The Stack Exchange Podcast show

The Stack Exchange Podcast

Summary: Hosted by Joel Spolsky with Jay Hanlon and David Fullerton, the Stack Exchange podcast lets you listen in on discussions and decisions about the Stack Exchange Network. The Stack Exchange podcast gives you an unparalleled view into how a startup is created and built. About Stack Exchange: Stack Exchange is a fast-growing network of over 100 question and answer sites on diverse topics from software programming to cooking to photography and gaming. We are an expert knowledge exchange: a place where physics researchers can ask each other about quantum entanglement, computer programmers can ask about JavaScript date formats, and photographers can share knowledge about taking great pictures in the snow.

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Podcasts:

 Podcast #62 – Delete This Whole Episode | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 0:47:33

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #62, recorded live on January 20th–with a live studio audience (kinda)!. Today’s podcast was brought to you by the American Venture Capital Association. With you today are our hosts Jay Hanlon, David Fullerton, and Joel Spolsky. Let’s jump right in: we made a big announcement! Andreessen Horowitz has invested a pile of money in our little company so we can improve our ‘programmer forums’. Precisely none of the pile of money is going into Jay’s raise, but one of those dollars is going to SomeKittens. So, the (forty) million dollar question: how are we going to use this money? (not on supporting ancient browsers.) We intend to (continue) spending money on Stack Overflow Careers. Our goal is to get every programmer a better job, and we want to do that without selling crazy-takeover-animated-bonzaibuddy-ads that feel like reading a newspaper on the subway (according to Joel), so we’re getting money from investors instead. How are we going to make this happen? We plan to revisit the developer side of the Careers equation and figure out how to make that better. More features to let programmers search and filter for interesting jobs, update the way profiles work, etc. – more of the stuff we were going to work on anyway. Careers is already a very developer-focused product: we limit the things our employers can do heavily based on what drives programmers nuts. For example, we only let employers contact a limited number of candidates unless those candidates actually respond, and we disallow contingency recruiters. (A pox on all of their houses.) You can get a Careers profile here. We filter the applications to make sure only real programmers end up with profiles on Careers. Time to take some questions from the peanut gallery! How will this [investment news] affect the sites? Not one bit! Well, a few bits. This cash will allow us to hire more designers, so more sites can graduate and get beautiful site designs. We’ll get to hire more people to hit more of our goals at the same time. For example, one of the things we’re actively working on now is improving search on Q&A sites. Have we mentioned lately that we’re hiring? Our most urgent need is for product managers, and you can apply for that job even if you’ve never had ‘product manager’ in your job title before. Will there be someone to represent the rage quitters? Yes. You’re hired. Thanks for volunteering. Would you consider being an intermediary, putting a “Buy This Person’s Time” on their profile page or answers? No! (Sorry, Brent.) Has the Stack Overflow design update changed user behavior? We’ve noticed a big uptick in the number of people complaining about how blue and cream go together. We’ve also gotten a lot of constructive feedback on meta that we’ve used to inform tweaks (but it’s really hard to distinguish those from comments about how people’s cheese has been moved). Can you comment on whether SO rep is useful to a job search? Lots of employers out there don’t know what Stack Overflow is, but Joel is going to use some of those 40 million dollars to educate them. But from our perspective, posting on Stack Overflow is more like blogging in that it can tell you a lot about a programmer and how they interact with the developer community. Stack Overflow reputation alone doesn’t always tell you about the second half of “smart and gets things done”. Will you be making a Windows Phone app? Not for the foreseeable future. This question makes our mobile lead sad. Are there any plans to add a chat feature to the mobile application? (Mobile lead Kasra just dropped dead.) We may add chat to the mobile app yet, but it’s not in our 2015 plan. Are we going to ever allow wildcards in searches? Currently in chat it just nulls the search. Chat search is weird and backwards, bu[...]

 Podcast #61 – The “What Jay’s Done Wrong” Podcast | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 0:53:50

