The multitude of social media channels that programmers can use to participate in software development has given rise to online developer profiles that aggregate activity across many services. Studying members of such developer profile aggregators, we found an ecosystem that revolves around the social programmer. Developers are assessing each other to evaluate whether other developers are interesting, worth following, or worth collaborating with. They are self-conscious about being assessed, and thus manage their public images. They value passion for software development, new technologies, and learning. Some recruiters participate in the ecosystem and use it to find candidates for hiring; other recruiters struggle with the interpretation of signals and issues of trust. This mutual assessment is changing how software engineers collaborate and how they advance their skills.

It is poorly understood how developers discover and adopt software development innovations such as tools, libraries, frameworks, or web sites that support developers. Yet, being aware of and choosing appropriate tools and components can have a significant impact on the outcome of a software project. In our study, we investigate link sharing on Stack Overflow to gain insights into how software developers discover and disseminate innovations. We find that link sharing is a significant phenomenon on Stack Overflow, that Stack Overflow is an important resource for software development innovation dissemination and that its part of a larger interconnected network of online resources used and referenced by developers. This knowledge can guide researchers and practitioners who build tools and services that support software developers in the exploration, discovery, and adoption of software development innovations.

Concept assignment approaches assist software engineers to comprehend software by localising problem domain concepts to source code elements. This paper presents an implementation of a concept assignment approach we call cognitive assignment which combines cognitive mapping of expert software engineers and Bayesian classification to help engineers tasked with understanding unfamiliar systems to localise a concepts implementation in the systems source