The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast #69 - It's Too Rainy For A Parade by The Stack Overflow Podcast

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...

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode 68 - A Badger, A Horse, and a Dik-dik (The Documentation Episode) by The Stack Overflow Podcast

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...

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #67 - The Firehose of Nerd-dom by The Stack Overflow Podcast

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!

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #66 - Thank You For Saying Words To Us by The Stack Overflow Podcast

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.

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #65 - The Word Has Two Meanings, You See by The Stack Overflow Podcast