The Stack Overflow Podcast

A warning to all souls before you go further: We know you’ve been dying to hear this special Halloween edition of the podcast, but due to its frightening nature, we recommend you proceed with caution and put all small children and ghosts to rest before hitting play. But if you are so adventurous as to continue… Welcome to the Stack Overflow Podcast #93, recorded October 25 in our New York City offices. This week’s episode is brought to you by the Society for for Responsible Use of Jack-o-lanterns. Did you know that jack-o-lanterns are the leading cause of smashed pumpkins in this country? Do your part, and say, “Jack-NO-lanterns!” to Big Pumpkin this holiday season. In this week’s podcast, Joel tells a scary story about the time he crafted an easter egg for Juno email, and then deviously hid it in the build server. Does the steady beating of the easter egg’s hideous heart give him away? Huddle closely and listen carefully, boys and ghouls, to hear his fate. It wouldn’t be a successful Halloween special without something dying. This year, the victim is the Experts Exchange paywall - as of this month, it’s been taken down and is gone forever. Joel, David, and Jay discuss while dancing on its grave. Additionally, we’ve long suspected that our studio was haunted, and during the recording of this episode, we experienced what we thought may have been a poltergeist at play: At the start of Joel’s One Minute Tech Review, the table started vibrating… although in this case it turns out to just have been David’s phone, which he forgot to turn off. While we didn’t ask, we assume the caller, a recruiter from a startup looking for a new VP of Engineering, will understand that we recorded her and David’s conversation to share with all our closest friends and listeners. Fair warning: things get dark in this segment. As part of our on-going series, Developer Stories, Genius.com CEO Tom Lehman stops by to talk to us about his journey as a programmer and founder. Tom, aka Joel Spolsky’s own Annie Wilkes superfan, has spent years learning everything about Joel, and wants him to never stop writing. Ever. Tom tells us how he went from making such projects as BetterMetroNorth.com to Genius.com. He also sets Joel up for a classic Shakespeare hip hop joke, which you get the pleasure of hearing over and over again. Regardless of whatever spooky things may be going on in the world, we continue each week to build our Stack Overflow Constitution. This week’s question: If somebody drops a scrap of paper on the subway and they don’t notice, do you tell them? Tweet your answer, pro or con, using hashtag #StackOverflowPodcast for the chance to win a nifty Stack Overflow sticker. And if you have a question of your own you’d like us to use in building this constitution, tweet @stackpodcast. If we like your suggested amendment, we’ll share it on the show and name it after you. Last week’s winner for the question, “Do you hold the door for a colleague if you know it’s going to make them run?” was… “Pro. Not only am I being polite, I'm helping improve their health.” - Andrew Bickerton, @coder4hire Please note: We’re taking a one-week break from the podcast and will resume episodes on November 14. Notable Links: Twitter: @stackpodcast Facebook: The Stack Overflow Podcast Our website is now live: http://stackoverflow.com/podcast

Welcome to The Stack Overflow Podcast #92, brought to you by the The Facsimile Association of America. Since the late 1800s, faxes have solved the infuriating problem how to get a message to someone quicker than physical mail, and since the late 1900s, slower than just sending an email. The Facsimile Association of America: When Was the Last Time You Needed to Fax? In this episode, you’ll learn how to identify fake New Yorkers from real New Yorkers by simply asking, “What is Gray’s Papaya known for?” You’ll also learn how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop. Finally, you’ll learn a new word: Recruitersplaining. Launching this week, Startup Or Shut Up, our new game where Joel, Jay, and David have to guess which one of three startup descriptions are fake. Spoiler: Jay gets a participation award for “trying.” But what really grinds our gears? This week, the gang rants about awful recruiter questions and responses, specifically from Google's (alleged, possibly outdated) "Director of Engineering" hiring test, such as Recruiter: Why is Quicksort the best sorting method? Interviewee: It's not always the case, nor even suitable. Recruiter: Quicksort has the best big-O. Interviewee: "big-O" ignores data storage latencies, topology, volume, available memory, and even the computational cost of every CPU instructions involved in a given implementation – instead, it merely counts the number of algorithmic operations! Big-O can be a valuable indication when designing algorithms but the best performing and scaling solution depends on the particular constraints of any specific problem and environment. Recruiter: Wrong, you had to give me the Quicksort big-O score. Aside from listening to the episode, if you want to learn how to do interviews the right way, go to Joel on Software and check out The Guerilla Guide to Interviewing. And if you're looking to apply to a similar job, (hopefully with a better interview), check out these senior software engineer postings. More important that interviewing, however, is our future legal system. As you all know, we’re preparing the Stack Overflow Constitution week by week, amendment by amendment in this podcast. This week’s amendment: Should you hold the door for a colleague if you know it's going to make them run? Go to Twitter and use #StackOverflowPodcast to vote Pro if you hold the door, and Con if you don’t. Notable Links: Twitter: @stackpodcast Facebook: The Stack Overflow Podcast Our website is now live: http://stackoverflow.com/podcast

