You have to be careful not to be tricked by the tech world’s April Fools' Day fabrications, but on Tuesday, one prank product became real.
It’s been a joke in programming circles for years: Instead of writing your code from scratch, just head over to theStack Overflowforums and copy the way another programmer already solved your problem.
The meme is such a fixture that Stack Overflow turned it into an April Fools' Day prank this year, saying it would limit free access to its siteunless people bought The Key, a unit with buttons just copying and pasting.
Enough people said they’d actually buy one that Stack Overflow, with help fromkeyboard aficionado Cassidy Williamsandcustom keyboard maker Drop, designed one for real and beganselling it for $29.
A portion of the keyboard sales' proceeds will go toDigitalundivided, a nonprofit set up to help Black and Latinx women succeed as technology entrepreneurs.
“Good artists copy, great artists steal, but [the]greatest artists copy, then paste,” saidBen Popper, Stack Overflow’s director of content, in a blog post.
Copying and pasting from Stack Overflow is in fact a widespread practice, as the company showed during the April Fools' event.
