The Stack Overflow Podcast

This is the 2^5 episode of the StackOverflow podcast, where Joel and Jeff discuss software piracy, dealing with public criticism, how to get people to answer your questions, and the ideal programmer office.

A brief digression about the analog to digital television switch. Make sure you watch this brief instructional video so you're prepared.

Joel gives an overview of Fog Creek's attitude towards software piracy and licensing. At its root, we believe that buying your software has to be easier than stealing it. Stop thinking of it as fighting an enemy and think of it as simply being better than the alternative.

On advertising: if you can get people to talk about or willingly watch your ad, you've already won. This is why Wil Shipley's rant about the Mojave Experiment is counter-productive.

I argue that Apple is making real headway in mainstream marketshare, largely because they've won the advertising war so decisively. Joel argues that they haven't. Which of us is right?

One of our major performance optimizations for the "related questions" query is removing the top 10,000 most common English dictionary words (as determined by Google search) before submitting the query to the SQL Server 2008 full text engine. It's shocking how little is left of most posts once you remove the top 10k English dictionary words. This helps limit and narrow the returned results, which makes the query dramatically faster.

Congratulations to Stack Overflow team member Geoff Dalgas; he's the proud father of a new baby boy as of last week!

We plan to mail out weekly email summaries of other people's answers and comments to your posts -- much like FriendFeed -- for people who haven't visited Stack Overflow in a week or longer.

Some topics are just fundamentally hard to understand, like the Monty Hall Problem, and lead to a lot of extra discussion. The two banned topics on the XKCD forums are 0.9999 = 1 and airplane on a treadmill for that reason.

Joel "doesn't want to get too inspirational and stuff" but if you're not doing a few things where you're failing a little, you're probably not trying hard enough. I say if everyone likes you, you probably aren't doing anything interesting.

Joel points to Guidelines on Writing a Philosophy Paper: "pretend that your reader is lazy, stupid, and mean." And the converse, as a reader, is to try to infer the most charitable possible interpretation of what you're reading. Not that anyone actually does this, in my experience.

Can you tell the difference between people who honestly want to have a discussion about a topic, and people who are using that topic as a prop for their ego? Learning to make this distinction can ultimately save you a lot of time.

My favorite Stack Overflow question this week is a classic, one of my early favorites: How to get attention for your old, unanswered questions. The response by icelava is absolutely on target -- if you want people to pay attention to your question, you have to pay attention to your question. Provide status and progress reports from your own continued effort to answer the question yourself. An excellent example of this is lassevik's tenacious return to his oddball problem which ultimately turned out to be a bug in the video driver, not his code!

Joel's favorite Stack Overflow question this week is Must haves for a developer's office. Hard to disagree with the community on this one: a quality chair, two large monitors, whiteboards, and control of the lighting. If possible -- and this is usually a hard thing to get, so you have to really consider how realistic a negotiating position asking for your own private office is. That said, Joel and I continue to believe having a private office is the most ideal programming environment; it offers choice between open/noisy and closed/private. This also depends how much noise you can tolerate. In any case, demand your Programmer's Bill of Rights. As Joel says, "it's only money"....

This is the thirty-first episode of the StackOverflow podcast, where

Joel and Jeff discuss.. stuff!

Based on some comments from Podcast #30, we now know that "Learning about NP-Completeness from Jeff is like learning about irony from Alanis Morissette". It's funny because it's true!

It was also noted that "[Jeff] certainly no mathematician." In my defense, I've always been very open about my lack of math skills. It's even item #3 in my Five Things We Didn't Know About You list.

I noticed that someone posted the halting problem to GetACoder.com, so if nothing else good came of this, at least humor was delivered.

How useful is math to most programmers? In other words, how often does a typical software developer use something they learned in, say, Calculus class or beyond? Joel cites the original Google PageRank algorithm paper (pdf) and Google's MapReduce (pdf) as good examples of math in practice for mainstream programming.

I believe it's important for programmers to develop skills that aren't programming, necessarily, but that are complementary to programming, such as graphic design. (Or databases, or HTML/CSS, etcetera) Remember, good programmers write code; great programmers steal code. This applies triply to design.

Joel and I both believe that status reports should be treated as a "public wall", never as weapons to determine how people get paid or promoted. The single best thing I've ever read on this is Poppendieck's Team Compensation (pdf) -- which I discovered through Joel's first collection of software writing. If I could, I'd print out a copy of this and staple it to the face of every person in the world who manages software developers. Yes, it really is that good. Go read it!

