The Stack Overflow Podcast

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

We're Back!  It's been a while since our last podcast (why you ask - listen to find out!) but we're back now and "stronger" than ever.  It's Joel, David and Jay (plus producer Alex and Abby) coming to you from the brand new SE Podcast Studio (check out the picture below) News of the day: we're finally in our new office (and podcast studio). We've got hexagonal offices (and therefore crooked hallways), and a cool café area. AND HEATED TOILET SEATS. And a kitchen with a giant walk-in refrigerator, for our interns (which we don't have). Taping podcasts in our new "studio"! The new office has a nice event space. We've even done an event in it already! Last week, we had all of the remote developers, sysadmins, community managers, and sysadmins fly into New York to come hang out in the new office. We ate sushi and fried chicken and played a lot of ping pong, and also got some work done. Originally, we had planned these summits to be our Main Decision-Making Time, which ended up working terribly. We need to be able to make our decisions and do our brainstorming with remote team members regardless of whether or not they're in the office. Jay, what's happening with the Stack Exchange sites? We closed a couple of small sites - Arduino and Big Data. Everything on Arduino could have been discussed on Electrical Engineering anyway. We may have the same problem with Network Engineering (currently in private beta), but we're more optimistic about that site. Likewise, we shut down Big Data, but currently have Open Data in private beta. Learn more about why one will survive where the other languished by listening in. Next topic: do tags belong in titles? Joel: "No." Jay: "You're wrong." (there's a bit more to it) This is a good discussion! You can weigh in in the podcast comments! David, do we have any new features? Check out our sites in an incognito window to see some stuff you may have missed. We'll be debuting the new Help section soon! Previously, we've had all of our FAQ/help/how-to information spread far and wide across the network sites and their metas. No longer! Also, we're working on some mobile apps. They're vaporware at this point. Related: we're hiring! Devs, front-end developers/designers (which is it?), community managers, sales people… everything. That's our show! Thanks for listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #47. See you in two weeks!

Our guest this week (after she joins a bit late) is Zuly Gonzalez - Stack Exchange moderator and power user.  As usual, we also have David Fullerton, Jay Hanlon, Joel Spolsky and (Fake) Producer Alex! Things are a mess over here, not just because we have to remember to stop masticating long enough to talk about podcast things. We're moving offices! The office is full of crates into which we have to pack all our stuff before we move. The new office is going to be awesome. It has hexagonal offices, and we don't remember if we've talked about this before. We have three chefs competing to be the chef for the new Stack Exchange office, and it's apparently a very desirable position, because they keep bribing Joel with treats. What's really going on? Our Tridion site went into public beta. It's different from the one that sounds like Magneto! For very small and/or very new sites, Joel thinks it might be useful to be able to email opted-in users every time a new question comes in. Let's talk about the new user homepage, shall we? It's exciting! We've been doing a lot of work about new user experience, and the homepage new users now see will finally be optimized for helping them figure out what to do next. Meanwhile, our guest has arrived! Welcome, Zuly! She's a moderator on OnStartups as well as a co-founder of Light Point Security, a web security startup that provides malware protection through the use of cloud-based web browsing. Zuly walks us through some of the history of OnStartups, the things that make the site work really well and ways in which the site could be improved. So what's the prognosis? Zuly would like to see people get more involved with the community aspect of the site, and with moderation. Moving on to questions of security. Zuly (and Joel) observe a move in the field of IT Security away from detection and protection against major threats and toward isolation (the Battlestar Galactica defense). Jay thinks everyone screaming homophobic slurs into Xbox headsets is German. Nobody is completely sure why. Jay wonders, what about real people? What things should normal people be thinking about in terms of security that most people still don't do? One other very serious question: Is Zuly's dog cuter than Joel's dog? Dog Talk ensues! Time to discuss a Meta question: how can we stop premature deletion? That's a wrap! You've been listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #46 with special guest Zuly Gonzalez and the rest of the regular gang! Join us next time from our brand new podcast studio - it's going to be awesome (but the podcast will still be terrible).

