The Stack Exchange Podcast

Jeff & Joel are back with guests this week – joining them are Kyle Brandt and George Beech, our very own sysadmins/ops guys/[insert your own term here] After a brief test of the emergency broadcast system, we plunge right into the podcast, including: Joel is late because he had to go up to AOL HQ to pick up some more floppy disks for the office We recently launched Blog Overflow - which was actually a pretty substantial engineering and technical background to making it happen. A huge discussion of the the SE infrastructure setup and why we host our own instead of relying on Amazon or another outside provider.  Hint: not only can we roll our own better, but its a lot cheaper too. In the department of little tweaks with big effect, check out our “network apocalypse”: at one point, Stack reconfigured to separate different types of network traffic due to microbursting overloading the network – this simple upgrade greatly increased the throughput and efficiency of the existing infrastructure. In the good news department: Jeff talks about the expanding user cards just introduced and based on a conversation from our podcast a few weeks ago with Michael Natkin In the bad news department: we’ve decided to cancel Stack Overflow DevDays due to low ticket sales – you can read Joel’s full blog post for all the details. Finally, we welcome our newest engineering hire – Demis! That’s it!  Tune in next week at the usual time for another episode with more guests! Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #17 w/ Kyle & George by Stack Exchange  

So it’s been a couple weeks since our last podcast, but Jeff & Joel are back and ready to catch up on everything they missed.  There’s no guest this week, just 60+ minutes of that Jeff & Joel banter that (we hope) you’ve grown to love. Jeff and Joel discuss “Zombie Poke,” aka facebook.stackoverflow.com deal in depth and dispel rumors of receiving a “dump truck of money.” Details of the deal are discussed, from what the new feature accomplishes and how it came about. Jeff also discusses the state of online identity and the issues that arise with having multiple logins. Joel explains why he thinks Facebook might be the new AOL. Jeff relays a story about a Stack Exchange user who devised a clever way to get his dad involved in the Bicycles Stack Exchange. Joel wonders if this, or something similar, should be undertaken by CHAOS. The duo discusses which Stack Exchange sites don’t meet their personal expectations. The hit list includes Super User, Writing, and Gaming. Jeff goes into depth about his issues with Gaming.SE, even though it’s the fifth most trafficked site. Joel talks about the myth that reputation affects programmers’ career opportunities. A question from the chat room about the Publicist badge spurs discussion about sharing questions on the internet and how it relates to Stack Overflow. We discuss the state of Community Wiki. If you’re looking for a good example of a community wiki answer, look no further than How do I diagnose not being able to reach a specific website as an end user? And of course, if you enjoy the Stack Exchange podcast, make sure to check out the Ask Different Podcast – hosted by our Ask Different (aka apple.stackexchange) moderators! We’re back on our regular schedule now, so tune in next week for another great episode!   Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #16 by Stack Exchange

Joining Jeff and Joel this week is Michael Natkin, from our Cooking.SE site.  Michael is especially interesting because he is a computer programmer, but he doesn’t answer questions at Stack Overflow, only on the Cooking site (he’s our first guest to do so!) – he also writes over at Herbivoracious (which he started back in 2007). Their discussion includes: Michael is a vegetarian “foodie” (even though he really hates that word) – he and Joel commiserate over the oddities of being a vegetarian trying to eat out Joel wants to know what type of questions usually come up on cooking (and how they maintain their 100% answer rate) Joel thinks that you should never combine chocolate and garlic, but there’s a Cooking.SE thread that disagrees On the topic of what questions should be closed, Jeff points to this Electrical Engineering meta thread with a great example of why we need to keep closing questions Kicking off a whole discussion of creating house rules – Joel and Michael jump into discussing Momofuku and restaurants who create dishes and refuse to alter them for guests Jeff wants to take a deep dive into the top question of the month on Cooking.SE Also interesting about Cooking.SE is that there are very few “modernist” questions on it Make sure to check out Modernist Cuisine if you want to find a REALLY expensive cookbook (but its written by a patent troll, so we can’t recommend it) Michael is still seeing some good user growth with a few new faces coming in to the top users every quarter One big question that comes up when you see a question that is salvageable but needs some work, is it better to just edit it for them or to point out the issue to them and ask them to change it On a related note: should you point out if someone’s question contains a bad assumption or is “doing it wrong” or just answer what they’re looking for – check out this post on Waxy about his favorite sandwich shop and sweet tea We’ve gone back and forth about how much promotion we should do on the individual site “brands” – ultimately we’ve found that we rather promote the individuals actually answering the questions and helping them build their reputations (and remember, once you make it to 2000 rep, we remove the “no-follow” from your profile URL so you get the Google juice) We just improved the individual site Twitter accounts and they now tweet way more info.  New community blog posts also show up in the header of each site so users will find out about the new posts We also rolled out massively improved tagging to help users better figure out what tags they should put on their questions Should our new CHAOS folks post their team blog on Tumblr (to make sharing easy) or our own platform (because its ours) If you haven’t checked out our new newsletters – you can get a weekly list of the most interesting questions on any of the sites you’re interested in, but don’t necessarily visit every day.  As Joel says, its kind of like a free candy store! Make sure to check out our upcoming conferences; Stack Overflow DevDays – a two day programming conference that will cover all the new technologies you need to know about; and Server Fault’s Scalability Day – helping system administrators learn about massively scaling systems (with speakers from Facebook, Netflix, etc) – plus, save $100 off either conference with the discount code “podcast” Thanks for joining us!  We’ll be on “summer vacation” for the next couple weeks, but we’ll be back on August 30th @ 4pm EDT with Anita Graser from GIS.SE (and our first female guest!). Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #15 w/ Michael Natkin by Stack Exchange