Welcome to The Stack Overflow Podcast #91, recorded Tuesday, October 11 at Stack Overflow headquarters in NYC. Today's episode is brought to you by Sukkot, also known as the Feast of Tabernacles. (חג סוכות שמח) Sukkot is the Jewish holiday where you have to eat and sleep in a temporary hut that you build in your backyard. "Oooh" - David Fullerton In this episode you can learn way too much about the New York Transit Museum, the word "Stack" at Microsoft, and the etymology of Channel 9, where Joel was interviewed last week with the help of gender neutral robot cameras. We have two new segments debuting this week: Introducing Stump Nick Craver! Here's how it works, we call Nick Craver (@Nick_Craver) and he will have 60 seconds to answer 5 questions about servers. If he answers all correctly, he will win a 6 month supply of Clorox Toilet Wands. As it turns out, a 6-month supply is exactly one wand. Developer Stories! Where we talk to developers who have cool or interesting stories to tell about how they got into computers and what they build with them. Our very first guest to tell us her developer story is the brilliant Dr. Omoju Miller (@OmojuMiller), a data scientist who is interested in data-driven, machine learning approaches to solving business problems. In discussing one of her blog posts that Jay was particularly struck by, she says: "I am the kind of person that had a very different, non-stereotypical upbringing. I had toys that were not gender specific. I had planes that I could fly down the street... I had robotic little rats… I had Legos, I had Barbies, I had Easy-Bake Oven… In our house when we were playing it was like we were building worlds. So you had to do the engineering to figure out how to build your building, you had to figure out what was going to be your power generation supply. After you built the house, you had to figure out what you were going to eat, what you were going to wear... It was a very holistic thing. Maybe because of that kind upbringing I have the ability to imagine worlds that don’t exist and just invent them. However, for a lot of people they’re bound in their imagination by what they’ve seen. And a lot of the ways in which we consume knowledge about who we can be is actually true media. If you keep on seeing images that don’t reflect a certain gamut of who you can be, then you have a very narrow view of what you think you can actually do in the world, especially when it comes to technical professions.” For this week’s installment of building Stack Overflow’s Constitution, our hosts ask the controversial question, “Are you allowed to stand over the IT person while you wait for them to reset your password?” Listen as our hosts talk it over and then tweet to us using #StackOverflowPodcast: PRO if you think that you should be able to stand over them and wait, or CON if you think that you should go back to your desk and wait for them to notify you. The best explanation, whether you are on the winning or losing side, will be read next week on air as well as win a fabulous Stack Overflow sticker and no Clorox Toilet Brushes. Last week's winner for the question, "When you are at the supermarket, should you be able to eat an item BEFORE you get to the cash register?" is: "Pro, the only problem is fitting on the scales after snacking by the bulk bins. #StackOverflowPodcast" - Jonathan Lisic, @jlisic Congrats Jonathan, you win a thing! See you next week! Notable Links: Developer Story Backchannel.com on Medium Stack Overflow Salary Calculator, now with International flavor! Le.Taxi info. (Editor's note: We are really, really sorry about the bad accents in this segment.] Twitter: @stackpodcast Facebook: The Stack Overflow Podcast Our website is now live: http://stackoverflow.com/podcast

Welcome to The Stack Overflow Podcast #90, recorded October 3 at Stack Overflow Headquarters in NYC. This week’s podcast is brought to you by the QWERTY keyboard: "Since 1878, it's not so bad!" Enough said. The podcast is also brought to you by Thinkful. Thinkful provides coding education with one-on-one mentorship. Rated #1 Coding Bootcamp by Course Report with over 6,000 students mentored. In this episode: Rant Soup™, now with Trello! If you would like to make your own Trello board of rants, or soup, go to Trello.com. Also, according to Joel, Jay is still not getting a raise. (Don't worry buddy, you'll get there someday…) Today's special guest, calling in from not-so-sunny London, is Stack Overflow PM Kit Karrau. Kit is the driving force behind our new product, the Developer Story, launching today. Developer Story shows what you’ve built, not just where you’ve worked or went to school. It’s your story; tell it your way. Go to s.tk/story to create yours now. As part of our favorite story about a developer in this week’s episode, we learn that Joel's hands are very small in a certain photo on a certain website (so you should definitely NOT go there right now to point and laugh). In the News this week, the gang finds out that developers rant the most about product managers, and that AI is going to put tax preparers out of business. It's also the third week of the Stack Overflow Constitution. Vote on this week's amendment: When you are at the supermarket, should you be able to eat an item BEFORE you get to the cash register? Listen to our hosts' points of view and then tweet to us using #StackOverflowPodcast: PRO if you think that you SHOULD be able to eat it before you leave the store (and pay for it at the register using the wrapper), and CON if you think that you SHOULD NOT, along with a brief explanation. The best answer will be read on the air next week, and by best, we mean which one made us chuckle the most. Last week's winner is Michael Berkowski with a great tweet story culminating with: "My request was denied, so I got to learn a little French instead #StackOverflowPodcast" - Michael Berkowski, @mberkowski 9:33 AM - 3 Oct 2016 See you next week! Notable Links: Developer Story: s.tk/story Devrant: https://www.devrant.io/ Twitter: @stackpodcast Facebook: The Stack Overflow Podcast Our website is now live: http://stackoverflow.com/podcast