Welcome to the 61st installment of the Stack Exchange Podcast, brought to you by okra (yes, that okra). On our show today are David Fullerton, Jay Hanlon, and Joel Spolsky. It’s been a long time since we last did a podcast, so let’s get started. First point of business: we have an iPad app! It’s got a snazzier feed and a fancy live preview in the Compose view. We’ve been getting more posts from mobile than we expected, because computing via iPad is the way of the future (according to Joel), so lots of features in the iOS app are now better optimized for posting as opposed to reading. Moving onto far more important business: Joel’s dog Taco got 21,000 likes on Instagram. PSA: Always make sure your insurance will cover it before you travel to Kansas City. (Any Kansas City. We’re not sure how many there are, or even which one Joel went to on his zombie visit.) Also, Garmin makes boats. By the way, we’re still talking about the iPad app, apparently. We’re collecting a lot of data about how our mobile apps are being used to help us gear them better toward the people who are actually using them. Our mobile team (led by Kasra) has been working really hard on making the apps shine (despite Joel’s efforts to force random features nobody will use onto them). So try it out (iOS, Android) and let us know what you think. We love feedback. Moving on! We revamped our Be Nice policy after hashing it out with the community on meta. (We didn’t handle the feedback part super well. Lessons were learned!) This discussion of it is about as long as the original draft was, so get comfortable. A secondary point of interest: should comments stick around forever, or disappear after 21 days? I bet you can guess Joel’s opinion. (This question is sheerly hypothetical. Nobody’s actually proposing this now.) A tertiary point of business: the numbering of the Ten Commandments really is disputed – Joel’s not making this part up. Okay that’s great. Next! Joel tries to bring up diversity (spoiler alert: we’re pro-diversity), but we decide to devote more of a podcast to it later. Say, David, what is a Stack Snippet? We’re glad you asked! It’s essentially a loving knockoff of JSFiddle. They help us ensure that our content stays up-to-date and relevant, and they reduce mental friction. This is cool: we open-sourced our monitoring system. It’s called “Bosun” (or “Boatswain”, or “bo’s’n”, or “the first word of The Tempest“, but we think it’s easiest to stick with Bosun). Listen about it in this podcast, read about it on the blog or the Server Fault blog, or just get started. It’s in alpha, but you can check it out. (Major credit to Matt Jibson and Kyle Brandt for their great work on this project.) We have a new Q&A site about Worldbuilding, and it’s doing really well – despite the Community Team’s misgivings about launching it. We’ve shifted toward letting most Area 51 proposals test their legs in private beta – as long as they don’t embarrass us or duplicate or overlap significantly with other sites. That’s why we decided to launch Worldbuilding even though we didn’t understand it – and luckily, they proved us wrong. Could a government control its people using frequencies? Does the sun being blocked affect electricity? How would an aquatic race develop computers? Is Superman a peeping Tom? or Would x-ray vision be biologically reasonable? How close to interstellar space travel could humans get in the near future? Worldbuilding is in public beta. So is: The site currently known as Moderators but whose name may be changing soon Startups Emacs History of Science and Math We closed down Web Design and Home Automation due to lack of activity. Salesforce is fully graduated with a beautiful new design. It’s got a[...]

 Podcast #60: Are We That Predictable? | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 0:00:01

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast episode number 60, brought to you by The National Pepperjack Cheese Council. Your hosts today are Joel Spolsky, Jay Hanlon, and David Fullerton (aka Fake Producer Abby). We’ll jump right into things with Community Milestones, but we promise to make them quick. Puzzling is now in public beta, and it’s about puzzles. Data Science (DAY-ta, not DAH-ta) is in public beta, and doing better than that topic’s previous iterations. Craft CMS, yet another CMS site, is now in public beta as well. Buddhism is now also in – surprise! – public beta. Last one: Hinduism is in public beta as well. Whew. Time to let Uncle David walk us through about a hundred new features that have launched since our last podcast. Curtail Recidivism of Q-Blocked/Suspended Accounts on Deletion. This is exactly what it sounds like (unless it sounds like nonsense). This makes it so that people who are blocked or suspended can no longer delete their accounts and create a new, non-suspended account. New badges: Curious, Inquisitive, and Socratic. These badges go to folks with a consistent pattern of asking good questions, which we hope will help encourage our users to ask more questions. We redesigned the Stack Exchange homepage… again. (The pendulum swings.) Make it your homepage! (Or don’t.) We also redesigned the Hiring page. You should come work with us! And we redesigned the mobile website, which you can check out by visiting any Stack Exchange site from your mobile device (unless it’s a BlackBerry). The Community Bulletin got redesigned as well. Careers got a new feature, too: City Pages. And that’s everything we’ve done for the last few months, except for the secret stuff David won’t tell us about. It’s time for our Featured Community. This time around it’s User Experience! Should error messages apologize? Should “Yes, delete it” be red, or green? How can users be prevented from pouring water into the bean compartment of a coffee machine? It’s time to talk about quality again. Jay is hopeful, because we had a great fight about this last time. Briefly: the perceived quality on Stack Overflow has been in decline for years. And this time, we’ve got numbers and things. Our current homepage algorithm was actively highlighting unanswered questions. We did this on purpose, but that was a long time ago. The effect of that system is that unanswerable questions stay on the homepage, because the average and good ones get answered almost immediately. So it makes Stack Overflow look like a site full of bad, unanswered questions. So here’s the new recommended tab. It’s doing two things: Not filtering out unanswered stuff. Weighting toward the tags that you’re interested in, but now with more randomness. You see a broader distribution of stuff. It’s not perfect, and that’s why it’s a little hidden for now, but we’ll keep working on it! The other angle we’re attacking this from is the low-quality algorithm. Or rather, the quality score algorithm. (The algorithm itself is very high quality.) We did some science and we threw a bunch of data into Vowpal Wabbit(not a typo) and built a predictor of question quality, which has given us lots of interesting information to work with. We can use hard blocks and warnings to teach people asking questions things like “add some code!” or “make sure you explain what your code is doing!”. But we don’t want to just tell people not to use certain words, because then they’re only learning not to say “thanks”, not how to write a good question. So the low quality algorithm can flag your question to be sent to a review queue before it can show up on the homepage. Probably. (This is all still up for debate.) This is primarily a Stack Overflow thing, so Meta Stack Overflow is the best place to discuss it. Hav[...]