Miguel De Icaza joins Jeff & Joel this week to discuss everything from Miguel’s many projects to identity on the internet to playdates for toddlers.  Miguel is a force in the software world, having initiated and contributed to all kinds of products over the years – he’s also well known for being one of the most productive programmers out there.  Check out the full episode for: Miguel has worked on a number of different projects including Midnight Commander, Gnome, Mono, Ximian and more Midnight Commander still continues to be developed to this day (albeit by other people) and it has some interesting new features that have been added Joel reiterates his hate for huge numbers of configuration options and appreciates Miguel not implementing ridiculous option trees in his programs We have a brand new podcasting setup (again!) – keep your eyes open for an upcoming post detailing our whole setup Jeff thinks that Unix couldn’t make the same advances as some other systems (like Apple) because they didn’t have a dictator to force massive changes on the community After leaving Novell (which owns Mono), he launched a new company (Xamarin) that is working on some new projects, while also supporting the existing Mono community Cross platform apps are stupid if they aren’t coded using the native UX and tools (see Word 5 for Mac, Safari for Windows, etc) which makes them look different from every other program on that platform Make sure to check out Area51 to see all of the new sites that are currently in commitment and under consideration of being launched.  Support the proposals that you want to see as Stack Exchange sites! Our new Bicycles site just launched as a full site (and gotten its own theme)! We’ve started a new team of people (CHAOS) who will help enhance and promote many of our communities – the first project they are working on is enhancing question titles and converting many of them into actual questions This has also led to a big debate internally over the relationship between great questions and titles and what guidelines we should set for making titles Miguel is the most productive person that Joel knows (besides James Franco) We have a new newsletters feature that allows you to get a weekly newsletter showing the top and most interesting questions from sites that you’re interested in but don’t visit every day.  Check out stackexchange.com/newsletters – it’s like a candy store filled with free candy! Sometimes people tell us they are interested in certain topics but their activity tells us something different (which is why we auto customize the homepage for each user) – its kinda similar to people on dating sites… Every once in a while, we have a site that makes it through Area51 despite it “sucking” (eg: freelancers) – the problem with these sites is that there simply aren’t enough questions because its too small a topic – the entire topic can be covered in one book There are two current proposals that present an interesting contrast on this topic: Christianity and Biblical Hermeneutics – the biblical site has great, specific questions, where’s Christianity doesn’t and will likely be a weak site Cross “Joel tells an army story” off your Stack Exchange Podcast Bingo Card! Coming soon: use as many OpenID logins as you want on SE (instead of the current limit of two) One of our developers (Kevin Montrose) wrote a great blog post on how your email is your identity Fair warning: Miguel lies a lot on his twitter feed Make sure you get your tickets for Stack Overflow DevDays (we just announced the first round of speakers for all the cities!) and use discount code “podcast” to save $100! Join us next week for another live episode on Tuesday @ 4pm (EDT) or catch the posted version on Wednesday. Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #14 w/ Miguel De Icaza by S[...]

Jeff & Joel are joined this week by Jin Yang – our resident web/graphic designer here at Stack (the distinction between the two becomes a discussion point).  Once we get the proper picture of Jin in the chatroom, he relates everything from his background in design to how he ended up at Stack Exchange and our philosophy behind design. Full topics this week include: Jin refers to himself as a “web designer” as opposed to a “graphic designer” because of the type of work he focuses on. Last week, we discussed this amazing answer from Eric Lippert and how it was a great answer in response to a poor question.  Looking over this led Joel to notice that some people will vote to close a question as duplicate because the answers are the same even though the questions are different. In this case, there was already some questions on the topic but Eric decided to write the “canonical” answer that can be referenced from here out.  Joel will often do the same thing on some of the other Stack Exchange sites (like in this OnStartups post) Sometimes you do have to have SOME duplication of questions to make sure that the different use-cases are covered, but you want to avoid there being 12 of the exact same question on every site. When applying for Stack Exchange, Jin created a custom site targeted at Joel to show his abilities. As Joel notes (and expands on) Jin went with the always smart tactic of spending a ton of time focusing on the one company he truly wanted to work for instead of very little time on 50 random companies. Many people forget that truly great design is very hard, when you have to meld it with making sure the site stays useful and effective for the users. Talking about continuous improvement: Jin notes an episode of This American Life covering similar topics. Joel likes Robin Williams’ (no, not that Robin Williams) book on design since it has really good and basic lessons on it – The Non-Designers Design Book We use a special CSS structure that lets us have a master CSS file for the entire network and then smaller CSS files for each site that just contain the differences between the generic template and the special parts of each site. We’ve also learned a number of design lessons: like that white on black designs just don’t look very good and aren’t usable. There have been issues in the past with designers creating their designs on macs but those designs then looking funny on PCs because of differences in text rendering – fortunately, thanks to improvements on both ends, that happens less now. While Jin is our in house designer and works on everything, we occasionally have help from some outside designers (such as for English and UX) who are members of the community. Prompted by a question for the chatroom, Jin is really excited about getting to design our RPG site. Anonymous feedback is now live!  That means non-logged in users and those with less than 15 rep can give feedback on how good questions/answers are.  We haven’t figured out how we’ll incorporate this data yet, but we’re collecting it and will figure that out. Make sure you get your tickets for Stack Overflow DevDays (we just announced the first round of speakers for all the cities!) and use discount code “podcast” to save $100! We’ll be back live next week with a bunch of brand new podcast gear  and our special guest: Miguel De Icaza.  Join us for the live stream and in the official show chatroom Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #13 w/ Jin Yang by Stack Exchange