Our guest this week is Eric Lippert - language architect extraordinaire and famous for all his work at Microsoft in developing their languages Eric joined Microsoft right out of college and was originally working on VB It's time for everyone's favorite game: Name the Worst Feature of that Microsoft Technology! If you're a non-programmer and still listening, make sure to email us for your free prize Eric now builds "static analysis" programs which actually means something real when he's talking about it We actually have some listener questions this week! First up - what problems with C# would Eric fix with magical genie powers? But wait, there's a second one he wants to change too! David has some interesting stuff to talk about! Make sure to check out Sustainable Living Check out the meta question (its a problem we have to deal with a lot): Lots of not-always-useful but well-intentioned answers A public service announcement: please don't forget how to dog Make sure to check out Eric's great blog at EricLippert.com Our designer Jin points out that Eric is not only a contributor to Stack Exchange, but also to the popular tumblr: Programmer Ryan Gosling Join us next week!

Welcome Back!  Our guest today is the one and only Robert Scoble - blogger and video maker extraordinaire.  He's joined by the usual Stack Exchange crew for a packed hour of fun. Robert is a geek who gets around and meets startups and tech innovators. He's calling from Flipboard's headquarters in Palo Alto, CA. Joel wonders if Flipboard is just kind of an echo chamber, but it certainly is not! As with much of the internet, your experience with Flipboard depends on who and what you choose to Follow and Like on your social networks. Facebook Graph Search seems cool so far, but you can't quite yet search for single friends who are Ruby programmers, or programmers at all. (You also can't do that on Careers, but that's because you can't use marital status in hiring decisions.) Stack Exchange maintains its own servers instead of hosting all our stuff on Amazon or something. Why? How? We walk through the reasoning. Robert is writing a book with co-author Shel Israel. (They published another book previously called Naked Conversations.) It's called Age of Context. The number and quality of sensors and wearable computers and databases and social media activity is increasing wildly these days. Tempo is a smart calendar from the lab that created Siri (and other amazing projects). Apps like Tempo (and Google Now) are the future of getting you all the information you need before you even know you need it. What else is new? Robert is waiting for Google Glasses, and he's got theBasis watch. Tempo and Mailbox have reservation systems to combat the huge scaling problems that arise when things get tens of thousands of users in the first hour after launch. What else is going on? There's a new Chromebook coming out, but Robert is saving his money for Google Glasses. Apple doesn't have the best-of-breed apps anymore. They don't have the right software people, and they don't know enough about us. Is this Tim Cook's fault? Unclear! Apple's secrecy is putting it at a disadvantage against the Amazons and the Googles of today. We have a user-submitted question! Steven who wants to know how many edits a normal answer typically gets. By the way, if you want to submit a question for an upcoming podcast, hop over to s.tk/podcastquestions. The best picture of a Siberian Husky gets a t-shirt! That's all, folks! You can find Robert as Scobleizer on probably any website in the entire world.  Make sure to tune in for the next episode when we have even more fun guests! Also, This is a really important twitter account that you should check out.