Welcome to The Stack Overflow (yes Overflow, listen to last week!) Podcast #89, recorded September 27 at Stack Overflow headquarters in NYC. This week's installment is brought to you by Inuktitut, the premiere language of the arctic and one of Nunavut's three official languages (Umiaryuap Publimaaqpaga tattaurniq ammayaq!) as well as National Voter Registration Day. Go to www.voteplz.org for the easiest way to register! "Every individual regardless of wealth or heritage has the same opportunity to vote and create real honest change." In this episode, Joel complains about things. How is that different from the other podcasts, you say? This time there's singing. Our hosts also talk about a few recent blog posts concerning the declining quality of Stack Overflow while trying very hard, and failing, to not quote the first U.S. presidential debate. Jay and Joel break down what these posts got right, what they got really wrong, and what we can learn from them in our mission to make Stack Overflow a better resource for the world's developers. (Disclaimer: no Kewpie dolls were harmed in the making of this podcast.) Speaking of the debate: Both candidates had something to say about tech, and we can't let that go without at least discussing the yuge problem of using "cyber" as a noun. Check out this week's “In The News” for this and much more, including hearing David ask "Grandpa Joel" to tell him more about the Xerox Alto. Also, it's the second week of our new feature (not a bug!): the Stack Overflow Constitution. Vote on this week's amendment: Should programming languages count toward your college language requirement? Listen to the podcast to see where our hosts stand and tweet at us to weigh in yourself. Use the hashtag #StackOverflowPodcast and give us your Pro or Con with a brief explanation. The best answer will be read on the air next week, and by best, we mean which one made us laugh. Last week’s winner, commenting on whether socks should go on before pants or pants before socks, was Bryan Bedard, who said "Con. I tried to put socks on before pants but got an InvalidOperationException #StackOverflowPodcast" - Bryan Bedard, 3:53 PM - 26 Sep 2016 See you next week! Notable links: Twitter: @stackpodcast Facebook: The Stack Overflow Podcast Our website is now live: http://stackoverflow.com/podcast Fascinating Xerox Alto restoration information Check out Esperanto on Stack Exchange and Lindsay Does Languages segment on Esperanto.

Welcome to The Stack Overflow Podcast, recorded September 20 at our headquarters in NYC. This week’s episode is brought to you by adorable otters, who hold hands at night so they don’t float away from each other. The episode is also brought to you by Compose, an IBM company. Compose is a production-ready, cloud hosted platform for building enterprise applications on open source database technologies. Before you listen, please note that this is episode #88, not to be confused with what should have been episode #73 since we last left off at episode #72. That episode was for The Stack Exchange Podcast, and this is The Stack Overflow Podcast. Confused? You’re literally the only one who is. Bury your feelings of embarrassment and don’t let anyone know. This week, our usual hosts Joel, Jay and David are joined by Documentation team lead Kevin Montrose and product creative director Kurtis Beavers to talk about all the updates to Stack Overflow Documentation including the REPOCALYPSE (i.e. reputation apocalypse). Also joining this week is Ilana Yitzhaki, the show’s new News Editor. A big change to pay close attention to: We’re writing the Stack Overflow Constitution, and we’re asking you, our listeners, to vote on the various elements of this new pivotal document. This week’s extremely important amendment says that one must put pants on before socks and NOT socks before pants. Listen to the podcast to hear the pros and cons of this amendment, then head to Twitter and submit your vote - with commentary - using the hashtag #StackOverflowPodcast. Also be sure to listen if you want to hear the gang talk about, but not in, Esperanto (or you could check out the new Stack Exchange Esperanto site instead). By listening to this week’s show, you’ll learn what you should never say to a designer as well as what flight simulators have to do with Excel. You’ll also find out what the gang would do if they had access to a time machine (spoiler: They really, really need to revisit their priorities here). Finally, in a great show of kindness, Jay compliments David on his correct use of the phrase “for which.”

