The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Overflow Podcast - Episode #04 by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Overflow Podcast - Episode #03 by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Overflow Podcast - Episode #02 by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Stack Overflow Podcast - Episode #01 by The Stack Overflow Podcast

Joel and Jeff sit down with our new community coordinator, Robert Cartaino, to record a "bonus" podcast discussing the future of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange 2.0.

We hired Robert Cartaino as a full time community coordinator to act as both city planner, sociologist, and programmer with deep technical background. He will be pivotal in helping us move toward the brave new world of Stack Exchange 2.0.

Rather than the old model of "pay us to use our software", Stack Exchange is now free. We're setting up a democratic process where the community itself will determine how and when create new communities. We liken it to Usenet 2.0.

The tension for us is that we want to offer a public service -- a community commons that is owned, governed, and mostly operated by the community in a very transparent way -- but like Craigslist, we are walking the line between behaving like a non-profit company while remaining a for-profit company.

As a thought experiment, we'd love it if that three years from now a new community is created in a language we don't even understand which meets the same criteria we originally created Stack Overflow, Server Fault, and Super User under. That is, it's a community you'd be proud to be associated with, and it fills the internet with useful, practical information. Our goal is to leave the internet better than we originally found it.

The new site creation tool is currently under development and should appear in about a month for public participation. Right now there are 74 (!) site proposals on meta.stackexchange.com for initial discussion.

We believe that removing money as a motivator actually frees people to participate simply because they love the topic, without being encumbered by the "don't make me think" factor of "is it worth my time to even do this at all?" We want to bring together the intersection of those people who love a topic, and want to make the internet a tiny bit better, one post at a time.

As for ownership, there is a concept of site founders for those who commit to a site and follow through on that commitment, and interim moderators during the private and public beta will be chosen from the most motivated users. And of course all content generated will continue to be Creative Commons licensed and freely available to anyone who wants it.

You are by no means alone -- we found that "build it and they will come" didn't work well for Stack Exchange. Under the new system, the community itself, us, will seed and support your site, and we will actively promote it as neighbor in our existing site network. We want to centralize and group community rather than fragment it, which is what the old SE model tended to do.

One of our Big Hairy Audacious Goals is to achieve some form of mainstream awareness. This is something that Facebook and Twitter have achieved, but we don't feel that Digg and Reddit have. It's our hope that if we keep taking baby steps outside our core engineering / programmer safety zone that we'll eventually get there.

There is a surprising amount of friction when trying to "move" an existing community to a new format. It's almost more practical to set up another community that runs in parallel and those who are attracted to the new format can move, while the old guard can stay with the comfort of what they know.

We hope you enjoyed this "bonus" podcast. We're still not sure when or if the next podcast will occur; keep an eye on blog.stackoverflow.com for the latest news.

The transcript wiki for this episode is available for public editing.

Joel and Jeff sit down with Anton Geraschenko to discuss the unique qualities of a community of expert mathematicians, how to capture a sphere in a knot, and the importance of off-site backups.

The Stack Overflow team will be in NYC from April 2nd to the 9th for a planning session. Expect exciting announcements at the end of that period, including some that will affect the podcast. Maybe there will be a Stack Overflow morning zoo crew!

There will also be a Stack Overflow open house in NYC sometime that week, so if you're in the area, please keep an eye on the blog!

Anton founded Math Overflow, which runs on the Stack Overflow engine via Stack Exchange. Math Overflow might be the largest community of Math PhDs (and PhD candidates) on the internet. Anton, interestingly, is not a programmer so he was outside our initial audience.

Anton attributes much of the initial success of Math Overflow to math bloggers, and most notably Secret Blogging Seminar. He also solicited emails from influential members of the math community and invited them to all participate at launch.

Interestingly, Anton also cites the importance of a meta-discussion site to the overall success of a community. This is a conclusion we (well, I) had to be dragged to, kicking and screaming, before we finally created meta.stackoverflow.com. I suppose it is analogous to having a government of some kind before you can have a country.

The meaning of Joel's oft-repeated phrase "no question is too easy" -- which I would rephrase as "no question should be uninteresting" -- has a whole different dimension on a site like Math Overflow which is intended for graduate level mathematics questions. Per Anton, you should probably ask "Does my community care about that?"

