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,…
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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)
company January 12, 2009

New Stack Overflow Server Glamour Shots

In Server Hosting — Rent vs. Buy? I solicited opinions on whether it made more sense to continue renting our Stack Overflow servers, or to buy them. Thanks for everyone’s feedback on that! Now the die is cast — check out these sexy glamour shots of the two (soon to be three) new Stack Overflow…
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Co-Founder (Former)
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,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Co-Founder (Former)
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