Welcome to the Stack Exchange Podcast, recorded Tuesday, August 2 at our headquarters in NYC. This week’s episode is brought to you by peanut butter, the tasty legume paste Americans spend $800 million on each year, as well as by our actual sponsor, IBM. Try the new IBM Cloud Tools for Swift. This week, our usual hosts Joel, Jay, and David are joined by Stack Overflow engineering manager Matt Sherman, who recently led the launch of our salary calculator. If you’re interested in working at Stack Overflow, or you just want to know how much our engineering, design, and product roles make according to years of experience and skill level, the salary calculator offers transparency into our compensation methodology. Comments about the calculator were split on Reddit and Hacker News between us paying too much and us paying too little so… we’re doing it right? The gang goes deep on developers’ problems with salary negotiations, and they share an epiphany about the meaning of the classic board game, Monopoly, that they probably should have realized years ago. As is now officially tradition — because there’s been two of them in a row — we have another One-Minute Tech Review from Joel for you. This week’s review is of Google Flights, where you can search for cheap flights in seconds. Will David throw shade on his review again? As is now also tradition, perhaps. Finally, Jay talks about our recent decision to stamp out use of the term “rep-whore” in the community. From now on, “rep-whore” will be treated like any other term that’s inconsistent with Stack Overflow’s “be nice” policy: it will be removed. If none of this is your cup of tea, make sure to listen anyway just to hear Joel tell a joke about the pluperfect tense. Memorize it and make sure to reuse at the next grammarian cocktail party you attend.

Welcome to the Stack Exchange Podcast, recorded Tuesday June 28th at Stack HQ! Today's podcast is brought to you by Eugene McCarthy for President, as well as by IBM. Try the new IBM Cloud Tools for Swift. New this week: one of those two sponsors is a real live sponsor. Bet you can't guess which one! Anyway, your hosts today are joined by Daniel X. Moore and Gareth Wilson from the HyperDev team at Fog Creek Software. But before we talk to the guests, our esteemed hosts run through some interesting tech news. (Or maybe just tech news. -Ed.) First up: .NET Core! Microsoft is trying to turn a gigantic ship around toward open-sourciness and community-friendliness. (Said ship is apparently unrelated to the arm of Microsoft that forced you to upgrade to Windows 10.) Also: did Microsoft build their own version of Trello? You decide. And now it's time for the first and possibly only but definitely first monthly One-Minute Tech Review with Joel Spolsky! This week's OMTR is Wallcat. It's free. You can install it. (If you know your Apple password.) It changes the background image on your computer every day! Amazing. Let's turn from tech news to Stack news. What's shipped since our last podcast? A new and improved Stack Overflow Enterprise! It's for big companies with lots of proprietary code who want to run private Q&A for their development teams. Companies with 1000+ developers who want this can get it by sending an email to enterprise@stackoverflow.com. We updated the sitewide Terms of Service. It forbids companies from going onto Stack Overflow to scrape profile data, which protects our users from spam. Our guests have been waiting very patiently through all this, so let's turn to them! Daniel X. and Gareth work at Fog Creek Software, the first company Joel founded. They're currently working on HyperDev, the easiest and fastest way to get your idea developed and deployed on the internet. You can get an app up and running in less time than it takes to listen to this segment--without shaving any yaks. So go check it out! We talk about the story of the product for a long time before we remember to talk about how it actually works, but rest assured, we do eventually dig into that part. So what's next for Stack Overflow? Running some tests on the /ask page. This hasn't been touched since the dawn of time, more or less. The community has been discussing ideas here, so read up and weigh in! Documentation. We'll cover this in more detail next podcast. And that's it for this podcast. Thanks for tuning in!

Welcome to the Stack Exchange Podcast episode #70! Today's podcast is brought to you by the BB-8 droid. Today your hosts are joined by developer Jason Punyon, whom you may remember from way back in Podcast #21. Punyon works out of balmy Buffalo, NY. (Here's the Buffalo sentence they talk about for a weirdly long time.) Punyon started working at Stack Overflow on the Careers team in June 2010 (back when Careers developers were devalued associates). His interview process involved a party and a change of pants. You should listen. So why are we having Punyon on the podcast, anyway? Because of Jobs on Stack Overflow. (We talked about this last podcast, too, and Donna wrote a blog post as well.) And now, a story about how David was wrong and Jason was right! Basically, we made a wrong decision a long long time ago and built Careers as a completely separate application. When at last we decided to fix this, we thought it was more or less insurmountable, or that it would take years. But then we had our annual company meetup at a hotel in San Diego with weird showers (take our word for it) and everything changed forever... because Dalgas and Punyon put their heads together. The summary: Careers is putting on a Stack Overflow outfit. (Jason does a better job of explaining it, don't worry.) Then Punyon went home and crammed years worth of work into a week. At least that's how I think it happened. It's live for everyone now, and you can go look at it, and it probably won't break because we did a lot of work to make it perform better for Stack Overflow's scale. Anyway. It's here: http://stackoverflow.com/jobs. Lest we make it sound like Jason singlehandedly shipped Jobs on SO, David made him recite the list of his co-conspirators from memory: Donna, Dalgas, Nick Craver, Dean Ward, Kirti Thorat, Nick Larsen, Roberta, Ana, Shog, Mike McGranahan... and if you worked on this but aren't listed here you should go yell at Jason and not me. Anyway, this was a cool project for Jason, who spends most of his time interpreting whale songs (which is apparently what the data team does). It was also cool because he gets to ship it and immediately run away to parental leave - babby #2 arrives on January 8! Congratulations, Punyon family! So! Is there anything else going on? There was some kind of bash going on at the time of this recording. A Winter Bash, you might say. Also, Stack Overflow en Español is in beta público, Stack Overflow на русском is graduating, and Stack Overflow スタック・オーバーフロー is continuing to flourish. And check out the new design on the Raspberry Pi site! Thanks for joining us for Stack Exchange Podcast #70. See you next time!