 Podcast #59 – The Decline and Fall of Stack Overflow | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 1:07:58

Welcome to the 59th running of the Stack Exchange podcast, brought to you by Nutella! Your hosts Joel Spolsky, David Fullerton, and Jay Hanlon are joined this week by special guests Josh Heyer (aka Shog9) and Robert Cartaino (aka Robert Cartaino) of the Stack Exchange Community Growth team. We’ve got a busy podcast scheduled, so let’s get down to business, starting with New Features with Uncle David. We are revamping the user profile, and you can check it out and give us feedback (and please do!). We are testing some new Careers ads on Stack Overflow. Hang onto your hats, people. We use the words “astonishing” and “frightening” and “Hawthorne effect“. If you have a gold tag badge, you can now Insta-Close-As-Dupe. This addresses the “Lord of the Flies” problem. The iOS app is on Joel’s phone, and it can be on yours, too! If you’re into that kind of thing, you can check out the Quantcast stats. Now we’ll come back around to Jay’s Boring Stuff, aka Community Milestones. Data Science and Puzzling were in private beta at the time of this recording, and by the time we posted this, Puzzling had moved to public beta. And now we get to switch over to our Big Meaty Topic for the day. At Stack Exchange (and particularly on Stack Overflow), we get a lot of complaints about quality declining on our sites. We split MSO and MSE, which gave people a chance to talk about their feelings (which is what we intended) and gave rise to questions like “Why is Stack Overflow so negative of late?“. It got a lot of interesting answers and comments. Essentially, we are scaring legitimate, thoughtful people away from getting help. That’s one side of the problem. Additionally, some of our best users are getting more frustrated than we want them to be and (importantly) expressing that it’s hard for them to find questions that they want to answer. That part is something we can actually do something about. Joel has two very very simple proposals to solve this problem. When a question gets upvoted by a user with x reputation (or maybe just upvoted), that upvote buys it y more impressions on the front page than the standard rate. Demonstrably good questions get more eyeballs than questions that haven’t been demonstrated to be good. Users that are relatively trusted by the system get more impressions on the front page for their questions. If you have a couple hundred reputation and you seem like a trusted user, your question gets more eyeballs. Better questions get more eyeballs and therefore have a better chance of being answered well. Tune in for extensive discussion of the nuances and issues involved in Question Neutrality. Thanks for listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #59, brought to you by Nutella!

 Podcast #58 – Pack ‘Em In Like Bees | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 0:59:18

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #58 brought to you by the Stack Exchange iOS app! Our hosts Joel Spolsky, David Fullerton, and Jay Hanlon are joined this week by our guests, the Stack Exchange Design Team: Jin Yang, Stéphane “The French Guy” Martin, Courtny Cotten, and Josh Hynes. Let’s kick things off with Community Milestones (assuming Joel knows where he is). Joomla! IHOP dot com is a Joomla! site. Unrelated: Donald Knuth mentioned our TeX site in a recent TUGboat. Earth Science Why do snowflakes form into hexagonal structures? What is the status of the Raymo & Ruddiman idea that Tibet cooled the Earth? Joel had a rock computer when he was a kid. We’re not sure that’s a real thing. (UPDATE: it is!) Academia has graduated and has a beautiful new design, thanks to designer Stéphane Martin. New Features The iPhone app is coming! [Ed: it has now been released!] We’re also working on instant automagical refresh in the apps. The MSO/MSE split happened! But we already talked about it. We’re busy breaking Super User by trying to migrate it over to CloudFlare. Coming soon… Careers 2.0 City Pages! Community of the Week: Travel Why do people on airplanes often have tomato juice as a drink? OK we’re all adults here, so really, how on earth should I use a squat toilet? Why are airline passengers asked to lift up window shades during takeoff and landing? How to avoid drinking vodka? And now we turn to our special guests! Jin Yang is the founding member of the design team. Stéphane Martin is the French guy, and he’s in the U.S. for the first time! Courtny Cotten is from Indiana, and Josh Hynes is from Pennsylvania. Those places aren’t as cool as France (apparently). So, what does the design team do? Jin gives us his memorized elevator pitch for what Stack Exchange designers do all day. (It includes beer pong, but probably not in the way you’re thinking.) Stéphane designed the new look and feel for Academia and tells us about the process creating the look and feel for that fully graduated community. Courtny’s worked on the new Careers 2.0 city pages, and Careers search results. Josh worked on reporting, messaging for Careers, and the new user profile page on the Q&A sites. Both of them are working on new features for Careers right now. We also delve deeper into Stack Exchange design culture and history. Anecdotes! Anecdotes galore! Thanks for listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #58, brought to you by our iOS app… and Jay’s crappy Batman drawing.

