The Stack Overflow Podcast

Joining Jeff and Joel this week is Michael Natkin, from our Cooking.SE site.  Michael is especially interesting because he is a computer programmer, but he doesn't answer questions at Stack Overflow, only on the Cooking site (he's our first guest to do so!) - he also writes over at Herbivoracious (which he started back in 2007).

Their discussion includes:

Michael is a vegetarian "foodie" (even though he really hates that word) - he and Joel commiserate over the oddities of being a vegetarian trying to eat out

Joel wants to know what type of questions usually come up on cooking (and how they maintain their 100% answer rate)

Joel thinks that you should never combine chocolate and garlic, but there's a Cooking.SE thread that disagrees

On the topic of what questions should be closed, Jeff points to this Electrical Engineering meta thread with a great example of why we need to keep closing questions

Kicking off a whole discussion of creating house rules - Joel and Michael jump into discussing Momofuku and restaurants who create dishes and refuse to alter them for guests

Jeff wants to take a deep dive into the top question of the month on Cooking.SE

Also interesting about Cooking.SE is that there are very few "modernist" questions on it

Make sure to check out Modernist Cuisine if you want to find a REALLY expensive cookbook (but its written by a patent troll, so we can't recommend it)

Michael is still seeing some good user growth with a few new faces coming in to the top users every quarter

One big question that comes up when you see a question that is salvageable but needs some work, is it better to just edit it for them or to point out the issue to them and ask them to change it

On a related note: should you point out if someone's question contains a bad assumption or is "doing it wrong" or just answer what they're looking for - check out this post on Waxy about his favorite sandwich shop and sweet tea

We've gone back and forth about how much promotion we should do on the individual site "brands" - ultimately we've found that we rather promote the individuals actually answering the questions and helping them build their reputations (and remember, once you make it to 2000 rep, we remove the "no-follow" from your profile URL so you get the Google juice)

We just improved the individual site Twitter accounts and they now tweet way more info.  New community blog posts also show up in the header of each site so users will find out about the new posts

We also rolled out massively improved tagging to help users better figure out what tags they should put on their questions

Should our new CHAOS folks post their team blog on Tumblr (to make sharing easy) or our own platform (because its ours)

If you haven't checked out our new newsletters - you can get a weekly list of the most interesting questions on any of the sites you're interested in, but don't necessarily visit every day.  As Joel says, its kind of like a free candy store!

Make sure to check out our upcoming conferences; Stack Overflow DevDays - a two day programming conference that will cover all the new technologies you need to know about; and Server Fault's Scalability Day - helping system administrators learn about massively scaling systems (with speakers from Facebook, Netflix, etc) - plus, save $100 off either conference with the discount code "podcast"

Thanks for joining us!  We'll be on "summer vacation" for the next couple weeks, but we'll be back on August 30th @ 4pm EDT with Anita Graser from GIS.SE (and our first female guest!).

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #14 w/ Miguel De Icaza by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Miguel De Icaza joins Jeff & Joel this week to discuss everything from Miguel's many projects to identity on the internet to playdates for toddlers.  Miguel is a force in the software world, having initiated and contributed to all kinds of products over the years - he's also well known for being one of the most productive programmers out there.  Check out the full episode for:

Miguel has worked on a number of different projects including Midnight Commander, Gnome, Mono, Ximian and more

Midnight Commander still continues to be developed to this day (albeit by other people) and it has some interesting new features that have been added

Joel reiterates his hate for huge numbers of configuration options and appreciates Miguel not implementing ridiculous option trees in his programs

We have a brand new podcasting setup (again!) - keep your eyes open for an upcoming post detailing our whole setup

Jeff thinks that Unix couldn't make the same advances as some other systems (like Apple) because they didn't have a dictator to force massive changes on the community

After leaving Novell (which owns Mono), he launched a new company (Xamarin) that is working on some new projects, while also supporting the existing Mono community

Cross platform apps are stupid if they aren't coded using the native UX and tools (see Word 5 for Mac, Safari for Windows, etc) which makes them look different from every other program on that platform

Make sure to check out Area51 to see all of the new sites that are currently in commitment and under consideration of being launched.  Support the proposals that you want to see as Stack Exchange sites!

Our new Bicycles site just launched as a full site (and gotten its own theme)!

We've started a new team of people (CHAOS) who will help enhance and promote many of our communities - the first project they are working on is enhancing question titles and converting many of them into actual questions

This has also led to a big debate internally over the relationship between great questions and titles and what guidelines we should set for making titles

Miguel is the most productive person that Joel knows (besides James Franco)

We have a new newsletters feature that allows you to get a weekly newsletter showing the top and most interesting questions from sites that you're interested in but don't visit every day.  Check out stackexchange.com/newsletters - it's like a candy store filled with free candy!