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #43 with Joel Spolsky, Jay Hanlon, David Fullerton, and special guest Alexis Ohanian, calling in from the Tutorspree office. Alexis is the co-founder of Reddit and an investor in Hipmunk. He's a strong advocate against SOPA and PIPA, and knows how to dress well while doing so, thanks to Joel. (Listen on to figure out what we're talking about here.) Talking about subreddits: Alexis wanted tags to categorize content coming into Reddit, but his co-founder Steve Huffman pushed for subreddits. Alexis tells us why and how it works as well as it does. (Joel has his own subreddit! And it was the first one ever!) Alexis has a book coming out in the fall called Without Their Permission. "Their" refers to gatekeepers - people who stand between people and access to information. He also has another book already out. So what's the next annoying thing that Washington is going to do to stymy innovation? The Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement is on the horizon. We dive into the wonderful world of software patent law. Per Joel: Amazon's 1-Click is the only thing that should have a patent. Nothing else needs one. Let's move on to copyright! Or get distracted and continue talking about patents! Just kidding, we successfully moved on to copyright (and how it relates to wishing someone a joyful anniversary of their birth). We also decided that Creative Commons needs to come up with a better open source birthday song. (Also, copyright should not be granted to anything Jay doesn't like.) Moving on: Kickstarter and friends. The connected web is changing the way people make things and sell them to other people who want to experience them. (Alexis Ohanian's project Breadpig is one of the companies leading the charge in this area.) Back to Reddit. Alexis walks us through the way Reddit works as a communication platform, and how the team handles "unwanted", but legal, speech (spoiler alert: they try to avoid censorship). Sometimes you find yourself in the tough position of having to defend reprehensible, but legal, ideas. Sometimes, though, someone can learn something. Oh, and finally: Alexis was supposed to eat a spoonful of cinnamon on the podcast today. New rule for podcast guests! Alexis says it's impossible, but he's discovered that he does indeed have some cinnamon accessible to him… See you next week!

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #42 - it's our usual gang back this week with Joel, Jay, David, and Producer Alex.  There's plenty of inside baseball, so put on your rally caps and make sure to stick it through to the end! David Mamet, apparently. Jay was a drama major. Michael forgot to pay the Google bill, so our hangouts are back down to 10 person limits (but it's fixed now!) We have one big thing to talk about that made a change and generated controversy. Joel correctly guesses what it is: we no longer display your accept rate (the percentage of questions you asked that you accepted an answer for). The team walks us through this feature's history and the rationale for removing it. (As soon as we shut it off, the temperature in New York plummeted. This is related.) Enjoy our hilariously awkward pause Jeff Atwood recommended replacing the accept rate with some kind of citizenship score. Will this just cause the same problems as the accept rate? How can we get around the problem of ridiculing people for low "citizenship scores"? People will learn how to game anything, after all - remember flag weight? David wonders why we need a third number at all. We already have your reputation and your badges on your little user card. Those already show how good of a citizen you are. Finally, this is something we're still looking at, so let us know your thoughts on the meta post. Site milestones! We have some good ones this week. Our Magento site went live (not to be confused with Mag_ne_to). This one is remarkable because it's something nobody in the company knows anything about, but it got created anyway. Congratulations to Math for being the first non-Trilogy site to hit 100,000 questions! Our hosts discuss the Math site and its relationships with other sites on the network for a while. One more new site to go over: English Language Learners. David and Joel don't really understand this site, so Jay tells us what's going on (hint: it's not about an X-Men villain). ELL should help relieve some stress from English Language and Usage, which was frustrated by the high number of certain types of questions that were coming in. Is this podcast the exception that proves the rule? Another site milestone: we have finally rolled out the final design of our Travel site. (It was blocked for a while because Joel had strong opinions about the original design.) When you finish listening to this podcast, go to Travel and ask or answer a question! Subscribe to your favorite site's newsletter! On to our next topic. We are changing some things with how duplicates work. We want to make it more positive! (It's the [you lucky bastard] close reason.) This is the first closing change, and it's going out in the next week or so. Well that's the podcast for this week! Thanks for tuning in, and now for our standard disclaimers: This podcast is not sponsored by self-driving car manufacturer Audible.com. Alexis Ohanian did not invent the DVR. YouTube is the place where you go to watch kids eat cinnamon. Join us next week when Alexis Ohanian eats a spoonful of cinnamon! Alex is not fired because correlation definitely implies causation.

