company September 21, 2008

What Was Stack Overflow Built With?

This question keeps coming up a lot on Stack Overflow for some reason: What was Stack Overflow built with? Some even wondered if Stack Overflow was built in Ruby on Rails. I consider that a compliment! This question has been covered in some detail in our podcasts, of course, but I know not everyone has…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
beta September 15, 2008

Then a Miracle Occurs – Public Beta

stackoverflow.com is now live and open to the public, as a public beta. Our heartfelt thanks to all the software developers who so patiently helped us test the site during the private beta. You are the true heroes of this project, contributing your time in creating over 8,500 questions in a month and a half…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
beta September 11, 2008

Help Us Beta Test

If you’d like to help us beta test Stack Overflow, in advance of the Monday launch, here’s how: Go to beta.stackoverflow.com Enter “twitter@twitter.com” and “falkensmaze” to gain access (note that this is NOT an account: it’s merely a password to gain access to the beta) Please do bear in mind the beta test guidelines. When…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
beta August 28, 2008

I Guess That’s Why They Call It “Beta

Just a quick note to the beta participants: We apologize for the recent spate of outages. We’re currently diagnosing a sporadic hang in the website that we haven’t quite got a handle on yet. Until we figure it out, we’re forced to restart the web service every few hours. I’ll update this post when we…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
beta August 1, 2008

Stack Overflow Private Beta Begins

And then a miracle occurred. We’re beginning the Stack Overflow private beta. I am sending out emails to the first 100 people for the private Stack Overflow beta; the email contains the password necessary to log in, as well as a link to this post. I will continue to email 100 people per day until…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
beta July 26, 2008

Stack Overflow Beta Design

Ever notice how most sites run by programmers have the worst designs ever? Yeah. We’re currently at the stage where we need to implement an actual design — for which I have recruited actual designers. Here’s a sneak peek at the beta design we’re furiously working on implementing at the moment. And even earlier: Trust…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company July 21, 2008

Dates: Relative or Absolute?

Another item we’re looking at as we get closer to the Stack Overflow private beta is the issue of how to display dates on the questions and answers. We started by displaying the absolute dates as you’ll see them on Joel’s existing forum — although we do add the time as well: Monday, June 27,…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background July 18, 2008

Easy Background Tasks in ASP.NET

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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company July 12, 2008

Stack Overflow Badge Feedback

Are you familiar with the “stinking badges” quote? It’s from the 1948 movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Here’s the actual clip from the movie: As I mentioned in Podcast #13 (and probably earlier), Stack Overflow will feature a system of badges. Hopefully the non-stinking type. These badges are based on my admiration —…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company June 25, 2008

Three Markdown Gotchas

I’ve enjoyed working with the excellent WMD “what you see is what you mean” Markdown control while building Stack Overflow. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised how easy it is to type a smattering of concise Markdown and generate rather nice-looking content. One of Markdown’s biggest advantages is its simplicity. Here’s a little Markdown test post…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background June 21, 2008

A Strangely Familiar Error

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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
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