The Stack Overflow Podcast

This is the twelfth episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, wherein Joel and Jeff discuss the following:

The difficulty of working on an airplane, even with an ultraportable laptop. I use the Dell XPS M1330, which I love, but it's still marginal on an airplane.

It's not quite version control, but why doesn't our IDE automatically create lightweight versions every time we save?

Joel discovers the wide world of undervolting, which can dramatically reduce the power usage (and thus heat generation) of the Intel CPU inside the Macbook Air -- which is notorious for overheating. The program is coolbook; look into it if you have a Macbook Air.

Marco Arment provides this sage bit of advice: Don't let Jeff Atwood lead your web project. Too late! I try to avoid becoming the web equivalent of Usenet's James Parry (kibo), the original egosurfer, by responding to every single post that includes my name. But it does give me an opportunity to reply via the podcast using an audio clip from my very favorite two man novelty band, Flight of the Conchords.

Stack Overflow is meant to replace some books, but by no means all of them. We love books! We spend the rest of the episode discussing Joel's Fog Creek Software Management Training Program reading list. It is a fantastic list, filled with excellent reads that will broaden and inspire you as a software developer -- or software entrepreneur.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention my favorite technical book title of all time: The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison.

It's not a book, exactly, but I highly recommend the 2001 documentary Startup.com which provides a sometimes disturbing look into the hysteria at the height of the original dot-com era.

If you only read one book from this list, make it Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. And if you like that, walk the list of Demarco and Lister books and read a few more!

I have read Robert X. Cringely for years. I love his older book Accidental Empires and the related three part video, Triumph of the Nerds. I was disturbed to find out from Joel that there is more than one Robert X. Cringely these days.

You own a copy of How to Win Friends & Influence People -- right? If not, why not? This is not a sleazy, ugly book like The Game. It's a timeless classic, as relevant today as it was over fifty years ago when it was originally written.

Don't have time to listen to all that jibba-jabba? Here is Joel's short list:

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

The Non-Designer's Design Book

Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

How to Win Friends & Influence People

Remember, most programmers don't read books -- but you should!

There were no listener questions this week. Please send in your questions -- the more controversial, the better!

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.

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

This is the eleventh episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and Jeff discuss the following:

Addressing a few key bits of podcast feedback: we'll try to avoid talking over each other, and the

callers who are asking questions, in the future.

On the value of software postmortems.

On data generation through Team System Database Edition and Redgate SQL Data Generator. If you don't have a tool to generate data, why not?

Joel provided me with a drop of the Joel on Software .NET discussion forums for the purposes of data load testing. It's up and running, but we're not sure we will use it; it might bias stackoverflow.com too heavily towards .NET topics initially.

Why not use full-text searching in SQL Server 2005 for stackoverflow.com? Joel says it's too hard to use, the index server is too disconnected from the main database process; it just has too many gotchas overall.

Joel sings the praises of Lucene.NET; it provides excellent full-text search results for the hosted FogBugz.

Reginald Braithwaite's fine essay We Have Lost Control of the Apparatus, which correctly notes that most desktop apps in the corporate world now have to compete with web apps.

On rooting out assumptions in discussions, to make sure you're actually discussing the same topic: try using the five whys technique Joel discussed.

The odd story of Microsoft's acquisition of LookOut, a popular and extremely fast indexing solution for Outlook. What happened? Why do so many large companies buy smaller software companies and then essentially kill them?

stackoverflow.com will be using Markdown, but one downside of Markdown it the spec allows HTML. This opens us up to XSS exploits, so we have to be very careful here.

If you do any sort of web programming whatsoever, please visit this page of XSS exploits, so you can "scroll" for yourself how dangerous and pervasive the XSS problem is today.

A discussion of the complex rules for storing and rendering both Markdown and HTML in the same content. It's part of the spec, and it gives users a lot of flexibility. We store both the Markdown and rendered HTML representations in the database.

We are using prettify.js which is almost magical in the way it works. It is used on Google Code, and it infers all syntax highlighting for most languages and content without any explicit markup indicating which language is in use. Are there other, better javascript syntax highlighters we should be looking at?

