company September 21, 2008

What Was Stack Overflow Built With?

This question keeps coming up a lot on Stack Overflow for some reason: What was Stack Overflow built with? Some even wondered if Stack Overflow was built in Ruby on Rails. I consider that a compliment! This question has been covered in some detail in our podcasts, of course, but I know not everyone has…

Jeff Atwood Co-Founder (Former)

This question keeps coming up a lot on Stack Overflow for some reason:

What was Stack Overflow built with?

Some even wondered if Stack Overflow was built in Ruby on Rails. I consider that a compliment!

This question has been covered in some detail in our podcasts, of course, but I know not everyone has time to listen to a bunch of audio footage to find the answer to their question. So, in that spirit, here’s the technology “stack” of Stack Overflow, the stuff Jarrod, Geoff, and I used to build it:

framework	Microsoft ASP.NET
language	C#
development environment	Visual Studio
web framework	ASP.NET MVC
browser framework	jQuery
database	SQL Server 2008
data access layer	LINQ to SQL
source control	Subversion (now Mercurial through Kiln)
compare tool	Beyond Compare
source control integration	VisualSVN (now, VisualHg)

We have a few other minor dependencies as well, such as ReCaptcha, DotNetOpenId, and the WMD control (which we subsequently rewrote), but that’s about it.

The Stack Overflow Podcast is a weekly conversation about working in software development, learning to code, and the art and culture of computer programming.

se-stackoverflow March 21, 2023

What our engineers learned building Stack Overflow (Ep. 551)

Charles “Cobih” Obih and Radek Markiewicz of the Stack Overflow platform team join Ben and Ryan to talk about changes to the inbox and what it’s like to build Stack Overflow’s public platform.