Podcast 300: Welcome to 2021 with Joel Spolsky
The Stack Overflow podcast is celebrating a milestone: Episode 300! As we ring in the new year we’ve brought on the man who co-created this podcast and co-founded Stack Overflow, Joel Spolsky. We chat about the origins of Stack, ideas for a new kind of “social media,” and what’s happening with Joel’s latest venture, Hash.ai.
Episode Notes
You can find the first episode of the SO podcast here. It was conducted over Asterix, open source telephony software that allowed for fancy operations like voice messaging and recording calls!
What would social software look like if we designed them to remove commerce and popularity? Are services like Mightybell an interesting example of where we might be headed?
If you want to build a model of something – say traffic patterns in your town or a hypothetical zombie invasion – you should check out a new project Joel is involved in, Hash.ai.
Tags: joel spolsky, the stack overflow podcast
2 Comments
MSSQL supported specifying the seed value for an identity int column long before Stack Overflow was written. Provided a table is empty it is trivial to reset the identity seed by changing the column to not be identity and then back to identity with a seed of 1.
If you ask about this on Stack Overflow some helpful badge collector will almost certainly decide it’s not a good fit.
One of the things about SO that really bugs me is it killed the newsgroups. Q+A kills discussion. SO rules actively suppress it. Saying SO is not the place would be ok if SO weren’t hogging all the attention to the point where there’s no other option. But it is.
Hi Peter,
I noticed Stack Overflow is as exactly as you say: Q+A.
Forums are a way for community members to reach out to each other and engage in lengthy ongoing discussions. There are many tech sites out there that fit this description. Stack Overflow is for busy bees who simply want relevant solutions to their problems. The threads must be kept trim and to the point, so that not only the OP, but any future visitor out there finds what they need without much hassle. In that sense, SO acts as a library with many archives, where the community members are the librarians responsible for its keep. Unmoderated discussions would make that job impossible, and the archives would become littered.
When I first used SO, I was a little frustrated by its librarians. But I took it ad encouragement to convey my thoughts better. Be it business, a group project, or even a fun discussion, we must be convincing, we must bring the other side to an understanding as succinctly as possible. Even our code must be the same.