• News of the day: we’re finally in our new office (and podcast studio). We’ve got hexagonal offices (and therefore crooked hallways), and a cool café area. AND HEATED TOILET SEATS. And a kitchen with a giant walk-in refrigerator, for our interns (which we don’t have).

Taping podcasts in our new “studio”!

• The new office has a nice event space. We’ve even done an event in it already!
• Last week, we had all of the remote developers, sysadmins, community managers, and sysadmins fly into New York to come hang out in the new office. We ate sushi and fried chicken and played a lot of ping pong, and also got some work done.
• Originally, we had planned these summits to be our Main Decision-Making Time, which ended up working terribly. We need to be able to make our decisions and do our brainstorming with remote team members regardless of whether or not they’re in the office.
• Jay, what’s happening with the Stack Exchange sites? We closed a couple of small sites - Arduino and Big Data. Everything on Arduino could have been discussed on Electrical Engineering anyway.
• We may have the same problem with Network Engineering (currently in private beta), but we’re more optimistic about that site. Likewise, we shut down Big Data, but currently have Open Data in private beta. Learn more about why one will survive where the other languished by listening in.
• Next topic: do tags belong in titles? Joel: “No.” Jay: “You’re wrong.” (there’s a bit more to it)
• This is a good discussion! You can weigh in in the podcast comments!
• David, do we have any new features? Check out our sites in an incognito window to see some stuff you may have missed.
• We’ll be debuting the new Help section soon! Previously, we’ve had all of our FAQ/help/how-to information spread far and wide across the network sites and their metas. No longer!
• Also, we’re working on some mobile apps. They’re vaporware at this point.
• Related: we’re hiring! Devs, front-end developers/designers (which is it?), community managers, sales people… everything.

That’s our show! Thanks for listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #47. See you in two weeks!

• Things are a mess over here, not just because we have to remember to stop masticating long enough to talk about podcast things. We’re moving offices! The office is full of crates into which we have to pack all our stuff before we move.
• The new office is going to be awesome. It has hexagonal offices, and we don’t remember if we’ve talked about this before.
• We have three chefs competing to be the chef for the new Stack Exchange office, and it’s apparently a very desirable position, because they keep bribing Joel with treats.
• What’s really going on? Our Tridion site went into public beta. It’s different from the one that sounds like Magneto!
• For very small and/or very new sites, Joel thinks it might be useful to be able to email opted-in users every time a new question comes in.
• Let’s talk about the new user homepage, shall we? It’s exciting! We’ve been doing a lot of work about new user experience, and the homepage new users now see will finally be optimized for helping them figure out what to do next.
• Meanwhile, our guest has arrived! Welcome, Zuly! She’s a moderator on OnStartups as well as a co-founder of Light Point Security, a web security startup that provides malware protection through the use of cloud-based web browsing.
• Zuly walks us through some of the history of OnStartups, the things that make the site work really well and ways in which the site could be improved.
• So what’s the prognosis? Zuly would like to see people get more involved with the community aspect of the site, and with moderation.
• Moving on to questions of security. Zuly (and Joel) observe a move in the field of IT Security away from detection and protection against major threats and toward isolation (the Battlestar Galactica defense).
• Jay thinks everyone screaming homophobic slurs into Xbox headsets is German. Nobody is completely sure why.
• Jay wonders, what about real people? What things should normal people be thinking about in terms of security that most people still don’t do?
• One other very serious question: Is Zuly’s dog cuter than Joel’s dog? Dog Talk ensues!
• Time to discuss a Meta question: how can we stop premature deletion?

That’s a wrap! You’ve been listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #46 with special guest Zuly Gonzalez and the rest of the regular gang! Join us next time from our brand new podcast studio – it’s going to be awesome (but the podcast will still be terrible).

• Eric joined Microsoft right out of college and was originally working on VB
• It’s time for everyone’s favorite game: Name the Worst Feature of that Microsoft Technology!
• If you’re a non-programmer and still listening, make sure to email us for your free prize
• Eric now builds “static analysis” programs which actually means something real when he’s talking about it
• We actually have some listener questions this week!
• First up – what problems with C# would Eric fix with magical genie powers?
• But wait, there’s a second one he wants to change too!
• David has some interesting stuff to talk about! Make sure to check out Sustainable Living
• Check out the meta question (its a problem we have to deal with a lot): Lots of not-always-useful but well-intentioned answers
• A public service announcement: please don’t forget how to dog
• Make sure to check out Eric’s great blog at EricLippert.com
• Our designer Jin points out that Eric is not only a contributor to Stack Exchange, but also to the popular tumblr: Programmer Ryan Gosling

Join us next week!

Welcome Back!  Our guest today is the one and only Robert Scoble – blogger and video maker extraordinaire.  He’s joined by the usual Stack Exchange crew for a packed hour of fun.

• Robert is a geek who gets around and meets startups and tech innovators. He’s calling from Flipboard‘s headquarters in Palo Alto, CA. Joel wonders if Flipboard is just kind of an echo chamber, but it certainly is not! As with much of the internet, your experience with Flipboard depends on who and what you choose to Follow and Like on your social networks.
• Facebook Graph Search seems cool so far, but you can’t quite yet search for single friends who are Ruby programmers, or programmers at all. (You also can’t do that on Careers, but that’s because you can’t use marital status in hiring decisions.)
• Stack Exchange maintains its own servers instead of hosting all our stuff on Amazon or something. Why? How? We walk through the reasoning.
• Robert is writing a book with co-author Shel Israel. (They published another book previously called Naked Conversations.) It’s called Age of Context. The number and quality of sensors and wearable computers and databases and social media activity is increasing wildly these days.
• Tempo is a smart calendar from the lab that created Siri (and other amazing projects). Apps like Tempo (and Google Now) are the future of getting you all the information you need before you even know you need it.
• What else is new? Robert is waiting for Google Glasses, and he’s got theBasis watch. Tempo and Mailbox have reservation systems to combat the huge scaling problems that arise when things get tens of thousands of users in the first hour after launch.
• What else is going on? There’s a new Chromebook coming out, but Robert is saving his money for Google Glasses.
• Apple doesn’t have the best-of-breed apps anymore. They don’t have the right software people, and they don’t know enough about us. Is this Tim Cook’s fault? Unclear! Apple’s secrecy is putting it at a disadvantage against the Amazons and the Googles of today.
• We have a user-submitted question! Steven who wants to know how many edits a normal answer typically gets.
• By the way, if you want to submit a question for an upcoming podcast, hop over to s.tk/podcastquestions. The best picture of a Siberian Husky gets a t-shirt!
• That’s all, folks! You can find Robert as Scobleizer on probably any website in the entire world.  Make sure to tune in for the next episode when we have even more fun guests!
• Also, This is a really important twitter account that you should check out.

]]> http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/03/podcast-44-this-should-have-been-43/feed/ 7 1:01:59 Welcome Back!  Our guest today is the one and only Robert Scoble – blogger and video maker extraordinaire.  He’s joined by the usual Stack Exchange crew for a packed hour of fun. Robert is a geek who gets around and meets startups and [...] Welcome Back!  Our guest today is the one and only Robert Scoble – blogger and video maker extraordinaire.  He’s joined by the usual Stack Exchange crew for a packed hour of fun. Robert is a geek who gets around and meets startups and tech innovators. He’s calling from Flipboard‘s headquarters in Palo Alto, CA. Joel wonders if Flipboard is just kind of an echo chamber, but it certainly is not! As with much of the internet, your experience with Flipboard depends on who and what you choose to Follow and Like on your social networks. Facebook Graph Search seems cool so far, but you can’t quite yet search for single friends who are Ruby programmers, or programmers at all. (You also can’t do that on Careers, but that’s because you can’t use marital status in hiring decisions.) Stack Exchange maintains its own servers instead of hosting all our stuff on Amazon or something. Why? How? We walk through the reasoning. Robert is writing a book with co-author Shel Israel. (They published another book previously called Naked Conversations.) It’s called Age of Context. The number and quality of sensors and wearable computers and databases and social media activity is increasing wildly these days. Tempo is a smart calendar from the lab that created Siri (and other amazing projects). Apps like Tempo (and Google Now) are the future of getting you all the information you need before you even know you need it. What else is new? Robert is waiting for Google Glasses, and he’s got theBasis watch. Tempo and Mailbox have reservation systems to combat the huge scaling problems that arise when things get tens of thousands of users in the first hour after launch. What else is going on? There’s a new Chromebook coming out, but Robert is saving his money for Google Glasses. Apple doesn’t have the best-of-breed apps anymore. They don’t have the right software people, and they don’t know enough about us. Is this Tim Cook’s fault? Unclear! Apple’s secrecy is putting it at a disadvantage against the Amazons and the Googles of today. We have a user-submitted question! Steven who wants to know how many edits a normal answer typically gets. By the way, if you want to submit a question for an upcoming podcast, hop over to s.tk/podcastquestions. The best picture of a Siberian Husky gets a t-shirt! That’s all, folks! You can find Robert as Scobleizer on probably any website in the entire world.  Make sure to tune in for the next episode when we have even more fun guests! Also, This is a really important twitter account that you should check out. podcasts The Stack Exchange Team no no http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/podcast-43-false-facts-blood-feuds/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2013/02/podcast-43-false-facts-blood-feuds/#comments Thu, 21 Feb 2013 18:31:19 +0000 Alex Miller http://blog.stackoverflow.com/?p=13165 Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #43 with Joel Spolsky, Jay Hanlon, David Fullerton, and special guest Alexis Ohanian, calling in from the Tutorspree office. Alexis is the co-founder of Reddit and an investor in Hipmunk. He’s a strong advocate against SOPA and PIPA, and knows how to dress well while doing so, thanks to Joel. (Listen on to figure out what we’re talking about here.)

• Talking about subreddits: Alexis wanted tags to categorize content coming into Reddit, but his co-founder Steve Huffman pushed for subreddits. Alexis tells us why and how it works as well as it does. (Joel has his own subreddit! And it was the first one ever!)
• Alexis has a book coming out in the fall called Without Their Permission. “Their” refers to gatekeepers – people who stand between people and access to information. He also has another book already out.
• So what’s the next annoying thing that Washington is going to do to stymy innovation? The Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement is on the horizon. We dive into the wonderful world of software patent law.
• Per Joel: Amazon’s 1-Click is the only thing that should have a patent. Nothing else needs one.
• Let’s move on to copyright! Or get distracted and continue talking about patents! Just kidding, we successfully moved on to copyright (and how it relates to wishing someone a joyful anniversary of their birth).
• We also decided that Creative Commons needs to come up with a better open source birthday song. (Also, copyright should not be granted to anything Jay doesn’t like.)
• Moving on: Kickstarter and friends. The connected web is changing the way people make things and sell them to other people who want to experience them. (Alexis Ohanian’s project Breadpig is one of the companies leading the charge in this area.)
• Back to Reddit. Alexis walks us through the way Reddit works as a communication platform, and how the team handles “unwanted”, but legal, speech (spoiler alert: they try to avoid censorship). Sometimes you find yourself in the tough position of having to defend reperehensible, but legal, ideas. Sometimes, though, someone can learn something.
• Oh, and finally: Alexis was supposed to eat a spoonful of cinnamon on the podcast today. New rule for podcast guests! Alexis says it’s impossible, but he’s discovered that he does indeed have some cinnamon accessible to him…

See you next week!

• David Mamet, apparently. Jay was a drama major.
• Michael forgot to pay the Google bill, so our hangouts are back down to 10 person limits (but it’s fixed now!)
• We have one big thing to talk about that made a change and generated controversy. Joel correctly guesses what it is: we no longer display your accept rate (the percentage of questions you asked that you accepted an answer for).
• The team walks us through this feature’s history and the rationale for removing it. (As soon as we shut it off, the temperature in New York plummeted. This is related.)
• Enjoy our hilariously awkward pause
• Jeff Atwood recommended replacing the accept rate with some kind of citizenship score. Will this just cause the same problems as the accept rate? How can we get around the problem of ridiculing people for low “citizenship scores”? People will learn how to game anything, after all – remember flag weight?
• David wonders why we need a third number at all. We already have your reputation and your badges on your little user card. Those already show how good of a citizen you are.
• Finally, this is something we’re still looking at, so let us know your thoughts on the meta post.
• Site milestones! We have some good ones this week. Our Magento site went live (not to be confused with Magneto). This one is remarkable because it’s something nobody in the company knows anything about, but it got created anyway.
• Congratulations to Math for being the first non-Trilogy site to hit 100,000 questions! Our hosts discuss the Math site and its relationships with other sites on the network for a while.
• One more new site to go over: English Language Learners. David and Joel don’t really understand this site, so Jay tells us what’s going on (hint: it’s not about an X-Men villain). ELL should help relieve some stress from English Language and Usage, which was frustrated by the high number of certain types of questions that were coming in.
• Is this podcast the exception that proves the rule?
• Another site milestone: we have finally rolled out the final design of our Travel site. (It was blocked for a while because Joel had strong opinions about the original design.) When you finish listening to this podcast, go to Travel and ask or answer a question!
• Subscribe to your favorite site’s newsletter!
• On to our next topic. We are changing some things with how duplicates work. We want to make it more positive! (It’s the [you lucky bastard] close reason.) This is the first closing change, and it’s going out in the next week or so.