The difficulties of Silverlight: 1.0 versus 2.0, and the distinctly un-webbiness of the "rectangle in a browser" model. If Flash hasn't been able to overcome these obstacles in 10 years of use and near total ubiquity on the web, how is Silverlight going to?

I'm excited about the SquirrelFish project, which promises to speed up plain old JavaScript running in the browser dramatically -- 1.5 times faster than Firefox 3, and 2.6 times faster than Opera.

On Steve Yegge's essay Done And Get Things Smart -- is the only reliable way to identify truly great people through actually working with them? Or following the social graph of "name the greatest engineer you have worked with" chain all the way back as far as you can?

Joel himself probably wouldn't pass the current interview process at Fog Creek. Hiring is hard; it's better to err on the side of safety, which means a lot of great programmers will get turned down.

We also answered the following listener questions:

Stephen Hill: "What do you think of Microsoft's Silverlight?"

Dave Roberts: "Joel, would you hire Jeff? If not, would you hire me?"

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.

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

This is the tenth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and Jeff discuss the following:

We provide some background for new listeners on what Stack Overflow will be. See Joel's post and Jeff's post.

Although we have ambivalent feelings about Expert's Exchange, what we're doing with Stack Overflow is similar, and they do have a sense of humor -- and invited me to a conference.

We will be using the cc-wiki licensing terms for content posted on Stack Overflow.

Hopefully we can ship before Wine (which just hit version 1 after 15 years) and Duke Nukem Forever. Check out a list of things that have happened since Duke Nukem Forever began development.

I confess that I was shocked to find out, while listening to our own podcasts, I wasn't hearing everything Joel was saying! Listening is hard. Make sure you're thinking about this the next time you listen to someone.

Joel has fun with instantrimshot.com and I mention sadtrombone.com ; these are excellent examples of the emerging classes of single-serving websites.

You crazy hackers figured out our super-secret beta website URL! I invite participation for the upcoming private beta, but our in-development site is not suitable for human consumption at this point. There is a special prize for those hardy few that "hacked" their way into the development site, though.

A brief discussion of the badges that you can earn while participating in the Stack Overflow site. We don't need no stinkin' badges, of course, but I think they'll be fun and complimentary to the reputation system.

Stack Overflow edits will only be possibly for users who have earned a little bit of reputation on the site by actively participating. This is where we diverge a smidge from Wikipedia, which still (amazingly!) allows regular anonymous edits. But I think it's a reasonable compromise: anonymous people can ask and answer, but not edit.

Jarrod did a tremendous job of getting our one-click build set up: it deploys the database, the code, and even runs unit tests against the website before deploying it. We're using MSBuild and nUnit.

Joel references AntiPatterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures, and Projects in Crisis (Paperback), and describes a few of the anti-patterns he's seen while developing small apps at Fog Creek for internal use.

On the dangers of being an internal IT developer. This is important if you love coding.

One of personal favorite bits of Joel's writing, on cleaning the toilet. Naturally.

Sometimes as a manager, it's your job to do the grubby, ugly stuff so the sales guys can sell and the developers can develop.

We use TortoiseSVN for Subversion integration as almost all other Windows developers do. But as Visual Studio developers, we've also adopted VisualSVN, which I highly recommend! It makes working with Subversion a pleasure instead of a chore, at least in my opinion.

At Fog Creek, they're switching to Mercurial source control, which like Git is part of the new, emerging class of distributed version control.

Source control remains the bedrock of software engineering. I meet so few software developers, myself included, that really understand source control. Just avoid SourceSafe at all costs, and understand the value of branching and merging.

Is there anything positive anyone can possibly say about Windows Mobile? How can something six versions old be this terrible? It should be razed to the ground and reinvented, ala Zune and Xbox 360. Can Google's Android be like Windows Mobile, sans all the sucking? I expect Apple to dominate this closed ecosystem; it plays to all their strengths.

