In programming and information security, a buffer overflow or buffer overrun is an anomaly whereby a program writes data to a buffer beyond the buffer's allocated memory, overwriting adjacent memory locations.
The hacker ethic is a philosophy and set of moral values within hacker culture. Practitioners believe that sharing information and data with others is an ethical imperative. The hacker ethic is related to the concept of freedom of information, as well as the political theories of anti-authoritarianism, socialism, liberalism, anarchism, and libertarianism.
In software development, obfuscation is the act of creating source or machine code that is difficult for humans or computers to understand. Like obfuscation in natural language, it may use needlessly roundabout expressions to compose statements. Programmers may deliberately obfuscate code to conceal its purpose or its logic or implicit values embedded in it, primarily, in order to prevent tampering, deter reverse engineering, or even to create a puzzle or recreational challenge for someone reading the source code. This can be done manually or by using an automated tool, the latter being the preferred technique in industry.
In software engineering and computer science, abstraction is the process of generalizing concrete details, such as attributes, away from the study of objects and systems to focus attention on details of greater importance. Abstraction is a fundamental concept in computer science and software engineering, especially within the object-oriented programming paradigm. Examples of this include:
Avram Joel Spolsky is a software engineer and writer. He is the author of Joel on Software, a blog on software development, and the creator of the project management software Trello. He was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team between 1991 and 1994. He later founded Fog Creek Software in 2000 and launched the Joel on Software blog. In 2008, he launched the Stack Overflow programmer Q&A site in collaboration with Jeff Atwood. Using the Stack Exchange software product which powers Stack Overflow, the Stack Exchange Network now hosts over 170 Q&A sites.
Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is intended to be easy to read in its source code form. Markdown is widely used for blogging and instant messaging, and also used elsewhere in online forums, collaborative software, documentation pages, and readme files.
Experts Exchange (EE) is a website for people in information technology (IT) related jobs to ask each other for tech help, receive instant help via chat, hire freelancers, and browse tech jobs. Controversy has surrounded their policy of providing answers only via paid subscription.
The Java programming language and Java software platform have been criticized for design choices including the implementation of generics, forced object-oriented programming, the handling of unsigned numbers, the implementation of floating-point arithmetic, and a history of security vulnerabilities in the primary Java VM implementation, HotSpot. Software written in Java, especially its early versions, has been criticized for its performance compared to software written in other programming languages. Developers have also remarked that differences in various Java implementations must be taken into account when writing complex Java programs that must work with all of them.
Glitch, Inc. is a software company specializing in project management tools. Its products included project management and content management, and code review tools. Fastly acquired the company in 2022.
Secure coding is the practice of developing computer software in such a way that guards against the accidental introduction of security vulnerabilities. Defects, bugs and logic flaws are consistently the primary cause of commonly exploited software vulnerabilities. Through the analysis of thousands of reported vulnerabilities, security professionals have discovered that most vulnerabilities stem from a relatively small number of common software programming errors. By identifying the insecure coding practices that lead to these errors and educating developers on secure alternatives, organizations can take proactive steps to help significantly reduce or eliminate vulnerabilities in software before deployment.
Code golf is a type of recreational computer programming competition in which participants strive to achieve the shortest possible source code that solves a certain problem. Code golf challenges and tournaments may also be named with the programming language used.
Stack Overflow is a question-and-answer website for computer programmers. It is the flagship site of the Stack Exchange Network. It was created in 2008 by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. It features questions and answers on certain computer programming topics. It was created to be a more open alternative to earlier question and answer websites such as Experts-Exchange. Stack Overflow was sold to Prosus, a Netherlands-based consumer internet conglomerate, on 2 June 2021 for $1.8 billion.
In software engineering, rubber duck debugging is a method of debugging code by articulating a problem in spoken or written natural language. The name is a reference to a story in the book The Pragmatic Programmer in which a programmer would carry around a rubber duck and debug their code by forcing themselves to explain it, line by line, to the duck. Many other terms exist for this technique, often involving different (usually) inanimate objects, or pets such as a dog or a cat. Teddy bears are also widely used.
MathOverflow is a mathematics question-and-answer (Q&A) website, which serves as an online community of mathematicians. It allows users to ask questions, submit answers, and rate both, all while getting merit points for their activities. It is a part of the Stack Exchange Network, but distinct from math.stackexchange.com.
Stack Exchange is a network of question-and-answer (Q&A) websites on topics in diverse fields, each site covering a specific topic, where questions, answers, and users are subject to a reputation award process. The reputation system allows the sites to be self-moderating. As of March 2023, the three most actively-viewed sites in the network are Stack Overflow, Unix & Linux, and Mathematics.
Steve Yegge is an American computer programmer and blogger who is known for writing about programming languages, productivity and software culture through his "Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants" site, followed by "Stevey's Blog Rants."
UserVoice is a San Francisco–based Software-as-a-Service company that develops customer engagement tools.
Discourse is an open source Internet forum system. Features include threading, categorization and tagging of discussions, configurable access control, live updates, expanding link previews, infinite scrolling, and real-time notifications. It is customizable via its plugin architecture and its theming system.
Visual Studio Code, also commonly referred to as VS Code, is a source-code editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux and macOS. Features include support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, code refactoring, and embedded Git. Users can change the theme, keyboard shortcuts, preferences, and install extensions that add functionality.
freeCodeCamp is a non-profit educational organization that consists of an interactive learning web platform, an online community forum, chat rooms, online publications and local organizations that intend to make learning software development accessible to anyone.
