Jeff Atwood

community August 28, 2011

A Bevy of New Badges

The badge system exists for two reasons: to teach new users how Stack Exchange works to encourage activities we view as positive to the community As the engine grows and evolves, we discover new areas that need badges. In fact, we’ve added a bevy of new badges in the last 6 months or so that…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community August 16, 2011

Gorilla vs. Shark

Who would win in a fight between a Gorilla and a Shark? OK, maybe you’re thinking that’s a ridiculous question. Perhaps it is. But various forms of this question get asked all the time. Consider this now-ancient Stack Overflow question titled Python v. Perl: Okay, so I’m finally making the jump into scripting languages and…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community August 9, 2011

Improved Tagging

Every Stack Exchange question is required to have at least one tag; tags are how we group, order, and find questions. But how do you determine which tags are correct for your question? When you start typing in the tags field we display a simple list of existing tags that match what you’ve typed so…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community August 4, 2011

Supporting Community Conferences

One fun way to promote your community is to consider what upcoming conferences, seminars, conventions, events, or meetups appeal to your community and represent an opportunity to attract new, high quality users who love this stuff as much as we do! There are a bunch of ways the community team can support your events; to…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community July 16, 2011

Mobile Stack Exchange

Another long-standing request, dating all the way back to 2009, is for a mobile optimized view of Stack Overflow. Since … the existing HTML and CSS was (and still is) rather light the original iPhone did a great job rendering Stack Overflow mobile traffic on Stack Overflow is only about 1% of traffic … we…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community July 11, 2011

Faster Edits with Inline Editing

Every Stack Exchange question and answer pair is intended to be an evergreen, editable resource for future travelers: The editing feature is there so that old question/answer pairs can get better and better. For every person who asks a question and gets an answer on Stack Exchange, hundreds or thousands of people will come read…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community July 1, 2011

It’s OK to Ask and Answer Your Own Questions

The FAQ has contained one key bit of advice from the very beginning: It’s also perfectly fine to ask and answer your own question, as long as you pretend you’re on Jeopardy! — phrase it in the form of a question. So … if you have a question that you already know the answer to…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community June 13, 2011

Optimizing For Pearls, Not Sand

In March 2010, we rebalanced our reputation system to favor answers. While we value good questions (and asking a great question is absolutely an art), we want to explicitly encourage people to provide the best possible answers. Without people interested in providing good answers, the questions are moot. We know that answers have more intrinsic…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community May 27, 2011

Stack Exchange is an OpenID Provider

If you’ve logged in to a Stack Exchange site recently you may have noticed a new button on the login page: That’s right — Stack Exchange is now officially an OpenID provider as well as an OpenID (and OAuth 2.0) consumer! As a provider, we can now offer a totally seamless signup experience for new…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community May 17, 2011

The Speed of Light Sucks

Our current datacenter is in New York City. Yep, where they make all that great salsa. So whenever you make a request to any Stack Exchange site, the internet tubes must connect from your location to our datacenter in NYC. We are not (yet) immune to the laws of physics, so depending on the distance…
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Co-Founder (Former)
background May 16, 2011

Stack Exchange Team at MIX 11

A big chunk of the Stack Exchange development team attended this year’s MIX conference. With tons of t-shirts and stickers in hand to give out, naturally! We managed to convince team members Sam Saffron (Australia) and Ben Dumke (Germany) to make the trek to Las Vegas for some, er, “teambuilding”. Even Jin, our designer in…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
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