background January 25, 2010

Six Whys – Or, Never Trust Your Network Switch

Remember Joel Spolsky’s fine article “Five Whys”? Sure you do! It contained this paragraph: Michael spent some time doing a post-mortem, and discovered that the problem was a simple configuration problem on the switch. There are several possible speeds that a switch can use to communicate (10, 100, or 1000 megabits/second). You can either set…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
careers January 22, 2010

Careers Success Stories

Now that Stack Overflow Careers is formally out of beta and fully operational, we’re getting a lot of traction with employers and making some excellent connections between companies who love great programmers, and programmers who love to code. Here are a few recent success stories people have shared with us: I was part of a…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community January 19, 2010

Welcome New Super User Moderators

We’ve appointed two new Super User moderators from the meta voting thread. Welcome Ivo and Troggy as our newest Super User community moderators! This also means that two existing Super User moderators, originally appointed in August 2009, will be retiring. TheTXI indicated to us via email that he no longer will be able to return…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community January 16, 2010

New, Improved Comments with @reply

Stack Overflow didn’t always have post comments. The first comment ever was on this post by Michael Stum, and it was posted on September 6th, 2008. There have been continuous improvements to comments since they were originally rolled out: Comments: Flags and votes Comments: Top n shown Comments: question owner is highlighted On top of…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
api January 15, 2010

What Would a Stack Overflow API Look Like?

We are now gearing up to build the first official Stack Overflow API. Please bear in mind that the first version of the API will be read-only by design. We’d rather attack the much harder problem of writing (that is, submitting questions, answers, and comments) in V2 with improvements rolled in from our experience having…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background January 14, 2010

Stack Overflow Network Configuration

I think we’ve finally arrived at a semi-stable network layout for running Stack Overflow and the rest of the trilogy. Here’s a diagram of our current network layout: The most recent changes were all in the name of redundancy: move to dual HAProxy routing instances add a third Stack Overflow server to the HAProxy rotation…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community January 14, 2010

Stack Overflow 2010 Moderator Nominations

Remember the Stack Overflow moderator elections we held last year? Sure you do! Nominate a New Stack Overflow Moderator — March 20, 2009 Stack Overflow Moderator Voting Now Open — May 5, 2009 Welcome New Community Moderators — May 19th, 2009 This whole “democracy” thing really must work, because the community truly picked winners, in…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background January 13, 2010

Coming Soon: Stack Overflow T-Shirts

I am beginning the process of placing a Stack Overflow T-Shirt order. Please refer to the two meta t-shirt questions to see proposed designs (or post your own), but I think we’re going to have to go with something simple and basic to please everyone. At the moment, I am thinking a large-ish copy of…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
careers January 6, 2010

Eating Our Own Careers Dogfood

In software development circles, eating your own dogfood is shorthand for using your own software. I was ecstatic the first time I used Stack Overflow to ask a programming question about the code that goes into Stack Overflow. And I was even more thrilled when I performed a programming related search that returned a useful…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background January 4, 2010

Stack Overflow: Where We Hate Fun

I noticed that the Stack Overflow question Strangest language feature has been closed and reopened several times now. The text of the question is brief: What is in your opinion the most surprising, weird, strange or really “WTF” language feature you have encountered? I agree this is not exactly an ideal question for Stack Overflow,…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
careers January 3, 2010

New, Lower Careers Pricing

You asked. We listened. While it is completely free to create and publish a public CV at Stack Overflow Careers — with the vanity URL of your choice, naturally — there is a nominal fee to make your CV searchable by hiring managers through our private search interface. We call this process “filing” your CV.…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
posts by author or