Yearly Archives: 2008

background July 18, 2008

Easy Background Tasks in ASP.NET

As I work on the badge implementation for Stack Overflow, I needed a way to call the code that detects and awards the badges out of band. Traditionally this is done by something like cron or scheduled tasks. I’d rather have the code stay inside our current codebase, though. I asked on Twitter and got…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company July 16, 2008

Podcast #14

This is the fourteenth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and Jeff discuss the following: This week’s Rock Band downloadable content is epic — the best of the Who. Pointless podcast trivia: the Who song Baba O’Reily is a concatenation of two influences, one philosophical, the other musical: Meher Baba and Terry Riley. “They’re…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company July 12, 2008

Stack Overflow Badge Feedback

Are you familiar with the “stinking badges” quote? It’s from the 1948 movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Here’s the actual clip from the movie: As I mentioned in Podcast #13 (and probably earlier), Stack Overflow will feature a system of badges. Hopefully the non-stinking type. These badges are based on my admiration —…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company July 10, 2008

Podcast #13

This is the thirteenth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and Jeff discuss the following: Joel Spolsky still claims he is a New Zealander — or at least his father was — though I refuse to believe anything that is not in Joel’s Wikipedia entry can possibly be true. More evidence: FogBugz uses the…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company July 2, 2008

Podcast #12

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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company June 30, 2008

Listen to Podcasts in Less Time

Joel may not listen to our podcasts after we record them, but I certainly do. I have to in order to put together the show notes with hyperlinks, and the episode summary. One way to speed up listening to the podcast is to use the fast playback option. In Windows Media Player, you can do…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company June 26, 2008

Podcast #11

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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company June 25, 2008

Three Markdown Gotchas

I’ve enjoyed working with the excellent WMD “what you see is what you mean” Markdown control while building Stack Overflow. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised how easy it is to type a smattering of concise Markdown and generate rather nice-looking content. One of Markdown’s biggest advantages is its simplicity. Here’s a little Markdown test post…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background June 21, 2008

A Strangely Familiar Error

Geoff Dalgas, the newest member of the Stack Overflow team, shared this strangely familiar error message he ran into while working on another project recently. Ah yes, the elusive stack overflow: In software, a stack overflow occurs when too much memory is used on the call stack. In many programming languages the call stack contains…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company June 20, 2008

Safe HTML and XSS

As I’ve mentioned before, we are using the most excellent WMD Markdown editor, for the reasons I outlined in that post. However, Markdown, per the official spec, supports both HTML syntax and Markdown syntax. You can mix and match both syntaxes freely. This is great if you want to stick with HTML and not learn…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company June 19, 2008

Podcast #10

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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
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