Well that’s the podcast for this week!  Thanks for tuning in, and now for our standard disclaimers:

This podcast is not sponsored by self-driving car manufacturer Audible.com. Alexis Ohanian did not invent the DVR. YouTube is the place where you go to watch kids eat cinnamon. Join us next week when Alexis Ohanian eats a spoonful of cinnamon! Alex is not fired because correlation definitely implies causation.

• So what’s involved in the move? We hired movers to do all the de-racking and truck driving, so the work done by SE employees involved laying everything out and then wiring it back up.
• We’ve got all sorts of people underfoot this week who came in from all around the country to work on the new datacenter. Once it’s complete, we’ll fail back over to NY from Oregon, where we’ve been since Hurricane Sandy. There are still some issues to work out before we can do that, though.
• Due to some of these issues, we are switching over to SQL 2012… tonight! Craver takes us step by step through how we’re going to manage that process.
• So what else are we talking about? How about the new about page! We rolled out a new about page, and you should check it out. Jay and David walk us through it.
• The Trello team got Trello-themed fortune cookies shipped to their office, which is awesome.
• Another feature that went out this week is the ability to upload your own profile picture instead of using Gravatar. Read about it and go upload your picture! (No animated gifs allowed.)
• Speaking of animating things, we also think the profile page needs a little simplifying, among other things. (Joel has noticed a few very simplified Q&A copycats cropping up that just have a few of our hallmarks, and missing the in-depth stuff that makes a community.)
• Let’s look at some interesting meta questions! Is it okay to ask for opinions?
• Speaking of questions like that, we’re not completely happy with the “not constructive” close reason. How do we know what kind of questions we want? Good Subjective, Bad Subjective helps, but the situation still gets tricky.
• Sometimes the answer determines whether the question was good subjective or bad subjective. There’s a great example of this on English. (Joel says it was a great question to begin with.)
• As we’ve been investigating closed questions, we’ve found some interesting observations about the process of closing questions and conditioning our users.
• So “too localized” is overused and misused, so we are looking at ways to tweak and improve the closing system so it will be less frustrating but continue teaching new users the things they need to learn about our sites.
• One thing we’re working on is tweaks and improvements to the close and reopen queues. Tune in next podcast for some of the other options we’re considering!
• We talk about the reopen queue for a really long time.  Also, close votes have an aging process. David talks us through the problems with it.
• This podcast is now at the top of the close queue.

We’ll see you next week for another exciting episode of….. The Stack Exchange Podcast!

• About 15 years ago, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to create some useful guidelines for the new digital landscape. We talk about what actually happens with the DMCA takedown notices, including loophole issues that Joel has discovered.
• So that’s one part of the DMCA. The other one is anti-circumvention technology, and we go through many of the nuances there.
• So the technological means of anti-circumvention have to be re-evaluated every now and then. New exemptions were announced in October regarding: ebook reading assisted technologies (like Amazon Kindles being able to read aloud to you); jailbreaking phones (not tablets); and unlocking phone handsets (not tablets).
• This has been Copyright Update #1 on the Stack Exchange Podcast, brough to you by Britton Payne!
• So what else is going on in the Stack Exchange universe? We just had a holidays! Part of our celebration included Winter Bash, which ends “today” (at time of recording). You can still check out all the details. Give us your thoughts about it on Meta.
• …including a “hat” that was a tribute to Jason Punyon, who is in a rock (jazz and disco, really) band. They played our holiday party at the Hotel Rivington, and they were astonishingly good.
• We have a couple new sites to talk about - Politics & Anime. Each has just over 250 questions, so they’re doing okay, for baby sites. We discuss the pitfalls and strengths of each of these new members of our network (especially Politics).
• (Somehow we get onto the topic of the Black Hebrew Israelites.)
• Politics is a difficult site to approach, but it’s not hard to pass the bar of being better than anything else that’s out there on the internet, and we’re well on our way to doing that.
• We turn to Anime. None of us know very much about anime, but we manage to turn this site into a conversation anyway.
• No news is good news, new-office-wise! Construction is constructioning. We’re moving in March, or so.
• There’s a glimmer in Joel’s eye called Stack Overflow TV.  They’ll be broadcast live on the Internet on stackoverflow.tv, which we will remember to buy before this podcast is published.
• Meth questions! Er, meta questions! First, we tackle “How to deal with a highly voted non-constructive question“. What’s the problem with the question mentioned there? How do we solve this? We decide to call them “pivot questions”. The conversation leads us to another common type of easy question: “bike shed” questions.
• While we’re here, go follow us on Twitter to get the best questions from all of our sites. (It can be a lot to swallow.)
• We experimented with automated twitter feeds and with manually curated twitter feeds, and have found limited success with both. We discuss how twitter feeds (and other types of feeds) work for our company and our sites.

For you people listening at home: We want to take your questions! Go to s.tk/podcastquestions to record your question for us to play and answer on the air. You can also send us a written message… somehow.

• Also, on today’s podcast, everyone is going to eat a spoon of cinnamon and ten Saltines. Sam tried to eat a spoonful of cinnamon and did not succeed. The Saltine Challenge: also hard. The Gallon Challenge: also hard.
• Jeremy is the new kid on the block. He started a few weeks ago and is our new resident UX Expert.
• We should have listeners call into the podcast with their questions, like we used to! (This was before Jay’s time.)  Go to s.tk/podcastquestions to submit an mp3 of your question for next week’s podcast.
• Jeremy is not from Texas, but he is from the South. We’re not sure how he got the horse up past security in the lobby.
• Back to Jeremy. He’s been focusing on the perspective of the new user (including making lots of brand new accounts). He’s trying to introduce the non-engineer perspective into our development process. He’s currently focusing on the sign-up process, which is critical for user acquisition.
• Why do we have a homepage URL? In the old days, your name used to link to whatever homepage you put in there. Nobody uses it now, though, so we can get rid of it!
• Jay points out that we have a fundamental difference between our power users and our casual users. Additionally, we have to wrestle with engineers vs. non-engineer types as users on our sites.
• Don’t make people think, or learn new things. (Don’t make me think about how you want me to enter my phone number.)
• Joel got in trouble with his bosses at Juno once upon a time. It had a 29-page wizard to get people to sign up, including a page for what diseases you had, and when your birthday and your kids’ birthdays were, featuring a horrible date picker (18 clicks to choose “August”).
• The answer to all these arguments? Just test it and see what people do. (Good thing we don’t have to fly to Colorado to do usability testing anymore.)
• We have a weird maximum age on Stack Exchange sites, so there are a ton of 89-year-olds on our site, apparently.
• We have heard from a lot of people that our site is impossible to log into. Our site is optimized for programmers. A great example: OpenID! We talk about OpenID and OAuth for… a while.
• Another example of something that’s a good idea for programmers but confuses everyone else is Gravatar. Gravatar is great if you already have an account, but the experience of trying to upload a picture is too many steps if you have to make a new Gravatar account.
• Do our listeners know how much Jeremy looks like Wil Wheaton?  Check out the Stack Exchange Team page to find out
• News from the dev team! We had two outages this week, totally unrelated to each other. One was ten minutes and the other less than 30 minutes. (Nowhere near as bad as Tumblr’s catastrophe last night!) (Our status blog is on tumblr.) One was a boring hardware failure, and the other one is a result of the fact that we’re starting to outgrow our search solution.
• So we’re investigating other options that will make our search even better (and it’s suddenly urgent)! So a side effect of these outages is that our search will get better. We talk about search for a while.
• So if you’re interested in working on that, we’re hiring for our New York office, or remotely!
• If you have questions for us, you can go record your question and send it to us!

That’s all for this week. See you on ChaCha!

• Stack Overflow Careers 2.0 is launching in Germany! (Much has happened since the last time we talked about Careers 2.0 on the podcast.)
• So Will, tell us about Careers 2.0! Will gives us an overview about what it is and why it’s awesome. It has two products: job listings and CV search. They are both neato.
• David and Joel discuss the background of why something like Careers 2.0 is necessary: resumes are awful for demonstrating what programmers know and can do.
• We have over 75,000 profiles in the CV search database, which is awesome. If you’re looking to hire a programmer, we have 84,000 that you can have.
• The average old-school big company hiring department has separated the task of finding resumes from the task of hiring candidates, so they are a little confused when they’re told to just check out Stack Overflow Careers 2.0.
• We are trying to take the work and the confusion out of the job of the hiring manager – kind of like a dating service, trying to make employers happy with their candidates and candidates happy with their new companies.
• We’re disrupting the contingency recruiting model, because contingency recruiters’ interests are not aligned with employers OR candidates.
• How come this localization took so long, Will? Because it turns out you can’t just go in and replace a bunch of English strings with their German equivalents!
• Also, the site was not originally built with localization in mind, so the project was a little bit painful. Will and David walk us through the challenges the Careers team faced
• Next currencies: bitcoins, and Google Wallet. Joel bought a sweater with Google Wallet, and it’s magical.
• Careers is hiring! Come join us in our new spectacular NYC office that we’ll move into in early 2013. It feels like a boat except it’s on the 27th and 28th floors. So a flying boat.
• We have no other topics to discuss, so we’re going to continue talking about what’s great about working for Stack Exchange. Free food! Cuban health care! Free MetroCards! Gym membership reimbursement! A beach party! We don’t poke people with a sharp stick, and there’s nothing else oppressive, either!
• People wear hats, especially winter-themed hats. Shouldn’t we celebrate all those hats? Definitely! Last year, we ran a project called Hatdash on our site about video games.. It was a huge hit, so we’re revamping the program this year for all sites that opt in. It will go live on December 19th. Hats!
• Joel teaches us about the nightly news in Israel. It would just run until they ran out of things to talk about, which meant you never knew when anything was going to be on after that.
• Next week on the Stack Exchange Podcast: Is this thing from the drug store killing you? We’ll tell you next week!

• Starting with the review queue and its new segment: the reopen queue! It’s exactly what it sounds like (the reverse of the close queue). David and Jay walk Joel through the review queue and its features.
• One of the problems with the review queue is people clicking “Looks good” all the way through just so they can get a badge. Who would do such a thing?
  [Spoiler alert: We will talk about the review queue for a really long time.]
• Ideally we want to teach you, instead of building something that quietly ignores you when you do something wrong. In certain queues, we use fake review items that catch you when you choose the wrong option.
• There are lots of conversations about this going on on Meta, and we’ll continue to look at the issues and work on solving them so we can fix this part of the game. (Remember flag weight?)
• The other new item on the review queue is the Community Evaluation queue, aka the “Judge Your Site” queue. It’s meant to replace the site self-evaluation meta post, which Joel tells us all about. It’s currently live on Ask Ubuntu and will soon be tested on other sites. Coming soon to a site near you!
• Money and OnStartups have very high quality competition, so they are at a disadvantage no matter how dedicated their users are. They’re good sites, but they may be stuck in beta for a while.
• Another example of this is Judaism. The answers are all excellent, and the best on the internet on the subject. It’s very small, but it’s growing.
• Sites need to go “beyond the blogs” – to find content that nobody would ever bother to write a blog post about. The Money site can’t compete with all the excellent finance blogs on the internet, so it has to go beyond them.
• People who care about our sites should be focusing on writing great answers that make the internet a truly better place, and not on pleasing every single asker that has a little question.
• We’ve only got through one of the things on our list so far. We’ll try one more. Not SSL; it’ll be even more boring, especially for the people who made it this far.
• Also Michael Pryor and his wife just had a baby!
• We beat Hurricane Sandy back with a stick, so we’re having a victory party tonight. (Stack Exchange skipped town, but helped a little bit, so we get to go.)
• If you tune in next week, you’ll hear about hats, our struggles and/or victory with SSL and possible ensuing party, and our victory over the German language.

We’ve got a ton of people from Stack, Fog Creek and Squarespace on to tell the CRAZY story of exactly what happened last week! Guests include: David Fullerton, VP Engineering at Stack Exchange; Geoff Dalgas & Nick Craver, both core developers at Stack Exchange; Alex Miller; Michael Pryor; Mendy Berkowitz, lead sysadmin for Fog Creek; Babak Ghaheremanpour, longtime Creeker; Anthony Casalena, CEO and founder of Squarespace.

