The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #39 - The One with Wil Wheaton by The Stack Overflow Podcast

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!

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #38 - This One's At Least a 4/10 by The Stack Overflow Podcast

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!

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #37 - Back At It, Again by The Stack Overflow Podcast

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.

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #36 - The Hurricane by The Stack Overflow Podcast

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...

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #35 - Scott Hanselman by The Stack Overflow Podcast

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.