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #41, featuring Joel Spolsky, Jay Hanlon, David Fullerton, Kyle Brandt, Nick Craver, and Geoff Dalgas, with Producer Alex calling in from Denver!  We have a bunch of systems administrators and the like here, because we are in the process of moving datacenters to our new home in New York City. So what's involved in the move? We hired movers to do all the de-racking and truck driving, so the work done by SE employees involved laying everything out and then wiring it back up. We've got all sorts of people underfoot this week who came in from all around the country to work on the new datacenter. Once it's complete, we'll fail back over to NY from Oregon, where we've been since Hurricane Sandy. There are still some issues to work out before we can do that, though. Due to some of these issues, we are switching over to SQL 2012… tonight! Craver takes us step by step through how we're going to manage that process. So what else are we talking about? How about the new about page! We rolled out a new about page, and you should check it out. Jay and David walk us through it. The Trello team got Trello-themed fortune cookies shipped to their office, which is awesome. Another feature that went out this week is the ability to upload your own profile picture instead of using Gravatar. Read about it and go upload your picture! (No animated gifs allowed.) Speaking of animating things, we also think the profile page needs a little simplifying, among other things. (Joel has noticed a few very simplified Q&A copycats cropping up that just have a few of our hallmarks, and missing the in-depth stuff that makes a community.) Let's look at some interesting meta questions! Is it okay to ask for opinions? Speaking of questions like that, we're not completely happy with the "not constructive" close reason. How do we know what kind of questions we want? Good Subjective, Bad Subjective helps, but the situation still gets tricky. Sometimes the answer determines whether the question was good subjective or bad subjective. There's a great example of this on English. (Joel says it was a great question to begin with.) As we've been investigating closed questions, we've found some interesting observations about the process of closing questions and conditioning our users. So "too localized" is overused and misused, so we are looking at ways to tweak and improve the closing system so it will be less frustrating but continue teaching new users the things they need to learn about our sites. One thing we're working on is tweaks and improvements to the close and reopen queues. Tune in next podcast for some of the other options we're considering! We talk about the reopen queue for a really long time.  Also, close votes have an aging process. David talks us through the problems with it. This podcast is now at the top of the close queue. We'll see you next week for another exciting episode of..... The Stack Exchange Podcast!

You're listening to the Stack Exchange Podcast #40 (We apologize to everyone who expected Wil Wheaton last week)  Your hosts are David Fullerton, Jay Hanlon, and Joel Spolsky.  We also have a surprise special guest: Britton Payne, professor of Copyright, Trademark, and Emerging Technologies at Fordham University. He knows a lot of things about software patent law, so we grabbed him as he walked by the studio to talk to us. About 15 years ago, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to create some useful guidelines for the new digital landscape. We talk about what actually happens with the DMCA takedown notices, including loophole issues that Joel has discovered. So that's one part of the DMCA. The other one is anti-circumvention technology, and we go through many of the nuances there. So the technological means of anti-circumvention have to be re-evaluated every now and then. New exemptions were announced in October regarding: ebook reading assisted technologies (like Amazon Kindles being able to read aloud to you); jailbreaking phones (not tablets); and unlocking phone handsets (not tablets). This has been Copyright Update #1 on the Stack Exchange Podcast, brough to you by Britton Payne! So what else is going on in the Stack Exchange universe? We just had a holidays! Part of our celebration included Winter Bash, which ends "today" (at time of recording). You can still check out all the details. Give us your thoughts about it on Meta. …including a "hat" that was a tribute to Jason Punyon, who is in a rock (jazz and disco, really) band. They played our holiday party at the Hotel Rivington, and they were astonishingly good. We have a couple new sites to talk about - Politics & Anime. Each has just over 250 questions, so they're doing okay, for baby sites. We discuss the pitfalls and strengths of each of these new members of our network (especially Politics). (Somehow we get onto the topic of the Black Hebrew Israelites.) Politics is a difficult site to approach, but it's not hard to pass the bar of being better than anything else that's out there on the internet, and we're well on our way to doing that. We turn to Anime. None of us know very much about anime, but we manage to turn this site into a conversation anyway. No news is good news, new-office-wise! Construction is constructioning. We're moving in March, or so. There's a glimmer in Joel's eye called Stack Overflow TV.  They'll be broadcast live on the Internet on stackoverflow.tv, which we will remember to buy before this podcast is published. Meth questions! Er, meta questions! First, we tackle "How to deal with a highly voted non-constructive question". What's the problem with the question mentioned there? How do we solve this? We decide to call them "pivot questions". The conversation leads us to another common type of easy question: "bike shed" questions. While we're here, go follow us on Twitter to get the best questions from all of our sites. (It can be a lot to swallow.) We experimented with automated twitter feeds and with manually curated twitter feeds, and have found limited success with both. We discuss how twitter feeds (and other types of feeds) work for our company and our sites. For you people listening at home: We want to take your questions! Go to s.tk/podcastquestions to record your question for us to play and answer on the air. You can also send us a written message… somehow.