We wondered if any Math Overflow question, given the highly specialized audience, could be popular in the broader internet sense. Anton cites Is it possible to capture a sphere in a knot? as a possible example.

Math Overflow did some community specific customization by incorporating jsMath markup in their posts. This has always been the vision, to provide tools that tailor the 'wiki' aspect of the Stack Overflow to the needs of particular expert communities. They plan to switch to the newer MathJax soon. And LaTeX is of course a long term standard in this area.

I now appreciate the importance of off-site backups. It's unlikely your datacenter will be hit by a meteor, but the odds of something going wrong with the air conditioning is much more likely. How likely? It happened to us! Remember kids, eat your Wheaties, and do your off-site backups! We're also entertaining the idea of a read-only mode for the website for these rare conditions so we don't have to tackle the very difficult problem of synchronizing data when you are running on a live backup.

Since we haven't launched the Stack Exchange site on Siberian husky puppies (yet), Joel asks for some listener input on what type of treats his new dog Taco would like.

Remember, podcast will be on hiatus for a bit while we retool it -- your suggestions are welcome in the interim, see you in about a month!

The transcript wiki for this episode is available for public editing.

In this episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Joel and Jeff discuss the pursuit of venture capital, why Joel is ending his blog, and the hidden power of Google's web spider.

We were surprised that so many people who read Joel's article about our venture capital experiment were unable to imagine any way we could put millions of dollars to use.

If you consider that our core mission is to kill software like vBulletin and phpBB, and you had millions of dollars, what would you do and how would you do it?

We were also a little disappointed that some people thought we would be willing to damage the community in some kind of quest to create a business. Hopefully we can be given a bit more credit than that -- Joel and I may be dumb, but we're not dumb enough to destroy the very thing we're trying to create!

Choosing a VC partner is like a marriage, and our philosophy is to only marry someone who has compatible views to our own.

Even if we didn't take VC, the process of talking to all these smart people who have accomplished so much in the industry was illuminating, and helped us synthesize and crystallize our own strategy for what we want to do with Stack Overflow -- we're excited about it, and we think you will be too once we can talk about it in more detail!

I was away for a two week trip with my family to beautiful New Zealand, where I gave a talk at Webstock 2010 titled Stack Overflow: Building Social Software for the Anti-Social.

I'm buying a new laptop from Dell, and giving away my old Dell laptop to a deserving meta.stackoverflow.com community member. Joel is a hard-core ThinkPad fan, but I believe what the world needs is more of an Ikea PC hardware experience. Dell's design isn't quite there yet but it has gotten better.

Joel elaborates a bit on why he's planning to quit blogging. There's plenty of precedent for leaving while you're still ahead, like Bill Watterson (of the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes") did. After 10 years of doing the same thing, you might want to evolve and do something different, too -- but hopefully not vanish without a trace. I'm still trying to convince him not to quit podcasting.

It's well known that 90% of our traffic comes from Google. But did you know that Google is about the only company with a competent spider, based on our logs? There are so many terrible spiders, even from large companies that really should know better. It's a chicken and egg problem; Google's spidering is so far ahead of every other search engine that I'm unclear how anyone could switch -- the result pages simply wouldn't be there!

I have found the Howard Aiken quote "Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats." to be very true with regards to Q&A and Stack Overflow. The corollary to this is that if you don't have to fight people to convince them your idea is good, your idea might not be so hot.

Even very smart people have to be in the right place at the right time to be successful. The best success strategy is probably dogged, bullheaded persistence, because there are so many variables you can't control or even predict.

We answered the following listener question:

Michael from Cambridge: "What if Google, or another large company, decided to clone your product and give it away for free? What should a hypothetical startup do if this happens to them?"

If you'd like to submit a question to be answered in our next episode, record an audio file (90 seconds or less) and mail it to [email protected]. You can record a question using nothing but a telephone and a web browser. We also have a dedicated phone number you can call to leave audio questions at 646-826-3879.

The transcript wiki for this episode is available for public editing.

Joel sits down with the Stack Exchange team, who are working on the hosted version of Stack Overflow at the Fog Creek offices in New York City.

Meet the Stack Exchange team -- David Fullerton, Aaron Maenpaa, and Emmett Nicholas.