Sometimes people tell us they are interested in certain topics but their activity tells us something different (which is why we auto customize the homepage for each user) - its kinda similar to people on dating sites...

Every once in a while, we have a site that makes it through Area51 despite it "sucking" (eg: freelancers) - the problem with these sites is that there simply aren't enough questions because its too small a topic - the entire topic can be covered in one book

There are two current proposals that present an interesting contrast on this topic: Christianity and Biblical Hermeneutics - the biblical site has great, specific questions, where's Christianity doesn't and will likely be a weak site

Cross "Joel tells an army story" off your Stack Exchange Podcast Bingo Card!

Coming soon: use as many OpenID logins as you want on SE (instead of the current limit of two)

One of our developers (Kevin Montrose) wrote a great blog post on how your email is your identity

Fair warning: Miguel lies a lot on his twitter feed

Make sure you get your tickets for Stack Overflow DevDays (we just announced the first round of speakers for all the cities!) and use discount code "podcast" to save $100!

Join us next week for another live episode on Tuesday @ 4pm (EDT) or catch the posted version on Wednesday.

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #13 w/ Jin Yang by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Jeff & Joel are joined this week by Jin Yang - our resident web/graphic designer here at Stack (the distinction between the two becomes a discussion point).  Once we get the proper picture of Jin in the chatroom, he relates everything from his background in design to how he ended up at Stack Exchange and our philosophy behind design.

Full topics this week include:

Jin refers to himself as a "web designer" as opposed to a "graphic designer" because of the type of work he focuses on.

Last week, we discussed this amazing answer from Eric Lippert and how it was a great answer in response to a poor question.  Looking over this led Joel to notice that some people will vote to close a question as duplicate because the answers are the same even though the questions are different.

In this case, there was already some questions on the topic but Eric decided to write the "canonical" answer that can be referenced from here out.  Joel will often do the same thing on some of the other Stack Exchange sites (like in this OnStartups post)

Sometimes you do have to have SOME duplication of questions to make sure that the different use-cases are covered, but you want to avoid there being 12 of the exact same question on every site.

When applying for Stack Exchange, Jin created a custom site targeted at Joel to show his abilities.

As Joel notes (and expands on) Jin went with the always smart tactic of spending a ton of time focusing on the one company he truly wanted to work for instead of very little time on 50 random companies.

Many people forget that truly great design is very hard, when you have to meld it with making sure the site stays useful and effective for the users.

Talking about continuous improvement: Jin notes an episode of This American Life covering similar topics.

Joel likes Robin Williams' (no, not that Robin Williams) book on design since it has really good and basic lessons on it - The Non-Designers Design Book

We use a special CSS structure that lets us have a master CSS file for the entire network and then smaller CSS files for each site that just contain the differences between the generic template and the special parts of each site.

We've also learned a number of design lessons: like that white on black designs just don't look very good and aren't usable.

There have been issues in the past with designers creating their designs on macs but those designs then looking funny on PCs because of differences in text rendering - fortunately, thanks to improvements on both ends, that happens less now.

While Jin is our in house designer and works on everything, we occasionally have help from some outside designers (such as for English and UX) who are members of the community.

Prompted by a question for the chatroom, Jin is really excited about getting to design our RPG site.

Anonymous feedback is now live!  That means non-logged in users and those with less than 15 rep can give feedback on how good questions/answers are.  We haven't figured out how we'll incorporate this data yet, but we're collecting it and will figure that out.

Make sure you get your tickets for Stack Overflow DevDays (we just announced the first round of speakers for all the cities!) and use discount code "podcast" to save $100!

We'll be back live next week with a bunch of brand new podcast gear  and our special guest: Miguel De Icaza.  Join us for the live stream and in the official show chatroom

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #12 w/ Patrick McKenzie by The Stack Overflow Podcast

This week, Jeff and Joel are joined by Patrick McKenzie - StackOverflow contributor, internet commentator and SEO expert (especially when it comes to driving traffic for Halloween bingo cards).  After a few early tech issues (don't worry, we cleaned up for everyone at home) we jump right into things, with tons of discussion, including:

The big news for Stack Exchange this week: we officially launched our new mobile support!

We also recently introduced in-line editing so you don't have to go to a separate page to edit an answer or question - we really want to encourage editing and have people help make questions better.

Patrick is the creator of BingoCardCreator.com - an amazingly popular site for putting together bingo cards for various occasions.  Apparently, one of the biggest markets is for Halloween Bingo Cards with the entire month of October being worth $20k in sales.