On Ruby performance, scaling, "enterpriseyness" and whether or not this is even the right question to ask. Shouldn't we be thinking of this in terms of the solution first, and the language as a side-effect of that?

We also answered the following listener questions:

Sebastian Dwornik: "Doesn't the current mobile phone platform war remind y...

This is the ninth episode of the StackOverflow podcast -- the first fully hosted on itconversations -- wherein Joel and Jeff discuss the following:

Apple's WWDC is going on this week, and Joel has a few Fog Creek people at the conference.

at a WWDC party, I saw my friend Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster, who just so happens to be a FogBugz user. If you have a Mac, check out Delicious Monster 2!

On the use of Javascript -- is it OK to require JavaScript on today's web?

How to pronounce OS X.

On Nicholas Carr's excellent Atlantic article Is Google Making Us Stupid? His blog is outstanding as well and highly recommended. Many people know him from his book Does IT Matter?

On the challenges of tagging and hierarchy, and the folly of attempting to define popularity before it exists.

The StackOverflow private beta is still scheduled for early next month. We have to go through at least one full cycle privately with Joel first. Beyond that, we will be seeding the site with the existing content of the discuss.joelonsoftware.com .NET questions forum.

On the absurdity and emotional emptiness of TechCrunch. Is it venture capital pornography?

A quick reference to my friend Matt Hempey's Here Comes Another Bubble video. It's so good, it won a webby award!

News flash: Joel adopts instant messaging technology, seven years after the fact!

We did our first server deployment of the stackoverflow code, where we ran into a little ASP.NET MVC beta problem. We're crossing our fingers and hoping ASP.NET MVC will have a "go live" license before we enter the public beta.

Joel describes the way they use FinalBuilder, and I describe my brief dabblings with MSBuild.

On the strange sentiment of "I agree with everything you've written, except.."

Why does Amazon's affiliate program work, when Fog Creek's Fogbugz affiliate program did not?

How Google Answers failed because they paid people.

Is it possible to "specialize in being a generalist"? Does that even mean anything? Expressing our general affection for Seth Godin, while acknowledging that he is, after all, a marketing weasel. But a really, really good one!

An example of specialization in action: how Larry O'Brien's single post on programming Sabre generated the majority of his income.

How I personally wish the "begins-with-www or doesn't-begin-with-www" debate would just go away. Perhaps some humor will help? Probably not.

A final coda on Joel's question to our audience about password management.

On the manifold evils of focus stealing, and our very favorite home page of all time: about:blank

We also answered the following listener questions:

John Topley: "What are your thoughts on affiliate programs, such as the new 37signals affiliate program?"

Matthew Glidden: "What do you think of Seth Godin's We specialize in everything?"

Jim McKeeth: "A reproducible way of generating a secure password: passwordmaker.org"

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.

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

This is the eighth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and I discuss the following:

As of our next podcast, we will be hosted at ITConversations -- the NPR of podcasts. A good outfit to be associated with!

Yes, Joel does pronounce "wav file" as "wohv file". I have no idea. Ask him.

Joel keynoted the Rails conference. Josh Susser said "If you missed it, count yourself lucky." Apparently at least David Heinemeier Hansson liked it.

It's true that I objected to David's attitude towards people who don't use Macs, but it's possible to have objections to specific statements people make, or specific beliefs they may have, and still respect them as a person. Disagreement does not mean we are mortal enemies. David has a lot of smart, interesting things to say. That just wasn't one of them.

"The programming community is larger than any one particular tribe." But why are certain communities more insular and insecure than others? Joel relates this to cognitive dissonance.

I remain a big fan of Clay Shirky and his latest book. How big a fan? It's Clay Shirky's Internet, We Just Live In It. I believe every working programmer who touches the web should read his latest book, Here Comes Everybody.

On addressing criticism -- "there arise a new, young generation of rebels who remember not when you were the young rebel, writing new things, and making no claim to authority."

I found Paulo's thoughtful criticism of our podcast and I wanted to address it. To quote Randy Pausch: "That’s a lesson that stuck with me my whole life. When you see yourself doing something badly and nobody’s bothering to tell you anymore, that’s a very bad place to be. Your critics are your ones telling you they still love you and care."

