Author: Loïc Houssier, Eira May, Ben Matthews

Simon is the founder and longtime project lead of OWASP ZAP, an integrated penetration testing tool that helps uncover vulnerabilities in web apps, including compromised authentication, sensitive data exposure, and SQL injection. ZAP is OWASP’s most active project and the world’s most popular web app scanner. 

Check out other OWASP projects here or explore ZAP’s docs.

Check out our blog post on how you can mitigate the ten most-found OWASP vulnerabilities in Stack Overflow C++ snippets.

Jit, where Simon is a distinguished engineer, is a DevSecOps platform that allows high-velocity engineering teams to embed security requirements throughout the DevOps workflow. You can explore Jit’s docs here.

Today we’re shouting out the question CSP Alerts by OWASP even though CSP header is added, definitively answered by one Simon Bennetts.

Simon is on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Learn more about Forrest on his website and check out his newsletter. 

You can follow Paige on Twitter or her LinkedIn.

Get on the list to try out some of the new stuff released today here.

Cloudflare offers zero-trust security and performance tools for web and SaaS apps.

Cloudflare Workers allows devs to deploy serverless code globally to over 285 data centers around the world.

Astro is an open-source web framework built for speed. Houston is a bot that lets you chat with their docs.

Check out Confbrew, a conference session Q&A bot from Markprompt and Contenda (where Cassidy is CTO). 

Connect with Brendan on LinkedIn or follow him on Twitter.

Connect with Michael on Twitter.

Connect with Fred on LinkedIn.

While you’re at it, follow Ceora and Cassidy on Twitter. 

Shoutout to Lifeboat badge winner The Nail for saving if->return vs. if->else efficiency from oblivion.

Luca currently heads up product at Humanitec, a platform orchestrator that provides self-service “golden paths” for developers.

Get up to speed (or refresh your memory) on what platform engineering involves and what an internal developer platform is.

Dynamic configuration management (DCM) is a methodology for configuring compute workloads.

Stop by the Platform Engineering Slack channel.

Hear from top DevOps and platform engineering leaders at PlatformCon 2023, a virtual event held June 8-9.

Find Luca on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Cheers to Lifeboat badge winner Devart for rescuing How can I show the table structure in SQL Server query? from the dustbin of history.

Ben and Ceora talk through some thorny issues around AI-generated music and art, explain why creators are suing AI companies for copyright infringement, and compare notes on the most amusing/alarming AI-generated content making the rounds (Pope coat, anyone?).

Episode notes:

Getty Images is suing the company behind AI art generator Stable Diffusion for copyright infringement, accusing the company of copying 12 million images without permission or compensation to train its AI model.

Meanwhile, a group of artists is suing the companies behind Midjourney, DreamUp, and Stable Diffusion for “scraping and collaging” their work to train AI models. 

One of those artists, Sarah Anderson, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about seeing her comics gobbled up by AI models and regurgitated as far-right memes.

Speaking of copyright violations, did Vanilla Ice really steal that hook from David Bowie and Freddie Mercury? (Yes.)

Check out the AI model trained on Kanye’s voice that sounds almost indistinguishable from Ye himself.

Read The Verge’s deep dive into the intersection of AI-generated music and IP/copyright laws.

Watch the AI-generated video of Will Smith eating spaghetti that’s been called “the natural end point for AI development.”

ICYMI: The Pope coat was real in our hearts.

Columbia University’s Data Science Institute recently wrote about how blockchain can give creators more control over their IP, now that AI-generated art is clearly here to stay.

Congrats to today’s Lifeboat badge winner, herohuyongtao, for answering How can I add a prebuilt static library in a project using CMake?.

Olin College of Engineering has one of the top-ranked undergrad engineering programs in the US. Its computing curriculum is a concentration within the engineering major, not a standalone major. The upshot is a liberal arts-informed course of study with fewer math and theory requirements than a typical CS degree and a greater emphasis on practical, job-ready skills like code quality, testing, and documentation. To learn more about how software design is taught at Olin, explore the course.

Andrew Mascillaro is a senior at Olin majoring in electrical and computer engineering. He’s currently a software engineering intern at Tableau. You can find him on LinkedIn.

Steve Matsumoto is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Olin; his academic interests include crypto and cybersecurity. You can find him on GitHub or through his website.

Prosus, one of the world’s largest tech investors, acquired Stack Overflow in 2021.

Check out the annual State of AI Report from Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth.

Read our CEO’s recent post on Stack Overflow’s approach to Generative AI.

Connect with Paul on LinkedIn. 

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is suvayu for their answer to How to put a big centered "Thank You" in a LaTeX slide.

Akita is a monitoring and observability platform that watches API traffic live and automatically infers endpoint structure.

Jean, who comes from a family of computer scientists, earned a PhD from MIT and taught in the CS department at Carnegie Mellon University before founding Akita.

Read Jean’s post on the Stack Overflow blog: Monitoring debt builds up faster than software teams can pay it off.

Jean is on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Congrats are in order for Stellar Question badge winner legendary_rob for asking Adding a favicon to a static HTML page.

A common refrain you’ll hear these days is that servers should be scaled out, easy to replace, and interchangeable—cattle, not pets. But for the ops folks who run those servers the opposite is true. You can’t just throw any of them into an incident where they may not know the stack or system and expect everything to work out. Every operator has a set of skills that they’ve built up through research or experience, and teams should value them as such. They’re people, not pets, and certainly not cattle—you can’t just get a new one when you burn out your existing ones. 

On this episode of the podcast—sponsored by Chronosphere—we talk with Paige Cruz, Senior Developer Advocate at Chronosphere, about how teams can reduce the cognitive load on ops, the best ways to prepare for inevitable failures, and where the worst place to page Paige is. 

Episode notes:

Chronosphere provides an observability platform for ops people, so naturally, the company has an interest in the happiness of those people. 

If you’re interested in the history of the pets vs. cattle concept , this covers it pretty well. 

Previously, we spoke with the CEO of Chronosphere about making incidents easier to manage. 

We’ve covered this topic on the blog before, and two articles came up during our conversation with Paige. 

You can connect with Paige on Twitter, where she has a pretty apropos handle. 

Congrats to Stellar Question badge winner Bruno Rocha for asking How can I read large text files line by line, without loading them into memory?, which at least 100 users liked enough to bookmark.  

Alura is a Portuguese-language edtech platform where users can learn programming, backend and mobile development, data science, design and UX, DevOps, and more.

They started small, grew into a bustling online program, then purchased a majority stake in FIAP, a private university in São Paulo, Brazil.  

Paulo and Stack Overflow Director of Engineering Roberta Arcoverde cohost a popular Portuguese-language podcast about programming, design, startups, and technology.

Paulo’s new open-source project is full of career resources for T-shaped developers.

Connect with Alura CEO Paulo Silveira on LinkedIn.

Connect with Alura Chief Education Officer Guilherme Silveira on LinkedIn.

Connect with Roberta Arcoverde on LinkedIn.

Today’s Lifeboat badge winner is netblognet for their answer to Get JSON object from URL.