Podcast 228: chatting with Stack Overflow’s community developers

This week we chat with Adam Lear and Jon Chan, two developers who work on the community team at Stack Overflow. We grill them on the best way to measure developer productivity and what it’s like creating software for a community of tens of millions of coders, all of whom have strong opinions about how the product should work.

Jon is the team lead for Public Q&A, which is what we call the platform that hosts the 172 community sites across Stack. Adam is a senior software developer on the community team and a former community manager. 

Jon describes his job these days as intercepting all the meetings, phone calls, and busy work that would keep the devs on his team from actually writing code. That, and to deliver product on time and to spec, with the hope that a predictable product pipeline is the best way to keep all stakeholders happy.

Adam spends most days writing code, although his most productive days are the ones when he deletes more than he creates. He was part of the team that helped ship our recent Dark Mode feature. 

If you want to learn more about some of our plans for upcoming changes to Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, tune in Friday for part two of this episode.