This week, Jeff and Joel are joined by Patrick McKenzie – StackOverflow contributor, internet commentator and SEO expert (especially when it comes to driving traffic for Halloween bingo cards).  After a few early tech issues (don’t worry, we cleaned up for everyone at home) we jump right into things, with tons of discussion, including: The big news for Stack Exchange this week: we officially launched our new mobile support! We also recently introduced in-line editing so you don’t have to go to a separate page to edit an answer or question – we really want to encourage editing and have people help make questions better. Patrick is the creator of BingoCardCreator.com – an amazingly popular site for putting together bingo cards for various occasions.  Apparently, one of the biggest markets is for Halloween Bingo Cards with the entire month of October being worth $20k in sales. He also has a new tool for helping doctor’s offices remind patients of upcoming appointments. Patrick owns a bunch of “exact match” domain names which provide a huge SEO bonus since Google assumes that anyone who owns a domain exactly matching a search must be credible.  The bonus doesn’t apply to hyphenated domains though. Joel suspects (and Patrick confirms) that Google now incorporate WHOIS data into their ranking to discount any domains that are owned by people who have a history of owning crappy domains. (Joel has apparently also never seen Burn Notice) One potential issue with rewriting question titles to be SEO’d is that not everyone searches in the same language that Google ranks for – so you might actually hurt how many people find your questions. Joel misses all the “labor of love” sites that people have written because they truly love a subject – the quality and usefulness of those sites is FAR better than the useless drivel turned out by content farms.  Patrick does point out one defense of them though. Jeff has been wanting to talk more about the “Ask Me Anything” concept that originated from Reddit.  Jeff thinks the format of Reddit isn’t the best for the AMA idea (and in general has some issues with the format) and likes a new site: AnyAsq.com which is really optimized for it. Ultimately, this leads to a further discussion of the value of various formats for organizing different types of content. Joel & Jeff have often wondered how to prevent the “tyranny of the sort order” in which already upvoted posts (or posts from high rep users) get lots of upvotes on their answer even though there may be a better one. Sometimes certain answers get crazy levels of upvotes – like this one Our math intern, Qiaochu, has been doing some research and found the effect of having an upvoted post on a users propensity to return: Of course Stack Overflow DevDays 2011 is still coming along, so make sure to pick up your tickets now!  We’ll be coming to 4 cities around the world this fall with some of the foremost experts on software development, so don’t miss it!  Use the code “podcast” for a $100 discount too! We’ll see you next week when our guest is Stack Exchange designer Jin Yang! Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #12 w/ Patrick McKenzie by Stack Exchange