 Podcast #57 – We Just Saw This On Florp | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 0:46:08

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #57, recorded Friday April 11, 2014 with your hosts Jay Hanlon, David Fullerton, and Joel Spolsky. Today’s podcast is brought to you by the Heartbleed bug. We have lots to talk about (which makes Joel scared), starting with Community Milestones (after we discuss 2048 strategy, that is)! Expats is newly in public beta. It’s a site for people that are dealing with the bureaucratic messes involved in living outside your home country. Check out their top-voted questions. Can I lose my US citizenship for accepting employment within a foreign government? How do I deal with PPACA (“Obamacare”) as an expatriate? How to build credit history in the USA? Tax residency when in the EU for less than 6 months And we’ve added yet another math site to the network: Math Educators. Graphic Design has graduated from public beta, and it now has its own beautiful design – check it out! (It’s a great site, but it also helps Jay do things like this.) That brings us to our Community of the Week: Information Security. (For the record: horses can live in barns.) Info Security has gotten a lot of traffic lately thanks to our sponsor, the Heartbleed bug. (We wonder if we’re spelling “security” wrong for a while before we realize the site is down. So we’ll come back to this.) Aaaanyway… let’s talk about New Features. The iOS app is going to come out in the next 6-8 weeks, but you can still sign up to test it for us if you have an iPhone. Also, we did an April Fool’s prank about unicoins. We’re making some changes to the Community Wiki system. There’s a blog post here if you’d rather fast forward through Jay’s explanation. We’re also making changes to how protecting questions works, and we’ve published a set of guidelines for how to use that feature. That finishes the New Features segment… except for the other new features we’re going to talk about. Breaking news: we’re overhauling the profile page. (Stick with us in this part to hear Joel get bored and start talking about emo kid piercings!) There’s a very outdated mockup here. Then, Joel gets so bored he brings up sports. On purpose. Several times. Also: this is what a Yugo looks like. MOVING ON. The gang invents a new game, and plays it for a while. Could this be a recurring segment? Tune in next week to find out! For now, we’ve killed enough time that Info Security is back online, so we’ll talk about it for a while. How exactly does the OpenSSL TLS heartbeet (Heartbleed) exploit work? Don’t understand how my mum’s Gmail account was hacked How does changing your password every 90 days incease security? Thanks for joining us during this very productive hour of your life for Stack Exchange Podcast #57, brought to you by Heartbleed – the first buffer overflow bug with a website, a logo, and a marketing department.

 Podcast #56 – Green or Red Curae | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 1:00:35

Welcome to the Stack Exchange Podcast #56 recorded on Thursday, March 6th 2014, aka the 4th of Adar II 5774, aka the second day of Lent. Today’s podcast is sponsored by Patent Trolls of America. Today’s guest is Micah Siegel, Senior Patent Advisor at Stack Exchange and Professor Emeritus at Stanford. But first, Community Milestones! We’ve already talked at length about The Workplace, but it should be noted that the Workplace community has just graduated. They are now a fully-fledged site, so go check out their design! Arduino is our newest public beta site. (An Arduino is a tiny little computer board thing, according to Jay.) We’ve tried it in the past and didn’t have enough activity, but this iteration is looking much stronger and we’re excited to see where it will go. Also, March 29th is Arduino Day. At long, long last, Personal Finance & Money has graduated. We love money! Longtime beleaguered designer Jin finally has assistance on his design team, so we are working through the backlog of graduated site designs. To commemorate Money’s graduation, we’ve made it Community of the Week. Here are some of the cool questions we discussed: Best way to start investing for a young person just starting their career? In a competitive market, why is movie theater popcorn expensive? Why does gold have value? This site grew out of an SE 1.0 site on the same topic, and it’s therefore one of our oldest sites. Check it out! Next up, we have New Features. Or, we don’t, because we haven’t done anything, and David is demoted. Just kidding: we do! We added the ability to customize your list of communities in the top bar switcher. We made some tweaks to the close vote review queue on Stack Overflow in an attempt to get it down from approximately nine billion flags. You can also sort by tag (or type of close vote), which you could always do, but now it’s much more visible. Here’s how it works. Work is ongoing on our mobile apps, as always. Reminder: you can download our Android app or sign up to alpha test our iOS app. Okay! Let’s talk patents! (Jay loves them, but David says they’re the worst.) It’s been a year since we started the Ask Patents project. Joel walks us through why we got into this area in the first place, and we fixed the problem. Done. Solved! (Kinda.) It’s confusing, because code is both copyrightable and patentable. About 7% of the patent applications submitted to the USPTO are what we call problematic. We decided to pick out the ones we are most concerned about and post them on the site for our communities to peruse and choose prior art. Micah talks through how we chose the patent applications to post, and how it’s been going. (Fun fact: we are the first entity to get a YouTube video accepted as prior art!) By the way, here’s the Planet Money podcast Joel was talking about. We came up with a hack about six months ago to help us make this process scale. Instead of filling out the janky confusing form, we simply started emailing the relevant Ask Patents link directly to the patent examiner. Magic! So is it working? We’ve proven as far as we can tell that if we target a bad application and put enough eyes from Stack Overflow on it, we’ll get good prior art. We know how all of the numbers break down: exactly how many people on Stack Overflow have to see the bad software patent in order for us to get enough prior art that enough of it will be good enough prior art to trigger an email to the patent examiner. What can people do right now if they want to make a difference? Go find some prior art requests and post prior art to help us destroy some patents. (Also, you can follow Ask Patents on Twitter.) Micah is consulting for a few other companies on patent issues, so you can contact him if your company wants to pick his brain. He knows a lot about the current Supreme Court case that might outlaw [...]

