The Stack Overflow Podcast

In this episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Joel and Jeff discuss the ethics of Craigslist, the pitfalls of customer-installable software, and caching for anonymous web users. If you’d like a Stack Overflow, Server Fault, or Super User sticker, you can now get three! Just send a SASE to Fog Creek software as documented in…

In this episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Joel and Jeff discuss reverse proxies, the pitfalls of self-support communities, and designing for engagement. It is my intent to attend the London and Cambridge DevDays, if my passport comes back in time. Speaking of which, is there anything funnier than a baby’s passport picture? We officially…

Joel’s vacation in France is going so very swimmingly that he has declined to participate in the Stack Overflow podcast for yet another week. I’m not one to judge, but apparently Joel loves France more than he loves Stack Overflow. I’m just sayin’. But, maybe we can pull something together sans Joel. There are some…

In this episode of the podcast, Joel and Jeff discuss lessons from a year of building Stack Overflow, the mysteries of COBOL, some YSlow website optimizations, and magic numbers. What have we learned in a year of building Stack Overflow? If someone wanted to design a system like Stack overflow, I’d give them these two…

Joel and Jeff discuss the disappointment of Google AdSense, the difference in skillset between programmers and testers, and the value of standards groups to working programmers. If you have feedback for Stack Exchange (still scheduled for beta by September 1st), please leave it on meta.stackoverflow.com under the Stack Exchange tag. The speaker list for Stack…

In this episode of the podcast, Joel and Jeff discuss the Mythical Man Month problem, keeping communication in check, Windows 7, and web scaling. Joel is fielding his largest team ever at Fog Creek — 9 programmers, 2 testers, and 2 program managers. They only have 10 usable weeks in the summer to build a…

In this episode of the Stack Overflow podcast, Joel and Jeff discuss software updates, the power of APIs and plugins, and leading by example. A brief discussion of how software should be updated, using Firefox and Apple’s Software Updater as examples. In a perfect world, you wouldn’t need to care about software updates because you’d…

In this episode of the podcast, Joel and Jeff sit down with Miguel de Icaza of the Mono project to discuss Mono, Silverlight / Moonlight, and the pros and cons of open sourcing your code. Miguel is one of the lead developers on the Mono project, which is an ongoing effort to bring the .NET…

This is the 60th episode of the StackOverflow podcast where Joel and Jeff discuss the value (or lack thereof) of meta-discussion, how much “big iron” popular websites need, and whether code forking is sometimes inevitable. A discussion of our newly launched outlet for meta-discussion at meta.stackoverflow.com. We view this as a pressure release valve. Why…

This is the 59th episode of the StackOverflow podcast where Joel and Jeff sit down with Damien Katz (of CouchDB) to discuss non-conventional databases, non-conventional programming languages, and taking on non-conventional programming projects. Stop, do not pass go, do not collect $200: watch Damien Katz’ outstanding Rubyfringe presentation, CouchDB and Me. It is a hugely…

This is the 58th episode of the StackOverflow podcast where Joel and Jeff discuss HTML encoding, designing “safe by default”, whether a question can be too simple, and the art of beta testing. Joel wonders if doing his Visual Studio development in a virtual machine is a viable solution. I say in this era of…