Author: Loïc Houssier, Eira May, Ben Matthews

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.

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. 

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.

Learn more about Staging Ground on our blog or in the help center.

Find Kyle on LinkedIn, GitHub, and Twitter.

Spevacus is a full stack developer and Stack Overflow moderator. They’re a participant in Charcoal, a user-run group that fights spam and rude/abusive content across the Stack Exchange network.

Stack Overflow and Elastic are collaborating to improve the search experience using vector search and generative AI. Learn more about the new AI features for Stack Overflow for Teams, including Enhanced Search.

Learn more about the Elastic platform, including vector search. Developers can start building here.

Connect with Paul, Steffi, and Gregor on LinkedIn.

Stack Overflow user chepner won a Lifeboat badge for answering How do I use __repr__ with multiple arguments?.

Carol is an applied clinical and intervention scientist: she develops and tests cognitive, behavioral, and social interventions that activate key mechanisms to elicit change. Learn more about understanding and mitigating code review anxiety (the full version of her article is here).

You can also check out the code review anxiety workbook.

Pluralsight’s Developer Success Lab is a team of scientists studying how developers work, learn, and innovate. 

Explore more of Carol’s work on code review anxiety, her bio, or her other work, from developer productivity and stress management to coding with GenAI. 

Connect with Carol on LinkedIn or Mastodon.

Still thinking about developer happiness and productivity? Read Eira’s article about the real 10x developers among us.

Connect with Ben Borra through his website or LinkedIn.

Asked and answered: Stack Overflow user Jian earned a Great Question badge with How do I close a frozen SSH session?. 

Before Medplum, Reshma founded and exited two startups in the healthcare space – MedXT (managing medical images online acquired by Box) and Droplet (at-home diagnostics company acquired by Ro). Reshma has a B.S. in computer science and a Masters of Engineering from MIT.

You can learn more about Medplum here and check out their Github, which has over 1,200 stars, here.

You can learn more about Khilnani on her website, GitHub, and on LinkedIn.

Congrats to Stack Overflow user Kvam for earning a Lifeboat Badge with an answer to the question: 

What is the advantage of using a Bitarray when you can store your bool values in a bool[]?

Cassidy reflect on her time as a CTO of a startup and how the shifting environment for funding has created new pressures and incentives for founders, developers, and venture capitalists.

Ben tries to get a bead on a new Moore’s law for the GenAI era: when will we start to see diminishing returns and fewer step factor jumps? 

Ben and Cassidy remember the time they made a viral joke of a keyboard!

Ryan sees how things goes in cycles. A Stack Overflow job board is back! And what do we make of the trend of AI assisted job interviews where cover letters and even technical interviews have a bot in the background helping out.

Congrats to Erwin Brandstetter for winning a lifeboat badge with an answer to this question:  How do I convert a simple select query like select * from customers into a stored procedure / function in pg?

How would all this work in practice? Of course, any metric you set out can easily become a target that developers look to game. With Snapshot Reviews, the goal is to get a high level overview of a software team’s total activity and then use AI to measure the complexity of the tasks and output.

If a pull request attached to a Jira ticket is evaluated as simple by the system, for example, and a programmer takes weeks to finish it, then their productivity would be scored poorly. If a coder pushes code changes only once or twice a week, but the system rates them as complex and useful, then a high score would be awarded. 

You can learn more about Snapshot Reviews here.

You can learn more about Flatiron Software here.

Connect with Kirim on LinkedIn here.

Congrats to Stack Overflow user Cherry who earned a great question badge for asking: Is it safe to use ALGORITHM=INPLACE for MySQL?