This week, Jeff and Joel are joined by Rory Blyth (with no ‘e’ as he is very insistent) fresh off his move to a new house in Portland, OR.  This week’s topics include: Rory has had a whirlwind of moving and relocating as of late.  Today is the first day he got more than 3 hours of sleep, but he is now happily in his new house. Rory hasn’t been writing as much as of lately because of random personal and relationship issues – but he’s free now! Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines! Jeff recommends “Enemy of the State” (even though it stars Will Smith) – it’s a spiritual sequel to The Conversation and it also contains a faraday cage, in case you’re interested in seeing one of those. While working on .Net Rocks! (our podcast competition – so don’t visit that link) Rory moved for a while to New London, CT – and it only took one day to decide to move there. Rory was also part of podcasting way back in the early days (of 2004) while everything was still being decided about formats, styles, enclosures, etc. He was also a featured guest on Podcast #71 of the Stack Overflow podcast in 2009! Jeff wants to know what Rory has been up to for the past couple years: and apparently Rory is still very focused on iPhone development. One of the biggest changes: all the clever hacks that programmers did originally are now supported by real APIs which makes it less fun for the nerds. MonoTouch was recently spun out by Novell after its “restructuring” and is now tied in to Xamarin. Rory loves MonoTouch because of the ease of it and the incredible power that it gives developers, including cocoa bindings, the ability to drop in .NET binaries, efficiencies, etc You can also find Rory’s new site at Rory.me (once he actually starts blogging there) One valid reason to use Objective C over MonoTouch is that it is a much smaller file,  Although it has gotten much more efficient recently, according to Rory. Rory argues that fascism is good in tech products: from the iPhone to Xbox, by isolating and controlling everything in the platform it allows the company to control the experience and ensure quality.  Otherwise you can end up with things like Windows Mobile / Windows CE. Google runs the risk of running into similar issues with Android.  The other question is if they are diversifying out too much (into crazy projects like wind power). How do we keep Stack Exchange questions up to date? The Monotouch vs Objective C question above is 2 years old now and may no longer be fully accurate; we accept edits from anonymous and 1 reputation users now, but how can we motivate them to improve this old question? Rory is also one of the most “prolific” answerers on our site with the highest vote to answer ratio on the site! Rory will also be speaking at Stack Overflow DevDays – so pick up your tickets now if you want to see him (with discount code ‘podcast’ for $100 off) Help us test the new Stack Exchange mobile view on your mobile device by enabling it on meta! (scroll down to the very bottom of the page to enable it there.) There’s no podcast next week (the 12th) but we’ll be back live @ 4pm on the 19th so see you then! Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #11 w/ Rory Blyth by Stack Exchange

Jeff & Joel are joined by Steve Karantza, better know as Shirlock Homes, our #1 user on the DIY Stack Exchange.  Steve is also our first non-programmer oriented guest on the podcast! Everyone wanted to know how Steve ended up on the site: turns out his son is a computer programmer who has used Stack Overflow for a while and encouraged his dad to check it out. Steve is also a big user of This Old House Pro, a community for contractors hosted by This Old House.  The main difference is that he gets answers on This Old House but gives answers on DIY.SE.  Steve would also like to see some more contractors join DIY.SE The number one problem he sees is people getting in over their heads.  Especially in regards to electrical and plumbing projects, people don’t know or understand the codes and safety issues. How do you know if a contractor is going to be competent and good?  Best advice is to get referrals.  And once you have them, make sure they are real, go out and actually see how the jobs came out. If you haven’t seen There, I Fixed It, go check it out for great examples of what not to do.  Especially, never, ever use a screwdriver as a fuse. One great question that Steve answered was how to estimate the height of a tree: he recommended an old logger method. If at any point during a project you stop and think; how the heck do I do this?  It’s time to stop and get advice, either from a contractor or other reliable source.  Steve relays the story of a friend who had a fixer-upper and continually called him for advice after getting stuck on a problem for 5 hours. Ever needed to do plumbing work but don’t know how to sweat pipes?  Check out Shark Bites which form secure couplings without sweating.  Unfortunately – they aren’t cheap. If you want to learn how to do home improvement work: just pick a project and start it.  Some contractors will also let you help out on projects on your house instead of one of their lowest level guys (but not all contractors will let you). Steve tried to build his first house at the early age of 22 right after he left the air force – as with all early projects, there were a LOT of lessons learned. Jeff also related how learning building is similar to learning code: ultimately one of the best methods is to simply sit down (or stand up) with someone better than you and work on a project with them One challenge for Steve has been learning all of the intricacies of the software and systems that make up the sites (like the difference between the main and meta sites), since he’s not a computer guy.  He’d also like to see some more highly experienced people come into the site. The writing that Steve has done on the site has also spurred his desire to keep writing and based on it, he’s even talked to some of the local papers about doing an “Ask the Contractor” column. Steve also noticed how long people continue to read and vote on his answers over time.  Joel pointed out this question on sliding glass doors that still continues to get lots of views even though only 3 people originally answered the question. Steve is excited about the Gardening and Landscaping site (which is currently in public beta) – if you haven’t checked it out, you should! Steve’s son Alex is also launching a new website – Axiom Home Services – to help homeowners with their home inspection questions and needs. Coming up soon, we’ll have a weekly newsletter which will recap interesting and popular questions from the week. We just officially announced the launch of DevDays 2011 tickets (yeah, yeah we’ve talked about it before, but now its official).  As always, you can get your tickets with a $100 discount by using the code “blog” Join us next Tuesday for a special surprise guest!  Not to mention, audio mixing provided by our very own Jason Punyon. Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #10 w/ Steve Karantza b[...]