For Stack Exchange sites that have a smaller community, Stack Exchanges may email users more aggressively, to invite users to answer less trafficked SE questions. Joel proposes that weekly roll-up emails might work well on smaller Stack Exchange sites.

Stack Exchange is a hosted service; it's currently running on 2.5 servers and soon a third.

Stack Exchange has an export feature, so all the data in your site can be dumped out to a file, similar to the way the monthly Stack Overflow cc-wiki data dumps work.

Joel blogged about Stack Overflow looking for venture capital -- that should not affect Stack Exchange. In any case, even if it did, you can use your own domain name which you take with you, and as mentioned above, you can export all your data. There should be competition, and smart competitors will support the Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange export formats.

Stack Exchange pricing is already at maximum, primarily to reduce demand to a level that the current SE team can support. It can only go down over time! It is definitely our goal to make it easier over time for everyone who wants a Stack Exchange site to have one. We're exploring a lot of possibilities including ad subsidized; it's also possible that larger corporate adoption of Stack Exchange may subsidize the smaller community sites as well.

Right now every Stack Exchange site has its own IIS website (even though they all share the same app pool), but that turns out to be not a great performance model for lots of small sites.

One of the Catch-22s of a Stack Exchange site is that fundamental actions like voting up and creating tags require reputation, but nobody has any reputation on a new site. The Stack Exchange team added a "bootstrap mode" which relaxes a lot of these requirements so you can get your site up and running.

David notes that a smooth admin / owner setup process is essential to the Stack Exchange service model. You also can't have a ghost town -- you need some questions bootstrapped into the system before you even show it to the broader public. This is analogous to the private invitation-only betas we did for Stack Overflow, Super User, and Server Fault.

If you'd like to provide additional feedback to the Stack Exchange team, we encourage you to visit Meta Stack Exchange and help us dogfood our own system.

If you'd like to submit a question to be answered in our next episode, record an audio file (90 seconds or less) and mail it to [email protected]. You can record a question using nothing but a telephone and a web browser. We also have a dedicated phone number you can call to leave audio questions at 646-826-3879.

The transcript wiki for this episode is available for public editing.

In this episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Joel and Jeff discuss the promise and peril of Email (both social and technical), Google Buzz, and the value of training material.

I will be at Webstock 2010 and in New Zealand for the next two weeks. I was excited to learn that the singer Wing is from New Zealand. Hear Wing in action. Don't say I didn't warn you. OK, maybe I didn't warn you.

I encouraged Joel to have the Stack Exchange team on for a podcast while I am gone for two weeks. There's a lot of interesting re-engineering of the Stack Overflow engine necessary to support lots of small and medium sites on our engine. If you have questions from the Stack Exchange team, please contribute them to this Meta Stack Exchange thread.

I am not a fan of email, to put it mildly, as I wrote in Is Email = Efail and Email: The Variable Reinforcement Machine. Given my discomfort with email, I struggle with the role of email on Stack Overflow -- mostly trying to keep it at arms' length while using it appropriately.

I agree with Joel's position here, which is that aggressive email notifications are toxic to the growth of a community. That's why our email notifications are somewhat.. slow. It's intentional.

Joel describes Jason Calacanis' cessation of blogging in favor of a private invitation only email list. He claims that it's a way of reaching people outside the normal domain of blogging. There are certain folks who just don't read blogs. Joel feels he has totally and utterly saturated the narrow world of programmers who read blogs, so it's worth experimenting with different distribution mechanisms and perhaps reach different audiences.

The root of the email problem is that it's the kitchen sink one-size-fits-all communication medium, when in reality, there should be communication escalation (or de-escalation) to fit what you're trying to communicate. Tailor your choice of communication medium to the particular message you are delivering!

Is email for old people? I do think younger people are correctly intuiting that there are more efficient mechanisms for online communication. As Joel notes, email is really the only canonical form of online communication that everyone is guaranteed to have. You may not have a Twitter or Facebook or Friendster account, but surely you have an email address. Everyone does!

I am highly skeptical of the new Google Buzz because it is built on email. You just can't build a stable structure on top of a broken system, in my humble opinion of course.