We’re planning on telling the whole story of Hurricane Sandy – it’s roughly in chronological order here

• We are from New York, and all of our offices and equipment are located there. Hurricane Sandy recently hit us, as you may have heard.
• We go back all the way to Monday night, 10/29. Nick got the first communications from Peer1, our datacenter, which was warning everyone that the power was going out for everything south of 34th street.
• Monday night, we thought all was safe in sound. Stack Exchange had some failover plans in place, however, as you heard about on a previous podcast.
• On the Fog Creek side, things were still relatively calm. They were basically blindsided, because the datacenter was confident that they had generator fuel for “like, days”.
• Then the storm hit. There was wind and a little bit of rain. Everything in Zone A got flooded basically immediately, as predicted, but if you didn’t live in Zone A you didn’t really notice.
• Michael Pryor’s foreshadowing. He saw a Hacker News post saying that Internap, another datacenter, was down – and started making plans to protect Fog Creek if Peer1 went down.
• Suddenly, we get word that the generator only has thirty minutes of fuel left.
• Mike Mazzei was the only Peer1 staffer there at the time, and he was stretched pretty thin. He is basically a super hero and ended up saving the day.
• Anthony managed to get exactly one email on Tuesday morning, and it happened to be about running out of fuel in the middle of the day (where he had previously thought they had a few days of fuel to spare).
• “Let me tell you what it looked like when I showed up.” Michael describes the scene on Broad St. for us.
• Based on flawed information from the NOC, Fog Creek makes plans to shut everything down at 10:45AM.
• Bradford was the only sysadmin who was awake and connected. He said we had to start doing a controlled shutdown
• Mike has the idea that if we can get the fuel up to the generator, we can keep everything online.
• Someone from Squarespace found empty 55-gallon drums on Craigslist and brought them down to the datacenter. The first attempt is pushing these barrels of diesel up the stairs.
• The building’s major task was getting the water pumped out of the basement, so at first Fog Creek and Squarespace and Peer1 were able to work on the fuel issue relatively unfettered.
• Fog Creek decides to bring their servers back up, since they had people on the ground in the datacenter now to monitor the situation
•  The bucket brigade begins!
• Michael goes home and sleeps for three hours. He then heads back to Peer1 and checks the generator tank which is only a quarter full…
• Joel tells us about trying to raise the alarm with incommunicado sysadmins Mendy and Sven and get them back online
• Sven starts working on with some others was moving Trello onto AWS
• Michael tells us about how lucky he got with the Fog Creek fishtank during last year’s power outage. Another example of how we were very lucky to be accidentally prepared for this event.
• Everyone laughs at us for having datacenters in Manhattan, but the clear benefit is that we had the physical ability to make things happen because the employees of the company are close, and downtown Manhattan is a priority to get back up and running, resources-wise.
• Wednesday morning was the day where we had the day laborers. Michael noticed that there were people carrying fuel that he didn’t recognize, and then they started carrying our fuel to our tank. Turns out they were day laborers, and they needed payin’.
• The system was in place, and it worked – we put a ton of fuel on the roof.  At that point, we thought there would be a happy ending.
• Enter Thursday. Anthony wakes up to find that the workers are not allowed in the building.
• The building management and ownership just didn’t understand what a datacenter does. We were “the telco guys”.
• Things go south with the building management and ownership because of a conflict with the day laborers, because the original company who hired the day laborers didn’t pay them.
• Everyone stays quiet and tries to just stay out of the way. Mike Mazzei gets the building manager to let the bucket brigade resume using only the eleven people that were already in the building – no outside help was allowed.
• We were allowed to do this until suddenly we weren’t anymore. Mike gives a “we did all we could” speech and everyone prepares to inform customers that the outage was inevitable…
• More army stories from Joel: the biggest challenge in a crisis situation is the “Fog of War” – 5% good communication and 95% rumor flying around.
• The building finally gets the pump going and fills the header, and then we’re basically okay.
• When Mike Mazzei got frazzled, Joel went ballistic on Peer1 corporate. We discuss how they should have handled the situation and put in more support.
• Another army story! When it hits the fan, you find yourself doing things that have a 1% probability of success, but it’s all you’ve got so you do it anyway.
•  STATUS QUO: Thursday night, the pump gets going. Friday and throughout the weekend, things are calm. Work continues on all the contingency plans, but the situation is more or less stabilized.
• The overarching key is communication, not only internally within your company, but with your customers.

• What exactly would Scott say that he does here?
• Scott Hanselman runs a podcast that doesn’t waste your time… unlike we have for the first nine minutes.
• Let’s talk about Scott’s recent presentation at Webstock! Or we’ll talk about how Scott is not a developer evangelist, despite popular belief. He is a community manager for ASP.net, IIS, anything angle bracket or curly brace related, anything “webby”.
• You can buy a single Q-Tip or Lego lightsaber on Amazon. (Most Lego fans don’t like Lego Star Wars.)
• Why do we have both Programming.SE and Stack Overflow? Joel tells us about the historical reasoning behind it. It’s a party line: Stack Overflow is for things you do at the computer, and Programmers is for things you do at the whiteboard.
• Do people still use Twitter? We thought they’d all moved on to App.net, but that’s only for people who had fifty dollars (that they didn’t spend on the new iPod connector).
• “Do you realize that you are a biscuit away from turning into Jerry Stiller?”
• Scott works remotely. Joel inquires: how does he make that work? Scott shares some tips! (Possibly… a blog post?)
• One of Scott’s biggest tips is to use more face-to-face communication instead of text-based. We don’t necessarily agree, and so we explore the topic in depth. Jay agrees, that debates and discussions are not productive in text-based chat.
• Scott will probably teach Computer Science when he retires… but then, he’ll be allowed to have an opinion!
• Back on the “working remotely” topic. There’s a difference between being on a distributed team and being the remote person on a not-so-distributed team. The latter is harder! Scott insists on camera at every meeting.
• We want to spend as much as we possibly can on remote collaboration, so we talk about some of the tech you can use to accomplish that.
• Windows 8 is coming out on Friday (or for the past year, if you are a developer or you tried to download it). How is it? Is it awesome, or did someone move everyone’s cheese? Listen in to find out… and then move on to a general discussion of changing user interfaces and what that does to users who are loyal to companies.
• Let’s talk about something else that isn’t twitter! Scott and Stack Exchange have in common that they provide an audience for answered questions, so Q&A isn’t one-on-one communication. It makes it useful for everyone. Stay tuned for the Joel Theory of Blogging. Is twitter the decline of modern blogging?
• Joel spoke to a bunch of recruiters in London, where he told them that their job is to make the company awesome enough that great candidates come to them. Joel has a lot of projects, remarks Scott, and we discuss them – including Trello and what makes it great, and Scott’s suggestions for improvement.
• What has everyone been doing since Joel was on the road? Some stuff we already talked about and some stuff we can’t talk about yet.
• Check out This Developer’s Life. It’s the best knock-off out there.

• First up on the agenda: Quantcast! Five minutes before we started recording, we noticed that Quantcast is ranking our network at #100! (or at least we were for a bit)
• If all that additional traffic should cause our New York data center to go down, what will happen, Kyle? Great segue, Joel! We are working on a system for failing over to our datacenter in Corvallis, OR.
• Our New York datacenter is also out of room for us, so we needed to have a failover system in place so the sites could stay up while we move all the equipment to the new datacenter.
• Nick Craver runs at a hundred degrees, no problem. (Extensive conversation about temperature in datacenters ensues.)
• Google opened up its datacenters via Street View, by the way. Cool.
• Now back to more details about the failover. The word “splurt” is used. Eventually Joel lays out the whole process step by step. In the ideal situation, when our failover is planned ahead of time and not due to sudden meteor attack, the whole thing should take between five and fifteen minutes. Afterwards, we come up in read-only mode, at which point someone can manually switch us back into normal mode – or not!
• Nick walks us through the sweet new equipment in the Corvallis datacenter. (How much would you pay for one of our original servers, hand-built and signed by @codinghorror?)
• When we DO fail over to Oregon, the moderators come with us! And they love Stephen King movies! What a segue.
• We’ve got a new Genealogy site, and it’s hard to spell, but the site is doing really well.  There are some very interesting questions on the Genealogy site, about many issues related to genealogy: how to use its software, how to find information, whether to distribute sensitive family information, etc.
• Robotics is coming soon! We’ll look back on this launch as the beginning of the end when Skynet becomes self-aware.
• We now segue, awkwardly, to the topic of moderators. We’ve got 275+ moderators.  So now we’re discussing the process of removing a moderator, if it’s ever necessary.
• We need to do it in a way to preserve the democracy and is similarly community-driven. We asked on Meta and got a lot of great feedback. The plan we came up with involved the other democratically-elected mods (and not the company) meeting and putting it to a vote.
• The gang wonders how to remove a Supreme Court Justice. It’s semi-relevant.

Tune in next week when we’ll have Scott Hanselman on (for real this time)!

• So what’s new in the seven months since our last podcast? Check out the new and improved review queue! If you’ve got enough reputation, you can see the review button at the top of any Stack Exchange site. The new system is clearer to use and it’s fast thanks to a ton of AJAX goodness.
• From the community side, one of the most important things about the review queue is the First Post queue – a list of the very first post from each brand new user.
• You can also filter the queue, so you can tell it what kind of posts you want to look at – “only duplicates”, for example..
• There’s a badge connected to using the review queue, so people are (naturally) gaming it. There’s an incentive to just go fast instead of thoughtfully helping to improve posts.
• If we add a “reopen” queue, will we then have to add a “reclose” queue?
• We’re looking at tweaking all of the language surrounding closing questions, including the word “closed” itself. “Not constructive” is itself not constructive feedback. How about “insufficiently objective”? “Poor thinking”? “You’re dumb”? “Subjective”? – but we have such a thing as good subjective. It’s not an easy thing to figure out.
  • (4:07PM – first mention of Taco the Siberian Husky.)
• Closing questions is on the road to deleting them, but we still have hope for closed questions – or at least for the user who asked the bad question. Closures need to provide feedback to the users who asked the questions, so they have the opportunity to dispute or explain the situation.
  • (4:16PM – first mention of Yahoo! Answers.)
• Got suggestions for how we re-word the close descriptions? Post them on Meta! The one thing that we need to be conveying is that Stack Exchange is a place for expert answers to factual questions, not shopping recommendations or discussion questions.
• So what does Wikipedia do with content like this? Jason Punyon is here, apparently! He’s impressed with the way Wikipedia points out the problems they have with their articles with a big box right at the top. Wikipedia faces many of the same problems we do, with the faceless cabal of “moderators” deleting content at will.
• Okay, let’s talk about something else.
• Bigger picture: how do we teach new people how to use the site? We’re working on a new “About” page! (Here’s the old one.)
• Example: tagging your first question! The current system tells new users they have to give their question at least one tag, but then it won’t let them create a new tag. They have to understand that there is a list of existing tags from which they must choose. (Or we’ll make the random forest do it for us.)
• So! What’s happened to the company in the last six months?
• We opened a sales office in Denver! We’re expanding our office in London! We hired Jay! Put your profile up on Careers 2.0, because it’s exploding and that’s why we’re hiring salespeople for those two offices (and the NYC one) like crazy!
• We’re hiring a ton. We’re hiring developers for Careers in NYC and for the Core Q&A team in NYC or telecommuting or hanging out in our sales offices in Denver or London. (The offices and the sales people are very nice. Plus there’s free lunch.)
• We’re hiring a product designer! And a product manager! And a senior sysadmin!
• We’re getting a new office in New York City, by the way! If you’ve got enough rep, we’ll give you a lifetime membership to come hang out in our offices now and then.
• So what else has happened? We’ve done some promotions. We’ve got a patents site. We’ve got an app development contest with Microsoft going, so you can win prizes (including cash) for developing a Windows 8 app. Apptivate.MS. The MS stands for Microsoft or Malaysia or Multiple Sclerosis or Montserrat (it’s the last one) but Microsoft uses it the most. (Montserrat is really small and probably has a viceroy.)

We’ll see you next week!