 Podcast #55 – Don’t Call It A Comeback | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 0:59:51

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #55, recorded on Friday Thursday the 13th with your hosts Joel Spolsky, David Fullerton, and Jay Hanlon! Today’s episode is brought to you by the city of Sochi, Russia. It’s been a long time since we last recorded, so we have a lot to talk about, and we’re going to skip most of it. First we’re going to talk about all our brand new sites, so Joel learn about them for the first time. Pets is a site for (you guessed it) pet owners to wonder why their cats like to watch them making the bed. Also, we already talked about this site. Moving on! We also launched Italian, which is very high quality but unfortunately very slow so far. Jay thought Ebooks would be awful, but it has turned out to be extremely high quality and high engagement. Hooray, beer! Our new Beer site is somehow different from Homebrew, so Joel quits. We launched a Relationships & Dating site, but we broke up with it pretty quickly because it generated too many bad “commitment” jokes (and because the topic was a hard fit for our engine). We launched a site for software recommendations. And discussed it at length. The good parts version: it’s going much better than expected. We almost forgot to talk about Aviation! It launched a while back, and it is a slam dunk for our engine. It’s time for our Site of the Week! (This week was apparently four months long.) Let’s talk about Code Golf. It’s a site for code golf (unsurprisingly!). Links discussed: We’re no strangers to code golf Draw the Olympics logo The Commodore 128 is a thing (though sort of irrelevant to Code Golf). We already talked at length about the new topbar, but it has bred some interesting changes to other areas of our pages. For example: when we moved Hot Questions out of the MultiCollider and into the sidebar, Code Golf started getting huge boosts on their most interesting questions (as did other sites with broadly interesting topics). Code Golf is seeing 11-15% more answers due to the traffic coming in from other sites via the Hot Questions sidebar. Neat! So! Let’s talk about our most exciting new site: Stack Overflow em Português. Localizing our codebase was a dream of ours for a long time, and we finally did it. It’s got 1304 perguntas at the time of recording this podcast. (If you want to know more about why we launched a non-English site, check out Jay’s blog post.) The public beta so far is one of our most successful launches ever. Also, you can go download our Android app or sign up to test our iOS app. Thanks for joining us for Stack Exchange Podcast #55, sponsored by the city of Sochi, Russia – don’t forget to visit the Friendship Tree. See you next time!

 Podcast #54 – The One With All The Anachronisms | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 1:08:15

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #54, with special guest Sara J. Chipps! Joining us today also is CFO Michael Pryor. Your hosts as usual are Jay Hanlon, David Fullerton, and Joel Spolsky. Today’s episode is brought to you by /r/husky! We’ll start out with Site Milestones. We have one: Ham Radio will be in public beta by the time this podcast goes live. Turns out there are tons of ham radio enthusiasts even today. Ham! New Features The big thing we’re currently working on is the new topbar. It hasn’t changed in years… until now! David walks us through the new features on the upcoming new version. You can see our mockups on MSO. We finally released our open source status dashboard, Opserver. It’s got all sorts of awesome stuff, and you can check it out. We’re still working on our mobile apps for Android and iOS. The Android alpha is out, and you can sign up - it’s great. The iOS alpha is coming soon(ish), so keep an eye out for signups. Let’s talk to our guest, Sara J. Chipps! (She’s impressed with the legitimacy and professionalism of our podcast setup.) She’s a cofounder of Girl Develop It, a system of low-cost software development classes geared toward women (but guys are welcome too). It’s judgement-free, for total beginners who want to take their first few steps into the world of software development. Sara recently left her role as CTO of Levo League to focus on getting Girl Develop It’s board and 501(c)(3) status together (Levo League is a professional community for Generation Y women, and it is awesome). This fall has been the Sara Chipps world tour - she’s been traveling all around to talk about hacking hardware with JavaScript. Check out NodeBots and Johnny-five. Sara, David, and Michael are all big nerds about hacking hardware. Check out Dorby the DoorBot (github) and the Christmas sweater that talks to the internet. Relevant: A Hundred People Coming Out of a Factory: The Movie! Moving on: let’s talk about women in technology. In 1984, 37% of CS degrees went to women. In 1998, it was 34%. In 2010-11, it was 12%.  Sara walks us through some of the stuff she’s working on that will make technology visible and appealing to girls and young women (and wearable technology that isn’t ugly). Practically, what can we as humans be doing now to help the situation better for women developers? Getting involved in projects that are already happening is a great way to start.Girls Who Code and Black Girls Code are good resources JSConf EU has started reaching out to women to find speakers and had a 50/50 conference. Sara says another important aspect of workplace diversity is keeping them on your team: praise them publicly, and redirect them privately. And get rid of the Well, Actually culture. How can Stack Overflow specifically help the situation? We currently do an okay job of creating a safe space for everyone and putting our emphasis on the content of a post instead of the person who posted it. The “over-moderation” we’re often criticized accidentally helps a lot with these issues, too – it makes us focus only on merit. Sara says we should consider hiring beginner developers and training them ourselves if we aren’t getting enough applications from female senior-level developers. Thanks for listening to the Stack Exchange Podcast with special guest Sara J. Chipps, along with Stack Exchange CFO Michael Pryor, brought to you by /r/husky.

