The Stack Overflow Podcast

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)!

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #34 - Kyle Brandt and Nick Craver by The Stack Overflow Podcast

We're back baby! After a 7 month hiatus, the Stack Exchange Podcast is back with new co-hosts: Joel Spolsky and Jay Hanlon. Our guest this week: David Fullerton

It's Back! Welcome to episode #33 of the Stack Exchange podcast.  We've got a brand new co-host (Jay Hanlon, our new VP of Community Growth) plus our guest this week is David Fullerton, VP of Engineering at Stack Exchange.

So what's new in the seven months since our last podcast? Check out the new and improved review queue! If you've got enough reputation, you can see the review button at the top of any Stack Exchange site. The new system is clearer to use and it's fast thanks to a ton of AJAX goodness.

From the community side, one of the most important things about the review queue is the First Post queue - a list of the very first post from each brand new user.

You can also filter the queue, so you can tell it what kind of posts you want to look at - "only duplicates", for example..

There's a badge connected to using the review queue, so people are (naturally) gaming it. There's an incentive to just go fast instead of thoughtfully helping to improve posts.

If we add a "reopen" queue, will we then have to add a "reclose" queue?

We're looking at tweaking all of the language surrounding closing questions, including the word "closed" itself. "Not constructive" is itself not constructive feedback. How about "insufficiently objective"? "Poor thinking"? "You're dumb"? "Subjective"? - but we have such a thing as good subjective. It's not an easy thing to figure out.

(4:07PM - first mention of Taco the Siberian Husky.)

Closing questions is on the road to deleting them, but we still have hope for closed questions - or at least for the user who asked the bad question. Closures need to provide feedback to the users who asked the questions, so they have the opportunity to dispute or explain the situation.

(4:16PM - first mention of Yahoo! Answers.)

Got suggestions for how we re-word the close descriptions? Post them on Meta! The one thing that we need to be conveying is that Stack Exchange is a place for expert answers to factual questions, not shopping recommendations or discussion questions.

So what does Wikipedia do with content like this? Jason Punyon is here, apparently! He's impressed with the way Wikipedia points out the problems they have with their articles with a big box right at the top. Wikipedia faces many of the same problems we do, with the faceless cabal of "moderators" deleting content at will.

Okay, let's talk about something else.

Bigger picture: how do we teach new people how to use the site? We're working on a new "About" page! (Here's the old one.)

Example: tagging your first question! The current system tells new users they have to give their question at least one tag, but then it won't let them create a new tag. They have to understand that there is a list of existing tags from which they must choose. (Or we'll make the random forest do it for us.)

So! What's happened to the company in the last six months?

We opened a sales office in Denver! We're expanding our office in London! We hired Jay! Put your profile up on Careers 2.0, because it's exploding and that's why we're hiring salespeople for those two offices (and the NYC one) like crazy!

We're hiring a ton. We're hiring developers for Careers in NYC and for the Core Q&A team in NYC or telecommuting or hanging out in our sales offices in Denver or London. (The offices and the sales people are very nice. Plus there's free lunch.)

We're hiring a product designer! And a product manager! And a senior sysadmin!

We're getting a new office in New York City, by the way! If you've got enough rep, we'll give you a lifetime membership to come hang out in our offices now and then.

So what else has happened? We've done some promotions. We've got a patents site. We've got an app development contest with Microsoft going, so you can win prizes (including cash) for developing a Windows 8 app. Apptivate.MS. The MS stands for Microsoft or Malaysia or Multiple Sclerosis or Montserrat (it's the last one) but...

The launch party of our Judaism Stack Exchange Site: Mi Yodeya

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #32 - Rep-Ocalypse by The Stack Overflow Podcast

With the recent "REP-OCALYPSE" that happened over the weekend, we thought it was a great time to do another podcast - so come join Joel, Jarrod, and Josh as they talk about some of the recent changes to the site and the motivations behind them.

JOEL: This is not necessarily a podcast, but it might turn into something useable, perhaps in the form of a podcast, maybe. The goal is to talk about all of the questions that are getting closed, aka REP-OCALYPSE NOW.

Part One: there has been closing and deletion of very popular old questions going on lately. Are we happy with how this is going? What are the other options?

This has come to a head because it got noticed all of a sudden thanks to the global reputation recalc.

SHOG: This is a perfect storm. Prior to the rep recalc, an SO mod got it in his head that he should go clean up these old popular questions, since they're totally inappropriate for the current standards of the site. He posted on MSO about it. Then, this rep recalc made a whole bunch of people painfully aware of a bunch of their stuff getting suddenly deleted.

A lot of the stuff that got deleted was worthy of getting deleted. Some were valuable, though, and were worthy of discussion and possible salvation.

JOEL: There are a few categories that the lynch mob is after that should stay open (They're interpreting a particular rule too zealously.) One of these is talking about separate questions that all have the same answer. One of them is three different [identify-this-game] questions that all refer to the same game.

SHOG: If you ask a bullshit joke question and it gets good answers, great! You broke the "only ask questions you really need the answer to" rule, but the page is now improving the internet. It has value. Good job!

