McDuck...we'll get into the wrapped spirit too. Let's take a walk down memory lane—maybe with Your 2025 Stacked, our fun year-in-review for our Stack Internal customers. Not your style? No worries. From the web, we've got a state of AI coding report for you, so you can look back and think about all the hours you saved (or more likely wasted) with coding bots. If you want to take it even further back, read about how they're recovering the lost files of Sega Channel. Maybe you'd even be interested in the history of your favorite default font, Times New Roman. If that's too much nostalgia for you, let's wrap this up by bringing you back to 2025. No Overflow could be complete without a few questions and a few answers, and this week we've even got the top ten Q&As of the year from our sites. Plus, we've plenty more—everything from melting big pieces of ice to ritualized workplace confessions and mayo disasters. It's all down below for you, wrapped and ready to go.

Issue 308: Software development time wasters

We've got a jampacked week for you of stories, so let's skip the small talk and get right to it. Coming off Microsoft Ignite, we've got a look into how the enterprise is reframing their AI initiatives to be slower, steadier, and more focused on their market fit. If you didn't know, we debuted our rebrand and new MCP Server at Ignite, and if you're curious how that's all going, be sure to check out the interview we did with HP's Distinguished Technologist Evan Scheessele on how they're using our MCP Server in their SDLC experiments. We also had a convo with Salesforce's Chief Scientist and Head of AI Silvio Savarese on how they're simulating terrible phone calls to make customer service AI agents better. Okay, maybe we can have a little small talk. Tell us, what do you hate about your job? We can guess...is it documentation? If it is, you're not alone—that's exactly what the data showed us in our latest Stack Overflow Knows survey. But maybe you love documentation and hate code reviews. If so, we have a pod with Macroscope's Kayvon Beykpour on how AI can ease some of your code review troubles. Maybe all of our troubles would be erased if we could just get those pesky interfaces right; we have an episode with Wesley Yu from Metalab on all things interfaces (which are everything, btw). All right, we're done with small talk now. Let's have a deep discussion about the questions that matter the most. Are wooden cutting boards more sanitary than plastic ones? What would it take to be a world-famous keynote speaker in software? Why do programs and languages have such silly names? Is your imposter syndrome telling the truth? As always, we've got all of those answers for you in the links below.