Yearly Archives: 2010

area51 July 7, 2010

Your New Site: Asking the First Questions

What is the single most important design element of a new Q&A site? The name? The logo? The colors? The FAQ? Think about that for a moment — see if you know the answer — and we’ll get back to the question later. If you’ve spent any time on our back-channel at meta.stackoverflow.com, the most…
Avatar for Robert Cartaino
Director of Community Development (former)
company July 2, 2010

Our Designer in Residence: Jin Yang

I’m pleased to announce we now have a full-time, bona fide designer on our team: Jin Yang. I worked with Jin a bit in constructing the Super User design last year, but he was absolutely instrumental in putting together our amazing Area 51 design and the equally impressive ‘sketchy’ design for the current Web Applications…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community June 29, 2010

Server Fault: Hiring From the Community

Remember when I talked about Eating Our Own Careers Dogfood? Well, that applies to all of our sites, not just Stack Overflow. Including Server Fault. I’m pleased to announce we’re expanding our team on the System Administrator side with Server Fault user Kyle Brandt. (yes, technically this means Kyle is Stack Overflow Valued Associate #00009,…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
area51 June 27, 2010

Area 51: Trusting the Community

The team and I have been busy cranking out Stack Exchange proposals like crazy. And by “the team and I,” I mean “the team.” They write tons of software while I chime in with encouraging remarks like “good job” and “move this thing over there.” The tools our developers create provide an unprecedented opportunity for…
Avatar for Robert Cartaino
Director of Community Development (former)
background June 25, 2010

Welcome Stack Overflow Valued Associate #00008

I’d like to introduce Stack Overflow Valued Associate #00008 — Sam Saffron. Sam is from Australia, yes, that Australia, but I’ve forgiven the continent. Well, mostly. Sam, in addition to being an avid participant on Stack Overflow and Meta Stack Overflow, has been busy building stuff. His Media Browser is an open source plugin for…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
cc-wiki-dump June 25, 2010

Stack Exchange Data Explorer Open Sourced

As promised, the Stack Exchange Data Explorer — a web-based tool for querying our creative commons data — is now open source! This is, of course, the project that our newest Valued Associate, Sam Saffron, has been working so hard on over the last 6-8 weeks. The project is hosted at Google Code in a…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company June 24, 2010

DevDays will return, but not until 2011

Remember the awesomeness that was Stack Overflow DevDays? If you’re coming in late… last fall, we took Stack Overflow on the road to ten (10!) cities with awesome one-day conferences. Over 4000 people attended to hear tutorials on  jQuery, ASP.NET MVC, Python, iPhone development, and some other topics which varied from city to city. It…
Avatar for Joel Spolsky
Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
background June 23, 2010

Workin On Ur Problemz

If you’ve ever been unfortunate enough to see our “workin on ur problemz” Stack Overflow error page … … let me apologize on behalf of our team. I originally found this image in some random image search and added the lolcat caption myself. I’ve often wondered where this image came from, and what sort of…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
careers June 23, 2010

Careers: Now More Awesome(r)

Careers has always been close to our heart, but we haven’t always been able to give it the attention we wanted to give it. No longer! We now have a dedicated development team and a dedicated sales team working tirelessly to make Careers the best place on the internet for programmers to find great jobs…
Avatar for Korneel Bouman
community June 19, 2010

Improvements to Bounty System

We originally rolled out the question bounty system in January 2009. It has worked fairly well, in terms of motivating answerers and increasing the connection between askers and answerers. But I think we made some mistakes in being overly strict in our design of the bounty system. Just take a look at some of these…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
area51 June 16, 2010

Area 51: We Come in Peace

You guys remember when the Interweb was full of information you couldn’t vote on? And blog posts you couldn’t fix when they were wrong? Early humans used message forums that were sinister, scary places just teeming with “threads” and “conversations” that intermingled willy-nilly and — I swear on my children I am not making this…
Avatar for Robert Cartaino
Director of Community Development (former)
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