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast episode #69, brought to you by The Lake Erie Soda Water Company. Your host is Joel Spolsky, joined by First Deputy of Community And So Forth Jay Hanlon and Lord High King of Nerds David Fullerton. Fortunately, the beer arrived shortly after the podcast began, so this one should be pretty good. By the way, we're changing everything. We should talk about that! First, let's review: you may remember how the last time we had a podcast, we talked about Documentation. It's now in private beta, and you can sign up. So here's the new stuff: we're working on something we're calling integration, or possibly unification. The legend has it that once upon a time, Stack Overflow was invented, and so was this bolted-on Careers site where programmers could get jobs. But they were two separate things, and if you wanted to get a job through Stack Overflow, you had to go to a whole different website and make a whole different account. Our unification project will move all of that stuff back into the Stack Overflow fold, making it an unobtrusive part of your day-to-day experience on the site. (Which you can just ignore if you aren't looking for a job.) We asked a sample of people signing up for Stack Overflow today if they were actively searching for a new job, not searching but open to opportunities, or not interested in jobs at all. We found that of those who answered, 23% were actively looking for jobs and 38% were open to opportunities. (There's a point here, but we digress to talk about Twitter's new hearts.) Oh, here's the point: 61% of new Stack Overflow sign-ups might be interested in the right new job. What all of this means for the average Stack Overflow user is that you no longer have to bother to keep a second profile on a separate site. Oh, and if you're at all interested in finding a new job, we want to be able to help you look for one in--here's the kicker--a way that isn't awful. We've been thinking about ways we think we can continue to help help make developers' lives easier. We're not about programming on a boat or making designer shoes for programmers. We're just about helping programmers learn, improve, and share their knowledge, and that's why Documentation and Jobs feel like natural fits into what we're already doing well with Q&A. [Producer Alex is now eating delicious seaweed snacks. Further bulletins as events warrant.] So! By now we've talked about integration a little bit on MSO. We're trying to take the pain out of the Jobs piece as quickly as possible while we're building out these other features. But wait. Joel makes an excellent point: why are we working on all of this new stuff instead of going back and fixing all of the problems with Q&A? Well, the answer is... why not both? Let's be clear: this is not about any shift in our focus on Q&A. Q&A is the thing that we're confident that we've done really well, and it's what our community is built on and uses to teach a new generation of programmers in a new way. Q&A is the killer feature, and it will stay that way. You know what? Just listen to David for this part, because my attempts to summarize his impassioned monologue are coming off cheesy and/or arrogant, and he's really nailing it. (Don't tell Jay I complimented David; he'll kick me off his team.) Okay. Moving on! Teams is in private beta and you can sign up to participate if you want, or just check out the teams that have already signed up. (So far, NetGuru is winning the non-competition.) Tune in for more Teams talk. We're gonna get a lot of stuff wrong at the beginning, like we always do, so we look forward to community input on how Teams should evolve. Here's the post Joel is talking about when he says "Harley Davidson Bike Buckle" a bunch of times. Also, Joel is a hypnotist. Also, we're done now, so thanks for wasting another hour of your life listening to the Stack Exchange Podcast!