Today's guest is Jeremy Tunnell, who says it's great to be here. He's the new Product Manager on the Stack Exchange team. He works out of Nashville but is in New York with us, recording live in the podcast studio! Also, on today's podcast, everyone is going to eat a spoon of cinnamon and ten Saltines. Sam tried to eat a spoonful of cinnamon and did not succeed. The Saltine Challenge: also hard. The Gallon Challenge: also hard. Jeremy is the new kid on the block. He started a few weeks ago and is our new resident UX Expert. We should have listeners call into the podcast with their questions, like we used to! (This was before Jay's time.)  Go to s.tk/podcastquestions to submit an mp3 of your question for next week's podcast. Jeremy is not from Texas, but he is from the South. We're not sure how he got the horse up past security in the lobby. Back to Jeremy. He's been focusing on the perspective of the new user (including making lots of brand new accounts). He's trying to introduce the non-engineer perspective into our development process. He's currently focusing on the sign-up process, which is critical for user acquisition. Why do we have a homepage URL? In the old days, your name used to link to whatever homepage you put in there. Nobody uses it now, though, so we can get rid of it! Jay points out that we have a fundamental difference between our power users and our casual users. Additionally, we have to wrestle with engineers vs. non-engineer types as users on our sites. Don't make people think, or learn new things. (Don't make me think about how you want me to enter my phone number.) Joel got in trouble with his bosses at Juno once upon a time. It had a 29-page wizard to get people to sign up, including a page for what diseases you had, and when your birthday and your kids' birthdays were, featuring a horrible date picker (18 clicks to choose "August"). The answer to all these arguments? Just test it and see what people do. (Good thing we don't have to fly to Colorado to do usability testing anymore.) We have a weird maximum age on Stack Exchange sites, so there are a ton of 89-year-olds on our site, apparently. We have heard from a lot of people that our site is impossible to log into. Our site is optimized for programmers. A great example: OpenID! We talk about OpenID and OAuth for… a while. Another example of something that's a good idea for programmers but confuses everyone else is Gravatar. Gravatar is great if you already have an account, but the experience of trying to upload a picture is too many steps if you have to make a new Gravatar account. Do our listeners know how much Jeremy looks like Wil Wheaton?  Check out the Stack Exchange Team page to find out News from the dev team! We had two outages this week, totally unrelated to each other. One was ten minutes and the other less than 30 minutes. (Nowhere near as bad as Tumblr's catastrophe last night!) (Our status blog is on tumblr.) One was a boring hardware failure, and the other one is a result of the fact that we're starting to outgrow our search solution. So we're investigating other options that will make our search even better (and it's suddenly urgent)! So a side effect of these outages is that our search will get better. We talk about search for a while. So if you're interested in working on that, we're hiring for our New York office, or remotely! If you have questions for us, you can go record your question and send it to us! That's all for this week. See you on ChaCha!

