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Header Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash A new feature we’ve been building out required the use of a thumbnail picker for video files. After looking around for open-source implementations, it was clear that there wasn’t something that already existed which would fit in with our app – for this reason we needed to build […]
At Buffer we regularly hold what we call ‘Snackchats’. These are short & informal presentations of something that we want to share with our team which help to build on our engineering culture and help each other to grow as engineers. Anyone on the team has the opportunity to give these talks ? Once a […]
I sometimes get asked by regular people in the actual real world what it is that I do for a living, and here’s my 15 second answer: We built a sort of Wikipedia website for computer programmers to post questions and answers. It’s called Stack Overflow. As of last month, it’s been 10 years since […]
Remember “cybersecurity”? Mysterious hooded computer guys doing mysterious hooded computer guy .. things! Who knows what kind of naughty digital mischief they might be up to? Unfortunately, we now live in a world where this kind of digital mischief is literally rewriting the world’s history. For proof of that, you need look no further than […]
Hey, we have a new thing for you today! Today’s new thing is called Stack Overflow for Teams. It lets you set up a private place on Stack Overflow where you can ask questions that will only be visible to members of your team, company, or organization. It is a paid service, but it’s not […]
There’s this popular idea among developers that when you face a problem with code, you should get out a rubber duck and explain, to the duck, exactly how your code was supposed to work, line by line, what you expected to see, what you saw instead, etc. Developers who try this report that the very […]
[This is the second in a series of posts about Stack Overflow. The first one is The Stack Overflow Age.] Around 2010 the success of Stack Overflow had led us into some conversations with VCs, who wanted to invest. The firm that eventually invested in us, Union Square Ventures, told us that they were so […]
I didn’t choose to be a programmer. Somehow, it seemed, the computers chose me. For a long time, that was fine, that was enough; that was all I needed. But along the way I never felt that being a programmer was this unambiguously great-for-everyone career field with zero downsides. There are absolutely occupational hazards of […]
It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post, I guess in general, but also a blog post about video games. Video games are probably the single thing most attributable to my career as a programmer, and everything else I’ve done professionally after that. I still feel video games are one of the best […]
We’ve read so many sad stories about communities that were fatally compromised or destroyed due to security exploits. We took that lesson to heart when we founded the Discourse project; we endeavor to build open source software that is secure and safe for communities by default, even if there are thousands, or millions, of them […]