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #68 recorded Tuesday, September 1, 2015 at Stack Exchange HQ in New York City. Today's podcast is brought to you by Labor Day - don't forget to put those seersucker suits away for the season! Your hosts today are David Fullerton, Jay Hanlon, and Joel Spolsky, with special guest Kevin Montrose. Here's what seersucker looks like (in case you were wondering about it while the gang talks about seersucker for a weirdly long time): (image via wikipedia) We've got two exciting things to talk about. First up: Stack Overflow has 10 MILLION QUESTIONS! We made a web page to celebrate, because that's what geeky web companies do. If you're too lazy click on that link don't worry because Jay eventually just starts describing the page to you. (Predictably, the conversation quickly devolves from celebration to discussion of how we can actually measure activity and helpfulness. Views? Sessions? Answers?) To celebrate, we asked folks to share their Stack Overflow stories on Twitter with #SOreadytohelp. Tons of people have shared so far (which may have something to do with the fact that you could win a t-shirt). Some of Jay's favorite selections: StackOverflow is the definition of all what's noble about this field: knowledge, sharing, rigor and dorky jokes. #SOreadytohelp -- Ahmed (@halflings) August 20, 2015 (The dorkier, the better.) #stackoverflow in Nairobi helped me skip condescending librarians,unreliable Internet to stream tuts,limited dev community #SOreadytohelp. -- Geoffrey Cimani (@asgardjotunheim) August 20, 2015 (Take that, librarians.) #SOreadytohelp Of all the "world changing startups" I think SO secretly is the most impactful one in the world. http://t.co/rXSuON6Vsq -- Goktug Yilmaz (@Esqarrouth) August 20, 2015 (Oh no! Our secret's out!) Okay, enough of that boring celebratory stuff. Our next topic is so big and exciting that I think it warrants a horizontal rule: Welcome to life below the fold. So! It's time to talk about what Stack Overflow could do next. It was just about a year ago that we thought to ourselves: "we need more things besides questions and answers!" At least that's how Joel remembers it. To make a long story short, we're talking about a possible new content type: Documentation. If you haven't read the meta post yet, you might want to skim it while you listen to this part. (I'll wait right here.) Done skimming? Welcome back. We're still talking about documentation. As it currently stands all around the internet, documentation is frequently: Poorly written or included as an afterthought Out of date Incomplete Lacking in clear examples We're thinking the Stack Overflow community can help improve the situation the way it did with Q&A, and we think that's the next thing we can do to serve developers. Here's what it could look like: (image via kevin's meta post, seriously, go read it) Documentation is a really early-stage project, which is why we went to the community for feedback. We're still figuring out what level the docs will be at (but we already know there will be NO toString() DOCS ALLOWED). Also, the Power Glove used to be a thing: (image via wikipedia) After a bunch of discussion, David has determined that we're about halfway through the Documentation project: we're 6-8 weeks in, and we've got 6-8 weeks to go. Perfect! Questions from the audience: Is SO inadvertently going to make projects stop writing their own docs? Maybe, but we doubt it. Other Q&A sites and forums still exist elsewhere on the internet, and documentation will too. How did you do you plan to solve the issue of distributing reputation for a collaboratively edited page of documentation? The short answer is we aren't sure yet, and we have to observe how people actually use docs in the private beta. One thing we've kind of decided is that we don't think it makes sense to take rep away from you when someone else adds to something you wrote. (If y...

Welcome to Stack Exchange podcast episode #67, recorded live from Stack Exchange HQ in NYC on August 11, 2015. Today's podcast is brought to you by the Stockwell Garage, a Grade II* Listed Building since 1988. Joining us on today's podcast are Jay Hanlon, David Fullerton, host Joel Spolsky -- and special guest Anil Dash of Makerbase! (Anil says he's never been invited on the podcast before, but that is a dirty lie.) Many know Anil because he comes free with every new Twitter account. There is a small number of other places you might know him from: He's on the board of Stack Exchange, Inc. He's on the board of Data & Society He's on the board of the Lower East Side Girls Club He's on the board of NY Tech Meetup He's an advisor to Medium He's an advisor to Donors Choose He's a founder of Activate He and Gina Trapani founded ThinkUp He and Gina just released Makerbase He co-created Monegraph (not to be confused with MoneyGram) He directed Expert Labs He's got a little blog you might have heard of Whew. When Anil started blogging, he felt he was late to the party (and said so in Vanity Fair). And while it's true that he didn't invent blogging (Justin did, probably), he certainly wasn't late to the scene either - he started his blog in 1999. Also, he's Prince's #2 fan (right behind ?uestlove). So! Anil's current all-consuming project is Makerbase, which is sort of like IMDb for digital projects. His cofounder Gina built the site while Anil sat around and watched supportively. Joel is in there already, because anyone can add or edit a page for a maker or project. Makerbase helps increase transparency in the digital world (so founders can stop getting all the credit for features and things that other people actually made). Makerbase is really simple: there are makers and projects. No companies, no job titles. Just makers and projects. You can add things you worked on for six months at your job, or just something you hacked up as a side project over the weekend, and Makerbase treats those projects equally. Makerbase was a little bit of a "pivot" for ThinkUp (and by "pivot" Joel actually means that ThinkUp is "a company with two products"). ThinkUp is "social media analytics, but way more interesting than that sounds". You hook up your Twitter or Instagram or whatever you have, and ThinkUp will tell you who your biggest fans are or that you should dial down your cursing. In a nutshell, it's sort of like the opposite of Ashley Madison. (You'll have to listen to the podcast to get that joke.) Jay asks Anil what project he's most proud to work with, and Anil deftly avoids the question by observing that computer science programs don't have ethics classes baked in, like law or medicine programs do. This is an odd disconnect, Anil feels, because software has immense power to create and alter culture. So a lot of the organizations Anil has gotten involved with address the intersection of technology, policy, and culture. David observes that the tech industry is shifting toward design in addition to (as opposed to?) straight-up technology. At some point, we all started to recognize that programmers are just not good designers, and that design is not just beauty: it's a real discipline that is worth thinking about. Jay says there's an indescribable element to it (and then he describes it adeptly). Design has been an integral part of the 30- or 40-year march toward accommodating people. Next, we ask Anil about how he spends a lot of time and energy thinking and speaking about social issues that are important to him. (He compares his efforts to learn from as many people as possible with Stack Overflow, and we didn't even know he was going to say that. Win!) Also--and this is related, in a "you had to listen to the show" kind of way--it's awesome when folks come along with you when you nerd out about something. That's why you should read Anil's blog post about Pri...

