It was one year ago today that the Stack Overflow private beta started. The first question was asked at 21:42 on July 31st, 2008.
Which means we've been doing this thing in public for a full year now -- it's a Stack Overflow birthday!
Some stats for our first year:
- Three new "family" sites have launched (serverfault.com, superuser.com, and meta.stackoverflow.com)
- 208 blog posts have been posted
- 63 podcasts have been recorded
- 258,560 questions have been asked; 932,356 answers have been provided
- 104,213 registered accounts have been created
- two full-time associates are on board (Jarrod and Geoff)
- Stack Overflow now peaks at 965k pageviews per day, and 414k visits per day.
But more important than any of this, is that I think we've honestly raised the quality bar for getting good answers to programming questions on the internet. There is nothing more thrilling to me than clicking on a Stack Overflow family search result in my own web searches -- I know the page will load fast, and the information I seek will be right at hand. And it'll be clean, clear, and formatted well through the tireless fractional effort of programmers just like me. Oh, and I do my part too -- I vote the heck out of things I find useful, and always try to leave them better than I found them, by providing more information in an answer or comment, or editing the posts for clarity.
If this thing we've been doing for the past year has been a success, I can't take credit for that. But you can:
This is the scary part, the great leap of faith that Stack Overflow is predicated on: trusting your fellow programmers. The programmers who choose to participate in Stack Overflow are the “secret sauce” that makes it work. You are the reason I continue to believe in developer community as the greatest source of learning and growth. You are the reason I continue to get so many positive emails and testimonials about Stack Overflow. I can’t take credit for that. But you can.
I learned the collective power of my fellow programmers long ago writing on Coding Horror. The community is far, far smarter than I will ever be. All I can ask — all any of us can ask — is to help each other along the path.
Nothing motivates me more than the idea that, together, we're raising the quality of our little corner of the internet in a tiny but measurable way. It is both a pleasure and an honor to serve the community in this endeavor, and I look forward to many more years of the same.
update: Yearling badges are now being awarded. Consider that your birthday cake!