• JOEL: This is not necessarily a podcast, but it might turn into something useable, perhaps in the form of a podcast, maybe. The goal is to talk about all of the questions that are getting closed, aka REP-OCALYPSE NOW.
• Part One: there has been closing and deletion of very popular old questions going on lately. Are we happy with how this is going? What are the other options?
• This has come to a head because it got noticed all of a sudden thanks to the global reputation recalc.
• SHOG: This is a perfect storm. Prior to the rep recalc, an SO mod got it in his head that he should go clean up these old popular questions, since they’re totally inappropriate for the current standards of the site. He posted on MSO about it. Then, this rep recalc made a whole bunch of people painfully aware of a bunch of their stuff getting suddenly deleted.
• A lot of the stuff that got deleted was worthy of getting deleted. Some were valuable, though, and were worthy of discussion and possible salvation.
• JOEL: There are a few categories that the lynch mob is after that should stay open (They’re interpreting a particular rule too zealously.) One of these is talking about separate questions that all have the same answer. One of them is three different [identify-this-game] questions that all refer to the same game.
• SHOG: If you ask a bullshit joke question and it gets good answers, great! You broke the “only ask questions you really need the answer to” rule, but the page is now improving the internet. It has value. Good job!
• JOEL: An example: the center cannot hold. The activity in the answers should be protected, not the questions. Hidden features questions tend to devolve. They lose value after the top ten or so answers.
• JOEL: So! There have been a lot of bad questions that were deleted, and some higher quality ones that are hotly contested. So what about programmer cartoons, or boat programming questions? They get a million views. They bring people into the network. Making those pages be Page Not Found is violent! It breaks the internet a little!
• SHOG: A theory: this is a lottery. Most of the time you post stuff, and it goes nowhere. Sometimes it strikes a chord, people go crazy over it and generate a great page.
• JOEL: There are no new questions that this really affects. If somebody asked “what’s your favorite Pascal question” today, it would get closed in a second.
• Eric Lippert wrote a great answer a year ago on a question that pissed people off – it was a duplicate and a homework question and all sorts of terrible stuff, but the amazing answer redeemed the question.
• SHOG: We don’t want to encourage people to gamble. We can encourage them to put their money in the bank instead!
• JOEL: Back to the question. What is bad about keeping these lottery winner questions around?
• JOEL: New example: the programmer cartoons. It benefits us because there are lots of views, and because people laugh! It’s better than googling “programmer cartoons” because we have voting.
• JOEL: Programmer cartoons questions get closed. So is it okay to keep the weird exceptions around just because they were very successful?
• Concept #1: Famous RFC about TCP/IP over Pigeon that wasn’t serious. Did it break the internet? Did this one not real RFC turn all RFCs into Reddit?
• Concept #2: Purim Torah on Judaism SE. On Purim, you are required to break rules and get drunk. Purim Torah is a humorous fake discussion of Jewish law that you discuss as if it were serious. The Judaism SE community has decided to allow it during/around the time of Purim. Some of the questions are very funny.
• An example of a “Purim Torah” Stack Overflow question: What is the name of this operator: “–>”?. This question wins the lottery! It’s okay that this happens occasionally. Every culture ever has a holiday in which certain rules are relaxed a little. Purim, Halloween, April Fool’s, Thursday, Naked Friday…
• SHOG: Now. Stack Overflow isn’t linear. As it gets older, more and more of these old questions keep cropping up. You don’t need to keep adding funny programmer cartoons to that one question and bumping it up. That’s why we have locking!
• JOEL: There is a larger class of questions that we should be discussing. Stuff that’s no longer on topic, but still has amazing answers. For example: career questions.
• Are we on the same page that there exists a class of question that’s awesome enough that it can’t be deleted? What do we do about people who just noticed that their amazing internet artifact was deleted, and they’re mad?
• When frequent flyer miles became a thing, travelers were wary of using them because they didn’t want their number of miles to go down, so they would continue to be treated well by the airline. The airlines realized they had to start printing their lifetime earned miles, so people wouldn’t be afraid of “losing” those miles.
• JARROD: Nick Craver is working on that right now! If you have reputation from something that sticks around for 60 days, the rep “locks in”.
• JOEL: Maybe pageviews should also be taken into account. Another idea: archiving stuff.
• JARROD: Here’s Pekka’s idea about archiving stuff: hosting our own archive of stuff that’s been deleted but shouldn’t go away and become a Page Not Found.
• JOEL: This is not for everything that got deleted, or else it would be spam spam spam. But this is for stuff that gets heavily linked to from elsewhere on the internet that we shouldn’t just take away. We’re not ashamed of these questions, this is just part of our history

Well that’s it for this week’s podcast – join us in the coming weeks as we get back into the swing of things and test our new formats.  See you soon!

• Joel was reading the transcript of Stack Overflow Podcast 001. It’s from April 2008. Listen to the awesome excerpt about the birth of Stack Overflow! (Stack Overflow is not another place to discuss tabs vs. spaces.)
• What was the biggest thing that surprised you about Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange? Jeff mentions the Meta Issue. Joel started out with a strong antipathy toward meta questions, or discussing the site on the site instead of discussing the topic of the site. It comes down to building the software to accommodate the direction the community goes in.  You can’t plan everything.
• Stack Overflow originally launched without comments, but that was fixed very shortly after launch, because it was something the community needed. Wikipedia hasn’t done this for Talk pages, and that’s why they’re so darn confusing.
• People have recorded nice messages for Jeff in honor of his departure. Geoff Dalgas aka Valued Associate #00003 goes first, and his clip is full of win (and awesomely bad music). Quantcast says we have 20 million visitors a month, and together they could populate a city the size of Seoul, South Korea. We have more people typing on our websites than English Wikipedia.
• Kyle Cronin sent in our next message. He’s an exemplary Stack Exchange user who contributed heavily to the birth of Meta Stack Overflow. Kyle was started a meta bulletin board after he found the official UserVoice site inadequate (that is until Jeff decided it was a core business function and made MSO).
• Next up is Josh Heyer aka Shog9, another Valued Associate who speaks very slowly. Jeff had originally put Josh in the same bucket as the Welbogs - people who get bored with chess, so they start flinging the chess pieces everywhere. Stack Overflow and Josh have grown up together. Jeff and Joel found a way to keep users like Josh interested and entertained without being detrimental to the core purpose of the sites, through Meta, Area 51, more sites, and beyond.
• History of the site: Started with Stack Overflow. Then came Server Fault and Super User, which topics were deemed off topic for Stack Overflow, but which were great fits for our audience. Then came Stack Exchange 1.0 and…
• …Valued Associate David Fullerton! He came over from Fog Creek and took the reins for Stack Exchange 1.0… which failed. Luckily, it became clear that the asset is not the software, but the community. Enter Stack Exchange 2.0! Communities were given the power to create new sites, for better or for worse. Theirs is the power to decide whether or not things like “identify this x” questions are helpful.
• There is such a thing as sites that harm the internet simply by continuing to exist. For that reason, sometimes sites need to be closed. Facts of life! (Askville is an extreme example. It can’t even hide its bad content, like Reddit can.)
• Here’s Jon Skeet, the all-time top user on Stack Overflow with more nice comments for Jeff. Jon Skeet is legendary. He has answered 20k questions on Stack Overflow thanks to his long commute to and from work. He exemplifies what makes a great Stack Overflow user, and has been justly rewarded with internet fame, and a ton of reputation.
• We’re almost at Version 3.0 of the core engine. Things are pretty polished, from a software perspective! But software is never really done, especially software that is being built for (and with) a community that’s always changing. So plenty of work remains to be done on the engine, but Jeff is leaving it in very capable hands.
• Information maintenance is a huge problem, especially in the realm of software development, and especially because Google tends to give higher PageRank to older pages. That’s a great way to have outdated information! That’s why Stack Exchange questions are always editable… but the incentive to do so is not always there. (Adding a new question still makes the page better, though, and you get reps!) Editing is a good way to earn your first few points of rep when you’re new to a site.
• Eric Lippert has our next message for Jeff. He demands markup that will make the text on our sites turn purple (because he writes his blog in purple). Eric uses Stack Overflow to interact with his customers and see what trouble they’re having and how they’re fixing them. (Eric is the Pope of C#.)
• That brings us up to today!
• Stack Overflow is enabling programmers that aren’t located in Silicon Valley-type places to make the greater programming community better and get recognized for their great work, even if they’re just a rote programmer at a regional insurance company.
• This is the final podcast with Jeff & Joel! Jeff’s last thoughts: the new babies are doing well and existing ex-baby Henry is doing well adapting to the young ones.
• Jarrod Dixon, Valued Associate #00002, will play us off.
• Jeff’s final advice: choose the adventures that scare you a little bit.

• The original Joel on Software forums were sort of a progenitor for Stack Overflow. They had strict rules: nothing off-topic was allowed – and discussing the forums themselves was off-topic. So a Joel on Software Off-Topic discussion group was created for all of That Stuff. Joel’s forums are still going strong!
• What happens if we let a community go on forever? If it’s stagnating or not really growing, it’s not necessarily making the internet worse. It’s just not doing anything. Right? But think about something like an eHow, that has low quality pages that still rank higher for most queries than other pages with real, good information. The Community Team does evaluations of the quality of sites, but they are beginning to make that process transparent to the communities or even have their communities do the checks. Or potentially to hire really deep experts now and then. Or both?
• What if we have the best site on the web, but it’s for a terrible topic? For example – what if horoscopes.stackexchange.com was the best darn horoscopes site out there. Does the topic still make sense on our engine? This is why proposals are examined so thoughly in Area 51 (and its respective discussion section).
• If you haven’t checked Area 51 out recently, you should stop by – there are lots of cool improvements that have been made. Robert, Jeff and Rebecca discuss the newfangled Area 51 process, and what sorts of mysterious things happen to a site when it spends its “week” in Private Beta.
• Sometimes proposals fail and get closed. Game of Go was one of them. It got shut down, but its questions and its users got migrated over to Board Games - which is one of the ideal ways to handle having a young site shut down. Another positive way to handle the shutting down of a site is to let its users regroup in Area 51 and try the proposal again with a different approach.
• “Wouldn’t it be simpler to just create a catch-all site, answers.stackexchange.com, and split off topics as they grow large enough for their own sites?” Basically, there is no way to grow acommunity through this method, since all the people there would have nothing in common. A counterexample is the split between Stack Overflow and Programmers - but that wouldn’t have worked with someone just asking a question about hardwood flooring on Stack Overflow and having it turn into Home Improvement.
• Really good moderation is key to everything. There are 260 moderators on the whole network! We start to identify moderators a few weeks into a site’s private beta by looking for active meta participants, editing to improve content, voting to close – doing activities other than simply asking and answering questions. This does not necessarily mean that the moderators must be the highest-rep users! That’s like asking your grandparents to be ushers at your wedding. Rebecca tells us about the changes that were made to the Stack Overflow election system for the recent moderator election. It involves badges. Learn more about elections! The Android elections are going on now.
• We hold chat-casts with moderators every few weeks to open a channel between the Community Team and the moderators. There’s also a monthly moderator newsletter with highlights of important announcements. That’s so people can get the 5-6 things they need to know without having to be too deeply ingrained in the moderators’ chat room or in metas.
• Meta Stack Overflow is to the federal government as individual site metas are to state governments. It’s possible to spend most of your time on your local site government, and the newsletter will keep you apprised of the changes on the national level.
• Moderation and meta activity are huge parts of why Stack Exchange is so awesome, but we can’t forget that it’s the amazing Q&A engine that makes all that awesomeness possible!

That’s it for Podcast #30, which is it for podcasts in 2011. See you next year!

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #30 w/ Robert & Rebecca by Stack Exchange

• We need a number display like they have in delis. If anyone out there can get us one on the cheap, Joel would appreciate it so he can always know what podcast number we’re on.
• Canvas is re-imagining a message board, because the aesthetic of forums hasn’t changed in a very long time. It’s got a focus on remixing and collaborating images.
• It’s similar to 4chan but interestingly, Canvas requires users to authenticate their login using Facebook to deter trolls, but still allows pseudonymous and anonymous posting.
• 4chan is weird. Stuff doesn’t last very long there – there’s no archive. Moot gives us a brief history of 4chan and how and why he started it.
• Its a fast way to get a message out to thousands of people because every post starts out as position zero on page zero. That’s why 4chan has a reputation for “porniness” when that actually represents a small percentage of the content that ends up there. (See the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.)
• Most of the internet’s memes originate on 4chan. They make the internet! The memes migrate to Reddit, where they move to the greater internet as a whole.
• 4chan and Reddit (and Tumblr and Twitter) reflect a recent trend away from text and toward images, short-form text, short videos, etc.
• So! Canvas! It’s a real venture-backed company. It’s not going to serve display ads (unlike 4chan which has only been monetized by banner ads).
• Shifting gears to talk about SOPA/PROTECT-IP. Hollywood wants it, and they spend way more money on campaign financing than the tech industry, so legislators are going to pass it. Hollywood wants the ability to go after ISPs who are resolving DNS entries to overseas sites, which is stupid because the workaround for that policy is simple. It wreaks havoc on the existing DMCA provisions for protecting copyrighted content online.
• A long, long time ago… people tried to sue telephone companies for allowing calls in which illegal things were discussed. That was ridiculous, and the phone companies were ruled to have no liability for how their channel is used. That’s the precedent that the internet operates on today.
• Joel describes the current provisions outlined in the DMCA that give copyright holders and websites ways to enforce copyright in a fair way that punishes only the infringer, not the website.
• It’s demonstrative of the fact that Congress is run by corporations currently; the only things that gets passed are things that companies want passed. Example: pizza is a vegetable.
• Two important books to read on the topic: Republic Lost and Master Switch.  You can also read Larry Lessig’s post on why he’s focusing on trying to reform the whole system
• Go to americancensorship.org to learn all about SOPA/PROTECT-IP, and what you should do to get involved. (Hint: in the U.S., it involves contacting your representatives.) It’s likely to come to a full floor vote soon, and we need to stop it. Add your name to the list Senator Ron Wyden will read during his filibuster of the bill.
• We come back to 4chan, where we learn about moderators, janitors, and on-topic-ness rules on the various boards. People apply to be moderators on 4chan, so it’s self-selecting.
• Chris is on Twitter, as are 4chan and Canvas. Also be sure to check out canv.as and 4chan… but don’t do that last one at work.

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #29 w/ Chris Poole by Stack Exchange

• The Spanish site is live! It’s sort of strange having a site about learning one language be conducted in another. With French we decided to let them try to conduct the whole site in French. It’s an experiment!
• Gaming is having a meteoric rise due to Skyrim. Check out the graphs! (Here they are in the show notes!) Skyrim questions have 1.35 million views in ten days, at time of recording. Whoa! Thanks to badp for posting.
• Anyway! Brent Ozar is our special guest today! He is a SQL Server Master. He has a blog. He has a talk about SQL tuning and whether or not you should even do it. He summarizes it for us, and the gang talks about SQL tuning, caching, load sharing. XML shredding. You know. Database stuff.
• At Stack Exchange, and especially with Stack Overflow Careers, we are trying to elevate users and show off how awesome they are.
• Joel’s been reading up on all the Wikipedia pages on personality disorders. Most executives, especially at startups, are indistinguishable from people in insane asylums, apparently. Paranoia is a particularly common form of mental illness among executives. This is relevant because people often say they won’t send employees to a Stack Overflow event because they’ll get poached! (But it’s probably true.)
• Feel free to poach Jason Punyon, employers. (Scratch “Punyon” off your Podcast Bingo card.)
• There’s a post on the Server Fault blog about why Stack Exchange isn’t in the cloud. It’s got a nice discussion about the pros and cons of letting somebody else host your stuff, which the gang explores.
• Answering questions on Stack Exchange is about doing a little science to come up with a canonical answer instead of just posting opinions. Jeff measured the range of a remote controlled robot in Battlefield 3 so as to be able to answer this question.
• Jeff experimented with posting a question for someone else on Super User (based on this post)- and it does! Well-written questions get better answers. But we eventually have to teach the person to fish (to write their own well-written question and post it themselves).
• You can find Brent at his website or on Twitter! (Here’s his video about how Stack Overflow scales with SQL Server.)