Welcome to Stack Exchange podcast episode #66, recorded live at Stack Exchange HQ in New York, NY on July 7, 2015. Today's podcast is brought to you by The Association of Ex-Fog Creek Summer Interns (AEFCSI). Today's show is hosted by the usual suspects Jay Hanlon, David Fullerton, and Joel Spolsky, plus ex post facto Producer Alex. First up: it's important to note that David is a charter member of the Association of Ex-Fog Creek Summer Interns, from way back before Fog Creek knew how to do internships (his words). He made graphs in Flash and that was his whole internship. So! Let's talk about features. The coolest one we have for you today: now, when you log in on one site, we log you in everywhere. You can read about it on meta. It seems like a no-brainer, but it was harder than it seemed, and that's why it took about 94 years. Turns out login is hard. Who knew? (Anna Lear, who has to work on this monster project, did. So did Dalgas.) In other news, we updated our blog, which you can see if you're reading this blog post. We moved off of Wordpress and onto Jekyll, which is the only CMS in the world that doesn't have its own Stack Exchange site. The new blog is open source, btw, so you can kick the tires. [Editor's note: some issues with the blog migration and our iTunes feed are why this podcast was published so belatedly, and why you can't listen to it in your podcast app just yet. Use the SoundCloud link below while we work that out.] We've also re-vamped what it means to graduate, and since this recording we've announced plans to tweak graduation even further. Essentially, what's going to happen is that we're going to consider any site for graduation if it hits 10 questions per day over a certain period, and then it's going to get a site design by Joel done totally in emoji. Some of this is true and some of it is false. You decide! (Also in this section: tangents.) Next topic: reddit. What the heck happened? Joel doesn't know because he was busy flying a drone into a swimming pool that weekend (true story). Oh, and here's the drawing the hosts start talking about in the middle of the drone story. Then we finally get to the reddit story, which is that Alexis Ohanian aka /u/kn0thing once tried to eat a spoonful of cinnamon on our show, way back in episode 43. And apparently something else happened at reddit, too. Jay and Joel walk us through the basics of the story (and David reminds us continually that we have no idea what actually happened). Related: What should we do to reduce the risk of a Reddit-like crisis? Basically, our assessment is that reddit moderators felt unsupported by reddit inc., and at Stack Exchange we have always strived to make sure our mods don't feel that way. (We don't always succeed, but we do our best--and have since way before reddit exploded. Just saying.) We are entirely dependent on our community, and our mods are the members of the community who give the most. A community isn't something a VC or company can own. Companies can serve communities, and once they stop doing that (hi Digg!), the community will leave--as well it should. The biggest lesson we can take away is that we have to listen to the things our community is asking us to fix. For reddit, it was moderator tools. For us, it's been things like the quality problem and people talking about how mean Stack Overflow is, which people like to write about on the internet. (Read this post by Bill the Lizard instead of the original post, btw.) We abruptly thank you for listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #66 brought to you by the AEFCSI!

