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background July 17, 2009

High Scalability Blog on Stack Overflow

It was quite an honor to see that the High Scalability Blog posted an entry on Stack Overflow! We referred to the HSB, and its exhaustively detailed information about how other websites handle scaling, many times during the course of Stack Overflow development. And I’ve cited it myself when researching what we think is the…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background July 10, 2009

This Just In: Stack Overflow Defeats Google

We knew in our hearts this day would come: Stack Overflow has defeated Google! On July 2, from 6:45 AM PDT until 12:35 PM PDT, Google App Engine (App Engine) experienced an outage that ranged from partial to complete. Following is a timeline of events, an analysis of the technology and process failures, and a…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background July 6, 2009

Are you a human being?

Ever had one of these days? Are you a human being? We apologize for the confusion, but we can’t quite tell if you’re a person or a script. Please don’t take this personally. Bots and scripts can be remarkably lifelike these days! Enter the CAPTCHA displayed below, and we’ll be out of your way. If…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background June 21, 2009

Stack Overflow Developer Lair

Remember Stack Overflow Valued Associate #00002? Me neither. Until I saw these photographs of his developer lair, that is: Never let it be said that I don’t practice what I preach — or rather, that I don’t encourage my teammates to build themselves a proper developer lair! Seen here: Two 30″ monitors and One 21″…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background June 16, 2009

The Perfect Web Spider Storm

We noticed something unusual on our Cacti graphs today. Can you spot it? Yes! The light gray of the graph background does seem a few shades lighter than normal! I see it too! No, no, of course I’m talking about that massive traffic spike from 06:00 to 15:00 PST (server time). In the words of…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background May 21, 2009

Welcome Stack Overflow Valued Associate #00003

I am pleased to announce that Stack Overflow just added another team member in an officially paid capacity: Geoff Dalgas. Geoff and I met on a customer site in 1996. Here was this crazy kid, in charge of all the computer stuff at a government facility, who knew more about the computers and custom software…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background May 2, 2009

Joel Talks About Stack Overflow at Google

On April 24th, Joel Spolsky gave a talk at Google on Stack Overflow. The talk was recorded and is available for viewing on YouTube. The talk highlights how, from the very beginning, we designed Stack Overflow to be a destination page for web search. We explicitly optimize for “drive-by” programmers who type a problem into…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background April 15, 2009

Podcast #49

This is the 49th episode of the StackOverflow podcast, where Joel and Jeff sit down with Alex Papadimoulis of The Daily WTF to discuss the distinction between IT/sysadmins and programmers, online justice for webforums, user-friendly IDs for databases, and the future of software distribution. Some of our favorite Daily WTF entries: Spaced Out and Have…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background March 15, 2009

Stack Overflow and BizSpark

Stack Overflow is language and platform agnostic by design. We feel that building cool stuff is way more important the brand of screwdriver you used to build it. Argue all you want about which brand of screwdriver is better, but what really matters is the end result — what you’ve actually built with your screwdriver…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background January 11, 2009

Welcome Our Newest Member: Alan Kay

I was amused to see this pop up on the Stack Overflow home page a few days ago: If you don’t know who Alan Kay is, first of all, shame on you — he’s one of the most important figures in modern computing: Kay is one of the fathers of the idea of object-oriented programming,…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
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