This week, Jeff and Joel are joined by Greg Wilson, an author, developer, and former university professor, who is also an expert on open source software development.  Once make it through the jokes and get his mic sounding great, we can jump in and explore all kinds of interesting topics, like: Everyone’s favorite Canadian airline? Porter Airlines!  What makes them so great?  They use FogBugz as their customer service software. We’ve hired a math intern to help us mine through all of our Stack Exchange data and (hopefully) improve the site.   And to make it better, he’s an MIT student and Math.SE moderator. According to a study of Microsoft data, what was the strongest predictor of bug rates in Windows Vista?  The answer: how far apart the developers are in the org charts. The more separate they are, the more likely there are to be conflicting orders or different mind sets. There have been fairly strong opinions for years on what makes a good programming setup/environment, but people are just now beginning to look at actual data to derive conclusions Greg thinks this is LONG overdue, especially given that software development is an engineering backed profession – why weren’t our processes based on science? Even big companies, who have access to the data, have been avoiding actually using data for their decision making: people treat it as a craft rather than an engineering discipline Greg has written several books on how to develop software better – two of which came out this year and are must reads. Making Software: Joel requires that you read this book, because its the first one to take a scientific approach to making software as opposed to the subjective and anecdotal way that most have in the past (eg: everyone who has done one software project and then written a post on HN about how their method is “amazing”). Greg wanted to use the results of his studies to bring actual concrete steps back to professionals on how they could improve their process His favorite chapter: while Test Driven Development is very popular right now, a survey of all of the studies that have been done on TDD have shown that the better the study done, the weaker the signal as to its benefit. Another study recently looked at how much effort goes into maintaining the build system: 5 to 30% of all development effort is spent on maintaining the build system.  With the variations being huge even when working on similar projects.  Clearly, there’s a huge difference in the efficiency of some developers. Measuring programmer “productivity”: As Joel points out, any metric that you come up with as a method for measuring programmer productivity can be gamed some how.  He even made money as a consultant in the past showing companies why they shouldn’t hire consulting companies to improve “productivity” since programmers would instantly game any system (which is how consulting companies appeared to be successful).  Ultimately, it’s pretty hard to actually measure. Greg points out that the irony is that the single most correlated measure of productivity is simply lines of code written.  Joel counters with that only holds true, so long as the developers don’t know they are being measured based on that (since its so easy to game). His second book is The Architecture of Open Source Applications: its entirely CC licensed so you can read it online for free.  if you do buy a hard copy though, all the proceeds go to Amnesty International. Greg decided to publish it for free online after seeing how quickly Beautiful Code was put onto torrent sites. His key thesis behind it is that we don’t teach people how to read code (only how to write it).  His example: you wouldn’t hire an architect who had never looked at other designs before. What’s really important isn’t the internals of the code, but rather the architecture – especially when it [...]

This week, Jeff and Joel are joined live “in studio” by Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and formerly the lead developer at Tumblr.  This week’s topics include: What’s the proper numbering format for podcast episodes: decimal, binary, octal?  There’s also an extensive debate regarding whether Marco has ever been on the podcast: everyone but Joel agrees that he hasn’t. Marco talks about leaving Tumblr to start his own company (Instapaper) Part of what made the move easier was that he did it on the side for about a year before leaving Tumblr (with the okay of his current boss of course). By the time he left, Instapaper had become a full time job and Tumblr had become far more than a full-time job – it needed even more time and support.  It became very stressful knowing that even the slightest mistakes in code could cause 1100 people per second to get error messages Instapaper is also a bit easier to support because it’s inherently designed for offline use, so if the servers go down, people aren’t immediately deprived of the entire functionality like they are if your web service is down. Instapaper was created by Marco to solve the problem of reading on the train and reading old articles that he had found while at work. Marco is currently being confronted by the “big player” problem (aka The Starbucks Problem), now that Apple has introduced their “Reading List” feature in the newest version of iOS and Mac OSX. As Marco points out though, there’s several big reasons that he isn’t really hurt by it: 1) It doesn’t solve the offline problem – it’s only online bookmarks  and (2) It doesn’t clean the text to make it easier to read Most importantly, it doesn’t solve everyone’s needs and at the same time, it educates the market as to the value of this type of service, thereby enlarging the entire market and creating more customers for Instapaper. This tends to work really well for the small player when you’re trying to solve a big problem with lots of personal preferences – it doesn’t work well when its one simple task that needs to be completed. Examples of situations that are good for the little guy: RSS Readers, email clients, coffee shops, etc.  Examples of situations that are bad for the little guy: .ZIP files, regular bookmarks, etc There’s also tons of successful notes and stock apps, despite Apple providing support for it natively.  So many people want more functionality that it creates a whole new market. Ultimately, if someone wants a bit more than what Apple provides by default, they are probably going to go to Instapaper and ultimately increase Marco’s user base..  The key to this model: you have to do it better than the big guy People sometimes also choose random or arbitrary reasons for choosing products (like the color or logo or name) Jeff finds that the effort of queuing things up (especially reading material) is greater than the benefit he gets from being able to read things later. Marco points out that he doesn’t want Instapaper to be seen as an obligation – something that many people ultimately feel it can be To combat this, he is considering a feature where he would email them saying “I noticed that you have X articles more than Y months old, do you want to archive them”, thereby giving them an ‘out’. People don’t find to tend the app while searching for offline reading – they just find that as an additional benefit after they start using it. Joel thinks that Facebook created the “Like” button in order to collect data about web pages that would be very good for creating a search engine Marco also points out that Facebook provides all of these various embed platforms so that they get the cookie on your computer and then can see anytime you visit any of these pages and build a graph of what you (and everyone else) looks at. Bringing it back to Stack Exchange: Jeff points out that we’ve been considering giving anonymous users the ability to vote somehow (currently voting is the most [...]