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #28 w/ Brent Ozar by Stack Exchange

• Right now, Dave’s working on a “magnificent symphony of software” – it’s the communication system he wants to use. It involves a minimal blogging tool with only RSS output (plus a dongle that will push the RSS to twitter, etc), a “River of News” aggregator, and an overarching tool for creating content that can be picked apart and included on other platforms.
• Dave’s philosophy is that some time soon, users are going to realize that they need a place to build and control their content before they post it to any service or platform that’s controlled by an outside company.
• The gang discusses the nature of comments on blogs (and on Stack Exchange questions and answers), and how to manage them – or whether to allow them at all. It leads to a discussion of creating new pages on Wikipedia, and its requirements for citations and notoriety.
• Dave suggests putting together a Best Practices manual on managing your content on the web. He suggests that having as few domain names as possible will help people not lose their content (or break all their links). Jeff suggests that Facebook can be that sort of “repository” for many people, but Dave disagrees. (n.b.: He recently deleted his Facebook account.) Companies don’t necessarily last forever – we’re looking at you, Geocities. (Talk of Facebook inevitably pushes the discussion into the realm of what information websites record, and how, and why – generally as related to advertising.)
• Services like FedEx and UPS can get you your new Kindle Fire on release day because they’ve cut every possible corner – except for the 1% of people who are not a simple case because they’ve moved, or they need their package on time. That 1% outlier idea can’t be applied to freedom (intellectual, personal, what have you), Dave says.
• Dave wants to buy a bland, uninvolved service that does nothing but provide the service it says it provides. Amazon was doing a great job of that until they kicked WikiLeaks off their storage. Dave is overlooking that incident for now because there is nowhere else to go that provides the whole package (uptime, reliability, etc).
• Dave wrote a blog post involving the quote: “If you’re not paying for something, you have no reason to expect it to be there tomorrow.” But does that mean that because you are paying for something, youcan expect it to be there tomorrow? The gang explores this philosophy.
• Suddenly we’re talking about how Dave believes there is no real hard line between government and business… an issue which cannot necessarily be solved in a 60-minute podcast.
• Twitter solves the subscription process that RSS has. With RSS, you have to go through a bunch of steps to get yourself subscribed. With Twitter, you just have to click one “follow” button, and you’re set.
• Joel is considering writing fiction! He likes the medium because you don’t have to tell the truth. You tell the deeper truth by manipulating the superficial facts.
• The coalition of the users doing stuff together independent of Facebook or Google or what have you is valuable and should be encouraged and protected. It’s a conversation that Jeff and Dave will continue offline.
• You can find Dave at Scripting News, and you should also check out EC2 for Poets.

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #27 w/ Dave Winer by Stack Exchange

• Jeff is packing up to go on an international trip. He’s going to Øredev in Malmö via Copenhagen and London on British Airways. He will take the train from Copenhagen to Malmö - good choice! Joel is full of handy travel tips. Among them: The chip-and-PIN credit card system is vastly superior to the one we use, which is why it can be tough to get cash overseas! Joel also has packing tips for the cold Swedish weather. Also, freezing eyeballs
• Per a chat room question: there’s no news on DevDays. Though we did have a vendor offer us a refund on money we didn’t pay, but Producer Alex is too honest for his own good. Also, Future iterations will be closer to the original conference.
• Stack Overflow is accepting nominations for moderators for the next 6 days (at time of recording). So far, the nominations are civil and intelligent (unlike in the real world of course). The gang talks about other sites/forums/chat rooms from years past that have held elections like ours. There aren’t many! Jeff & Joel discuss what moderator elections mean for a community, why communities need moderators, and what makes a good moderator.
• David Fullerton is here to provide some insight on what makes a Hot Question on the Stack Exchange homepage… and we realize that an algorithm can never replace a good old-fashioned human moderator. Moderation is incredibly important.
• Jeff & Joel discuss previous elections, and the lessons learned from them which have turned into requirements for this new round of nominations.
• There are real-life elections today, too, but the weird off-season ones. “Dogcatcher” and “comptroller”. Leave it to the professionals who read the newspaper and listen to NPR every day! (If you were informed enough to vote in your local elections today, good on you!)
• The Gaming Stack Exchange is having a massive competition in honor of the launches of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. We want to see which game gets the most views on the site in the week after it was released. There are sweet prizes! Jeff will be shocked if Call of Duty wins this particular contest. David thinks Skyrim is going to win, too. It seems that many people feel this way. Can Call of Duty pull it off? Maybe, if we discover The One Question that gets a million views from Google.
• Also, we’re having a launch party on Friday! If you’re a gamer in New York and you want to come, send an email to team+gaming@stackexchange.com! We will also be livestreaming the party, where there will be 10 consoles playing MW3 and Skyrim. Stack Exchange and Fog Creek employees will be playing games, having snacks, and asking and answering great questions on the site.
• Spoiler alert for the first Modern Warfare game: it’s a video game where you die! In the campaign story, you die. You have to, and there’s no way around it. You die! That’s sort of rare.

Jeff is off to the airport! Go see him at Øredev! We’ll be back next week at the normal time (Tuesday @ 4pm ET) when Dave Winer (the Podfather) will be live in the studio with us.  See you then!

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #26 by Stack Exchange

• Chatrooms are chaotic! Jeff mentions that lots of spaces need editorial oversight. A lot of good information is available, but it’s a hard to find it in the disorganizations. It’s a chronic problem.
• Mark and Joel talk about his command-line work. Mark had to reverse-engineer this stuff, almost from scratch. SoftICE was effectively a device driver that took control away from the OS, when it was active. Mark’s become famous for being a Microsoft hacker (yes they exist) and for his work with rootkits, the problems with which are becoming an epidemic.
• Mark started outside of Microsoft, but later his company was acquired by them. He’s worked on Vista, Windows 7, and a bit of Windows 8, but is now on Windows Azure. For Azure, an OS for data centers, Mark works for the fabric controller team. Like the kernel in Windows, this defines processes and consumes application xml. Basically, he’s all up and down the stack. One of their biggest concerns is upping consistency, to make Azure the best in the industry.
• One of the project’s other goals is to have a virtual machine deploy in less than 5 minutes, and update in 2 minutes or less. Right now, those times are 8-9 minutes at the 50th percentile. They’re pursuing a variety of tactics to optimize the boot process. There are lots of moving parts to optimize. It’s a fun project, and it’s all new.
• Not that many companies can deploy a cloud operating system at such a scale. Investment is expensive, although, as Jeff points out, machines today are more powerful than ever before. Still, although Stack Overflow is ranked #180, getting to #150 requires four times the traffic. Mark points out that yes, you can manage the servers yourself, make the investment, figure out all the parts, and so forth. Or, in nine minutes, you can upload your webapp to the cloud and pay only for what you use.
• The cloud is best for companies who have traffic in bursts and periodic traffic. Companies where, say, there’s a known holiday shooping rush or other specific types of workload patterns. By contrast, Stack Overflow’s traffic is weirdly predictable. Mark notes that the other benefit to cloud computing is replication; if a disk fails (as 3-5% of them do annualls) your data is cloned across the country.
• Mark wrote a novel: Zero Day, which was published in March. It’s a cyber thriller based around a cyber terrorism plot to bring down parts of the world using malware. It’s readable and got lots of verisimillitude. The sequel, Trojan Horse is set to come out next fall.
• Right now, while direct attacks are less common, spear-phishing (targeted phishing attacks) and good old exploitation of vulnerabilities in a system are still serious threats.
• Jeff talks about the back-and-forth about putting anti-virus software on our servers. On the one hand, it’s absolutely necessary, especially as Careers 2.0 has users uploading resumes and CVs onto the server. On the other hand, mention “anti-virus” in a Linux room and be prepared to get laughed out. There’s also a serious performance question there.
• Everyone should go implement 2-step verification on their email accounts (Gmail account!) right now. Well? Go! Do it now! We’ll wait.
• Mark says he would separate his password into tiers, with the top tier being ecommerce sites. Jeff says that this is part of why he’s been pushing for third-party sign-ins, where the third party isn’t a bunch of idiots. Mark believes we are converging towards this naturally, with the proliferation of Google and Facebook sign-ins.
• Joel wonders if maybe there just aren’t that many malevolent people in the world. Mark quickly counters with Facebook’s admission that 600k logins are compromised daily.
• He also points out that while our security is better (compare XP to Vista or 7′s security hardening) the attacks are more sophisticated than ever. Just look at Stuxnet.
• Be sure to check out our Security and Writers sites. They’re awesome!

Next week’s guest is Chris “moot” Poole, from 4chan and Canvas.
Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #25 w/ Mark Russinovich by Stack Exchange

• Jeff Atwood is joining the podcast from his vacation. He has an announcement! He is having twins! In February! This will bring the total Atwood Child Count to 3, meaning they will outnumber the adults. Congratulations, Jeff!
• Talk of children leads to talk of war which leads to talk of Battlefield 3. The core team spent some time playing today. It incentivizes working as a team!
• ANYWAY. Eric Ries is our guest today! He’s got a new book out called The Lean Startup. What is a Lean Startup? It’s an analogy to lean manufacturing: a system of management about fast cycle time and building quality in from the beginning. Lean startups take those techniques and apply them to startups, where there are a lot more unknowns about the product and the customer.
• Eric wants to convince Jeff and Joel not to batch deploy anymore. (We deploy multiple times per day. We have at least one per day, and other than that people can deploy as they see that they need to.) The discussion about the way the teams deploy changes leads to a discussion about unit testing.
• Joel’s criticism of lean startups: the combination of Lean Startups and the fact that any startup can get a huge amount of funding instantly leads to a lot of startups that seem to “pivot” an awful lot. Color is a classic example of this. Eric reminds us thatwinter is coming for entrepreneurship, and this might not be a problem much longer.
• What is a pivot? A change in strategy without a change in vision. The key to the analogy is that in a pivot, one foot stays planted while you shift around to a new direction.
• Innovation accounting is Eric’s alternate accounting system that’s designed to tell if you’re getting close to product market fit. ROI, profitability, growth rates – all the traditional accounting metrics don’t apply at the really early stages of a startup.
• Joel’s dream for the Stack Exchange Network is medical research. The problem is getting a critical mass of people together to make the site work. Currently, we branch into other verticals via “overlapping circles” – starting out with programmers who also have other hobbies.
• Gaming is one of the biggest sites that has been created out of the “overlapping circles” theory. It’s likely to be an excellent bridge between the existing community of programmers and civilians who also play games, so we are going to put time and effort into figuring out how exactly to make Gaming more awesome.
• Eric is Mr. Pivot, so let’s get back to that: Pivoting is not necessarily a mistake. It’s the realization that a strategy that you used to be pursuing is working well for a specific customer base, and that you should pursue the parts of it that work. Gamers tend to pick a certain game to obsess over for a while, so it makes sense for the Gaming Stack Exchange to take a more specific approach to games as opposed to the Stack Overflow generalist approach.
• If you could imagine having An Encyclopedia Of X, there could be a site about X. (There might not be an encyclopedia on Call of Duty, but there would be one about all games in general.) That leads to the generalist approach, which can get messy, but we allow users to participate in segmenting themselves.
• Joel has decided to attack the Stack Overflow moderator flag queue. Some things he’s noticed: There is a tendency to pile flags on people that don’t speak English natively. The mental load on a new moderator can be very high as they learn the ropes of how to handle particular types of flags. Handling flags requires a lot of effort and decision from moderators. Joel has an idea on how to handle this! Discussion on moderation and flagging ensues.
• Eric‘s book The Lean Startup, found on Amazon or right on Eric’s website, peaked at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list!

Make sure to join us next week (at the usual time of course) when our guest is Mar Russinovich.

