Stack Overflow is attempting to guarantee that its repository of programming data, saved within the type of hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands of questions and solutions, is obtainable even to individuals with out web entry. It’s asserting an initiative known as Overflow Offline, the place it’ll work with builders and a variety of organizations that take care of issues just like the justice and jail techniques, schooling, and scientific endeavors.

For individuals who don’t have fixed web entry, with the ability to simply obtain, search by means of, and browse Stack Overflow could possibly be a giant assist. A weblog put up from Stack Overflow goes into the way it’s being utilized by prisoners or college students in distant communities who’re attempting to study coding in addition to researchers at locations just like the South Pole who’ve very restricted web connections however nonetheless want to have the ability to write packages and scripts.

According to the put up, Stack Overflow’s initiative includes working with a nonprofit known as Kiwix, which creates an open-source program that’s maybe most well-known for letting you obtain and browse offline variations of Wikipedia. Stack Overflow has been one of many archived websites you may obtain with Kiwix, however in response to the positioning’s put up, updates for that model broke in 2018. Since then, Stack Overflow has helped the builders upgrade their scraper so it may deal with the huge quantity of knowledge on the positioning and so it may additionally scrape different websites within the Stack Exchange community, like those devoted to chemistry, aviation, or parenting.

Technically, you’ve been in a position to obtain an offline model of Stack Overflow with out Kiwix. (The firm behind the positioning has been doing information dumps on Archive.org for years.) But these are nowhere close to as user-friendly to entry and search by means of because the Kiwix model, with the posts and feedback typically being saved in separate information. 

Now that the extra user-friendly model is being updated again, individuals can have entry to a way more up-to-date offline model. For instance, if somebody had been attempting to study Apple’s SwiftUI framework (a Sisyphean task, to make sure), the earlier archive wouldn’t have had any info on it for the reason that tech got here out in mid-2019. The new Kiwix copy of Stack Overflow, nonetheless, returns almost 35,000 outcomes whenever you seek for SwiftUI.

Stack Overflow says it’ll work to enhance its offline dataset sooner or later based mostly on suggestions from its companions and customers, doubtlessly by decreasing its measurement. The present Kiwix model of Stack Overflow is available in at a hefty 80GB, requiring nearly as a lot disk house because the almost 6.5 million articles within the English model of Wikipedia. That’s a giant ask for somebody with, say, a 128GB SSD. That is, nonetheless, nonetheless an enormous enchancment from the previous Kiwix archive, which was a large 134GB.