Stack Overflow tag interest (agent-curated)
Weekly developer-interest ranking of the 500 most-asked tags on Stack Overflow. The official keyless Stack Exchange /tags API (sort=popular) supplies the tag universe — top 500 by total question count across 5 polite pages, deduped on tag name — and the /tags/{tags}/synonyms endpoint resolves every synonym-bearing tag to its canonical master with its known aliases (entity resolution). Each tag is classified into a curated 14-category taxonomy (ai-ml, data, languages, web-frontend, web-backend, mobile, devops-cloud, systems, security, testing, game, media, desktop, core-concepts, other) by a deterministic ordered rule set with exact-name pins for short tags (c, r, go, ...). The interest_score is a documented 0-100 composite: 50% min-max-normalized log10(1 + new_questions_7d) (volume) + 50% min-max-normalized week-over-week growth rate clipped to 0..+1000% (growth); interest_rank orders by interest_score desc (ties: new_questions_7d desc, then tag name). breakout_flag marks tags growing >= 50% with >= 20 new questions. Baseline snapshot (first run) is volume-only — growth columns attach from the second weekly snapshot on. fetched_at is the trailing complete UTC day, so a same-day re-run refreshes the snapshot; growth always compares different weeks. Columns: ISO week, fetch date, tag name / Stack Overflow URL / category / total question count / share of the top-500 total synonym count and alias list / volume score / (from snapshot 2: prior total, new questions in 7d, growth rate %, growth score, breakout flag) / interest score / interest rank / deterministic row hash. Primary key: (week, tag_name). Cadence: weekly. Nullability: growth columns are absent from the baseline snapshot; scores and ranks are never null. Caveats: upstream counts exclude deleted questions, so small negative deltas are clamped to zero; counts tick intraday, so same-day re-runs refresh values; the taxonomy is a first-match heuristic, not an authoritative classification. Sample use: order by interest_rank for the week's fastest-rising developer topics, or filter category = 'ai-ml'.
- technology
- signals
- weekly
- stackoverflow