Joel feels like he was misunderstood on the topic of exceptions. Well, if you were writing a memory allocator for an operating system, anyway.

Joel and I do agree that threading is hard. It's amazing that web apps largely get a pass on this, thanks to the architecture of the webserver model.

I give a shout-out to Rick Brewster of Paint.NET who calls the (excellent) threading code he wrote in Paint.NET "easily the most complex code in Paint.NET"

We're using SQL Server 2005 as the underlying database for stackoverflow.com. We engage in a brief discussion of the pros and cons of Oracle and MySQL databases in our (limited) experience.

Joel describes his frustration with the way some writers turn single anecdotes into statements of truth, both on the internet and off. Of course Joel and I are both guilty of this, too.

In my better blog posts, I tend to use more of a meta-aggregation model, where I do research and summarize what I found. I point to a lot of different opinions, then offer my own -- but I try to diligently avoid clinging religiously to my opinions. In the face of new, better data, I can be convinced. I firmly believe in strong opinions, weakly held.

When it comes to Domain Specific Languages, we definitely prefer them to a bunch of XML. I am particularly fond of SQL and Regular Expressions as mini-DSLs -- I believe in embracing the concept of languages inside languages.

Joel and I are still very excited about Microsoft's DLR (IronPython and IronRuby) as an escape route from the superficial differences between the Coke and Pepsi of C# and VB.NET.

welcome Geoff Dalgas to the stackoverflow.com programming team!

As usual, thank you for all the questions and for the Wiki edits!

We also answered the following listener question:

Tendayi Mawushe: In the enterprise Java world, you can't do much without writing a lot of XML. In response to that, a new idea little domain specific languages is emerging. What are your thoughts on this?

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.

The t...

This is the seventh episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and I discuss the following:

Many thanks to Stuart Cam for recording a stackoverflow theme song; a brief digression on the introductions to the Sopranos and Get Smart.

How programmers know it's a holiday: the door to the office is locked, or the Google logo changes.

Tuesday is also Rock Band new song download day. This week was pretty epic -- the complete album The Cars. Joel would like the 1975 song Convoy. Maybe he's a CB radio fan?

Working from home, I miss some of the camaraderie of my fellow programmers. What can I do about that? I've always admired Joel's commitment to creating a good working environment for programmers. Joel has a regular column in Inc. magazine, and the June issue happens to cover this topic.

Joel calls http://www.officesnapshots.com/ "office pornography", where "pornography" is described as "looking at pictures of things you can't have." It's also sort of like MTV Cribs for the IT set.

Joel points out that cool office common areas are great, but what really matters is the desk where you actually do your work.

I like to build my own PCs and use three monitors, so it's difficult for me to bring my work with me without it turning into a comedy routine. Another reason I enjoy having my own office: I'm into decorating -- see my old office at Vertigo.

Do private offices interfere with collaboration and pair programming?

Which configuration of monitors is ideal for programming?

I profess my love for WinSplit Revolution, which I consider essential on any monitor larger than 22". We also wonder why OS window managers aren't smarter about edge snapping and using available desktop space intelligently.

An extended discussion of OpenID. I encourage everyone reading this to sign up for an OpenID and try it yourself. I recommend myopenid. Joel signs up for an OpenID live on the podcast.

The importance of proper OpenID attribute exchange -- so you can store your avatar image, URL, birthday, address and so forth in one place and have it handed over automatically to websites from your OpenID provider. Without this, OpenID is much less attractive.

A discussion of Eric Sink's C and Morse Code -- isn't programmer time spent learning C better spent learning how to communicate and understand the business domain they're working in? There's a deeper topic of Systems Analyst vs. Programmer here that we'll have to dig into.

Reminder: Joel will be in Portland keynoting RailsConf later this week.

Joel wants people to write in about their preferred password management solutions.

As usual, thank you for all the questions and for the Wiki edits! We appreciate all the interest in the private beta signups, too.

