Yearly Archives: 2009

company January 27, 2009

Reputation Bounty for Unanswered Questions

Do you feel like your Stack Overflow questions just aren’t getting the answers they deserve? If so, you’re not alone. As Corey Trager noted in a blog comment: Speaking for myself, you don’t have to reward me for ASKING questions on Stackoverflow: Getting an answer is enough of a reward in itself. Just do whatever…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company January 25, 2009

New Stack Overflow Servers Ready

After many trials and tribulations, the new Stack Overflow servers are now ready to ship. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the newest members of the stackoverflow.com hardware family: SOWEB1, SOWEB2, and SODB1. That’s right, I even labelled them with my black and silver sharpies. It’s been an awfully long month and a half since I originally…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company January 24, 2009

Adventures in Delclusionism

In Wikipedia, there are two opposing camps: the inclusionists and the deletionists. I found Nicholas Carr’s definitions to be the clearest and most succinct: Inclusionists believe that there should be no constraints on the breadth of the encyclopedia – that Wikipedia should include any entry that any contributor wants to submit. An article on a…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company January 22, 2009

Podcast #38

This is the 38th episode of the StackOverflow podcast, where Joel and Jeff discuss YSlow optimizations for large websites, the value of unit testing, and the hidden pitfalls of asking questions to programmers. Joel notes that simply paying attention to what your coworkers are doing is an effective way to build and lead a team.…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company January 17, 2009

Further Adventures of a RAID Noob

I mentioned in the last podcast that I wasn’t sure how the two-drive RAID mirroring was supposed to work in the Lenovo RS110 1U servers we bought. This server comes with a mini-PCI RAID card as standard equipment, the LSI 1064E. To set it up, I did the following: Installed two 500 GB “datacenter class”…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company January 15, 2009

Podcast #37

This is the 37th episode of the StackOverflow podcast, where Joel and Jeff discuss the expansion of Stack Overflow into non-programming IT topics, the pernicious problem of “systemitis”, and how to reach the next generation of programmers. I was star-struck that Alan Kay actually participated in Stack Overflow, both answering a question and even asking…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community January 14, 2009

Where In The World Do Stack Overflow Users Come From?

Someone asked what the breakdown of Stack Overflow users is by country — on Stack Overflow. I didn’t think it was a particularly appropriate question, because it’s a poll, a meta-question, and not even really a poll about programming per se. Sort of a triple whammy. But I’m happy to answer here on the blog,…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company January 14, 2009

Coming In March: IT Stack Overflow

As I alluded to in a previous post, part of the reason we’re investing in new server hardware is so that we can expand. We will launch an IT-centric Stack Overflow sister website in March 2009 While we haven’t quite worked out all the details yet, here’s what we do know: It’s a place where…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company January 12, 2009

New Stack Overflow Server Glamour Shots

In Server Hosting — Rent vs. Buy? I solicited opinions on whether it made more sense to continue renting our Stack Overflow servers, or to buy them. Thanks for everyone’s feedback on that! Now the die is cast — check out these sexy glamour shots of the two (soon to be three) new Stack Overflow…
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Co-Founder (Former)
background January 11, 2009

Welcome Our Newest Member: Alan Kay

I was amused to see this pop up on the Stack Overflow home page a few days ago: If you don’t know who Alan Kay is, first of all, shame on you — he’s one of the most important figures in modern computing: Kay is one of the fathers of the idea of object-oriented programming,…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community January 10, 2009

WMD Editor Reverse Engineered

Remember that WMD reverse engineering project we reluctantly undertook? Check out the current state of the Git repository: This is a major milestone — we’ve essentially de-obfuscated the WMD code, which was my #1 goal! A few thanks are in order: Chris Jester-Young for getting the ball rolling, doing quite a bit of de-obfuscation, and…
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Co-Founder (Former)
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