Jeff and Joel are joined by Sam Saffron (aka Waffles), our only Australian developer at Stack Exchange! Does “Hell Banning” — making a problematic user’s posts visible to just him or her — make sense? You can see Jeff’s post about it over on Coding Horror. When issues like this are presented to the community, the gravity of the situation is often not fully conveyed to the audience. They can’t see all the removed content that tells the story of how destructive that person was to the community. Of course, we always encourage discussion of general moderation issues on the per-site metas. Two pieces of advice about moderation discussions: try to stick to generalized dicussions about a broad class of moderation, without delving into minutiae specific to one user and one situation. To keep it useful to the community, avoid devolving into a laundry list of every tiny thing that happened to every user. Also, try to limit discussion about moderation to those users who have an actual connection to the site and these moderation events, and aren’t just stopping by to opine about some abstract, perceived wrong on the internet. (insert XKCD cartoon here) Sam Saffron has been working remotely for Stack Exchange from Australia for about a year now. Sam came to our attention as an avid participant on Stack Overflow and meta, as well as his own homegrown Stack Overflow inspired support tool he wrote, Community Tracker. In addition to being the lead on the Stack Exchange Data Explorer, Sam’s touched almost every area of the engine at this point: improvements to badges, privileges, edits, users page, tags page … We’re starting to build a feature we call emacs.stackexchange.com, which essentially gives users a filtered view of Stack Overflow to specific topic groups, as represented by a set of tags. We have historically shut down Area 51 proposals that would factionalize Stack Overflow, and although we feel this is the correct decision, we are sympathetic to the underlying concern. Stack Exchange sites are intended to be groups of topics, identified by tags, that are of broad interest to people who all love a topic — like, say, programming. This is fine when you follow a large tag like [java] or [c#], but what about when you follow 20 small tags? Yes, you can set up a tag filter, but it might be nice to have some default groupings for certain popular sub-areas — thus, emacs.stackexchange.com instead of the Area 51 site proposal for emacs. The bedrock guideline of our Area 51 site creation process is, “I’d like to ask a question about {x} but there’s no place on the Stack Exchange network to do so”. We’ve been a bit disappointed that the CSTheory community has been unwilling to accept an expansion of their scope, because there are technical computer science questions on Stack Overflow that aren’t being handled correctly and have no other place to go. The German and Japanese proposals are now public! These are our first baby steps into other languages, as guided by the community. It’s already caused a bit of an issue as we “advertise” popular questions to the network that may have very few words in English. This also comes up with http://judaism.stackexchange.com/ questions which can have quite a bit of Hebrew in them. As Joel builds out the CHAOS (NYC community development and evangelism) team out, they start with a generalized online SAT/ACT style aptitude test. Which Jeff did not pass. :) But the far more interesting test that we’re giving candidates is what we call the “Internet competency test” — how would you test someone to see if they are experts at using the internet? How to find things, how to send email, how to link, what “The Facebooks” and “The Twitters” are, and so forth? Building such a test is an interesting thought exercise. How would you do it? A q[...]

It’s our first test of a live podcast!  In case you missed it, we streamed this week’s podcast live during the taping. It’s something we’re playing with and may continue to do in the future if it is popular.  You can tune in to the live tapings Tuesdays @ 4 PM Eastern / 1 PM Pacific — check Joel and Jeff’s Twitter feeds for the location. We’ve found that hosting a podcast while running a business is more useful than you might think — because it allows you to introspect on your own thoughts and decisions and have a history explaining why you made those bad decisions at the time. Even if you only have 10 listeners, and one of them is your dad. Jeff is currently reading Super Cooperators which focuses on the prisoner’s dilemma and how it applies to social situations. In the real world, people remember your actions, and that history changes how they interact with you. Ultimately our concept of reputation derives from the realization that your current actions will have future consequences not just on other people, but on society and the greater internet. Some of the NY team went to hear Bing Gordon give a talk on gamification that covered a number of topics.  In particular, he noted that almost everyone (except for males age 18-24) prefer a cooperative game to a competitive one, and people are much more likely to continue with something if at least one other person sees and validates what they did. That’s one reason why we’re so gung-ho about everything being public — by keeping everything visible and in the open, you encourage more civic-minded level of behavior than what happens behind closed doors. Sometimes people can be turned off by these types of reputation systems, though. There’s a fantastic article at TheAwl about how Wikipedia made it possible for amateurs who are obsessive about a topic to become, en masse, as reliable as traditional experts. Stack Exchange is now an OpenID provider!  We did this primarily for two reasons. First, any time you send people off to another site to sign up, you lose visitors. By keeping everything on Stack Exchange, we increase the success rate of sign ups. Second, while MyOpenID is a great service, it’s free — so there’s no incentive for JanRain to maintain it and keep it in good repair. There have been some recent … incidents … with MyOpenID. Down votes no longer cost you, the down-voter, any reputation points on questions only.  We found that too many people weren’t willing to down vote questions because of the -1 cost to the voter. Downvotes on questions are a critically important signal for us in separating the good questions from the not-so-good questions. Upcoming guests include Steve Karantza (Shirlock Homes from DIY.SE), Rory Blyth, Dave Winer, Jason Calacanis, and more.  If you have guest suggestions, make sure to add them to the Meta thread! We’re hiring a Community Evangelism Team!  They’ll be responsible for promoting our communities and sites out to new audiences, and helping them grow. It’s a great job for anyone who wants to get into the startup world or a recent grad with a humanities degree who doesn’t want to be stuck working at an agency for the next 10 years.  For more details, check out the job post. Joel takes his first question from the audience: why does he think great programmers aren’t going to be found developing internal company apps? Tune in next week when our guest is Sam Saffron (aka Waffles) – once again, you’ll be able to watch/listen live on Tuesday @ 4pm as we do the taping.  Follow @spolsky and @codinghorror for the link.  You can also hang out in the official chat room during the tapings. Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #06 by Stack Exchange