One team at Fog Creek instituted a daily standup meeting for their project, which is a staple of most agile development approaches. In addition to the "Daily Kiwi" convention, Fog Creek also use a locally hosted instance of Laconica, an open source Twitter clone. It's certainly an interesting alternative to email.

Joel believes most small to midsize software companies will deal with an economic downturn by (temporarily) deferring development of new versions of their products. For companies that have a lot of "extra" staff, the economy might be an excuse to get rid of the worst performing 10% of your employees.

Joel justifies having a nice office space as 1) a recruiting tool 2) enabling higher programmer productivity and 3) the cost of a nice office space is a tiny number relative to all your other expenses running a company. I argue that companies which don't intuitively understand why nice office space is important to their employees who spend 8+ hours every day there.. well, those companies aren't smart enough to survive anyway.

My favorite Stack Overflow question this week is Are Parameters really enough to prevent Sql injections? Joel and I have a long discussion about the importance of parameterized SQL, both for performance and for security (beware Little Bobby Tables!). But you should know that it's not 100% foolproof; it is possible (though rare) to have latent SQL injection exploits even when fully parameterized.

Joel's favorite Stack Overflow question this week is How do you pull yourself out of a programming 'slump'? Joel knows tons of programmers who have burned out by age 50, and feels it is rare to find programmers who have written code for 20 to 30 years. Joel's article Fire and Motion and my article Moving The Block sort of cover this topic. Joel also recommends the book Death March as a reference book for what to avoid.

We answered the following listener questions in this episode:

Mike Akers: "How much time should programmers be spending in Photoshop?"

David from the UK: "How do you handle status reports at Fog Creek?"

Matthew Glidden: "How do you run a software company in lean economic times?"

If you'd like to submit a question to be answered in our next episode, record an audio...

This is the thirtieth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, where Joel and Jeff sit down with Richard White of uservoice.com.

Richard worked as the user interface guy on calendar startup Kiko.com; UserVoice was originally inspired by Richard's work on Kiko, as a hybrid of Reddit and FogBugz.

There are some thematic similarities between Dell's IdeaStorm and My Starbucks Idea and UserVoice -- to some degree, UserVoice is users voting on the direction your software should take. Does software democracy work?

UserVoice isn't just for software -- there's also Obama CTO and Rebuild The Party. This generated huge load and traffic, so if nothing else it was a good scaling test. The usual item has a maximum of 50 comments; one suggestion had 980 comments.

Our use of UserVoice is a bit anomalous; I prefer to (politely) decline requests that I think we won't get to. Is it more honest to let reasonable requests like this one languish in the system for literally years, ala Microsoft's Connect, then to find out that they've been set to "wontfix" after 3 years? As a user myself, I find this behavior abhorrent.

We do plan to talk a bit less about building Stack Overflow and a bit more about our favorite questions on Stack Overflow.

Joel's favorite Stack Overflow question this week is What Tricks Do You Use to Get Yourself "In The Zone"?

UserVoice is a Ruby on Rails app, with approximately 6,000 lines of code. A large portion of that is unit tests.

Jeff's favorite Stack Overflow question is What is an NP-Complete Problem. This is a followup to the blog post where I demonstrate a sadly incomplete understanding of the concept of being NP-complete.

Joel notes that there are harder problems than NP-Complete, namely the halting problem. There's a great Stack Overflow question on this, The Halting Problem in the Field

There are a lot of very hard problems in computer software that aren't necessarily NP-complete -- and we've had limited success "solving" them, such as speech and voice recognition. Furthermore, if the best algorithm we can come up with is something like n-cubed, is that a realistic solution?

UserVoice will be using Jan Rain's RpxNow to implement OpenID. We wondered how myopenid.com would make money; their RpxNow service is the answer to that question. Now uservoice can mark that item off their own uservoice page -- it's the #2 most requested feature by customers of User Voice.

We also answered the following listener question:

Chris Conway: "After 26 episodes of the podcast, will you ever take a turn to less self-reflexive discussion?"

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.

This is the twenty-ninth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and I discuss the following:

The downside of being a PC gamer: it's prime game release season. My productivity last week was nil due to the release of Fallout 3, as I discuss on my blog. But it was totally worth it.

One videogame cliche is the levels filled with random barrels and crates as filler. The classic game site Old Man Murray used to rate games on how quickly you saw a crate after starting the game. And then there was the Quake 2 mod where you played as a crate .. in a room full of crates! Surreal.

