Welcome to the Stack Exchange Podcast, episode #65, recorded Tuesday, May 12, 2015 at Stack Exchange Headquarters in New York City. Today’s podcast is brought to you by the Association of Airline Mile Programs and hosted by the usual suspects. We’ll start off with the extremely important and community-relevant subject of why Joel hates frequent flyer programs. It’s a fascinating story and I can’t do it justice in summary. But I will say, for those of you who find it TOO ENTERTAINING AND DRAMATIC, that this story ends around 7 minutes into the show. 7:16 to be exact.
Things we are working on that are very similar to airline miles programs:
Site designs! We’re updating them. All of them. The down side of giving every graduated site a custom design is that when we want to design something new–a new user profile, for instance–we have to design it fifty times. So we’re standardizing all of our designs and modernizing a few of them so we can roll new stuff out more easily. Ask Different and Android Enthusiasts are good examples of what we’ve been up to. You can find the full list of updated sites (and those still waiting for updates) on meta. Mobile updates! We’ve released updates for both of our mobile apps (on Android and iOS). (The Windows Phone app is still in the planning stages; the current plan is to wait until Windows runs iOS apps.) Data stuff! We’re working behind the scenes to make your experience on Stack Overflow and Careers better (or at least more relevant to you). We’re improving Careers matching, which makes us able to match you with better job ads in the sidebar, and to recommend more relevant jobs to people who go to Careers. It’s also related to the stuff we’re using to recommend you questions on the Stack Overflow homepage that you might want to answer, and THAT in turn is related to the Next Answer Hook, in which we try to find you more questions to answer that are similar to the question you just answered. (If you want to go right the source, you can find top jobs in design, mobile and more over at Stack Overflow Jobs.)
Things that already happened which we haven’t yet talked about (enough):
The new user profile! It’s the big thing that we launched since the last podcast. Jay’s going to talk about it because he wrote the blog post. We’ve been working on this for a looooong time. Joel will give the overview, for those who haven’t been paying attention, and who also didn’t read the blog post I just linked. The short version is that we split your profile into two parts: the part you care about (Activity), and the part other people care about (Profile). We talk about this for a while. The most important part of the discussion is that if you enjoyed this podcast, you can mail Joel Spolsky a note. You can find the office’s mailing address on the website. And in case you were TOO FASCINATED by this tangent, Jay brings us back to the topic of the new profile features around minute 31. (By the way, here’s the thread about new privileges, where you can suggest anything as long as it isn’t animated GIF backgrounds for your profile.) The moral of the story is that we–specifically Jay and David–learned a lot about how to manage projects, products, and processes through this experience. Okay. Whew. User profile page talk: done (around 56:00). It’s finally time for…
Community Milestones!
- We have a Health site in public beta.
- CiviCRM is in public beta too – and we have no idea how to pronounce it.
- Woodworking is in (you guessed it) public beta.
- Stack Overflow in Russian–the artist formerly known as HashCode.ru–has officially launched, and is doing phenomenally.
Thanks for listening to Stack Exchange Podcast Episode #65. For a special treat stay tuned after the credits for the Very First Episode of the Stack Overflow Podcast, starring Joel and co-founder (emeritus) Jeff Atwood.