Welcome to the Stack Exchange Podcast, episode #65, recorded Tuesday, May 12, 2015 at Stack Exchange Headquarters in New York City. Today’s podcast is brought to you by the Association of Airline Mile Programs and hosted by the usual suspects. We’ll start off with the extremely important and community-relevant subject of why Joel hates frequent flyer programs. It’s a fascinating story and I can’t do it justice in summary. But I will say, for those of you who find it TOO ENTERTAINING AND DRAMATIC, that this story ends around 7 minutes into the show. 7:16 to be exact. Things we are working on that are very similar to airline miles programs: Site designs! We’re updating them. All of them. The down side of giving every graduated site a custom design is that when we want to design something new–a new user profile, for instance–we have to design it fifty times. So we’re standardizing all of our designs and modernizing a few of them so we can roll new stuff out more easily. Ask Different and Android Enthusiasts are good examples of what we’ve been up to. You can find the full list of updated sites (and those still waiting for updates) on meta. Mobile updates! We’ve released updates for both of our mobile apps (on Android and iOS). (The Windows Phone app is still in the planning stages; the current plan is to wait until Windows runs iOS apps.) Data stuff! We’re working behind the scenes to make your experience on Stack Overflow and Careers better (or at least more relevant to you). We’re improving Careers matching, which makes us able to match you with better job ads in the sidebar, and to recommend more relevant jobs to people who go to Careers. It’s also related to the stuff we’re using to recommend you questions on the Stack Overflow homepage that you might want to answer, and THAT in turn is related to the Next Answer Hook, in which we try to find you more questions to answer that are similar to the question you just answered. (If you want to go right the source, you can find top jobs in design, mobile and more over at Stack Overflow Jobs.) Things that already happened which we haven’t yet talked about (enough): The new user profile! It’s the big thing that we launched since the last podcast. Jay’s going to talk about it because he wrote the blog post. We’ve been working on this for a looooong time. Joel will give the overview, for those who haven’t been paying attention, and who also didn’t read the blog post I just linked. The short version is that we split your profile into two parts: the part you care about (Activity), and the part other people care about (Profile). We talk about this for a while. The most important part of the discussion is that if you enjoyed this podcast, you can mail Joel Spolsky a note. You can find the office’s mailing address on the website. And in case you were TOO FASCINATED by this tangent, Jay brings us back to the topic of the new profile features around minute 31. (By the way, here’s the thread about new privileges, where you can suggest anything as long as it isn’t animated GIF backgrounds for your profile.) The moral of the story is that we–specifically Jay and David–learned a lot about how to manage projects, products, and processes through this experience. Okay. Whew. User profile page talk: done (around 56:00). It’s finally time for… Community Milestones! We have a Health site in public beta. CiviCRM is in public beta too – and we have no idea how to pronounce it. Woodworking is in (you guessed it) public beta. Stack Overflow in Russian–the artist formerly known as HashCode.ru–has officially launched, and is doing phenomenally. Thanks for listening to Stack Exchange Podcast Episode #65. For a special treat stay tuned after the credits for the Very First Episode of the Stack Overflow Podcast, starring Joel and co-founder (emeritus) Jeff Atwood.

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast Episode #64, recorded in the podcast studio at Stack Exchange HQ in New York City, NY. Our podcast today is brought to you by string cheese! (It can be eaten by pulling strips from the cheese along its length and eating those strings.) Our hosts are Jay Hanlon, David Fullerton, and Joel Spolsky, joined today by guest Roberta Arcoverde. Roberta is visiting NYC on vacation, and she's obviously doing a terrible job taking time off because here she is at work. Roberta joined the team in March 2014 and has been working on Careers ever since. She's currently our only employee in Brazil. (We used to have another employee in Brazil, but he moved to Ithaca, which has Cornell University, rain, and its own currency.) Anyway. Roberta's not from Ithaca. She's from Rio de Janeiro and she works on the Careers team, where her first big project was our internal Candidate Query Language (CQL). As a computer science researcher working with languages and compilers, she was really pumped to work on this project. It's what allows employers to do advanced searches on our candidate database. More recently, Roberta's working on rewriting our message processor, Back Office. It used to be written over ServiceStack, which we're phasing out, even though we love it (and Demis used to work with us). Discussion of ServiceStack and what it's good at (and where it falls short for us) ensues. And StackExchange.Redis. And Wasabi. And Roslyn. Moving on... Roberta's been working remotely from Brazil since she started with us, and it's her first time working for a remote company. At Stack Exchange we try really hard to make remote culture work. Now we do stuff like Remote Bev Bash, where we get everyone to grab a beverage and hop in a Google Hangout together on Fridays. (balpha figured out how to rig two hangouts together so we don't have to worry about participant limits.) One time we made origami, and one time Dalgas joined the bev bash from a pub. It's how we make remote work work. (Also, very importantly, Roberta's going to get another cat, and name it either Donut or Chelsea (or Alan).) Roberta didn't apply to work here when she first saw the listing (even though she knew David worked here). She knew we were a great company making a product admired by many, but felt hesitant about applying because the team page made the dev team looked like a boys' club. (This was June 2013, when the dev team was 100% male.) Fortunately for us, she changed her mind - thanks in large part to our podcast with guest Sara Chipps which reassured her that we're aware of our representation problems and we want to make them better. We've learned a lot about how to represent our open jobs over the past few years, and we hope folks from all walks of life feel confident applying to work with us. (We're relieved that Roberta joined our team and discovered that we are not jerks. Well, most of us aren't.) Here's a link to the results of our developer survey, in case you got to this part in the conversation and wondered where it was. Roberta's hesitance to apply with us isn't surprising given lots of her past experiences with programming while female. Example: at a conference last summer, which she attended as a representative of Stack Overflow wearing a Stack Overflow t-shirt, one of the conference organizers assumed she was a booth babe. Lots of people visiting the Stack Overflow booth addressed their technical questions to Gabe, who does not work as a developer here. This is the kind of thing that happens all day every day in real life and on the Internet. Another relevant link: Coding Like a Girl. So, how can we fix it? How can we make sure we're not turning more amazing programmers like Roberta away from our company because of our image? For starters, we're trying to be more open and public about our commitment to the idea that diverse teams create better products. We toss around some ideas about changes we could...