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #24 w/ Eric Ries by Stack Exchange

• James Portnow is joining us! Extra Credits has been a thing for a few years. The idea struck back when James was working at Activision. He wanted to open up the conversation about game development and design to the consumer side, instead of continuing to speak in the industry-centric bubble.
• At Stack Exchange, we’re trying to make learning fun. All of the gamification that we do on the system is in service to the goal of making the internet a better place for learning.
• Extra Credits did an episode about gaming addiction, which is related to the reason for the reputation cap on Stack Exchange sites.
• Stack Exchange has sites for gamers and game developers! The Game Development site is distinct from Stack Overflow because developing a game is a bigger set of activities than just writing code.
• Gamification is a way to get users to “read the manual”, and get them to the point where they don’t need the gamification aspects anymore at all.
• Games like Simon and Dragon’s Lair don’t give you any choice or control. Games provide positive simulation in various ways – by feeling like you’re acquiring a skill, by keeping things neat in Tetris, or on Stack Exchange, seeing somebody vote up something you wrote.
• One Chance is a flash game with an interesting mechanic: it leaves a cookie that prevents you from playing the game again. It’s an interesting concept on the bleeding edge of game design.
• The dark side of gamification… is conditioned actions that make players continue to play FarmVille, slot machines, some MMOs, etc. Players become aware that they are not enjoying the experience, but they are compelled to continue nonetheless.
• The danger in the Khan Academy is that for the American education system, this is the way to reduce our budget: have people record videos and have other people learn via these gamified websites. This is James’s concernabout the Khan Academy.
• When gamifying education, everybody should start off at 1 and work up from 1 - not get docked points down from A+ or whatever. You also have to incentivize the class to help get each other’s points up, not just each individual’s own points. A high sense of agency is the sense of having control over your own existence and the world around you. When a student falls behind a little bit and does not feel like he or she can catch back up, they lose their sense of agency, and it becomes a monumental task to get the student back on track. Games teach us that outcome is directly related to our own actions, but with more instant results. (Programming is another way to demonstrate this direct impact.)
• Joel peeled hard boiled eggs in the Israeli Army, so you can cross that off your Podcast Bingo card.
• James is the hero in his own story. Games teach you that you can always win, and that nothing is unachievable. We will close on that hopeful note! James can be found @JamesPortnow or @ExtraCreditz on Twitter, or over at Extra Credits.
• Oh, right, news from Stack Exchange: David, interim CTO while Jeff is on vacation, has no news. Except that we have a mascot now. (David had nothing to do with it.) Also, Jeff will be speaking at Oredev, which is November 7-11, and Punyon should probably go with him.
• Oh, yeah! We have our own URL shortener! It’s s.tk. Check out s.tk/joel and you’ll pick up the gist.

Make sure to tune in next week when our guest is Eric Ries.

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #23 w/ James Portnow by Stack Exchange

• Paul’s least favorite scripting language of all time is PHP. Paul works in static analysis, which is looking at a program that is not running, and making decisions about whether or not it will work, how to make it faster, what the security implications are. Paul has solved the Halting Problem… twice.
• PHP stinks, so we talk about C and C++ for a while. Bjarne Stroustrup wrote a great book on the topic.
• The people who love language design are not the people that are enthused by PHP, and they were scared off by the “poisonous community” (Paul’s words!). The most popular programming languages that aren’t very well designed: PHP, Perl, JavaScript, shell. Their creators “had no business designing languages”. How did they become popular?
• Haskell was a programming language that was well-designed but never gained any traction. Paul says there are two types of programming languages: those that start safe and try to build performance, and those that start performing well and try to build safety in. Haskell is the former. It “escaped” from academia… barely. F# comes from the same school of thought.
• What about Dart? Google released a spec. They’ve got a full implementation that’s ready to go in Chrome.
• The cool kids are using MongoDB, CoffeeScript, and tortoise shell glasses.
• Enough about programing languages! Paul started a YC journalism startup called NewsTilt. It was the Future of Journalism, which is a terrible business to get into. Here‘s why it got shut down. In a nutshell: there were problems with the product, and problems with communication between Paul and his co-founder. Also, not being in Silicon Valley can be problematic… though Silicon Valley is not necessarily the be-all end-all of startup success. Perhaps most important was that it didn’t solve a problem Paul really cared about.
• Circle CI is a compiler-related startup that does capture Paul’s interest. It’s “continuous integration made easy”!
• Paul didn’t actually make the slides for his talk. But the message he wants to get out there is that working on compilers is actually very easy, and not something only wizards can do.
• Paul can be found on Twitter @PaulBiggar, and at PaulBiggar.com.

Join us next week when our guest is James Portnow from Extra Credits – same place, same time.

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #22 w/ Paul Biggar by Stack Exchange

• Stack Exchange 1.0 (which gave users wanting their own Q&A site the Stack Exchange software, without being official Stack sites) is touched on. Jeff discusses the clones that exist and their reason for existing.
• Trello’s launch caused some kerfuffle on Web Apps.SE when general (and off-topic) help questions started being asked. In the larger sense, they discuss the necessity of applications and products to have their own unique help service.
• Some recent changes made to Area 51 are discussed, including the restructured voting system for example questions. Joel discusses the problems that arose out of the previous method of judging example questions.
• Fabian asks about overlapping proposals on Area 51, and David gives an overview of the process that goes along with the decision to merge proposals. Joel admits they aren’t too good at judging whether or not proposals are the right size.
• Joel gives a call to arms for Area 51! They discuss the soon-to-launch Biblical Hermeneutics site and its relationship to the existing Christianity and Judaism sites.
• Jeff brings up some other sites on Area 51, including LEGO and Firearms. The validity of a Healthcare IT site is discussed.
• Alex just access to Stack Exchange’s real-time Google Analytics, so the traffic trends of the site are discussed.
• Jeff plugs one of his pet proposals, and others discuss theirs (Krav Maga does indeed pop up).
• Joel shifts the conversation over to Careers. You can visit Joel’s profile here! Careers and Stack Overflow aren’t integrated as well as they should be, and solutions to that are discussed. Jeff and David also talk about cool updates coming to Careers. On a sidenote, if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be an intern for Fog Creek, you’re in luck! David talks about that experience briefly.
• Careers’ relationship with Linked In is mentioned and spurs on a wider discussion about the other career site.
• The history of Careers’ filter is discussed, including how it ran originally and how it runs now.
• Notifications on Stack Overflow have been modified recently. Jeff goes into the depth about how this was brought about. The term “yak-shaving” is involved.
• A discussion about parenting questions on other Q&A sites reminds Jeff of a recent discussion on Parenting.SE, regarding the horrific-sounding “hot saucing”.

Join us next week at the usual time when we’ll be joined by Paul Biggar and his wonderful Irish accent.

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #21 w/ David Fullerton by Stack Exchange

• John didn’t know who Jeff was until the Stack Overflow Podcast started. (Pop quiz: What was the podcast called before Stack Overflow was Stack Overflow?) Jeff and Joel brought everyone with them on their initial journey of setting up the site. Transparency is king.
• Version numbers don’t matter to Stack Overflow. There’s “current” and “not current” – it’s a constant work in progress. Especially if version numbers are a ploy to get everyone to buy the software again.
• We are downgrading Joel to an Etch-a-Sketch, since he can’t get his trackpad to work.
• Good programmers have a temptation to clean up Stack Overflow, and that can lead to everything suddenly looking off-topic. One result is that we get a lot of questions closed as General Reference. The gang discusses the many ways these questions have been handled over the years. There’s even a blog post on the topic. Jeff and Joel have different interpretations of how these types of questions should be treated.
• So what can be done to encourage good questions? One point of view is that a clearly no-work, no-effort question should not be rewarded with a brilliant answer. Another is that we shouldn’t care about the questioner – the goal is to create a useful piece of information that makes the internet better. We’re here to serve the 15 million people who get answers from the site without ever typing a word.
• Weakness to be addressed: better canonical answers, better de-duping, better practices at editing questions. The answer might be… better social networking, although that’s been heavily discouraged in the past. It’s promotion on Other Channels that gets eyeballs onto pages. Therefore, promoting things you’ve written is an incentive for asking better questions and giving better answers.
• We allow (and sometimes encourage) users to ask and then answer their own questions. Ask a good question when you start the project, then keep trying to figure it out yourself. In the meantime, somebody might jump in and answer your question. If not, solve the problem and add the answer yourself!
• What if the system tried to parse the code you’re typing a little bit? That way questions that aren’t necessarily similar in their vocabulary would be more intelligently flagged as similar to other questions that are actually related.
• Careers 2.0 doesn’t have an applicant tracking system, which is why Stack Exchange uses Resumator for its internal hiring. Why didn’t we ever think of that before!! (/dripping sarcasm)
• A Mac v. Windows conversation take us 20 minutes over time, even when it isn’t a heated debate!
• (Sidebar: conversations about PCs and Windows are generally much more technical than are conversations about Macs and Apple stuff… except among developers.) The main complaint John gets about his Ars Technica articles is requests for reviews of Windows to the same level of technical detail as his Mac reviews.
• Follow John Siracusa on twitter and listen to his podcast!

Join us next week when Jeff and Joel are joined by David Fullerton, the head of our NY (read: SO Careers) Dev Team.  Same Place, Same Time.
Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #20 w/ John Siracusa by Stack Exchange

• Jeff and Joel are bored of board meetings. How do you make them productive or even useful? Brad Feld says you should give out a document beforehand. Joel does this, and nobody reads it, but they at least pretend they did. Maybe Joel should plant money under the attendees’ chairs?
• Joel launched Trello at TechCrunch Disrupt last week, and they did not have adequate monitors onstage! It was representative of the general A/V “screw-uppedness” of the whole conference. Cool story, bro.
• Let’s talk about John Sheehan! He’s a developer evangelist at Twilio and doesn’t have enough Stack Overflow reputation. He travels around trying to make developers be more awesome.
• The future of phones is in things like BBM, iMessage, etc – alternatives to SMS. Voice is a whole ‘nother medium, for when emoticons just aren’t cutting it anymore. Text is useful for transmitting pieces of information, but for more nuanced conversations voice or video is necessary. How fortunate for this conversation that we have someone from Twilio on the line!
• New in the SE Universe: Linguistics! Joel’s dad thinks it’s full of amateurs. We also have a site on Christanity now. It is less technical than Judaism… which isn’t good. Our engine works better on more technical applications. Jeff: “I’m not 100% sure Christianity is working.” It’s still early, and it is getting more fact-based as it gets older, though.
• Bitcoin is low on activity until it gets a new question. It’s not what we call a healthy or growing site, but maybe that’s okay for a site like Bitcoin. There is no defined formula, and it is still being figured out.
• Now private beta participants will be able to invite others to the site while it’s still private. This devalues committing to a proposal slightly, but the private betas sometimes need a little help.
• John was at the BUILD conference in Anaheim last week. It was like Disney World, but with middle-aged dudes with questionable hygiene! Windows 8 had a developer preview, but it’s probably a year away from launch. John got to play with one of their tablets and says they’ve taken touch and made it completely un-intuitive. The longer he used it, the less he liked it. John is giving it away to the developer of the coolest Twilio app that uses some of the new WinRT or Metro stuff announced.
• Scrolling is a thing that many people have many feelings about. We got onto the subject through talking about Windows 8 merging its mobile and desktop systems, and how Apple is doing the same thing with iOS and OS X.
• John asks: Does anyone have any faith in a PC manufacturer making a tablet you would actually want to buy? Joel says no. Alex says no. Everyone keeps doing things like putting stickers about the component brands on a sports car.
• Totally hot right now: Trello t-shirts.
• DevDays failed because we did not promise a thousand dollar piece of hardware to every attendee, like developers at BUILD got.
• Jeff has not been to Burning Man. He likes the idea, but does not like the idea of being in the desert for so long. Joel did that in the army (cross that off your Podcast Bingo cards!), and it isn’t pretty.
• The Stack Exchange API 2.0 is baking! Take a look at the spec, and provide some feedback if you like. It’ll be released by the end of the year. Stats on the API will maybe be released in a blog post or something. Jeff uses the API as much as anyone that doesn’t work here, rather than using things a special, sneaky way. (You can read about past mistakes with the API on Kevin Montrose’s blog. Jeff, Joel, and John share their opinions on APIs and company/developer relations in general.
• New changes to the site are in the works. For example, no more duplicate title, and no more “Here code. You fix.” questions will be allowed.
• If you’re a programmer, and you want a better job, check out all the great new profile features at Stack Overflow Careers 2.0.

Join us next week at the normal time when our guest will be John Siracusa from Ars Technica (or as Joel likes to refer to him: “he wrote that really amazing review of Lion”).
Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #19 w/ John Sheehan by Stack Exchange

• Joel gives rundown of what he’s seen at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco so far. A discussion about differences between East Coast and West Coast tech startups leads Jeff and Joel to talk about how important centralized locations are for modern day companies.
• The recent Facebook deal has led to a recent influx of general Facebook support emails. This leads to a discussion about user support and how other companies rate against Stack Exchange.
• The merits of paying for internet services comes up, specifically thefreemium and 37signals models. Jeff discusses the merits of 37signals and Joel recounts his time using that model.
• The Most Valued Super User contest is discussed, specifically how this contest gets people to do “the right thing for the right reasons.” Mention of the contest’s prizes spur a discussion about merchandising (and inadvertently, whose head looks best on a plush Buddha).
• Jeff announces that Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange are getting Nerd Merit Badges.
• The Bitcoin site launched recently and is proving to be very popular. In other site news, Jeff mentions that enhancements are underway for the SE language sites.
• Jeff addresses the problem of duplicate questions, specifically on Meta. A little later on, Jeff goes into detail about the defense mechanisms being put in place to block duplicate questions.
• User interface proves to be a hot topic today between Jeff and Joel. What starts as a discussion about search engine functionality leads to a full-on talk about the ins and out and future of user interface. Listen to find out which user interface Jeff thinks is like a canker sore!
• Many sites have launched in the last week, opened recently. The new targeted method of advertising proposals may be the cause of this. As new sites open, Jeff and Joel discuss the new sites with overlap of existing questions. This is currently an issue with the existing Physics site and the soon-to-launch Theoretical Physics site.
• CHAOS member Sam brought up the idea of regional Stack Exchanges. Jeff and Joel support their differing opinions on the necessity of localized Stacks (also known as the “let your freak flag fly” theory vs. the “Hurricane Irene” defense).