Welcome to Stack Exchange podcast #38 with Joel, Jay, David, and new special guest Will Cole, PM on the Careers team.  We're doing a deep dive into Careers today, as we have the launch of Careers in German coming up! Stack Overflow Careers 2.0 is launching in Germany! (Much has happened since the last time we talked about Careers 2.0 on the podcast.) So Will, tell us about Careers 2.0! Will gives us an overview about what it is and why it's awesome. It has two products: job listings and CV search. They are both neato. David and Joel discuss the background of why something like Careers 2.0 is necessary: resumes are awful for demonstrating what programmers know and can do. We have over 75,000 profiles in the CV search database, which is awesome. If you're looking to hire a programmer, we have 84,000 that you can have. The average old-school big company hiring department has separated the task of finding resumes from the task of hiring candidates, so they are a little confused when they're told to just check out Stack Overflow Careers 2.0. We are trying to take the work and the confusion out of the job of the hiring manager - kind of like a dating service, trying to make employers happy with their candidates and candidates happy with their new companies. We're disrupting the contingency recruiting model, because contingency recruiters' interests are not aligned with employers OR candidates. How come this localization took so long, Will? Because it turns out you can't just go in and replace a bunch of English strings with their German equivalents! Also, the site was not originally built with localization in mind, so the project was a little bit painful. Will and David walk us through the challenges the Careers team faced Next currencies: bitcoins, and Google Wallet. Joel bought a sweater with Google Wallet, and it's magical. Careers is hiring! Come join us in our new spectacular NYC office that we'll move into in early 2013. It feels like a boat except it's on the 27th and 28th floors. So a flying boat. We have no other topics to discuss, so we're going to continue talking about what's great about working for Stack Exchange. Free food! Cuban health care! Free MetroCards! Gym membership reimbursement! A beach party! We don't poke people with a sharp stick, and there's nothing else oppressive, either! People wear hats, especially winter-themed hats. Shouldn't we celebrate all those hats? Definitely! Last year, we ran a project called Hatdash on our site about video games.. It was a huge hit, so we're revamping the program this year for all sites that opt in. It will go live on December 19th. Hats! Joel teaches us about the nightly news in Israel. It would just run until they ran out of things to talk about, which meant you never knew when anything was going to be on after that. Next week on the Stack Exchange Podcast: Is this thing from the drug store killing you? We'll tell you next week!

Welcome back!  We're actually back to a fairly normal podcast this week and want to bring you back up to speed on Stack Exchange after our adventures the last few weeks.  What's on the agenda? What's new this week? Starting with the review queue and its new segment: the reopen queue! It's exactly what it sounds like (the reverse of the close queue). David and Jay walk Joel through the review queue and its features. One of the problems with the review queue is people clicking "Looks good" all the way through just so they can get a badge. Who would do such a thing? [Spoiler alert: We will talk about the review queue for a really long time.] Ideally we want to teach you, instead of building something that quietly ignores you when you do something wrong. In certain queues, we use fake review items that catch you when you choose the wrong option. There are lots of conversations about this going on on Meta, and we'll continue to look at the issues and work on solving them so we can fix this part of the game. (Remember flag weight?) The other new item on the review queue is the Community Evaluation queue, aka the "Judge Your Site" queue. It's meant to replace the site self-evaluation meta post, which Joel tells us all about. It's currently live on Ask Ubuntu and will soon be tested on other sites. Coming soon to a site near you! Money and OnStartups have very high quality competition, so they are at a disadvantage no matter how dedicated their users are. They're good sites, but they may be stuck in beta for a while. Another example of this is Judaism. The answers are all excellent, and the best on the internet on the subject. It's very small, but it's growing. Sites need to go "beyond the blogs" - to find content that nobody would ever bother to write a blog post about. The Money site can't compete with all the excellent finance blogs on the internet, so it has to go beyond them. People who care about our sites should be focusing on writing great answers that make the internet a truly better place, and not on pleasing every single asker that has a little question. We've only got through one of the things on our list so far. We'll try one more. Not SSL; it'll be even more boring, especially for the people who made it this far. Also Michael Pryor and his wife just had a baby! We beat Hurricane Sandy back with a stick, so we're having a victory party tonight. (Stack Exchange skipped town, but helped a little bit, so we get to go.) If you tune in next week, you'll hear about hats, our struggles and/or victory with SSL and possible ensuing party, and our victory over the German language.