The podcast is on the road again this week, with Jeff and Joel coming to you live from Jeff’s living room in El Cerrito, CA.  They’re also joined by Josh Heyer (aka Shog9) who calls in from Colorado.  This is actually the second time we’ve done a podcast from Jeff’s house, the first time being Episode #51. Server Fault and Super User have recently seen a substantial hit in the amount of traffic coming from Google the last few weeks.  There’s a number of possible reasons, but Joel wonders if it has to do with long clicks vs short clicks. Joel’s theory is that Google is looking at this ratio as a signal for the quality of a site: high quality sites should have more long clicks (meaning you don’t return to Google quickly) and fewer short clicks (where you click a link and then immediately return to the search page). We’re also wondering if the Google algorithm change is penalizing sysadmin content – since a number of other sites focused on System Administrators / IT Professionals have also seen big drops in traffic from Google. Jeff previously blogged about Google algorithm issues and the fundamental risks of any site relying on a single source for so much of their traffic. If you have any data or observations from running your sites, make sure to hop over to our webmasters.stackexchange question on this topic. Our guest today is Josh Heyer, our new part-time community manager.  Josh was originally on Usenet, then moved to forums and Code Project, and joined Stack Overflow right after it launched; he’s been with us from the beginning. One of the first things that Josh pushed to change after joining the team was to make it more clear why accounts were being suspended.  Someone would get suspended and then complain about it publicly; they had a reason, but other people didn’t. This sometimes led to lots of heat and noise on meta, detracting from the quality of the site.  By making the reason for a suspensions public, you remove the gossiping and public discussion.  And if you don’t — you get the Streisand effect. We’re now tackling the last of the low hanging fruit in making the site performance better: serving static content using a CDN.  By utilizing a CDN for lower priority/static content (like logos and other images) we can serve files faster to different areas of the world. Make sure to hop over to that blog post and help us (and you!) out by telling us which CDN works best for you. We’ve been using our own home-brew CDN-like setup that offloads all of our static content off the main servers (to reduce CPU loads) and onto a side domain.  Unfortunately, these secondary servers were still located in our NY data center, so it did not do anything to reduce ping times to distant locations. In our experience, breaking your static content off onto its own server can have a huge performance benefit, even for small or medium sites. It’s amazing how many highly technical people don’t think to clear their browser cache when they’re having a problem with a website loading.  Always clear your browser cache and try again before contacting a site’s support team. Please? We started a logo contest for Lucene.net, the open source project powering our search.  If you want to help out by trying your hand at designing a logo for this project, check out the 99designs contest we created on their behalf. Because our search currently focuses on relevance (determined by keyword mentions), we recommend editing good questions to make sure a proper set of keywords appear in them; this makes it easier for others to find these questions in search. Remember that search results have several tabs, but always defaults to relevance. Try the votes, active, and other tabs to get a different sort of your search results. Currently, there’s no way for anonymous users to indicate their satisfaction with a page — should we add som[...]

