Stack Overflow Podcast #89 – The Decline of Stack Overflow Has Been Greatly Exaggerated
Welcome to The Stack Overflow (yes Overflow, listen to last week!) Podcast #89, recorded September 27 at Stack Overflow headquarters in NYC. This week’s installment is brought to you by Inuktitut, the premiere language of the arctic and one of Nunavut’s three official languages (Umiaryuap Publimaaqpaga tattaurniq ammayaq!) as well as National Voter Registration Day. Go to www.voteplz.org for the easiest way to register! “Every individual regardless of wealth or heritage has the same opportunity to vote and create real honest change.”
In this episode, Joel complains about things. How is that different from the other podcasts, you say? This time there’s singing.
Our hosts also talk about a few recent blog posts concerning the declining quality of Stack Overflow while trying very hard, and failing, to not quote the first U.S. presidential debate. Jay and Joel break down what these posts got right, what they got really wrong, and what we can learn from them in our mission to make Stack Overflow a better resource for the world’s developers. (Disclaimer: no Kewpie dolls were harmed in the making of this podcast.)
Speaking of the debate: Both candidates had something to say about tech, and we can’t let that go without at least discussing the yuge problem of using “cyber” as a noun. Check out this week’s “In The News” for this and much more, including hearing David ask “Grandpa Joel” to tell him more about the Xerox Alto.
Also, it’s the second week of our new feature (not a bug!): the Stack Overflow Constitution. Vote on this week’s amendment: Should programming languages count toward your college language requirement? Listen to the podcast to see where our hosts stand and tweet at us to weigh in yourself. Use the hashtag #StackOverflowPodcast and give us your Pro or Con with a brief explanation. The best answer will be read on the air next week, and by best, we mean which one made us laugh.
Last week’s winner, commenting on whether socks should go on before pants or pants before socks, was Bryan Bedard, who said
“Con. I tried to put socks on before pants but got an InvalidOperationException #StackOverflowPodcast” – Bryan Bedard, 3:53 PM – 26 Sep 2016
See you next week!
Notable links:
- Twitter: @stackpodcast
- Facebook: The Stack Overflow Podcast
- Our website is now live: http://stackoverflow.com/podcast
- Fascinating Xerox Alto restoration information
- Check out Esperanto on Stack Exchange and Lindsay Does Languages segment on Esperanto.
8 Comments
What happened to the comments? Guess we don’t like people questioning the almighty SO, eh?
That same thing that should happen to all useless discourse.
Useless Discourse: Things I disagree with.
Unrelated, but to trail onto the discussion we were having…
I don’t see nearly as much cynicism and elitism on other StackExchange sites as I do SO. Information Security, SharePoint… even the Programmers page. You just don’t see the level of obnoxiousness that you see on StackOverflow. StackOverflow contains a special breed of douchebaggery.
Nobody disagrees that people should be civil when moderating, and we have plenty of tools for dealing with those people that can’t leave their bad attitude at the door.
The problem is that some folks claim they’re being abused solely because their off-topic questions get closed. Those folks are not arguing the issues on their merits.
The comments on this post were wiped inadvertently when we updated Jekyll (the engine that powers our blog). The update changed the post’s URL from lowercase to title case, which caused Disqus to treat it like a new post. Sorry about that–we’re looking into the error.
(This happened on our other recent blog posts, too. Not just the ones that happened to be housing heated quality debates.)
Where’s my tin foil hat! 🙂
If the StackOverflow team is as I imagine it, the responsible party has been publicly shamed and has already seen a coding review in which other snobby developers sit around and castigate him to make them feel better about themselves.