I've always wondered if Joel was a gamer. Apparently he played Call of Duty 3 and 4, which bring him back to his days as an Israeli Army infantryman. Also, Bioshock, which is outstanding. At least he has good taste.

Joel wonders why we don't use Google search as the primary search method on Stack Overflow. Of course it is possible to search Stack Overflow with Google using the "site:" specifier, as long as you scope to an appropriate "folder". Currently we offer Google as a search alternative when no results are found. I still think both search methods are desirable, because we can search by user, by tag, and so forth.

My first organic hit on Stack Overflow based on a coding search was this question about using Beautiful Soup in IronPython under C#.

One of Joel's favorite Stack Overflow questions this week is Coding In Other Spoken Languages. The discussion is great, but it does beg the question -- as much time and money as companies spend localizing software, why don't we localize programming languages? Joel points out that the Excel macro language is perhaps an exception, as the function names are localized. This is quite rare, but there are non-English based programming languages out there.

Joel has literally written the book on hiring great programmers -- Smart and Gets Things Done. In this podcast he examines a few guidelines from the Fog Creek hiring practices. One of those is having an intern program that is second to none. I was definitely impressed when I visited. Did I mention that they have fully catered lunches every weekday? Also, don't forget that the interview process is your opportunity to judge the company that wants to hire you. If they don't have a good interview process, do you really want to work there?

The amount of information you are faced with as a developer is overwhelming, with more new stuff arriving every day. How do you keep up with information overload? I recommend "Just In Time" learning. Joel highlights the difference between the early days of Java and today, now that Java has grown into something of a monster. Is .NET on the same path?

We also answered the following listener questions:

Jonas from Sweden: "Can you expand on what characteristics a good programmer should have? When hiring, how do I get them to tell me what makes them a good programmer?"

Idriss Selhoum: "How do you feel about Microsoft releasing new .NET versions so rapidly, and fragmenting the developer base?"

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.

This is the twenty-eighth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, where

Joel and Jeff discuss Windows Azure, SQL Server 2008 full text search, Bayesian filtering, porn detection, and project management -- among other things.

Jeff met the inestimable Joey DeVilla aka Accordion Guy at PDC, who challenged him to pronounce Azure as in "Windows Azure". My pronunciation reference for Azure is entirely based on the word appearing in the movie A Clockwork Orange.

Joel and I greatly enjoyed Corey Trager's Jeff Atwood is Trying to Kill Me. We do try to exploit the Jewish / Goyish dynamic. Also, Jeff is sorry he tried to kill you, but glad you survived to write that highly entertaining article.

We are still struggling with SQL Server 2008 full text search issues. And yes, we have engaged with the SQL Server team on this.

Joel's Inc. magazine article about Stack Overflow is now on newsstands (it's the issue with Kevin Rose of Digg on the cover). The article is also online as well: How Hard Could It Be? The Unproven Path.

We have worked closely with Brent Ozar, who has singlehandedly took it upon himself to be our Stack Overflow database ninja. He's gone far, far beyond what I would ever expect a volunteer to do -- so we've added him as an official member of our virtual team. And if you need SQL Server expertise, Brent is your man.

Microsoft finally fixed their bizarre position on hotfixes. Instead of the bad old days of mandatory phone calls and requests, you can simply download the hotfix you need.

One limitation of Linq to SQL is that it does not support any SQL Server full text search predicates. Fortunately, we can freely intermix SQL strings and Linq syntax as much as we like.

Joel points out that Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses an if statement. We worry that Microsoft doesn't adapt their software well enough to the wider internet world, as demonstrated by the radically differing approaches to spellcheck from both companies.

We aren't clear what the purpose of Microsoft's new "Oslo" or M modelling language, announced at PDC, is. More domain specific languages? Every developer becomes a language designer? Why does that scare me a little?

Ray Ozzie made specific reference to "architecture astronaut" at PDC, which is extra humorous because Joel was referring to Ozzie when he coined the term.

Joel remembers Hillel Cooperman, who used to be a star at Microsoft, but now works for Jackson Fish Market.

One Stack Overflow question we enjoyed this week: Showing too much 'skin' detection in software. The definitive debunking of this technique is from Dan of Dan's Data, who reviewed PORNsweeper in 2000. We don't believe the technical landscape has changed since then. Great discussion on Stack Overflow as well.

