Jeff Atwood

company July 30, 2008

Podcast #16

This is the sixteenth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and Jeff discuss the following: Programmer design is scary — We now, thank goodness, have an actual designer design! Thanks to Jeremy Kratz for assisting us with our design woes. We also appreciate input from Tim Almond, Rob Allen, and Nathan Bowers. We plan…
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Co-Founder (Former)
beta July 26, 2008

Stack Overflow Beta Design

Ever notice how most sites run by programmers have the worst designs ever? Yeah. We’re currently at the stage where we need to implement an actual design — for which I have recruited actual designers. Here’s a sneak peek at the beta design we’re furiously working on implementing at the moment. And even earlier: Trust…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company July 24, 2008

Podcast #15

This is the fifteenth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and Jeff discuss the following: A brief discussion of our shoestring budget, and the project schedule. The beta for Stack Overflow is close; we will likely be trickling people in by the end of the month. Strategies for handling recurring or background tasks in…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company July 21, 2008

Dates: Relative or Absolute?

Another item we’re looking at as we get closer to the Stack Overflow private beta is the issue of how to display dates on the questions and answers. We started by displaying the absolute dates as you’ll see them on Joel’s existing forum — although we do add the time as well: Monday, June 27,…
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Co-Founder (Former)
background July 18, 2008

Easy Background Tasks in ASP.NET

As I work on the badge implementation for Stack Overflow, I needed a way to call the code that detects and awards the badges out of band. Traditionally this is done by something like cron or scheduled tasks. I’d rather have the code stay inside our current codebase, though. I asked on Twitter and got…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company July 16, 2008

Podcast #14

This is the fourteenth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and Jeff discuss the following: This week’s Rock Band downloadable content is epic — the best of the Who. Pointless podcast trivia: the Who song Baba O’Reily is a concatenation of two influences, one philosophical, the other musical: Meher Baba and Terry Riley. “They’re…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company July 12, 2008

Stack Overflow Badge Feedback

Are you familiar with the “stinking badges” quote? It’s from the 1948 movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Here’s the actual clip from the movie: As I mentioned in Podcast #13 (and probably earlier), Stack Overflow will feature a system of badges. Hopefully the non-stinking type. These badges are based on my admiration —…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company July 10, 2008

Podcast #13

This is the thirteenth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and Jeff discuss the following: Joel Spolsky still claims he is a New Zealander — or at least his father was — though I refuse to believe anything that is not in Joel’s Wikipedia entry can possibly be true. More evidence: FogBugz uses the…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company July 2, 2008

Podcast #12

This is the twelfth episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, wherein Joel and Jeff discuss the following: The difficulty of working on an airplane, even with an ultraportable laptop. I use the Dell XPS M1330, which I love, but it’s still marginal on an airplane. It’s not quite version control, but why doesn’t our IDE…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company June 30, 2008

Listen to Podcasts in Less Time

Joel may not listen to our podcasts after we record them, but I certainly do. I have to in order to put together the show notes with hyperlinks, and the episode summary. One way to speed up listening to the podcast is to use the fast playback option. In Windows Media Player, you can do…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company June 26, 2008

Podcast #11

This is the eleventh episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and Jeff discuss the following: Addressing a few key bits of podcast feedback: we’ll try to avoid talking over each other, and the callers who are asking questions, in the future. On the value of software postmortems. On data generation through Team System Database…
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Co-Founder (Former)
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