Introducing the Heap, the software engineering blog for everyone

Source: Stack Overflow Blog

Background

When I started at Stack Overflow nearly seven years ago, my primary duty was to manage the blog. My boss at the time decided to treat the blog like an editorial outlet with an engineering focus, with external contributors providing articles that discussed what life was like as a software engineer alongside our own work. It proved successful; many of those contributed articles are among our most popular and insightful pieces.

I wanted more voices on the blog, but I was limited by our distribution channels and the time it took to source and edit contributions. Stack Overflow has always been a place for the software engineering community to share knowledge and trade insights so everyone could build better. Our Q&A covered the problems and pitfalls that come from creating software; perhaps the blog could cover what engineers think about their work and the world they’re creating.

A few months ago we explored opening up articles on the main Stack Overflow site. While we ultimately decided not to move forward with that idea, we kept the lines open to see if there was continued interest in reader‑contributed articles. The steady stream of interest led us to host community blog posts on The Overflow blog.

Introducing The Heap

Today we’re happy to share that we’ve opened The Heap, a place for software engineers, technologists, and anyone involved in the construction of tech to share their thoughts with the world. This is very beta right now, and the manual process is slow, but we want to start sharing the ideas you have and encourage more of you to write hot takes, best practices, and advice for the community.

Naming

For those wondering about the name, it’s a programming reference. Our primary public site is named after an error that occurs on the stack, a memory structure that stores local variables and function calls. Another common memory structure is the heap, which is explicitly allocated and deallocated in no particular order. It speaks of the vastness of what it can hold, and I hope to see you all creating pointers to locations in the Heap.

How It Works

This is the most basic MVP right now; posting is manual and involves a lot of emailing. We’re not letting everything through, because, as anyone who’s seen the raw feed of a comment field knows, the internet loves to spam. In the future we hope to add direct submissions on the site, voting, and easier discovery. (If you want to promote the best hotels in Tallahassee, maybe look elsewhere.)

Licensing

All articles will be licensed under a CC BY‑SA 4.0 grant, which allows anyone to publish, remix, and quote these articles, and is the same license applied to questions and answers on StackOverflow.com. The best of the articles may find their way into the newsletter or be promoted to the main blog feed. Either way, we encourage you to promote anything you publish with us—and any work you publish is work you should be proud of.

Call for Contributions

If you’ve got something you’ve been dying to share with the Stack Overflow community but don’t quite have a place to share it, give us a shout. We’d be happy to add your voice to The Heap.