Monthly Archives: December 2009

community December 28, 2009

Introducing MarkdownSharp

One of the things that came out of Markdown, One Year Later was that we really needed to open source our C# server-side implementation of Markdown. While the client side implementation of Markdown is already open sourced, there are two sides to the Markdown story on Stack Overflow — what appears in the Javascript preview…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company December 24, 2009

Podcast #78

In this episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Joel and Jeff sit down with Paul, David, and Matthew — the creators of Litmus and DocType — to discuss ASCII vs. pixels, the power of Amazon EC2, and the unglamorous but critically important topic of backup. The fine folks at Litmus created DocType partly as a…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community December 19, 2009

Free Vote-Based Advertising for Open Source Projects

I’m happy to announce that Stack Overflow’s program of free vote-based advertising for Open Source projects, originally proposed back in September, is now live! Some say Stack Overflow is now the largest programming site on the internet. I’m not sure about that, but I can tell you that Stack Overflow regularly gets well over a…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company December 18, 2009

Scheduled Site Maintenance – Saturday

This Saturday, December 19th, from 4 PM to 8 PM PST, all trilogy sites and the blog will be down for a spot of maintenance. What are we doing? A few things, several of which were inspired by comments on our Server Rack Glamour Shots: Upgrading one server which does a lot of VM utility…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company December 17, 2009

Podcast #77

In this episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Joel and Jeff discuss how to (accidentally) destroy your software business, Google’s new DNS and page speed rankings, and why the most productive employees aren’t paid 10 times as much. Just as a disaster planning exercise, what kind of things could happen that would destroy your software…
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Co-Founder (Former)
background December 16, 2009

Badges: Positive Only

There’s been no shortage of proposals for new badges since we first announced the badge system in August 2008. And we have implemented quite a few new ones since then, many of them based on community feedback: Tag-based badges Reversal and Pundit Enthusiast and Fanatic Mortarboard, Epic, and Legendary (Yes, more are planned.. I have…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background December 14, 2009

Stack Overflow Rack Glamour Shots

We installed our secondary (backup) database server tonight. Geoff took the opportunity to snap a few glamour shots of the Stack Overflow server rack at our host PEAK Internet. I present them here for your unbridled enjoyment and pleasure: update: Based on feedback from this post, we went back and improved our rack hygiene: These…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background December 13, 2009

Blog Outage – Backup Policies

On Friday, the server which hosts this blog suffered catastrophic data loss. Fortunately, the blog server is at a different datacenter entirely than PEAK, which hosts all the Trilogy sites. It’s a long story, and I’ll document it in more detail elsewhere, but the short version is this: This particular host’s (again, not PEAK) backup…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background December 8, 2009

Stack Overflow Trilogy Lego Minifigs

Courtesy of Stack Overflow user MicTech, we have the following photos of Lego characters in Trilogy-appropriate garb: The League of Web Justice has never been so darn adorable! Update: I finally got much higher resolution pictures of the Trilogy minifigs, and you can view them here.
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company December 5, 2009

Database Server Upgrade: Outage Saturday

There will be an outage today from 5 pm – 7 pm PST as we upgrade the database server. If you’re curious, we’re going from 2.5 GHz to 3.33 GHz CPUs, and using the old CPUs to build a second, backup database server. Our last upgrade was in July when we went from 24 GB…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company December 4, 2009

Podcast #76

In this episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Joel and Jeff discuss the Stack Overflow Careers philosophy, online community growth patterns, and how to tell if you’re Sid Meier or not. Stack Overflow Careers is now fully open for business! Joel explains what it’s all about, the proverbial programmer search engine. One thing we have…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
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