background January 11, 2009

Welcome Our Newest Member: Alan Kay

I was amused to see this pop up on the Stack Overflow home page a few days ago: If you don’t know who Alan Kay is, first of all, shame on you — he’s one of the most important figures in modern computing: Kay is one of the fathers of the idea of object-oriented programming,…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community January 10, 2009

WMD Editor Reverse Engineered

Remember that WMD reverse engineering project we reluctantly undertook? Check out the current state of the Git repository: This is a major milestone — we’ve essentially de-obfuscated the WMD code, which was my #1 goal! A few thanks are in order: Chris Jester-Young for getting the ball rolling, doing quite a bit of de-obfuscation, and…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background January 6, 2009

Welcome Stack Overflow Valued Associate #00002

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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
background January 6, 2009

The Best Time to Ask a Stack Overflow Question?

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…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community January 6, 2009

Accept Your Own Answers

Have you ever wondered why you can’t accept your own answer on Stack Overflow? If so, you’re not alone. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words; here’s what I just did to one of my own questions: Before: After: Hey, look at that, I just accepted my own answer! Now, there are…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company January 5, 2009

Using Your Own URL as Your OpenID

One of the cooler features of OpenID is delegation. This means, instead of having your OpenID identifier be yourname.myopenid.com it can be simply yourdomain.com Much easier to remember, right? And it’s really easy to do, too! Here’s how I did it. First, sign up for an OpenID with the provider of your choice (note that…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company January 3, 2009

We Now Support Multiple OpenIDs

The current top ranked feature request is to Allow Changing the Associated OpenID. Just how much would you pay for a feature like this? 50 gp? 740 flooz? 13 plat? 6,999 linden dollars? We’re giving this fabulous feature to you — for today only — ABSOLUTELY FREE! That’s right! FREE! But wait.. there’s more! Not…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community December 31, 2008

I Move to Close This Question

As an active Stack Overflow user, one of the abilities you’ll gain at 3,000 reputation is the ability to close and reopen questions. Closed questions don’t allow any new answers to be added, but can still be edited and commented on. All it takes is one user (with the appropriate reputation level, natch) to decide…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community December 31, 2008

Daily Dose of Daily Reputation Cap

It’s your daily dose of everyone’s best friend, the +200 per day Stack Overflow reputation cap! Did you know that… Without the +200 per day reputation cap, a certain Stack Overflow user would have almost 60,000 reputation? Implementing a logarithmic decline in the value of upvotes would make almost no difference to most people’s reputation scores?…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company December 28, 2008

Reverse Engineering the WMD Editor

We’ve been quite happy with the WMD Markdown editor on Stack Overflow, kindly provided by the author, John Fraser of AttackLabs. However, there are definitely some outstanding bugs and issues with it that we’d like to fix. Progress on this front has been severely hampered by three problems: We only have obfuscated / minified versions…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
community December 27, 2008

New UserVoice Moderators

Over the last few months, I’ve noticed a few users that have been exceptionally active on the Stack Overflow UserVoice feedback site. I have extended UserVoice moderator privileges to Joel Coehoorn (it’s pronounced koo-horn) and Sean Massa. I wasn’t kidding when I said this in the Stack Overflow FAQ: At the high end of this…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
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