The act of sending mail is also incredibly complicated because spammers have abused the infrastructure for a decade. There are a few immune responses that are still effective, such as DKIM and Reverse PTR records. SenderID is another method, also based on DNS records, but it's less well regarded. If you're going to send email and you want it to arrive, you need to implement all this stuff!

Joel has documented a lot of the process at Fog Creek in a series of training videos and a book, titled Make Better Software. Compared to most companies, Fog Creek is quite transparent in this regard, and I might even say they evangelize for better programmer working conditions.

Our featured questions this week are:

Server Fault: What's your recommended server room kit? A nice description of the key items any well provisioned server room ought to have.

We answered the following listener question on this podcast:

Pierre "Good programming training material is expensive. How can students obtain good training materials?"

If you'd like to submit a question to be answered in our next episode, record an audio file (90 seconds or less) and mail it to [email protected]. You can record a question using nothing but a telephone and a web browser. We also have a dedicated phone number you can call to leave audio questions at 646-826-3879.

The transcript wiki for this episode is available for public editing.

update: my 2010 webstock talk is...

In this episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Joel and Jeff sit down with Mac developer Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software to discuss his experience as a longtime Mac developer and small Mac software business owner, and the possible impact of the iPad.

Daniel launched Red Sweater software way back in 1999 (and has been an active Mac developer since 1995), but it didn't become his primary business until 2005-ish. The big apps in his stable are MarsEdit, blog composing software, and Black Ink, a crossword app. There has been no iPhone version of these OSX apps to date because it wasn't a good fit, but the iPad is going to be a nearly perfect fit.

In Daniel's experience, the primary change in Apple's software developer support story over the last 15 years is that Apple has become much more pragmatic in adopting developer tools from the UNIX and open source world. Remember when Apple had its own Unix, a/ux?

Apple has a whole new alternative to gcc, the clang compiler.

The Macmillan-Amazon Kindle incident highlighted how Apple entering the eBook market with the iPad and iBooks is actually disruptive in a good way, that benefits both readers and writers.

Joel agrees that the iPad will probably kill the Kindle hardware. We think e ink is kind of overrated. It's not clear how much this matters to Amazon. It is bizarre that the Kindle app will be allowed to run on the iPad as a competing "app store" next to iBooks.

I'm a little perplexed about the existence of iWork for the iPad, since it highlights the main weakness of the iPad -- while touch is great, the inclusion of keyboard support is odd, and I'm not sure how well it's going to scale to large screens and I think it's a weak replacement for the mouse paradigm.

Joel and I think Steve Jobs never really believed that computers made sense as general purpose devices. Computers should always have been appliances, and the iPhone and iPad are manifestations of that.

Steven Frank likens the iPad to the new world of computing, a bespoke from the ground up reconception of how computers should work, compared to the classic OSX, Linux, Windows desktop old world.

Is lack of support for Adobe's Flash on the iPad the equivalent of dropping the floppy drive from early iMac models? I'd say the floppy drive was already pretty useless by the time Apple dropped it, whereas Flash is still kind of useful in a lot of circumstances, as John Nack notes. Particularly on a large screen device billed as delivering a no-compromises web experience.

If Apple choosing to make a political statement about dropping Flash (on the iPhone and now iPad) results in websites built with better Flash fallbacks than an empty box on a web page, that is a good thing. It's just hard for me, personally, to accept that Apple is doing this out of the goodness of their own heart, rather than as a nakedly capitalistic way to protect the income stream from the App Store.

It has been pointed out to me that Stack Overflow is powered by bored programmers, so it is in our best interest for programmers to be bored at work.

Joel says that being bored says a lot more about a person's state of mind rather than whether the environment is actually boring. If you're bored while programming, "you are doing it wrong."

There are several dimensions to improving questions on any site on the trilogy; primary among those is editing (at 2k rep), and there always is voting to close (at 3k rep), flagging for moderator attention (at 15 rep). And meta-discussion about questions is always welcome on meta.stackoverflow.com.

Community moderation is an important part of our sites, and we're currently conducting an election to determine the next Stack Overflow moderator. You do need 200 reputation to have the right to vote, though.

For more great Mac dev discussion, check out Daniel's podcast with Manton Reece, Core Intuition.

We answered the following listener question...