So as you may have heard in the news, the east coast got hit pretty hard by Hurricane Sandy - in particular, our datacenter in Lower Manhattan was almost knocked entirely offline.  If not for the incredible efforts of Fog Creek Software, Squarespace, and Peer1 (the datacenter) there would have certainly been days of outages for everyone involved. We've got a ton of people from Stack, Fog Creek and Squarespace on to tell the CRAZY story of exactly what happened last week! Guests include: David Fullerton**, VP Engineering at Stack Exchange; Geoff Dalgas & Nick Craver, both core developers at Stack Exchange; Alex Miller; Michael Pryor; Mendy Berkowitz, lead sysadmin for Fog Creek; Babak Ghaheremanpour, longtime Creeker; Anthony Casalena**, CEO and founder of Squarespace. We're planning on telling the whole story of Hurricane Sandy - it's roughly in chronological order here We are from New York, and all of our offices and equipment are located there. Hurricane Sandy recently hit us, as you may have heard. We go back all the way to Monday night, 10/29. Nick got the first communications from Peer1, our datacenter, which was warning everyone that the power was going out for everything south of 34th street. Monday night, we thought all was safe in sound. Stack Exchange had some failover plans in place, however, as you heard about on a previous podcast. On the Fog Creek side, things were still relatively calm. They were basically blindsided, because the datacenter was confident that they had generator fuel for "like, days". Then the storm hit. There was wind and a little bit of rain. Everything in Zone A got flooded basically immediately, as predicted, but if you didn't live in Zone A you didn't really notice. Michael Pryor's foreshadowing. He saw a Hacker News post saying that Internap, another datacenter, was down - and started making plans to protect Fog Creek if Peer1 went down. Suddenly, we get word that the generator only has thirty minutes of fuel left. Mike Mazzei was the only Peer1 staffer there at the time, and he was stretched pretty thin. He is basically a super hero and ended up saving the day. Anthony managed to get exactly one email on Tuesday morning, and it happened to be about running out of fuel in the middle of the day (where he had previously thought they had a few days of fuel to spare). "Let me tell you what it looked like when I showed up." Michael describes the scene on Broad St. for us. Based on flawed information from the NOC, Fog Creek makes plans to shut everything down at 10:45AM. Bradford was the only sysadmin who was awake and connected. He said we had to start doing a controlled shutdown Mike has the idea that if we can get the fuel up to the generator, we can keep everything online. Someone from Squarespace found empty 55-gallon drums on Craigslist and brought them down to the datacenter. The first attempt is pushing these barrels of diesel up the stairs. The building's major task was getting the water pumped out of the basement, so at first Fog Creek and Squarespace and Peer1 were able to work on the fuel issue relatively unfettered. Fog Creek decides to bring their servers back up, since they had people on the ground in the datacenter now to monitor the situation  The bucket brigade begins! Michael goes home and sleeps for three hours. He then heads back to Peer1 and checks the generator tank which is only a quarter full... Joel tells us about trying to raise the alarm with incommunicado sysadmins Mendy and Sven and get them back online Sven starts working on with some others was moving Trello onto AWS Michael tells us about how lucky he got with the Fog Creek fishtank during last year's power outage. Another example of how we were very lucky to be accidentally prepared for this event. Everyone laughs at us for having datacenters in Manhattan, but the clear benefit is that we had the physical ability to make things happen because t...