Joel refers to the famous 1994 memo from Steve Sinofsky -- Cornell is WIRED! Steve started as Bill Gates' assistant, and now he's in charge of Windows 7 after shipping Office 2007.

Another Stack Overflow question we enjoyed this week: What do project managers do all day? We're not sure why the owner keeps deleting this question, as we think the answers have a lot of value. Joel also has a lot to say on the general topic of project management.

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.

This is the twenty-seventh episode of the StackOverflow podcast, where Joel and Jeff interview Alexis "kn0thing" Ohanian and Steve "spez" Huffman, the founders and co-creators of Reddit.

Jeff is at the Professional Developers' Conference in Los Angeles. He co-presented a session with Phil Haack on ASP.NET MVC, which you can view online if you are so inclined. Also while at PDC, Jeff participated in a brief roundtable meeting with Ray Ozzie, who had some completely unsolicited and very positive things to say about Stack Overflow!

If you didn't know, Joel was the genesis of one of the earliest branded reddits -- the Joel on Software reddit.

We discuss the Reddit switch from Lisp to Python, and the way Reddit stored raw user passwords in the database.

We use a weighting algorithm based on Reddit's when we calculate "hotness" in Stack Overflow.

Reddit, like us, ran for quite a while on a single server. Moving to a second server, splitting the database, provided solid gains for Reddit and is something we just did as well. According to Steve, splitting off the database is easy -- making sure you can scale to multiple application web servers is the difficult part, because of shared state caching.

Steve is a big fan of HAProxy which is a single software load balancer in front of all ~20 Reddit servers.

Reddit's first big partner is The Independent, for branded content. Although there is also WeHeartGossip. Joel and I feel these sorts of communities -- to be truly successful -- need personalities associated with them that are emblematic of the values and goals of that community.

We briefly discuss some of the protection mechanisms Reddit has in place to prevent abuse and spammers. Steve and Alexis have much more experience dealing with abusive users than we do. Per Steve, the Reddit mantra is "anything goes", so they try to do as little as possible to inhibit users. We generally agree that the volume of badness is remarkably small. Most users behave responsibly -- and this isn't just an optimistic opinion, it's based on actual data. That's the good news!

Behold the power of the Reddit audience: they may just have saved the world by sending a crowbar to the CERN Hadron collider.

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.

This is the twenty-sixth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, where Joel and Jeff answer five listener questions, mostly about social software design. Warning: this podcast features cowbell. Really.

Christopher Leary: "Any thoughts on the general design of karma and rep systems based on your experience building one for Stack Overflow?"

Michael L Perry: "What about a system where votes by people who have more reputation count more?"

Jeff Metzner: "If I post personal anecdotes as an answer to a question, is it reasonable for other users to edit that?"

Anonymous: "Why can't we ask IT questions? What about a sister site like Stack Overflow but for IT questions?"

Miles Dennis: "For a cost-conscious startup, where do you see the balance between taking inexperienced staff that costs less, versus experienced staff that costs more?"

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.

When calling the audio phone number, be sure to leave your name, so we can properly cite you when we answer your question.

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

This is the twenty-fifth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, where Joel and Jeff sit down with the ineffable Steve Yegge, who you may know from his excellent and extremely popular blog Stevey's Blog Rants. Steve worked for Amazon and currently works for Google.

Steve proposes we use the Muppets Show theme as our podcast theme song. I'm more amenable to "The Touch" as featured in the Transformers the Movie from 1986.

We ask how Google maintains its culture in the face of an army of new hires entering the company every month.

Steve is, to put it mildly, a language maven. He shares some of his perspectives on language aesthetics. Should languages be designed by committee, or by a benevolent dictator?

If Steve could teach every developer one thing, it wouldn't be how to type, or how to write -- but how to market.

Google has an infrastructure in place to support "mini-startups" within the company. Joel thinks all good startups must have ideas that sound terrible. YouTube is a great example, as is the Flip video recorder.

Being an entrepreneur often means spending a lot of your time not programming. This can be challenging for software engineers who love to code. Make sure you know what you're signing up for if you go this route.

Steve is a big believer in the Google experience, even though his last three projects have been cancelled "for business reasons". Instead of Joel's "Smart, and Gets Things Done", Steve proposes "Done, and Gets Things Smart."

How much does choosing the "right" programming language matter? Isn't the variance between programmers far more significant to the end result? On the other hand, the best programmers often tend to be fluent in multiple languages.