He also has a new tool for helping doctor's offices remind patients of upcoming appointments.

Patrick owns a bunch of "exact match" domain names which provide a huge SEO bonus since Google assumes that anyone who owns a domain exactly matching a search must be credible.  The bonus doesn't apply to hyphenated domains though.

Joel suspects (and Patrick confirms) that Google now incorporate WHOIS data into their ranking to discount any domains that are owned by people who have a history of owning crappy domains. (Joel has apparently also never seen Burn Notice)

One potential issue with rewriting question titles to be SEO'd is that not everyone searches in the same language that Google ranks for - so you might actually hurt how many people find your questions.

Joel misses all the "labor of love" sites that people have written because they truly love a subject - the quality and usefulness of those sites is FAR better than the useless drivel turned out by content farms.  Patrick does point out one defense of them though.

Jeff has been wanting to talk more about the "Ask Me Anything" concept that originated from Reddit.  Jeff thinks the format of Reddit isn't the best for the AMA idea (and in general has some issues with the format) and likes a new site: AnyAsq.com which is really optimized for it.

Ultimately, this leads to a further discussion of the value of various formats for organizing different types of content.

Joel & Jeff have often wondered how to prevent the "tyranny of the sort order" in which already upvoted posts (or posts from high rep users) get lots of upvotes on their answer even though there may be a better one.

Sometimes certain answers get crazy levels of upvotes - like this one

Our math intern, Qiaochu, has been doing some research and found the effect of having an upvoted post on a users propensity to return:

Of course Stack Overflow DevDays 2011 is still coming along, so make sure to pick up your tickets now!  We'll be coming to 4 cities around the world this fall with some of the foremost experts on software development, so don't miss it!  Use the code "podcast" for a $100 discount too!

We'll see you next week when our guest is Stack Exchange designer Jin Yang!

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #11 w/ Rory Blyth by The Stack Overflow Podcast

This week, Jeff and Joel are joined by Rory Blyth (with no 'e' as he is very insistent) fresh off his move to a new house in Portland, OR.  This week's topics include:

Rory has had a whirlwind of moving and relocating as of late.  Today is the first day he got more than 3 hours of sleep, but he is now happily in his new house. Rory hasn't been writing as much as of lately because of random personal and relationship issues - but he's free now! Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines!

Jeff recommends "Enemy of the State" (even though it stars Will Smith) - it's a spiritual sequel to The Conversation and it also contains a faraday cage, in case you're interested in seeing one of those.

While working on .Net Rocks! (our podcast competition - so don't visit that link) Rory moved for a while to New London, CT - and it only took one day to decide to move there.

Rory was also part of podcasting way back in the early days (of 2004) while everything was still being decided about formats, styles, enclosures, etc. He was also a featured guest on Podcast #71 of the Stack Overflow podcast in 2009!

Jeff wants to know what Rory has been up to for the past couple years: and apparently Rory is still very focused on iPhone development. One of the biggest changes: all the clever hacks that programmers did originally are now supported by real APIs which makes it less fun for the nerds.

MonoTouch was recently spun out by Novell after its "restructuring" and is now tied in to Xamarin. Rory loves MonoTouch because of the ease of it and the incredible power that it gives developers, including cocoa bindings, the ability to drop in .NET binaries, efficiencies, etc

You can also find Rory's new site at Rory.me (once he actually starts blogging there)

One valid reason to use Objective C over MonoTouch is that it is a much smaller file,  Although it has gotten much more efficient recently, according to Rory.

Rory argues that fascism is good in tech products: from the iPhone to Xbox, by isolating and controlling everything in the platform it allows the company to control the experience and ensure quality.  Otherwise you can end up with things like Windows Mobile / Windows CE.

Google runs the risk of running into similar issues with Android.  The other question is if they are diversifying out too much (into crazy projects like wind power).

How do we keep Stack Exchange questions up to date? The Monotouch vs Objective C question above is 2 years old now and may no longer be fully accurate; we accept edits from anonymous and 1 reputation users now, but how can we motivate them to improve this old question?

Rory is also one of the most "prolific" answerers on our site with the highest vote to answer ratio on the site!

Rory will also be speaking at Stack Overflow DevDays - so pick up your tickets now if you want to see him (with discount code 'podcast' for $100 off)

Help us test the new Stack Exchange mobile view on your mobile device by enabling it on meta! (scroll down to the very bottom of the page to enable it there.)

There's no podcast next week (the 12th) but we'll be back live @ 4pm on the 19th so see you then!

Stack Exchange Podcast - Episode #10 w/ Steve Karantza by The Stack Overflow Podcast