This week, the Stack Exchange podcast travels to England, where Jeff and Joel are joined by Stack Overflow legend Jon Skeet (and son!) along with Marc Gravell. Picking up the discussion from last week’s episode: what constitutes a good question? Our very own “How to Ask” page is a start — and it’s a mandatory page on Stack Overflow for all new askers. It’s partially based on Jon’s own post, Writing the Perfect Question. Why should you downvote a question? Is there such a thing as a bad question? There most certainly is! We generally tend to consider questions where the asker put virtually zero effort into asking worthy of a downvote. Jon has also written a bit about reasons for voting on questions and answers. Two of the most important aspects of a good question, per Jon, are providing evidence that you’ve researched the problem yourself, and providing as much information as possible: detailed code snippets, error messages, objectives, etc. Some users don’t want to answer questions by users with low accept rates. Jon deeply disapproves of the practice of leaving comments nagging users about their accept rate, especially since you can gain far more reputation by writing good answers that are highly upvoted rather than ones that are accepted. Accept rate by itself doesn’t capture all of the information about how good (or bad) a member of the community a given user is. Perhaps accept rate could be expanded into a broader numeric metric of how “civic minded” a user is. Only two things keep Jeff up at night: the size of the constantly growing database, and maintaining quality within the community. We absolutely want a friendly and civil atmosphere, but as the site grows, people have to learn to follow the norms and guidelines of the site themselves without manual hand holding. It doesn’t scale. Ultimately, we can’t save every user, and some have to be turned away from the site in order to protect the overall quality of the community. You must give a little to get. To maintain quality, we started capping the number of questions that can be asked by a user in a given time period. If users are submitting more than 6 questions a day, or more than 50 questions a month … are they really putting the appropriate amount of research effort into their questions? Jon wonders if there are algorithmic solutions to detect users asking low quality questions – similar to how GMail reminds you when you reference an attached document in your email, but forget to actually attach something.  Jeff responds that we already do that for answers, and are beginning to aggressively extend it to questions. Following up on the previous conversations about improved flagging tools — we get hundreds of flags per day, and the vast majority of them are valid. (Comment flags … not so much). Even though we’re buried in them at the moment, we welcome flags from the community because nearly every one goes directly towards a better signal-to-noise quality ratio on your site. So keep ‘em coming! Jon wonders whether the quality of answers is increasing or declining.  Jeff and Joel respond that not only are the percentage of answered questions increasing but that answer quality, to their knowledge, has never been disputed. It’s fundamentally easier to preserve the answer experience than the question experience because users love to vote on answers: good answers go to the top, bad answers to the bottom.  But the flow of incoming questions — which make up the entirety of the front page and the top 25% of every question page — have a hugely disproportionate effect on any Q&A system; that’s why we spend so much time focusing on them. The main issues we see with answers isn’t quality per se, but that people misuse the answer field to enter thank yous, pleas for help, and other irrelevancies. We do provide the How to Answ[...]

This week, Jeff and Joel are joined by Scott Hanselman – tune in for their discussion of everything from MIX11 to the salads at Jack in the Box. Welcome Scott Hanselman! Be sure to check out both of Scott’s excellent podcasts at Hanselminutes and This Developer’s Life. Joel recently wrote an unintentionally controversial blog post about lunch and how important it is here at Stack Exchange and Fog Creek. Despite the claims that Joel is torturing introverts by forcing them to eat lunch together, the truth is that almost everyone at both companies is introverted and yet enjoy lunch together. Scott wonders how so many people have so much time to sit around on Hacker News and Reddit (and everywhere else) discussing thse blog posts when they have work to do. Of course we have to reference Clay Shirky’s classic Gin, Television, and Social Surplus here. Scott is busy putting together a new Synology DiskStation DS1511+ to replace his Windows Home Server setup – unfortunately, there’s a lot of options (and a lot of bad ones out there). Scott is a wired enthusiast, but he does like his optimized wireless N setup, which is based on a Netgear N600. Microsoft has an amazing video conferencing system known as RoundTable — now branded as the Polycom CX5000 — that captures the room in 360 degrees and then automatically detects and shows the person who is talking. Scott also has a mobile remote telepresence device running around Redmond as him, somewhere. He also recommends the Cisco Umi. Over on mechanics.stackexchange.com, Jeff wonders why online car communities are so brand-centric — there are hundreds of dedicated sites for Ford enthusiasts, and Subaru enthusiasts, and so forth. Whereas programmers can have Java and Python installed side by side on the same PC, you have to own a lot of physical, real world vehicles to have experience with many different car brands — or, be an auto mechanic. Perhaps programmers are kinda-sorta mechanics in the sense that they spend most of their time practicing the noble art of maintenance programming. Stack Exchange sites do well in professions where you can open a relevant Stack Exchange site in a window side-by-side with the work you’re already doing on the computer. But what about people who don’t regularly work on computers? Is it realistic to expect people who tend to work offline to take the time and effort to come online after they finish working and keep discussing their work? Or, will the proliferation of computing devices like smartphones and tablets bring the online world to them while they work? It does happen, since diy.stackexchange.com is clearly an offline site but produces a lot of really high quality questions and answers about home improvement. We’ve improved flagging dramatically on Stack Exchange over the last few months. You may have noticed a public flag weight value on some user profiles. Your flags now carry different weight depending on how accurate and helpful your flags have been in the past … and the more you successfully flag, the more daily flags you’ll get, in a sort of virtuous cycle. Scott asks: why should I care about all these points and flags and badges and reputation systems on Stack Exchange? What’s the point of you guys building your own Dungeons and Dragons MMORPG system online? Tune in to next week’s podcast when Joel will be “live” from London and our guest will be the infamous Jon Skeet! Also, if you’re interested in helping us pick content for Stack Overflow Dev Days – check out Joel’s post on it. Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #03 w/ Scott Hanselman by Stack Exchange