Tune in next week at the normal time and with our normal in-studio setup (really, promise) for another episode as Jeff & Joel are joined by John Sheehan, developer evangelist for Twilio.

See you then!

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #18 by Stack Exchange

After a brief test of the emergency broadcast system, we plunge right into the podcast, including:

• Joel is late because he had to go up to AOL HQ to pick up some more floppy disks for the office
• We recently launched Blog Overflow - which was actually a pretty substantial engineering and technical background to making it happen.
• A huge discussion of the the SE infrastructure setup and why we host our own instead of relying on Amazon or another outside provider.  Hint: not only can we roll our own better, but its a lot cheaper too.
• In the department of little tweaks with big effect, check out our “network apocalypse”: at one point, Stack reconfigured to separate different types of network traffic due to microbursting overloading the network – this simple upgrade greatly increased the throughput and efficiency of the existing infrastructure.
• In the good news department: Jeff talks about the expanding user cards just introduced and based on a conversation from our podcast a few weeks ago with Michael Natkin
• In the bad news department: we’ve decided to cancel Stack Overflow DevDays due to low ticket sales – you can read Joel’s full blog post for all the details.
• Finally, we welcome our newest engineering hire – Demis!

That’s it!  Tune in next week at the usual time for another episode with more guests!

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #17 w/ Kyle & George by Stack Exchange

• Jeff and Joel discuss “Zombie Poke,” aka facebook.stackoverflow.com deal in depth and dispel rumors of receiving a “dump truck of money.” Details of the deal are discussed, from what the new feature accomplishes and how it came about.
• Jeff also discusses the state of online identity and the issues that arise with having multiple logins.
• Joel explains why he thinks Facebook might be the new AOL.
• Jeff relays a story about a Stack Exchange user who devised a clever way to get his dad involved in the Bicycles Stack Exchange. Joel wonders if this, or something similar, should be undertaken by CHAOS.
• The duo discusses which Stack Exchange sites don’t meet their personal expectations. The hit list includes Super User, Writing, and Gaming. Jeff goes into depth about his issues with Gaming.SE, even though it’s the fifth most trafficked site.
• Joel talks about the myth that reputation affects programmers’ career opportunities.
• A question from the chat room about the Publicist badge spurs discussion about sharing questions on the internet and how it relates to Stack Overflow.
• We discuss the state of Community Wiki. If you’re looking for a good example of a community wiki answer, look no further than How do I diagnose not being able to reach a specific website as an end user?
• And of course, if you enjoy the Stack Exchange podcast, make sure to check out the Ask Different Podcast – hosted by our Ask Different (aka apple.stackexchange) moderators!

We’re back on our regular schedule now, so tune in next week for another great episode!

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #16 by Stack Exchange

Their discussion includes:

• Michael is a vegetarian “foodie” (even though he really hates that word) – he and Joel commiserate over the oddities of being a vegetarian trying to eat out
• Joel wants to know what type of questions usually come up on cooking (and how they maintain their 100% answer rate)
• Joel thinks that you should never combine chocolate and garlic, but there’s a Cooking.SE thread that disagrees
• On the topic of what questions should be closed, Jeff points to this Electrical Engineering meta thread with a great example of why we need to keep closing questions
• Kicking off a whole discussion of creating house rules – Joel and Michael jump into discussing Momofuku and restaurants who create dishes and refuse to alter them for guests
• Jeff wants to take a deep dive into the top question of the month on Cooking.SE
• Also interesting about Cooking.SE is that there are very few “modernist” questions on it
• Make sure to check out Modernist Cuisine if you want to find a REALLY expensive cookbook (but its written by a patent troll, so we can’t recommend it)
• Michael is still seeing some good user growth with a few new faces coming in to the top users every quarter
• One big question that comes up when you see a question that is salvageable but needs some work, is it better to just edit it for them or to point out the issue to them and ask them to change it
• On a related note: should you point out if someone’s question contains a bad assumption or is “doing it wrong” or just answer what they’re looking for – check out this post on Waxy about his favorite sandwich shop and sweet tea
• We’ve gone back and forth about how much promotion we should do on the individual site “brands” – ultimately we’ve found that we rather promote the individuals actually answering the questions and helping them build their reputations (and remember, once you make it to 2000 rep, we remove the “no-follow” from your profile URL so you get the Google juice)
• We just improved the individual site Twitter accounts and they now tweet way more info.  New community blog posts also show up in the header of each site so users will find out about the new posts
• We also rolled out massively improved tagging to help users better figure out what tags they should put on their questions
• Should our new CHAOS folks post their team blog on Tumblr (to make sharing easy) or our own platform (because its ours)
• If you haven’t checked out our new newsletters – you can get a weekly list of the most interesting questions on any of the sites you’re interested in, but don’t necessarily visit every day.  As Joel says, its kind of like a free candy store!
• Make sure to check out our upcoming conferences; Stack Overflow DevDays – a two day programming conference that will cover all the new technologies you need to know about; and Server Fault’s Scalability Day – helping system administrators learn about massively scaling systems (with speakers from Facebook, Netflix, etc) – plus, save $100 off either conference with the discount code “podcast”

Thanks for joining us!  We’ll be on “summer vacation” for the next couple weeks, but we’ll be back on August 30th @ 4pm EDT with Anita Graser from GIS.SE (and our first female guest!).

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #15 w/ Michael Natkin by Stack Exchange

• Miguel has worked on a number of different projects including Midnight Commander, Gnome, Mono, Ximian and more
• Midnight Commander still continues to be developed to this day (albeit by other people) and it has some interesting new features that have been added
• Joel reiterates his hate for huge numbers of configuration options and appreciates Miguel not implementing ridiculous option trees in his programs
• We have a brand new podcasting setup (again!) – keep your eyes open for an upcoming post detailing our whole setup
• Jeff thinks that Unix couldn’t make the same advances as some other systems (like Apple) because they didn’t have a dictator to force massive changes on the community
• After leaving Novell (which owns Mono), he launched a new company (Xamarin) that is working on some new projects, while also supporting the existing Mono community
• Cross platform apps are stupid if they aren’t coded using the native UX and tools (see Word 5 for Mac, Safari for Windows, etc) which makes them look different from every other program on that platform
• Make sure to check out Area51 to see all of the new sites that are currently in commitment and under consideration of being launched.  Support the proposals that you want to see as Stack Exchange sites!
• Our new Bicycles site just launched as a full site (and gotten its own theme)!
• We’ve started a new team of people (CHAOS) who will help enhance and promote many of our communities – the first project they are working on is enhancing question titles and converting many of them into actual questions
• This has also led to a big debate internally over the relationship between great questions and titles and what guidelines we should set for making titles
• Miguel is the most productive person that Joel knows (besides James Franco)
• We have a new newsletters feature that allows you to get a weekly newsletter showing the top and most interesting questions from sites that you’re interested in but don’t visit every day.  Check out stackexchange.com/newsletters – it’s like a candy store filled with free candy!
• Sometimes people tell us they are interested in certain topics but their activity tells us something different (which is why we auto customize the homepage for each user) – its kinda similar to people on dating sites…
• Every once in a while, we have a site that makes it through Area51 despite it “sucking” (eg: freelancers) – the problem with these sites is that there simply aren’t enough questions because its too small a topic – the entire topic can be covered in one book
• There are two current proposals that present an interesting contrast on this topic: Christianity and Biblical Hermeneutics – the biblical site has great, specific questions, where’s Christianity doesn’t and will likely be a weak site
• Cross “Joel tells an army story” off your Stack Exchange Podcast Bingo Card!
• Coming soon: use as many OpenID logins as you want on SE (instead of the current limit of two)
• One of our developers (Kevin Montrose) wrote a great blog post on how your email is your identity
• Fair warning: Miguel lies a lot on his twitter feed
• Make sure you get your tickets for Stack Overflow DevDays (we just announced the first round of speakers for all the cities!) and use discount code “podcast” to save $100!

Join us next week for another live episode on Tuesday @ 4pm (EDT) or catch the posted version on Wednesday.

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #14 w/ Miguel De Icaza by Stack Exchange

Full topics this week include:

• Jin refers to himself as a “web designer” as opposed to a “graphic designer” because of the type of work he focuses on.
• Last week, we discussed this amazing answer from Eric Lippert and how it was a great answer in response to a poor question.  Looking over this led Joel to notice that some people will vote to close a question as duplicate because the answers are the same even though the questions are different.
• In this case, there was already some questions on the topic but Eric decided to write the “canonical” answer that can be referenced from here out.  Joel will often do the same thing on some of the other Stack Exchange sites (like in this OnStartups post)
• Sometimes you do have to have SOME duplication of questions to make sure that the different use-cases are covered, but you want to avoid there being 12 of the exact same question on every site.
• When applying for Stack Exchange, Jin created a custom site targeted at Joel to show his abilities.
• As Joel notes (and expands on) Jin went with the always smart tactic of spending a ton of time focusing on the one company he truly wanted to work for instead of very little time on 50 random companies.
• Many people forget that truly great design is very hard, when you have to meld it with making sure the site stays useful and effective for the users.
• Talking about continuous improvement: Jin notes an episode of This American Life covering similar topics.
• Joel likes Robin Williams’ (no, not that Robin Williams) book on design since it has really good and basic lessons on it – The Non-Designers Design Book
• We use a special CSS structure that lets us have a master CSS file for the entire network and then smaller CSS files for each site that just contain the differences between the generic template and the special parts of each site.
• We’ve also learned a number of design lessons: like that white on black designs just don’t look very good and aren’t usable.
• There have been issues in the past with designers creating their designs on macs but those designs then looking funny on PCs because of differences in text rendering – fortunately, thanks to improvements on both ends, that happens less now.
• While Jin is our in house designer and works on everything, we occasionally have help from some outside designers (such as for English and UX) who are members of the community.
• Prompted by a question for the chatroom, Jin is really excited about getting to design our RPG site.
• Anonymous feedback is now live!  That means non-logged in users and those with less than 15 rep can give feedback on how good questions/answers are.  We haven’t figured out how we’ll incorporate this data yet, but we’re collecting it and will figure that out.
• Make sure you get your tickets for Stack Overflow DevDays (we just announced the first round of speakers for all the cities!) and use discount code “podcast” to save $100!

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #13 w/ Jin Yang by Stack Exchange

• The big news for Stack Exchange this week: we officially launched our new mobile support!
• We also recently introduced in-line editing so you don’t have to go to a separate page to edit an answer or question – we really want to encourage editing and have people help make questions better.
• Patrick is the creator of BingoCardCreator.com – an amazingly popular site for putting together bingo cards for various occasions.  Apparently, one of the biggest markets is for Halloween Bingo Cards with the entire month of October being worth $20k in sales.
• He also has a new tool for helping doctor’s offices remind patients of upcoming appointments.
• Patrick owns a bunch of “exact match” domain names which provide a huge SEO bonus since Google assumes that anyone who owns a domain exactly matching a search must be credible.  The bonus doesn’t apply to hyphenated domains though.
• Joel suspects (and Patrick confirms) that Google now incorporate WHOIS data into their ranking to discount any domains that are owned by people who have a history of owning crappy domains. (Joel has apparently also never seen Burn Notice)
• One potential issue with rewriting question titles to be SEO’d is that not everyone searches in the same language that Google ranks for – so you might actually hurt how many people find your questions.
• Joel misses all the “labor of love” sites that people have written because they truly love a subject – the quality and usefulness of those sites is FAR better than the useless drivel turned out by content farms.  Patrick does point out one defense of them though.
• Jeff has been wanting to talk more about the “Ask Me Anything” concept that originated from Reddit.  Jeff thinks the format of Reddit isn’t the best for the AMA idea (and in general has some issues with the format) and likes a new site: AnyAsq.com which is really optimized for it.
• Ultimately, this leads to a further discussion of the value of various formats for organizing different types of content.
• Joel & Jeff have often wondered how to prevent the “tyranny of the sort order” in which already upvoted posts (or posts from high rep users) get lots of upvotes on their answer even though there may be a better one.
• Sometimes certain answers get crazy levels of upvotes – like this one
• Our math intern, Qiaochu, has been doing some research and found the effect of having an upvoted post on a users propensity to return:

• Of course Stack Overflow DevDays 2011 is still coming along, so make sure to pick up your tickets now!  We’ll be coming to 4 cities around the world this fall with some of the foremost experts on software development, so don’t miss it!  Use the code “podcast” for a $100 discount too!

We’ll see you next week when our guest is Stack Exchange designer Jin Yang!