One way to drag the "one horse language" programmers into multiple languages is to support sublanguages within the same runtime, ala IronPython, IronRuby, Jython, and JRuby.

Steve is considering porting his game Wyvern to Android. He can't talk about his current full time project at Google, but he does fess up to owning it -- both from the business side and the engineering side. So if this time it's cancelled, we really know who to blame.

Steve: "You can't write about anything interesting without making a bunch of people mad.", "Everything you say can be quoted out of context 500 years from now."

One of my very favorite Steve Yegge posts is You Should Write Blogs. Unfortunately, despite my cajoling, blogging just isn't for everyone. Too many brilliant programmers are virtually unknown because they have no footprint on the web. This is one of the reasons we created Stack Overflow -- to lower that participation barrier, at least a few millimeters.

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.

This is the twenty-fourth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, a special roundtable discussion conducted in NYC at Joel's Fog Creek offices with the entire Stack Overflow team. That includes Jarrod Dixon, Geoff Dalgas, and Michael Pryor in addition to Joel and Jeff.

We muse about the 7.5 million dollar Dreamhost billing error. We admire the openness of Dreamhost, that they would be so up front about such a major gaffe on their blog.

There is a rule at Fog Creek which we at Stack Overflow also follow -- never ship on Friday.

A brief discussion about responsible advertising; contrasting our ad deal with woot and the Audible sponsorship of podcasts. One sells a product we've bought before and vouch for, the other sells DRM encumbered product.

Michael and Joel bring up the idea of mixing real world money and our reputation system. I don't think we'll do this, but it's an interesting conversation.

Discussing Geoff's cool JavaScript reputation graphing system.

The giant "questions" with 300 answers were putting a huge load on the server and on client browsers. We never anticipated this would happen. Jarrod's pagination feature was deployed last night. Pagination begins at 30 answers, which matches the current wiki community threshold. If your "question" gets to page two of the answers, it'll be paginated and converted to community mode.

Michael asks the eternal question -- why not support alternate login methods versus OpenID? I believe that OpenID is a bit of a chicken and egg problem at the moment, and we want to support a better future. We are open to partnering with another OpenID provider to provide a more seamless signup experience; myopenid supports this and we'll try to get it in the queue.

We go around the table, discussing the short term future -- what's the #1 feature each of us wants to see in on Stack Overflow?

Michael draws a comparison between Stack Overflow and Project Euler. You get points on this site for solving algorithmic / mathematical problems.

Although it has been criticized, we continue to like the Stack Overflow design, which is largely thanks to Jeremy Kratz. We feel providing solid layout and markup control makes our questions look great.

We've been pleasantly surprised with the SQL Server 2005 full-text search on Stack Overflow, but we agree with Joel that something like Lucene.NET would probably work better, as it operates at the logical "page" level instead of database record level. People don't think in terms of database records; they think in terms of web pages.

Geoff discusses how important sitemap.xml was for us. Unlike a blog, we didn't have stable, permanent links to questions. until we rolled out sitemap it was literally impossible to find questions using web search, even if you entered the exact word-for-word title. As google says, you should use sitemaps for "any site where certain pages are only accessible via a search form".

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.

This is the twenty-third episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and I discuss the following:

The Stack Overflow team will be in New York City from the 24th to the 28th. It's partly business, and partly a reward to our team for their hard work on the site. What are some cool geeky things for us to do in NYC?

We wonder: do newscasters wear pants?

Joel describes his upcoming Inc. magazine article enumerating the seven development mistakes we made in building Stack Overflow. I think by seven he meant zero.

Most of the reviews of Cuil and Knol are negative because "I tried it for what it was intended to be used, and it didn't work."

The power of short informal code reviews in bridging the skill gap between beginning and expert software developers. Good developers think of this as self-preservation, because today's beginner code is tomorrow's code you'll have to maintain.

There have been a lot of requests for a packaged, customized version of Stack Overflow, but we have some reservations about the difficulty of delivering a packaged solution, and whether the current design will scale down to smaller private communities at all.

Should trusted users be allowed to close questions? Or should the community simply vote them down? I argue we need both of these methods; Joel feels we only need voting.

It's ok to have some "fun" programming questions every now and then. It can't be a community if you don't stop every so often to have some (at least partially on topic) fun.

We also answered the following listener questions:

"How do you handle newbie questions?"

Richard: "How do you cultivate programmer mentoring at a small company?"

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.