 Podcast #53 – Let’s Go Rio | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 0:49:57

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #53 with special guest Gabe Koscky, our new Brazilian community manager, and usual suspects Jay Hanlon, Joel Spolsky, and David Fullerton. Today’s show is brought to you by the National Security Administration! Site Milestones: We launched Astronomy, which is not the same thing as the Space Exploration site we’d previously launched. You can ask questions about gravity (the force) on Astronomy. You cannot ask questions about Gravity (the movie). Astronomy and Physics have a lot of overlap, and that’s okay! Also, you can’t say Count Dooku in Portuguese. This is an adult-only podcast. We also launched Tor, a Q&A site about The Onion Router, a protocol for people who want more privacy and anonymity on the internet. There’s been a lot of press lately about the nefarious deeds you can do thereon, but there are legitimate reasons to use it, too. Our last new site is almost definitely not by the NSA: Pets. The site is doing very well. It’s extremely high-activity so far. This is David’s favorite question. And now, this week’s Featured Site: The Workplace. It’s still in beta, and we don’t usually talk about betas in our featured site segment, but this site is especially interesting because its answers are much less factual than most other sites… and yet it’s still successful. Get to the point! How do I deal with difficult but talented employees? is relevant to David’s daily work life. There’s some good information on workplace transitions. Joel says it’s a self-help group for commiserating. Jay disagrees! It’s time to find out everything Gabe knows about Portugal, where he doesn’t live, and has never visited. (Gabe was hired to correct Jay when he calls the language “Brazilian”, or the South American country “Portugal”.) He’s been with us for a few months now as our very first Portuguese-speaking community manager as we work on getting Stack Overflow available in other languages. So why do we need Stack Overflow in Portuguese? Why not just let everyone speak English? Lots of Brazilian programmers simply don’t speak English, and won’t learn – but while so many of the world’s resources about programming are in English, they’re out in the cold. Aside: Joel got a milkshake delivered from Shake Shack, thanks to WunWun, which is extremely confusing. There’s an Area 51 proposal for the site, and we’ll almost certainly be rolling Stack Overflow in Portuguese out to Area 51 committers first – so check it out if you’re interested. Thanks for listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #53 with special guest Gabe Koscky, brought to you by the NSA (they’re listening). Tune in next time for our chat with special guest Sara Chipps!    

 Podcast #52 – We Didn’t Need Headphones | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 1:10:46

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #52 with your hosts Joel Spolsky, David Fullerton and Jay Hanlon. Today’s show is brought to you by Marmite Yeast Extract – you either love it, or hate it! (You probably hate it.) Joining us today are Careers 2.0 Marketing Coordinator Bethany Marzipan, er, Marzewski and Careers 2.0 Product Manager Will Cole. Site Milestones: Space continues to be all around us, everywhere. It’s also a Stack Exchange site, but we’ve talked about it already. Our new milestone is Digital Fabrication, which will probably be in public beta by the time this podcast airs. It’s about modern iterative manufacturing (3D printing, for example). New Features: Our Android alpha is continuing, and we now have someone working on the iOS version (but that’s a long way away from alpha). Another minor change: we got rid of the automatic downvote from the Community user when a question got closed. Since you no longer have to pay 1 rep to downvote a question, this was no longer really necessary. Featured Site: Skeptics! This is a great example of a site whose community has taken the engine in a very interesting, odd, and wholly successful new direction. This is Doubting Thomas. It’s sort of like the MythBusters (who folded a piece of paper eight times)… except better! Skeptics has rules you can’t break: your question must reference a notableclaim, and the answers must have referenced sources. Examples: Will a mother bird abandon her young if touched by a human? Did people think the Earth was flat? Is there any evidence of a “mosquito line”? Do expensive, “premium” speaker cables actually make a difference? And now we turn to our guests! Let’s talk about recruiting programmers. Recruiters are terrible. They make people take down their LinkedIn profiles just to avoid getting messages from headhunters. Our hosts and our guests step through the issues related to recruiting developers, and how to solve them. (Good thing we’re working on a way to fix the problem, too! It will be perfect in 6-8 weeks.) Also, Jeff Atwood designed a keyboard. If your employer isn’t great at recruiting, have them check out the Careers 2.0 Blog. Bethany and the rest of the team are building up a compendium of great information for hiring employers over there. Thanks for listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #52. Marmite may be stored at room temperature, even after it’s been opened.

