Friday, April 6, 2018

The Stack Overflow Age

Joel Spolsky (tweet):

And, also: Stack Overflow will be ten years old soon! Wow! So I thought it would be cool to get the old band back together for a little reunion tour over the next few weeks. I want to catch you all up on some stuff but mostly I want to tell the story of Stack Overflow in a not-completely-disorganized way. With some perspective, it’s clearer now what we did right and what we messed up, so I’ll try to cover the good and the bad over a series of blog posts.

[…]

Of course, it turned out a lot bigger than we thought it would. The company today has 250 employees, is profitable, and has made it possible for millions of people to learn how to code and to deal with the new, super-complicated world of APIs and frameworks that we live in. But we just wanted to fix the internet.

2 Comments RSS · Twitter

Programming, especially in an unfamiliar language or framework, has become unthinkable without access to Stack Overflow.

I am not a programmer, so Stack Overflow gets less use, but other nodes on the Stack Exchange network have been likewise invaluable for my needs. From Linux/Mac/Windows/Android to grammar, a lot of information at my finger tips. Don't get me wrong, for Linux stuff, I still hit the Arch, Gentoo, and Red Hat documentation as well, but to experience a discussion instead of just documentation has been invaluable.

It was interesting reading the Twitter thread on the Stack Overflow anniversary. Not sure what to think, but definitely an interesting conversation about inclusion and tone. Since I don't actually ask questions, hostility hasn't been a problem for me. I just read through results and then compare those notes with other sources, as mentioned, but it's definitely interesting seeing other people's perspectives.

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