Welcome to Stack Exchange podcast #35 with special guest Scott Hanselman. We also have your loyal cohosts, Jay Hanlon and David Fullerton. And Joel Spolsky? What exactly would Scott say that he does here? Scott Hanselman runs a podcast that doesn't waste your time… unlike we have for the first nine minutes. Let's talk about Scott's recent presentation at Webstock! Or we'll talk about how Scott is not a developer evangelist, despite popular belief. He is a community manager for ASP.net, IIS, anything angle bracket or curly brace related, anything "webby". You can buy a single Q-Tip or Lego lightsaber on Amazon. (Most Lego fans don't like Lego Star Wars.) Why do we have both Programming.SE and Stack Overflow? Joel tells us about the historical reasoning behind it. It's a party line: Stack Overflow is for things you do at the computer, and Programmers is for things you do at the whiteboard. Do people still use Twitter? We thought they'd all moved on to App.net, but that's only for people who had fifty dollars (that they didn't spend on the new iPod connector). "Do you realize that you are a biscuit away from turning into Jerry Stiller?" Scott works remotely. Joel inquires: how does he make that work? Scott shares some tips! (Possibly… a blog post?) One of Scott's biggest tips is to use more face-to-face communication instead of text-based. We don't necessarily agree, and so we explore the topic in depth. Jay agrees, that debates and discussions are not productive in text-based chat. Scott will probably teach Computer Science when he retires… but then, he'll be allowed to have an opinion! Back on the "working remotely" topic. There's a difference between being on a distributed team and being the remote person on a not-so-distributed team. The latter is harder! Scott insists on camera at every meeting. We want to spend as much as we possibly can on remote collaboration, so we talk about some of the tech you can use to accomplish that. Windows 8 is coming out on Friday (or for the past year, if you are a developer or you tried to download it). How is it? Is it awesome, or did someone move everyone's cheese? Listen in to find out… and then move on to a general discussion of changing user interfaces and what that does to users who are loyal to companies. Let's talk about something else that isn't twitter! Scott and Stack Exchange have in common that they provide an audience for answered questions, so Q&A isn't one-on-one communication. It makes it useful for everyone. Stay tuned for the Joel Theory of Blogging. Is twitter the decline of modern blogging? Joel spoke to a bunch of recruiters in London, where he told them that their job is to make the company awesome enough that great candidates come to them. Joel has a lot of projects, remarks Scott, and we discuss them - including Trello and what makes it great, and Scott's suggestions for improvement. What has everyone been doing since Joel was on the road? Some stuff we already talked about and some stuff we can't talk about yet. Check out This Developer's Life. It's the best knock-off out there.

On the show this week are Kyle Brandt and Nick Craver, two SE employees who are heading up our systems upgrades and relocations - they'll dish all kinds of details on our infrastructure, plus plenty of chat about other mildly relevant things. First up on the agenda: Quantcast! Five minutes before we started recording, we noticed that Quantcast is ranking our network at #100! (or at least we were for a bit) If all that additional traffic should cause our New York data center to go down, what will happen, Kyle? Great segue, Joel! We are working on a system for failing over to our datacenter in Corvallis, OR. Our New York datacenter is also out of room for us, so we needed to have a failover system in place so the sites could stay up while we move all the equipment to the new datacenter. Nick Craver runs at a hundred degrees, no problem. (Extensive conversation about temperature in datacenters ensues.) Google opened up its datacenters via Street View, by the way. Cool. Now back to more details about the failover. The word "splurt" is used. Eventually Joel lays out the whole process step by step. In the ideal situation, when our failover is planned ahead of time and not due to sudden meteor attack, the whole thing should take between five and fifteen minutes. Afterwards, we come up in read-only mode, at which point someone can manually switch us back into normal mode - or not! Nick walks us through the sweet new equipment in the Corvallis datacenter. (How much would you pay for one of our original servers, hand-built and signed by @codinghorror?) When we DO fail over to Oregon, the moderators come with us! And they love Stephen King movies! What a segue. We've got a new Genealogy site, and it's hard to spell, but the site is doing really well.  There are some very interesting questions on the Genealogy site, about many issues related to genealogy: how to use its software, how to find information, whether to distribute sensitive family information, etc. Robotics is coming soon! We'll look back on this launch as the beginning of the end when Skynet becomes self-aware. We now segue, awkwardly, to the topic of moderators. We've got 275+ moderators.  So now we're discussing the process of removing a moderator, if it's ever necessary. We need to do it in a way to preserve the democracy and is similarly community-driven. We asked on Meta and got a lot of great feedback. The plan we came up with involved the other democratically-elected mods (and not the company) meeting and putting it to a vote. The gang wonders how to remove a Supreme Court Justice. It's semi-relevant. Tune in next week when we'll have Scott Hanselman on (for real this time)!