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #12 w/ Patrick McKenzie by Stack Exchange

• Rory has had a whirlwind of moving and relocating as of late.  Today is the first day he got more than 3 hours of sleep, but he is now happily in his new house. Rory hasn’t been writing as much as of lately because of random personal and relationship issues – but he’s free now! Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines!
• Jeff recommends “Enemy of the State” (even though it stars Will Smith) – it’s a spiritual sequel to The Conversation and it also contains a faraday cage, in case you’re interested in seeing one of those.
• While working on .Net Rocks! (our podcast competition – so don’t visit that link) Rory moved for a while to New London, CT – and it only took one day to decide to move there.
• Rory was also part of podcasting way back in the early days (of 2004) while everything was still being decided about formats, styles, enclosures, etc. He was also a featured guest on Podcast #71 of the Stack Overflow podcast in 2009!
• Jeff wants to know what Rory has been up to for the past couple years: and apparently Rory is still very focused on iPhone development. One of the biggest changes: all the clever hacks that programmers did originally are now supported by real APIs which makes it less fun for the nerds.
• MonoTouch was recently spun out by Novell after its “restructuring” and is now tied in to Xamarin. Rory loves MonoTouch because of the ease of it and the incredible power that it gives developers, including cocoa bindings, the ability to drop in .NET binaries, efficiencies, etc
• You can also find Rory’s new site at Rory.me (once he actually starts blogging there)
• One valid reason to use Objective C over MonoTouch is that it is a much smaller file,  Although it has gotten much more efficient recently, according to Rory.
  
• Rory argues that fascism is good in tech products: from the iPhone to Xbox, by isolating and controlling everything in the platform it allows the company to control the experience and ensure quality.  Otherwise you can end up with things like Windows Mobile / Windows CE.
• Google runs the risk of running into similar issues with Android.  The other question is if they are diversifying out too much (into crazy projects like wind power).
• How do we keep Stack Exchange questions up to date? The Monotouch vs Objective C question above is 2 years old now and may no longer be fully accurate; we accept edits from anonymous and 1 reputation users now, but how can we motivate them to improve this old question?
• Rory is also one of the most “prolific” answerers on our site with the highest vote to answer ratio on the site!
• Rory will also be speaking at Stack Overflow DevDays – so pick up your tickets now if you want to see him (with discount code ‘podcast’ for $100 off)
• Help us test the new Stack Exchange mobile view on your mobile device by enabling it on meta! (scroll down to the very bottom of the page to enable it there.)

There’s no podcast next week (the 12th) but we’ll be back live @ 4pm on the 19th so see you then!

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #11 w/ Rory Blyth by Stack Exchange

• Everyone wanted to know how Steve ended up on the site: turns out his son is a computer programmer who has used Stack Overflow for a while and encouraged his dad to check it out.
• Steve is also a big user of This Old House Pro, a community for contractors hosted by This Old House.  The main difference is that he gets answers on This Old House but gives answers on DIY.SE.  Steve would also like to see some more contractors join DIY.SE
• The number one problem he sees is people getting in over their heads.  Especially in regards to electrical and plumbing projects, people don’t know or understand the codes and safety issues.
• How do you know if a contractor is going to be competent and good?  Best advice is to get referrals.  And once you have them, make sure they are real, go out and actually see how the jobs came out.
• If you haven’t seen There, I Fixed It, go check it out for great examples of what not to do.  Especially, never, ever use a screwdriver as a fuse.
• One great question that Steve answered was how to estimate the height of a tree: he recommended an old logger method.
• If at any point during a project you stop and think; how the heck do I do this?  It’s time to stop and get advice, either from a contractor or other reliable source.  Steve relays the story of a friend who had a fixer-upper and continually called him for advice after getting stuck on a problem for 5 hours.
• Ever needed to do plumbing work but don’t know how to sweat pipes?  Check out Shark Bites which form secure couplings without sweating.  Unfortunately – they aren’t cheap.
• If you want to learn how to do home improvement work: just pick a project and start it.  Some contractors will also let you help out on projects on your house instead of one of their lowest level guys (but not all contractors will let you).
• Steve tried to build his first house at the early age of 22 right after he left the air force – as with all early projects, there were a LOT of lessons learned.
• Jeff also related how learning building is similar to learning code: ultimately one of the best methods is to simply sit down (or stand up) with someone better than you and work on a project with them
• One challenge for Steve has been learning all of the intricacies of the software and systems that make up the sites (like the difference between the main and meta sites), since he’s not a computer guy.  He’d also like to see some more highly experienced people come into the site.
• The writing that Steve has done on the site has also spurred his desire to keep writing and based on it, he’s even talked to some of the local papers about doing an “Ask the Contractor” column.
• Steve also noticed how long people continue to read and vote on his answers over time.  Joel pointed out this question on sliding glass doors that still continues to get lots of views even though only 3 people originally answered the question.
• Steve is excited about the Gardening and Landscaping site (which is currently in public beta) – if you haven’t checked it out, you should!
• Steve’s son Alex is also launching a new website – Axiom Home Services – to help homeowners with their home inspection questions and needs.
• Coming up soon, we’ll have a weekly newsletter which will recap interesting and popular questions from the week.
• We just officially announced the launch of DevDays 2011 tickets (yeah, yeah we’ve talked about it before, but now its official).  As always, you can get your tickets with a $100 discount by using the code “blog”

Join us next Tuesday for a special surprise guest!  Not to mention, audio mixing provided by our very own Jason Punyon.

Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #10 w/ Steve Karantza by Stack Exchange

• Everyone’s favorite Canadian airline? Porter Airlines!  What makes them so great?  They use FogBugz as their customer service software.
• We’ve hired a math intern to help us mine through all of our Stack Exchange data and (hopefully) improve the site.   And to make it better, he’s an MIT student and Math.SE moderator.
• According to a study of Microsoft data, what was the strongest predictor of bug rates in Windows Vista?  The answer: how far apart the developers are in the org charts. The more separate they are, the more likely there are to be conflicting orders or different mind sets.
• There have been fairly strong opinions for years on what makes a good programming setup/environment, but people are just now beginning to look at actual data to derive conclusions
  Greg thinks this is LONG overdue, especially given that software development is an engineering backed profession – why weren’t our processes based on science?
  Even big companies, who have access to the data, have been avoiding actually using data for their decision making: people treat it as a craft rather than an engineering discipline
• Greg has written several books on how to develop software better – two of which came out this year and are must reads.
• Making Software: Joel requires that you read this book, because its the first one to take a scientific approach to making software as opposed to the subjective and anecdotal way that most have in the past (eg: everyone who has done one software project and then written a post on HN about how their method is “amazing”).
• Greg wanted to use the results of his studies to bring actual concrete steps back to professionals on how they could improve their process
• His favorite chapter: while Test Driven Development is very popular right now, a survey of all of the studies that have been done on TDD have shown that the better the study done, the weaker the signal as to its benefit.
• Another study recently looked at how much effort goes into maintaining the build system: 5 to 30% of all development effort is spent on maintaining the build system.  With the variations being huge even when working on similar projects.  Clearly, there’s a huge difference in the efficiency of some developers.
• Measuring programmer “productivity”: As Joel points out, any metric that you come up with as a method for measuring programmer productivity can be gamed some how.  He even made money as a consultant in the past showing companies why they shouldn’t hire consulting companies to improve “productivity” since programmers would instantly game any system (which is how consulting companies appeared to be successful).  Ultimately, it’s pretty hard to actually measure.
• Greg points out that the irony is that the single most correlated measure of productivity is simply lines of code written.  Joel counters with that only holds true, so long as the developers don’t know they are being measured based on that (since its so easy to game).
• His second book is The Architecture of Open Source Applications: its entirely CC licensed so you can read it online for free.  if you do buy a hard copy though, all the proceeds go to Amnesty International.
• Greg decided to publish it for free online after seeing how quickly Beautiful Code was put onto torrent sites.
• His key thesis behind it is that we don’t teach people how to read code (only how to write it).  His example: you wouldn’t hire an architect who had never looked at other designs before.
• What’s really important isn’t the internals of the code, but rather the architecture – especially when it comes to understand what you’re trying to achieve.
• The best parts about the book are where the authors stop talking about what’s inside the code and start talking about why those things are there.
• Deloitte performed a study called “A Random Search for Excellence” (based on a book by Tom Peters called “In Search of Excellence“).  They tried to explain the data that Peters used by assuming that all of the companies were on a random walk and found that yes, he didn’t actually prove anything.
• Joel is reading Henry Petroski’s new book on the difference between science and engineering.
• TO-DO: Greg needs more data for his upcoming work.  So take your favorite piece of open source software (something you find interesting) and take it apart and tell us how it all fits together.
• Joel’s post on building communities with software
• Jeff’s take: If you want to get better, work with programmers who are better than you.  Period.  And since its so important to pick your work family well, consider coming to work at Stack Exchange!
• Make sure to register for Stack Overflow DevDays 2011!  Use the code “PODCAST” for a $100 discount in any city.
  • We’ll also be having a one day hackathon on December 13th in Washington DC – come join the entire Stack Exchange dev team in hacking away on your favorite open source project!
• We’ve launched a few new sites including Astronomy and Philosophy!  Plus, Travel is now in private beta and Personal Productivity is starting soon!
• We’re going to start a weekly newsletter highlighting the best questions on the sites.  We’re targeting this based on some recent data we’ve found that a lot of our users don’t return frequently after their initial visits and activity.
• Because of how much we love our universal inbox,  we’re working on an feature that would email the things that you missed from your inbox.

Thanks for joining us again this week – join us next Tuesday @ 4pm when our guest is Steve Karantza (aka Shirlock Homes on DIY.StackExchange).  We’ll be live at livestream.com/stackexchange – see you then!
Stack Exchange Podcast – Episode #09 w/ Greg Wilson by Stack Exchange

• What’s the proper numbering format for podcast episodes: decimal, binary, octal?  There’s also an extensive debate regarding whether Marco has ever been on the podcast: everyone but Joel agrees that he hasn’t.
• Marco talks about leaving Tumblr to start his own company (Instapaper)
• Part of what made the move easier was that he did it on the side for about a year before leaving Tumblr (with the okay of his current boss of course).
• By the time he left, Instapaper had become a full time job and Tumblr had become far more than a full-time job – it needed even more time and support.  It became very stressful knowing that even the slightest mistakes in code could cause 1100 people per second to get error messages
• Instapaper is also a bit easier to support because it’s inherently designed for offline use, so if the servers go down, people aren’t immediately deprived of the entire functionality like they are if your web service is down.
• Instapaper was created by Marco to solve the problem of reading on the train and reading old articles that he had found while at work.
• Marco is currently being confronted by the “big player” problem (aka The Starbucks Problem), now that Apple has introduced their “Reading List” feature in the newest version of iOS and Mac OSX.
• As Marco points out though, there’s several big reasons that he isn’t really hurt by it: 1) It doesn’t solve the offline problem – it’s only online bookmarks  and (2) It doesn’t clean the text to make it easier to read
• Most importantly, it doesn’t solve everyone’s needs and at the same time, it educates the market as to the value of this type of service, thereby enlarging the entire market and creating more customers for Instapaper.
• This tends to work really well for the small player when you’re trying to solve a big problem with lots of personal preferences – it doesn’t work well when its one simple task that needs to be completed.
• Examples of situations that are good for the little guy: RSS Readers, email clients, coffee shops, etc.  Examples of situations that are bad for the little guy: .ZIP files, regular bookmarks, etc
• There’s also tons of successful notes and stock apps, despite Apple providing support for it natively.  So many people want more functionality that it creates a whole new market.
• Ultimately, if someone wants a bit more than what Apple provides by default, they are probably going to go to Instapaper and ultimately increase Marco’s user base..  The key to this model: you have to do it better than the big guy
• People sometimes also choose random or arbitrary reasons for choosing products (like the color or logo or name)
• Jeff finds that the effort of queuing things up (especially reading material) is greater than the benefit he gets from being able to read things later.
• Marco points out that he doesn’t want Instapaper to be seen as an obligation – something that many people ultimately feel it can be
• To combat this, he is considering a feature where he would email them saying “I noticed that you have X articles more than Y months old, do you want to archive them”, thereby giving them an ‘out’.
• People don’t find to tend the app while searching for offline reading – they just find that as an additional benefit after they start using it.
• Joel thinks that Facebook created the “Like” button in order to collect data about web pages that would be very good for creating a search engine
• Marco also points out that Facebook provides all of these various embed platforms so that they get the cookie on your computer and then can see anytime you visit any of these pages and build a graph of what you (and everyone else) looks at.
• Bringing it back to Stack Exchange: Jeff points out that we’ve been considering giving anonymous users the ability to vote somehow (currently voting is the most protected form of interaction on the site).  One option is a ‘like’ or ‘thumbs-up’ button somewhere on the page.  Another option is to collect the votes from anonymous users, but count them in a separate tally or as a fractional vote
• Fun Fact: there are two important etiquette rules in New York City
  • 1) You should go through the revolving door first so that he is doing the work of pushing the door
  • 2) When getting in a taxi, you should get in first, since the first person in needs to slide across the seat.
• We’ve rewritten the descriptions for the close reasons of subjective and argumentative to make clear that its for a question that is inviting discussion or outside the scope of the site.
• Registration for Dev Days in all cities is now open – make sure you register and get more info at http://devdays.stackoverflow.com

Join us next week, once again live @ 4pm on Tuesday for Greg Wilson for deep insights into the communities surrounding open source software projects.

Stack Exchange Podcast #08 w/ Marco Arment by Stack Exchange