Background

Simucal asks: What is SO’s peak time of day in terms of number of users on the site? I’m curious because there are times when I want to ask a fairly niche question and asking when the most number of users are on might be beneficial. I did a quick query on non-deleted revisions, grouped…

I am pleased to announce that Stack Overflow just added another team member in an officially paid capacity: Jarrod Dixon. Jarrod and I met on the job in 2002, and became fast friends. Here was the rare programmer who loved to code every bit as much as I did. It was our calling, and we…

Joel and I started recording a podcast yesterday, but we belatedly realized things are quite slow as this is a holiday week. We decided to postpone until next week so we’d have meatier topics to discuss. Thus, no Stack Overflow podcast this week. But I do have a bit of good news — I am…

I noticed that our friends at UserVoice now support OpenID: This means you can (finally) log into both sites (stackoverflow.com and stackoverflow.uservoice.com) using the very same OpenID. I believe they’re using RPXNow to implement this feature. Hooray for open interoperability, and open identity standards! So I guess that’s what Richard was hinting at when we…

I will be attending the Microsoft Professional Developers’ Conference this year, courtesy of Microsoft. The main reason I am attending is to help Phil Haack deliver a session about ASP.NET MVC. ASP.NET MVC: A New Framework for Building Web Applications Monday, October 27th 3:30 pm — 4:45 pm Room 153 Phil invited me to talk…

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…

Geoff Dalgas, the newest member of the Stack Overflow team, shared this strangely familiar error message he ran into while working on another project recently. Ah yes, the elusive stack overflow: In software, a stack overflow occurs when too much memory is used on the call stack. In many programming languages the call stack contains…