Josh Zhang
Site Reliability Engineer at Stack Overflow who manages bot traffic and DDoS protection, and authors technical write-ups about operational work on the Stack Overflow blog.
Best podcasts with Josh Zhang
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Feb 19, 2026 • 20min
Why Stack Overflow and Cloudflare launched a pay-per-crawl model
Will Allen, Cloudflare VP who builds bot management and pay-per-crawl tooling. Josh Zhang, Stack Overflow SRE who runs bot traffic and DDoS defenses. Janice Manningham, Stack Overflow product leader on data licensing and access controls. They discuss why pay-per-crawl was needed, how crawlers and scraping evolved, technical 402 handling and tooling, and programmatic licensing vs enterprise deals.
Jul 30, 2024 • 22min
How Stack Overflow fends off scraping bots
In this insightful discussion, Josh Zhang, a staff site reliability engineer at Stack Overflow, and Serge Ballesta, a dedicated user awarded a Lifeboat badge, tackle the ongoing battle against scraping bots and DDoS attacks. They explore advanced detection techniques and the evolving measures Stack Overflow employs to protect user data. The conversation highlights the ethical dilemmas of data scraping in the age of AI, emphasizing the vital need to safeguard original content creators and community integrity among rising security threats.
