Back in late Spring, we posted “Stack Overflow Isn’t Very Welcoming. It’s Time for That to Change.” We know it’s all too common for companies to announce they really want to do a thing, and then… not much happens. So, it is time to share the work we’ve been doing behind the scenes and how our team of data scientists, developers, long term community managers, and UX specialists will continue iterating on our plans for the future.

This new workflow should help new askers craft questions more successfully with less stress. Each step gathers specific input that’s generally needed to help answerers. …

Last month, Joe wrote about the Welcome Wagon work that we are doing to make Stack Overflow more welcoming and inclusive. Our current work involves projects across domains from asking questions to framing community standards and more; one project we have been working on is understanding how comments are used and misused on Stack Overflow.

We are a data engineer (Jason) and data scientist (Julia). As folks who code for a living and use Stack Overflow, as well as work here, we have certainly experienced and witnessed unwelcoming behavior in Stack Overflow comments first hand, whether through cond …

Thanks to some amazing efforts and collaboration between our veteran users and quite a few new faces that jumped in to help us with our inclusion efforts, our brand new Code of Conduct (CoC) is rolling off the press and going into effect across the network today. For those of you that haven’t been following along with announcements we’ve been making on our Meta site, we’re replacing our current ‘Be nice’ policy with a formal, far less ambiguous and way more informative Code of Conduct.

As far as our rules go, nothing really changes: we’re just clarifying that we don’t have space for belittling  …

Today we launched the 2018 update to the Stack Overflow Salary Calculator, a tool that allows developers and employers to find typical salaries for the software industry based on experience level, location, education, and specific technologies.

The methodology we used is similar to last year, but this year we’ve added support for eight new countries and refined which technologies contribute to our salary predictions. Our salary calculator is based on the comprehensive data from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, and the unprecedented number of responses we had this year has allowed us to build a more accurate model that applies to more developers across the world. …

IBM and Stack Overflow are partnering to bring learning and development to the AI community. As of today, the Artificial Intelligence site on the Stack Exchange network is sponsored by IBM. The site, featuring “questions about life and challenges in a world where ‘cognitive’ functions can be mimicked in purely digital environment”, is home to over 2,200 questions and 3,200 answers.

The partnership aims to expand awareness of the AI industry, encourage innovation within the AI space, and help developers solve complex problems in the field. …

This Saturday between 10AM EDT (14:00 UTC) and 2PM EDT (18:00 UTC), we will be moving all services from our primary New York data center over to our secondary data center in Colorado. We previously completed a read-only test in preparation for this move and have high hope confidence of success. All user-facing services will be moved including: All Q&A Sites (including Stack Overflow) Stack…

We have successfully completed our core network and infrastructure maintenance in the primary data center, and this Friday between 8PM EDT (00:00 UTC) and 10PM EDT (02:00 UTC) we will be moving all services from our secondary data center in Colorado back to New York. All user-facing services will be moved including: All Q&A Sites (including Stack Overflow) Stack Overflow Talent Stack Ov…

We’ll be upgrading from SQL 2016 to SQL 2017 on our primary clusters between 9:00-10:00AM EDT (13:00-14:00 UTC) on March 17, 2018. We expect to be read-only less than an hour and in full maintenance mode only a few minutes. For more details, see our post on meta.stackexchange. If we’re in maintenance and you can’t see that post, try again in a few minutes!

We’ll be performing some server maintenance on our primary SQL clusters between 9:00-10:00AM EDT (13:00-14:00 UTC) on July 14, 2018. We expect to be read-only less than an hour and in full maintenance mode only a few minutes. For more details, see our post on meta.stackexchange. If we’re in maintenance and you can’t see that post, try again in a few minutes!

We’ll be performing maintenance on one of our core network devices on July 11 at 8 PM EDT (July 12, midnight UTC) for approximately 30 minutes.  This will be occurring on redundant network routes, and we’re expecting only limited impact to production traffic and services.