We also answered the following listener question, with a lot of peripheral discussion on related topics:

John Dyer: Isn't it better for programmers to program using standard programming frameworks and libraries rather than creating things from scratch?

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.

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

This is the sixth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and I discuss the following:

A mercifully brief critique of Joel's Skype avatar. Of course, he should be using this image.

The other programmer I'm working with, Jarrod, will be visiting me this week. It's his first visit to California! Welcome to the San Francisco Bay area -- geek mecca. We will get some pair programming time in.

We'll also visit the Computer History Museum, one of my favorite places in the world. I like to refer to it as computer hardware pornography.

An examination of the ASP.NET MVC development model as compared to the classic ASP.NET Form model.

We'll be using JQuery as our JavaScript and AJAX framework, and ELMAH for error handling duties.

A bit on the Fog Creek philosophy of error handling: crashes are automatically entered in Fogbugz.

About crashing in general. I enjoy talking about this because I think it's incredibly important. Crash responsibly!

Why you should pay people not to work at your company.

Why am I so evangelical about Twitter?

What should Joel talk about at the Rails Conference Keynote?

Is it unfair to dismiss Java? Is the only difference between Java and COBOL that Java doesn't require you to type keywords in all capital letters?

The rare topic that Joel and I agree on: presentations should be about entertainment first and information second.

What's the best way to deal with the larger bandwidth requirements for a podcast? We're going to use up more than 1250 GB this month. Should we be on ITConversations?

We would like to support OpenID for site logins.

About my $5,000 donation to open source on .NET -- or more specifically, to ScrewTurn Wiki.

A brief mention of Google DocType and the now defunct Google Answers.

Is Google starting to have the Microsoft "big company" problem? Why can't big companies effectively spin off smaller companies?

What is the Microsoft "Strategy Tax"?

The list of new features in Vista. How many did you know about? More importantly, how many of these features do you use and care about?

A mention of the [Software Engineering Radio](http://se-radio.net/ ) podcast.

As usual, thank you for all the questions and for the Wiki edits! We appreciate all the interest in the private beta signups, too.

We also answered the following listener questions, with a lot of peripheral discussion on related topics:

Warren Henning: Why custom build stackoverflow.com when you could use something off the shelf?

Andrew Hay: Why did you choose to reinvent the default ASP.NET membership provider?

Martin Wallace: Have you considered open sourcing the stackoverflow.com code?

Daniel Thompson: What should be in the next version of Windows, and is it worth spending hundreds of dollars to upgrade?

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.

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

This is the fifth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and I discuss the following:

Trivia clarifications from podcast #3: Leonardo DiCaprio on Growing Pains, and how the Fonz actually Jumped the Shark in Happy Days

Thanks for all the offers to pitch in and help!

The StackOverflow private beta should be in about 6-8 weeks.

My depressing lack of project planning: Joel maintains I need a task list. In Fogbugz, of course.

A discussion of the ASP.NET login provider model and NTLM, and how to enable NTLM in Firefox.

A correlation between the prevalence of NTLM and Microsoft's model of developing software for corporations versus developing software for consumers.

A discussion on David Heinemeier-Hansson's excellent Startup School talk: Is it pathetic that someone needs to stand up at a startup school and tell people that they need to charge for their product?

Businesses will spend money -- consumers won't. You can't make money selling commodities to consumers as a startup; you have to sell a luxury.

The Google model: get the eyeballs, figure out how to make money later. Is that fair to startups? Can every startup make it to the necessary scale to get that revenue model to work?

experiments with AdSense on fakeplasticrock.com and codinghorror.com (search)

Why Joel and I feel compelled to run ad-blocking software in our browsers. Why doesn't it block the Google search result ads? Are search result ads more task-related and thus useful?

Jamie Zawinski on social networking websites: they should get you laid.

I try to get Joel to use Twitter again, and he references the Penny Arcade cartoon. I still think it's useful. Follow me on Twitter!

A (very) long -- but worthwhile -- discussion about my recent post on XML.

Revealing Notepad's "bug".

Apps like RescueTime which track what applications you're running over time.