 Podcast #51 – The Return of Coding Horror | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 1:04:01

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #51, with special guest Jeff Atwood and the usual suspects Joel Spolsky, David Fullerton, and Jay Hanlon. Today’s show was brought to you by Pan-American World Airways! We kick off the discussion with a topic not on the agenda… which is reminiscing about who used to prepare the agenda on the old Joel & Jeff podcasts. Site Milestones! Spaaaace is now in public beta, so you should check it out. We also closed the India proposal, after much discussion about the possibilities for location-based sites. Five years ago today (7/31) was the start of the Stack Overflow private beta! (It’s also Harry Potter’s birthday.) We have a new feature starting this week: featured sites! We’ll grab the most interesting questions from a particular site to highlight the things people might not be aware of. This week, we’re highlighting Open Data. “What’s open data, Jay?” Glad you asked! It’s a site for developers and researchers who are trying to use publicly available data to translate it into more functional systems. (We make our data available, too.) We were reached out to by the contractor running data.gov - neat! We did a minor feature tweak: a new privilege. At 500 rep, you get access to the Late Answers and First Posts review queues. Congratulations! We’re working on an Android app. You can help test it! We’ve started rolling it out to alpha testers. It’s mostly functional – you can view questions, ask, answer, comment, vote, and view your inbox. (Ben wrote a great blog post about what he learned while developing for Android – you should read it.) Let’s turn to our special guest Jeff Atwood. He’s got many honorifics, and Jay got most of them wrong. Jeff has young children, and our hosts have lots of opinions about child things. So! Jeff’s new project is Discourse. Like Stack Overflow, Discourse was born from the negative experience of having to go to ugly, nonfunctional places on the internet because you have to. Jeff walks us through the process of refining this idea and creating the product and highlights some of its best features. Here’s the link to Jeff’s presentation at ForumCon. Side note: Forums and chat systems are incredibly similar, with one key difference: on a forum, you type in a complete thought. In a chat system, you write in half-clauses, and maybe three or four messages together make a thought. Discourse is an instant improvement over many commenting systems (as opposed to forum systems). It was never intended to compete with Disqus, but that’s how BoingBoing is using it and it seems to be working well. Jeff is looking for three major partners. He’s got two already. Listen in to hear the Stack Exchange exclusive on the third Discourse partner! (DISCLAIMER: there is no actual announcement.) Thanks for listening to the Stack Exchange podcast featuring Jeff Atwood! Check out BoingBoing’s forums or How-To Geek’s forums to see Discourse in action. Until next time!

 Podcast #50 – Listen To This Podcast | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 0:43:41

Welcome to Stack Exchange podcast #50, featuring usual suspects Joel Spolsky, Jay Hanlon, and David Fullerton, plus special guest Shog9 aka Nine Shogs Shogging.  And remember, today’s podcast is sponsored by the House of Lords, bringing you excellent laws, 100% free!  This is podcast #50… sort of. It’s the 50th podcast since we switched from the Stack Overflow podcast to the Stack Exchange podcast, but we’ll celebrate anyway.  Our most recent blog post had an instruction in the title, and 80 people bothered to do so. Apparently, our blog post titles have power. We probably promise only to use it for good.  Site milestones, featuring Jaydles. Since our last podcast, we have launched Space Exploration. As of this recording it’s in private beta, but it may be public by the time of publishing. The activity level is very good – 150 questions in the first few days. 136 of them are even open! (Amusingly, the proposal faced some promotional setbacks during the Area 51 process.) New features. We redesigned two small but important pages: the badges page and the privileges page, which used to be extremely confusing. We also fulfilled an ancient [feature-request] - you can now retract close votes. Jon Ericson is the newest member of the Community Team, and since Community Managers have lots of direct interaction with the community we like to introduce them personally. He’s a top user on Biblical Hermeneutics and we are happy to have him on board. Reason #48923 to work at Stack Exchange: we now have two private chefs working for us. They are awesome. Also,  today is the rollout of our custom beer pong table. Blame Jay and Michael. What is there that’s left to say about closing? We made some changes to closing. It’s close to our hearts because a) we hate fun, and b) the whole reason that people like us (and also hate us) is because we close all the crap. But people don’t feel that way about closing. So we needed to learn to close less hatefully. Enter: the War of the Closes. Jay walks us through what changed. Including statistics! And buckets! So why do we have to close questions at all? Joel has the answer! Because otherwise we would be like Yahoo! Answers. Joel walks us through the history of programming questions, from the Dark Days. It takes a while. Get comfortable. Also, we still hate fun. (If you didn’t copy down the question number, this is the question we talk about for a while.) This could be a podcast all on its own. Here’s the Meta.Travel.SE question we discuss. Here’s the FlyerTalk example thread Joel was talking about. Joel broke the shades in the conference room. Possibly forever. Then, back to close reasons. We realized we couldn’t ever cover all of the off topic questions, so there’s an “other” free-form reason. Go to stackoverflow.com and search for “closed:1″ and click “newest”. This will show you the most recently closed questions. You’ll hopefully find that the new set of reasons makes much more sense. We’re happy with the way Thanks for joining us!  Today’s guest has been Nine Shogs Shogging, joining Jay Hanlon, David Fullerton, and Joel Spolsky.  Today’s episode was sponsored by the House of Lords. See you next time!

