Blog - Stack Overflow

This is the twenty-third episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and I discuss the following:

• The Stack Overflow team will be in New York City from the 24th to the 28th. It’s partly business, and partly a reward to our team for their hard work on the site. What are some cool geeky things for us to do in NYC?
• We wonder: do newscasters wear pants?
• Joel describes his upcoming Inc. magazine article enumerating the seven development mistakes we made in building Stack Overflow. I think by seven he meant zero.
• Most of the reviews of Cuil and Knol are negative because “I tried it for what it was intended to be used, and it didn’t work.”
• The power of short informal code reviews in bridging the skill gap between beginning and expert software developers. Good developers think of this as self-preservation, because today’s beginner code is tomorrow’s code you’ll have to maintain.
• There have been a lot of requests for a packaged, customized version of Stack Overflow, but we have some reservations about the difficulty of delivering a packaged solution, and whether the current design will scale down to smaller private communities at all.
• Should trusted users be allowed to close questions? Or should the community simply vote them down? I argue we need both of these methods; Joel feels we ony need voting.
• It’s ok to have some “fun” programming questions every now and then. It can’t be a community if you don’t stop every so often to have some (at least partially on topic) fun.

We also answered the following listener questions:

1. “How do you handle newbie questions?”
2. Richard: “How do you cultivate programmer mentoring at a small company?”

If you’d like to submit a question to be answered in our next episode, record an audio file (90 seconds or less) and mail it to podcast@stackoverflow.com. You can record a question using nothing but a telephone and a web browser.  We also have a dedicated phone number you can call to leave audio questions at 646-826-3879.

The transcript wiki for this episode is available for public editing.

 

 Standard Podcast [01:06:09m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This question keeps coming up a lot on Stack Overflow for some reason:

What was Stack Overflow built with?

Some even wondered if Stack Overflow was built in Ruby on Rails. I consider that a compliment!

This question has been covered in some detail in our podcasts, of course, but I know not everyone has time to listen to a bunch of audio footage to find the answer to their question. So, in that spirit, here’s the technology “stack” of Stack Overflow, the stuff Jarrod, Geoff, and I used to build it:

We have a few other minor dependencies as well, such as ReCaptcha, DotNetOpenId, and the WMD control, but that’s about it.

This is the twenty-second episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and I discuss the following:

• Stack Overflow is now a public beta. We went from about 2-5% CPU usage during the private beta to over 50% CPU usage, on an 8-CPU server! Some day one stats: 1,500 questions were asked, 6,000 answers provided, 1,700 comments added, there were 62,000 unique visitors and almost 700,000 page views. Miraculously, the server is still running and performance is still snappy.
• It was tempting to keep a closed community, but Joel and I believe the real value here is in letting Google and other web search engines in, along with the hordes of everyday average programmers. We believe programmers are a smarter breed of user, and the low-friction question and answer format will be sustainible for the greater public community if is designed properly. Hopefully.
• We sit down with Josh Millard of MetaFilter, who graciously agreed at very short notice to come on and talk about his role as one of the 5 member core team that helps run and maintain MetaFilter.
• Josh is a programmer, too: you may remember him as the creator of the weird and wonderful Garkov!
• It was a great honor for Stack Overflow to make MetaFilter. I remain a longtime fan of MetaFilter and it definitely influenced the building of Stack Overflow. MetaFilter is a sort of collaborative blog with an amazing and incredibly effective (and eclectic) Q&A community.
• MetaFilter has grown to five moderators over time. How do you decide who becomes a moderator? Does moderation scale? How much can/should the community police itself?
• MetaTalk is the “backchannel” of MetaFilter, analogous to the “discussion” page on Wikipedia. It turns out there are two channels of communication in any social website. The topic, and then the topic about the topic. These are two very different audiences with very different needs.
• “technologically assisted profiling” is how MetaFilter works; the community flags questionable things (in addition to discussion on MetaTalk) and then the moderators act on those flags. MetaFilter is extremely strict — they consider PR and blatantly promotional material spam, which rules out a huge section of what normally appears on Digg or Reddit.
• MetaFilter has not voting, but it does have a favorites system, which is something we have planned for Stack Overflow. I follow the Best of MetaFilter feed which I believe is determined by how many people have favorited a given MetaFilter post.
• In the rare event where a user goes haywire — remember that it costs $5 to even join MetaFilter — these users will be given “timeouts” of a day or two until they cool down. There are no scarlet letters or black marks that can be placed on users. The history of the user’s actions, particularly if that history is public, is usually enough to handle the problem. We definitely agree with this philosophy.

We did not have time to answer any listener questions today, but please send them in and we’ll get to them on the next episode!

If you’d like to submit a question to be answered in our next episode,
record an audio file (90 seconds or less) and mail it to podcast@stackoverflow.com. You can record a question using nothing but a telephone and a web browser.  We also have a dedicated phone number you can call to leave audio questions at 646-826-3879.

The transcript wiki for this episode is available for public editing.

 

 Standard Podcast [01:05:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

stackoverflow.com is now live and open to the public, as a public beta.

Our heartfelt thanks to all the software developers who so patiently helped us test the site during the private beta. You are the true heroes of this project, contributing your time in creating over 8,500 questions in a month and a half — not to mention putting up with our bugs and errors. Your beta badges are forthcoming.

We’ll see how long Stack Overflow manages to stay up now that it’s in public view. We did some last minute caching and optimizations that should help.

I, for one, am keeping my fingers crossed.

If you’d like to help us beta test Stack Overflow, in advance of the Monday launch, here’s how:

1. Go to beta.stackoverflow.com
2. Enter “twitter@twitter.com” and “falkensmaze” to gain access (note that this is NOT an account: it’s merely a password to gain access to the beta)
3. Please do bear in mind the beta test guidelines.

When asking questions, try to keep them on topic:

• Is your question about programming?
• We prefer questions that can be answered, not just discussed.
• Provide details, but write clearly and simply.

I thought these guidelines were straightforward, but they haven’t stopped anyone from asking anything they damn well please. Every time I visit the site, I half expect to see “How do I make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?”

If you’re wondering what’s so special about Stack Overflow, the answer is — well, nothing, really. It’s a programming Q&A website. The only unusual thing we do is synthesize aspects of Wikis, Blogs, Forums, and Digg/Reddit in a way that is somewhat original. Or at least we think so.

Stack Overflow is that tiny asterisk in the middle, there.

But hopefully you’ll see what I mean when you experience it for yourself.