Joel Spolsky

community January 5, 2011

The Wikipedia of Long Tail Programming Questions

Have you ever noticed how certain questions come up again and again on Stack Overflow sites? Oh look, my PC is freezing. Should I use SELECT *? Oh, and, how can I host a server from home? Really, people, do you want to be answering these same questions ten years from now? How about when…
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Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
community October 29, 2010

Stack Overflow results featured in MSDN Search

Did you notice anything different about MSDN search lately? MSDN is Microsoft’s mega huge developer information portal, and we’re happy to announce that starting today, Stack Overflow search results will be incorporated into the results when you search for something on MSDN. That lets you see official Microsoft developer documentation alongside the community conversations that…
Avatar for Joel Spolsky
Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
area51 October 13, 2010

Stack Exchange Naming for Dummies

A while ago, I wrote: “Individually-branded sites felt more authentic and trustworthy. We thought that letting every Stack Exchange site have its own domain name, visual identity, logo, and brand would help the community feel more coherent. After all, nobody wants to say that they live in Housing Block 2938TC.” Well, funny thing… that didn’t…
Avatar for Joel Spolsky
Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
area51 September 17, 2010

Merging Season

Area 51 is filling up with thousands of ideas for new Stack Exchange sites, and a pretty clear pattern has started to worry us: too many ridiculously niche proposals, overlapping proposals, and proposals that are already covered by an existing site. Do we really need a site for each individual content management system? The Stack…
Avatar for Joel Spolsky
Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
area51 September 14, 2010

Pruning season

Soon, we’re going to close down one of the 24 Stack Exchange sites that were created over the last two months. Sadly, the Gadgets Stack Exchange will go dark soon. A lot of the questions on that site were about Apple gear and Android gear; those questions can be migrated to the (beta) Apple site,…
Avatar for Joel Spolsky
Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
company September 2, 2010

Fork it!

First, some background. I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico… OK, wait a minute, you don’t need that much background. In the beginning there was Stack Overflow. When we set up Stack Overflow, we knew people would use it to ask questions about lots and lots of different programming topics. Instead of the traditional approach,…
Avatar for Joel Spolsky
Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
background July 13, 2010

Domain Names

Let’s say, just hypothetically, that you wanted to learn how to bake a cake. So you go to the bookstore and you have a choice of two books. There’s a generic yellow book that is part of a series: And there’s another book that stands by itself… it doesn’t look like a part of a…
Avatar for Joel Spolsky
Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
company June 24, 2010

DevDays will return, but not until 2011

Remember the awesomeness that was Stack Overflow DevDays? If you’re coming in late… last fall, we took Stack Overflow on the road to ten (10!) cities with awesome one-day conferences. Over 4000 people attended to hear tutorials on  jQuery, ASP.NET MVC, Python, iPhone development, and some other topics which varied from city to city. It…
Avatar for Joel Spolsky
Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
background June 14, 2010

New Hires in New York

The New York team has been growing, too! New York, in addition to being the official corporate headquarters and the location of our sales team, has a development team working on two important projects. I’d like to introduce you to those members of the team. Working on Stack Exchange 2.0, we’ve got David Fullerton: and…
Avatar for Joel Spolsky
Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
community May 4, 2010

Announcing the Stack Overflow Series A Financing

We’ve been growing quite a bit lately: We’re now #709 on Quantcast. In less than two years, we’ve grown from zero to 7.1 million unique people visiting our network of sites every month. This growth makes us happy, because it means millions of people are getting quality answers to their questions. As Jack Marchetti describes…
Avatar for Joel Spolsky
Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
company April 13, 2010

Changes to Stack Exchange

Like the small-town mayor who suddenly finds herself running an entire state, our ambitions for Stack Overflow keep growing. Our original idea of making the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your programming questions suddenly seemed too small. Programming questions? We asked. Why just programming questions? Why not every question under the…
Avatar for Joel Spolsky
Co-founder & Former Chairman of the Board
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