 Podcast #49 – The One Where We Edited Out The Title Reference | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 0:49:44

Welcome to episode 49 of the Stack Exchange Podcast! We are welcoming special guest Matt Grum, as well as usual suspects Joel, David, and Jay.  Matt is the top rep user on Photography. He’s got 957 answers (and has never asked a question)! He’s a photographer and a developer, so his exposure to the Photography site came from his involvement with Stack Overflow First, some site milestones! Blender is in public beta. (Matt is way more qualified to tell you what Blender is than any of the rest of us.) Also, the second attempt at a Freelancing site is successfully moving to public beta. In graduation news, Salesforce is going to fully graduate after a very quick run through the beta process. Also, Christianity graduated, and its design is beautiful and you should check it out (nice job Jin!). And lastly (and sadly), Libraries is closing. What privileges does Matt remember getting? He thinks he remembers when he learned he could edit other people’s posts, but he’s generally stayed away from the management of the site and just focuses on answering photography questions instead. The Chicago Sun-Times fired all its photographers and told its journalists to use iPhones. Matt and our hosts have opinions on this intersection of journalism and amateur photography. Google Glass is interesting in this context. What if taking a photo is now even more accessible than just taking out your phone? Jay wants to ask a question that might be terrible for our site but great for a podcast: if someone had an old point-and-shoot camera and wanted to upgrade, what should they do? Speaking of shopping questions… Photography is much more lenient with them than other sites on our network. Weirder yet, it seems to be working. Photography exists at the intersection of art and technology. Since Matt is a developer and a photographer, he kind of exists at that intersection too (and so did his thesis). Sometimes our sites are difficult to use, but if you want to use our site to learn something interesting, check out Matt’s answers. They are extremely high-quality. This one is his most highly voted answer. Matt photographs weddings and tells us about some of the coolest ones he’s seen. (Costume weddings are classy and fancy, not, like, Darth Vader-themed.) As a wedding photographer, you’ve got to dress to fit in, and interact and have fun with the guests in order to get great casual shots. Also, don’t use a spy satellite. We have a user question!  @moneywithwings wants to know if Stack Overflow has a rule against editing somebody else’s code. Matt says we encourage collaboration and want to make sure we have the best information available; Jay wants to hire him on the spot. (By the way, we’re hiring! and also, you can ask your own user questions at s.tk/podcastquestions.) Thanks for listening to the Stack Exchange podcast, and thanks to our guest Matt Grum and his band Juno for the outro music!

 Podcast #48 – Sponsored by Powdermilk Biscuits | File Type: audio/mpeg | Duration: 0:52:12

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #48! Our guest today is Jorge Castro, member of the Community Team at Canonical (of Ubuntu fame). We also have Robert Cartaino, our very own Director of Community Development, here at Stack Exchange, as well as the usual suspects – David Fullerton, Jay Hanlon, and Joel Spolsky..  Our guest Jorge Castro works on Ubuntu, at Canonical. He says to pretend it’s double Os instead of U’s: Ooboontoo. (David, Jay, and Joel work on Stack Exchange, at Stack Exchange.) So, Jorge! What does a Community Manager at Canonical do? What’s the role, and what does that actually mean day to day? At Canonical, the Community Team is a part of the engineering department, not the marketing department. They are tasked with doing things that help engineers do their job and help people improve Ubuntu. Jorge usually wears pants to work. Usually. The whole team is distributed, and they use IRC, Trello, and Google Hangouts to keep everything moving remotely. This is all well and good, but what do community managers actually do? Nobody is really sure, either at Canonical or at Stack Exchange. Jorge walks us through the team’s core responsibilities. Robert gives his view on the core role of a Community Manager (by the way, we are hiring community managers!) Jorge’s team just terminated an experiment with crowdsourcing feature requests and ideas. It was the Ubuntu Brainstorm, and it was originally written by an enthusiast who just kind of decided that it should be done, and Ubuntu picked it up. Side note: You can’t handle the Knuth. To finish the Brainstorm story, last month it was decided that… it wasn’t really working. The barrier to contributing to Ubuntu is getting lower and lower, so people with features to dicuss can just show up to the Developer Summit. The moral of the story is that it’s in the process of being shut down, but it’s not ideal to just close all of the communication channels (because sometimes users have great ideas). We discuss the advantages and pitfalls of crowdsourced feature requests. Jay bought this last week. Anyway. The barrier to participate in Ubuntu is getting lower, so it’s easier to get peopletruly involved – instead of halfheartedly participating in the Brainstorm and feeling like they’re involved. Ask Ubuntu is one of our sites! It’s our fourth biggest site by number of questions, with 140k questions, and 3rd for traffic with 231k visits per day. Jorge has been involved with it just about from the start, but he’s not a moderator – just a 20k user. One initial problem was the cyclical nature – every time a Ubuntu release came out, there was a flood of new users asking new questions and the answer rate plummeted to the bottom of the list. Then the review queue came and saved the world! Jorge has a feature request: custom review queues. He even went through the proper channels and proposed it on Meta! Robert walks us through Community Self-Evaluations. The system picks out a certain number of questions, and the community goes through and gauges whether or not the information available is better than the other information out there on the internet. We discuss it for a while. So what’s missing for Ask Ubuntu? What could we build that would make it work better? Jorge says the biggest problem the site is having right now is user confusion about what is a bug report and what’s a configuration issue.  Site launches! As of this recording, Open Data and Network Engineering are in public beta. Go check ‘em out! Thanks to Jorge Castro and Robert Cartaino for joining us, as well as the Usual Suspects (MINUS Producer Alex, who gets NO credit).    

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