company February 8, 2009

New Datacenter Migration

We just finished migrating our new servers over to the new datacenter at PEAK Internet. The installation was aided greatly by Stack Overflow team member Geoff Dalgas, who happens to live about a mile from PEAK in Corvallis, Oregon. He visited the facility before the servers arrived, and also helped with their installation. Having Geoff…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company February 6, 2009

Server Speed Tests

We now have the new servers set up in the data center, and configured with copies of the Stack Overflow website and database. We excitedly ran a few quick speed comparisons with the live site and found.. the new site was two times slower than the old one. (insert sound of analog record needle being…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company January 30, 2009

Updated WMD Editor

Thanks to the herculean efforts of several Stack Overflow users, we were finally able to deliver some long-overdue bugfixes to our beloved WMD editor in early January, once it was fully reverse engineered. (Sadly I still have yet to hear from the original WMD author, John Fraser, after months of attempting to contact him in…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company January 29, 2009

New Replies Notification

We just rolled out a new replies notification feature. You’ll notice that there is a small envelope icon next to your name at the top of the page. Every 30 minutes, we check to see if new comments have been added to your posts, or if new answers have been added to your questions. If…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company January 27, 2009

Reputation Bounty for Unanswered Questions

Do you feel like your Stack Overflow questions just aren’t getting the answers they deserve? If so, you’re not alone. As Corey Trager noted in a blog comment: Speaking for myself, you don’t have to reward me for ASKING questions on Stackoverflow: Getting an answer is enough of a reward in itself. Just do whatever…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company January 25, 2009

New Stack Overflow Servers Ready

After many trials and tribulations, the new Stack Overflow servers are now ready to ship. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the newest members of the stackoverflow.com hardware family: SOWEB1, SOWEB2, and SODB1. That’s right, I even labelled them with my black and silver sharpies. It’s been an awfully long month and a half since I originally…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company January 24, 2009

Adventures in Delclusionism

In Wikipedia, there are two opposing camps: the inclusionists and the deletionists. I found Nicholas Carr’s definitions to be the clearest and most succinct: Inclusionists believe that there should be no constraints on the breadth of the encyclopedia – that Wikipedia should include any entry that any contributor wants to submit. An article on a…
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Co-Founder (Former)
company January 17, 2009

Further Adventures of a RAID Noob

I mentioned in the last podcast that I wasn’t sure how the two-drive RAID mirroring was supposed to work in the Lenovo RS110 1U servers we bought. This server comes with a mini-PCI RAID card as standard equipment, the LSI 1064E. To set it up, I did the following: Installed two 500 GB “datacenter class”…
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Co-Founder (Former)
community January 14, 2009

Where In The World Do Stack Overflow Users Come From?

Someone asked what the breakdown of Stack Overflow users is by country — on Stack Overflow. I didn’t think it was a particularly appropriate question, because it’s a poll, a meta-question, and not even really a poll about programming per se. Sort of a triple whammy. But I’m happy to answer here on the blog,…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company January 14, 2009

Coming In March: IT Stack Overflow

As I alluded to in a previous post, part of the reason we’re investing in new server hardware is so that we can expand. We will launch an IT-centric Stack Overflow sister website in March 2009 While we haven’t quite worked out all the details yet, here’s what we do know: It’s a place where…
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Co-Founder (Former)
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