JOEL: An example: the center cannot hold. The activity in the answers should be protected, not the questions. Hidden features questions tend to devolve. They lose value after the top ten or so answers.

JOEL: So! There have been a lot of bad questions that were deleted, and some higher quality ones that are hotly contested. So what about programmer cartoons, or boat programming questions? They get a million views. They bring people into the network. Making those pages be Page Not Found is violent! It breaks the internet a little!

SHOG: A theory: this is a lottery. Most of the time you post stuff, and it goes nowhere. Sometimes it strikes a chord, people go crazy over it and generate a great page.

JOEL: There are no new questions that this really affects. If somebody asked "what's your favorite Pascal question" today, it would get closed in a second.

Eric Lippert wrote a great answer a year ago on a question that pissed people off - it was a duplicate and a homework question and all sorts of terrible stuff, but the amazing answer redeemed the question.

SHOG: We don't want to encourage people to gamble. We can encourage them to put their money in the bank instead!

JOEL: Back to the question. What is bad about keeping these lottery winner questions around?

JOEL: New example: the programmer cartoons. It benefits us because there are lots of views, and because people laugh! It's better than googling "programmer cartoons" because we have voting.

JOEL: Programmer cartoons questions get closed. So is it okay to keep the weird exceptions around just because they were very successful?

Concept #1: Famous RFC about TCP/IP over Pigeon that wasn't serious. Did it break the internet? Did this one not real RFC turn all RFCs into Reddit?

Concept #2: Purim Torah on Judaism SE. On Purim, you are required to break rules and get drunk. Purim Torah is a humorous fake discussion of Jewish law that you discuss as if it were serious. The Judaism SE community has decided to allow it during/around the time of Purim. Some of the questions are very funny.

An example of a "Purim Torah" Stack Overflow question: What is the name of this operator: "-->"?. Thi...

Well, it's time for the final Stack Exchange Podcast featuring Jeff Atwood before he rides off into the sunset.  Tune in to hear Jeff and Joel reminisce about the origins of Stack Exchange, the journey along the way, and listen to some special recordings from those who have been around since the beginning.

Joel was reading the transcript of Stack Overflow Podcast 001. It's from April 2008. Listen to the awesome excerpt about the birth of Stack Overflow! (Stack Overflow is not another place to discuss tabs vs. spaces.)

What was the biggest thing that surprised you about Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange? Jeff mentions the Meta Issue. Joel started out with a strong antipathy toward meta questions, or discussing the site on the site instead of discussing the topic of the site. It comes down to building the software to accommodate the direction the community goes in.  You can't plan everything.

Stack Overflow originally launched without comments, but that was fixed very shortly after launch, because it was something the community needed. Wikipedia hasn't done this for Talk pages, and that's why they're so darn confusing.

People have recorded nice messages for Jeff in honor of his departure. Geoff Dalgas aka Valued Associate #00003 goes first, and his clip is full of win (and awesomely bad music). Quantcast says we have 20 million visitors a month, and together they could populate a city the size of Seoul, South Korea. We have more people typing on our websites than English Wikipedia.

Kyle Cronin sent in our next message. He's an exemplary Stack Exchange user who contributed heavily to the birth of Meta Stack Overflow. Kyle started a meta bulletin board after he found the official UserVoice site inadequate (that is until Jeff decided it was a core business function and made MSO).

Next up is Josh Heyer aka Shog9, another Valued Associate who speaks very slowly. Jeff had originally put Josh in the same bucket as the Welbogs - people who get bored with chess, so they start flinging the chess pieces everywhere. Stack Overflow and Josh have grown up together. Jeff and Joel found a way to keep users like Josh interested and entertained without being detrimental to the core purpose of the sites, through Meta, Area 51, more sites, and beyond.

History of the site: Started with Stack Overflow. Then came Server Fault and Super User, which topics were deemed off topic for Stack Overflow, but which were great fits for our audience. Then came Stack Exchange 1.0 and...

...Valued Associate David Fullerton! He came over from Fog Creek and took the reins for Stack Exchange 1.0... which failed. Luckily, it became clear that the asset is not the software, but the community. Enter Stack Exchange 2.0! Communities were given the power to create new sites, for better or for worse. Theirs is the power to decide whether or not things like "identify this x" questions are helpful.

There is such a thing as sites that harm the internet simply by continuing to exist. For that reason, sometimes sites need to be closed. Facts of life! (Askville is an extreme example. It can't even hide its bad content, like Reddit can.)

Here's Jon Skeet, the all-time top user on Stack Overflow with more nice comments for Jeff. Jon Skeet is legendary. He has answered 20k questions on Stack Overflow thanks to his long commute to and from work. He exemplifies what makes a great Stack Overflow user, and has been justly rewarded with internet fame, and a ton of reputation.

We're almost at Version 3.0 of the core engine. Things are pretty polished, from a software perspective! But software is never really done, especially software that is being built for (and with) a community that's always changing. So plenty of work remains to be done on the engine, but Jeff is leaving it in very capable hands.

Information maintenance is a huge problem, especially in the realm of software development, and especially because Google tends to giv...

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #31 - Goodbye Jeff by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #30 w/ Robert & Rebecca by The Stack Overflow Podcast