Engineering

Keep tabs on what our engineering team is working on.

engineering July 29, 2015

“Why Are There So Many Programming Languages?”

I was asked this question twice in the past week, by colleagues who work with our clients. It sounds like a dumb question, but it’s not. The short answer is that we don’t need so many languages, but we want them. Let’s explore this further. Aren’t they all the same? In a sense, yes. You…
Avatar for Matt Sherman
Engineering Manager (former)
2017inReview
engineering July 23, 2015

Announcing StackExchange.Precompilation

One of the main guidelines at Stack Exchange is that we are open by default. So, I’m excited to announce that we’re open-sourcing StackExchange.Precompilation, a tool to help you bring faster pre-compile times and Roslyn (DNX inspired) goodies to your old ASP.NET MVC 5 project. What does it do, you ask? It replaces the C#…
Avatar for Samo Prelog
Principal Software Developer
culture July 9, 2015

Going From Mobile Back To The Web

Developers will generally agree that learning the latest and hottest set of technologies will help you advance your career and avoid getting left behind. In addition, most of us know that specialization in one technology stack triumphs shallow knowledge in many others. In this post, I’d like to share my more unusual — though not…
Avatar for Arie Litovsky
Web Developer
design July 2, 2015

How We Built Our Blog

Yesterday, we announced the redesign of our blog and the addition of our engineering channel. This is the first post related to engineering detailing a walkthrough of what we’ve built, and what better than to blog about rebuilding our blog on our new blog? How meta. It started with an engineering blog A few months…
Avatar for Jon Chan
Engineering Manager, Public Platform
company January 16, 2015

Why We (Still) Believe in Private Offices

There was a time where it seemed like we barely even needed to talk about this: Joel had won the argument, the Internet agreed that private offices were the future, and only incompetent management (or a tight budget) was still putting developers in cubicle farms. A glorious future lay before us. The original Fog Creek…
Avatar for David Fullerton
President and Chief Technology Officer (former)
community November 11, 2014

Announcing Bosun, our new open source monitoring & alerting system

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason. Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey A big part of scaling up an engineering team is getting serious about monitoring and alerts. A good monitoring system collects data from all of…
Avatar for David Fullerton
President and Chief Technology Officer (former)
engineering September 17, 2014

I Can Powershell and So Can You!

Often automating a task is not worth the time and rarely takes the time planned. At StackExchange we have lots of people on our team and in our community who are amazing at Powershell. I am not one of those people. Is it possible to save time using Powershell, even if you’re not a guru?…
Avatar for Dan O’Boyle
Internal Support Engineer
design May 14, 2014

The Importance of Planning

[W]e should create designs and share them with peers and customers, consider their feedback, adjust and redesign, and repeat the process over and over again on the way to developing a whole product. We should build quickly but responsively. — Randy Hunt I’m not here to argue against the “Ship Early, Ship Often” mantra. I wholeheartedly endorse…
Avatar for Joshua Hynes
Senior Product Designer (former)
culture January 28, 2014

My First Six Weeks Working at Stack Overflow

I started working at Stack Exchange (which many know for/as Stack Overflow) as a software developer just six weeks ago. This (lengthy) post is about a number of things: what it was like relearning a lot of what I know about web development, the challenges and resources I encountered doing so, and a few pointers…
Avatar for Jon Chan
Engineering Manager, Public Platform
company March 8, 2011

PEER 1 Hosting – Making your data center more awesome!

In 2003, Fog Creek Software (aka Joel’s other baby) moved offices, and decided to ditch its internal T1 and look for a colocation provider. Joel was impressed with PEER 1 Hosting’s customer service, the shiny new data center in NYC, and PEER 1 Hosting even volunteered to host Joel on Software – for free! When we…
Avatar for Alison Sperling
Director of Marketing (former)
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