Discussion of an email from Michael Dorfman, wherein he is embarrassed on my behalf for my lack of computer science rigor.

Joel questions the sense of humor of his readers.

A brief bit of advice from Joel on washing your electronics, and how to fix your computers by dropping them. Hey, I didn't say it was good advice.

Thank you for all the questions and for the Wiki edits!

There were no listener questions this week. We'd love to answer your questions on any topic!

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].

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

This is the fourth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and I discuss the following:

Why we think stackoverflow.com isn't "reinventing the wheel", or at least, reinventing it in a useful way. Failure, however, is always an option.

We will be using ASP.NET MVC to build stackoverflow, as covered in my recent blog post. Joel and I carry on a long discussion of Model-View-Controller.

A mention of CSS Zen Garden. Joel thinks it's an unrealistic example, but I don't.

Defining "skinnability", whether it applies to your application, or if it even matters.

A mention of this year's Maker Faire, where I met the Wikimedia Foundation's Jay Walsh. Followed by an examination of why we admire Wikipedia and consider it a defining influence.

Guests welcome! You will be able to participate fully in stackoverflow.com without ever creating an account -- but there will be perks for creating an account.

A bit about our reputation system -- learning the lessons of PageRank.

Dealing with the inevitable evil users and users who actively game the reputation system. Not you, of course. We like you.

Adopting Creative Commons by-nc-sa for our podcast and CCWiki for stackoverflow.com.

On the contract between Joel and Jeff to form stackoverflow.com : the difference between a C Corporation and Limited Liability Company (scintillating!)

Do we need lawyers? Yes, we need lawyers. Unfortunately.

The final results of our logo contest.

Twitter: is it only useful for "web celebrities?" I personally love Twitter and find it quite useful. Follow me on Twitter, and see for yourself. I'll try to convince Joel to join up.

Tip of the week: Redgate SQL Compare.

Thank you for all the questions and for the Wiki edits!

We also answered the following listener questions, with a lot of peripheral discussion on related topics:

Kyle Neumeier: How will you provide enough content to achieve a critical mass of activity on stackoverflow.com?

Andrew Morrow: How will you deal with answer ordering and voting? Will it be based on votes alone? If so, how do we follow the thread of a conversation?

ObviousTroll: Is it worthwhile to go back to school and get a graduate degree in computer science?

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].

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

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

A brief, but awesome, reference to Donald Gibb in Revenge of the Nerds.

We are now using Skype and Pamela to record our podcast for higher quality.

Joel's original 2002 Recommended Programmer Reading list and Jeff's Top 5 Programming Books -- and why stackoverflow.com will complement, not replace, these kinds of books.

The ineffable Steve Yegge, and a digression on the philosophy of Apple and Microsoft font rendering strategies.

Confirming that stackoverflow.com will be as language agnostic as we can make it. It is for programming questions, whatever the language and platform. Yes, it's true that Joel and I have a Microsoft background, but we respect that programming is far larger than Microsoft.

Why You Should Learn C (again).

On our technology stack: stackoverflow.com will be built in ASP.NET running on our dedicated Windows Server 2008 x64 box -- but that doesn't mean stackoverflow.com, the site, will be about ASP.NET!

On jumping the shark.

An extended examination of everyone's favorite language: Wasabi! Along with some reasons why you might actually want to build your own DSL and compiler.

A discussion of our logo contest at 99designs.com.

What, exactly, is a stack overflow?

We also answered the following listener questions, with a lot of peripheral discussion on related topics:

Dave Kauffman: On Computer Science versus Software Engineering: is there any real-world use for recursion?

Nick Malaguti: How should he deal with real world programming projects as a part of college classes? Specifically, the fact that there's no real hierarchy and an inability to move the deadline? Also, what software do you recommend to manage software projects? (Joel swears that Nick was not paid to ask this question, in case you were wondering.)

David Alison: What do we think of services like the Google App Engine?

Tim Patterson: How to use blogtalkradio.com to easily record a question for stackoverflow using nothing but your telephone and a web browser.

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].

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