Welcome to ISSUE #53 of the Overflow! This newsletter is by developers, for developers, written and curated by the Stack Overflow team and Cassidy Williams at Netlify. We’re on the cusp of holiday festivities, and we here at Stack Overflow hope you and yours are happy and safe this season. This week, we’ve got a first look at our community health indicators, the odds your Secret Santa will end in a perfect pairing, and the merits of older technologies.

From the blog

Hat season is on its way! Join us for Winter Bash 2020 stackoverflow.blog
2020 was not an easy year for anyone in the world. As we do with someone who has overstayed their welcome at a party, let’s signal that it’s time for 2020 to leave… by wearing hats!

The Loop: A community health indicator stackoverflow.blog
As the number of users grows and we improve our site engine, the social aspect of the network becomes more complicated. With all this social complexity, the CM team must daily answer one simple question: Is the community healthy?

Podcast 295: Diving into headless automation, active monitoring, Playwright and Puppeteer stackoverflow.blog
We chat with Checkly’s Tim Nolet about active monitoring and how he made peace with AWS after they turned his open source project into a new product.

Build security skills with AWS Training and Certification. promotion
Security is the foundation for everything you do in the cloud. With AWS Training and Certification, you can begin enhancing your skills, differentiating your abilities, and mastering best practices to innovate securely and confidently.

Interesting questions

How much did the first hard drives for PCs cost? retrocomputing.stackexchange.com
A few megabytes used to cost megabucks. 

What is the probability that Secret Santa arrangement will result in perfect pairings? stats.stackexchange.com
We’ve made a list, we’ve checked it twice, what are the chances, we got it just right?

Why do exploration spacecraft like Voyager 1 and 2 go through the asteroid belt, and not over or below it?  space.stackexchange.com
It turns out that there’s a lot of space in space, so hitting asteroids is pretty unlikely. 

Is copying a lot of files bad for the CPU or computer in any way? superuser.com
“A computer is a machine. This is one of the things that machine is designed to do.” 

Links from around the web

Old is solid; new gets talked about css-tricks.com
It’s often tempting to go for the latest flashy tool that everyone is talking about, but sometimes going to the “old” dependable tech that you know is just as good (if not better).

Privacy matters even if “you have nothing to hide” write.privacytools.io
Privacy is a touchy subject throughout the world. It is good to be reminded sometimes why it is so important to protect yours.

Generating social sharing images In Eleventy dev.to
As you’re building out your personal site and figuring out your New Year’s Resolutions for your online presence, why not try generating social cards for the content you share?

The rules of margin collapse www.joshwcomeau.com
Sometimes in your CSS, adjacent margins can overlap. This is an awesome deep dive into everything you need to know about the phenomenon called “margin collapse.”

Spend less time in Slack. Try Stack Overflow for Teams.