community engagement
You know how interviewers love asking about your greatest weakness, or the biggest mistake you’ve ever made? These questions may sound formulaic, maybe even borderline cliché, but be careful when you answer: they are more important than they seem. So when people ask me what our biggest mistake was
programming
There is a high correlation between “programmer” and “gamer.” One of the first Area 51 sites we launched, based on community demand, was gaming.stackexchange.com. Despite my fundamental skepticism about gaming as a Q&A topic – as expressed on episode 87 of Herding Code – I have to admit
software development
After we created Stack Overflow, some people were convinced we had built a marginally better mousetrap for asking and answering questions. The inevitable speculation began: can we use your engine to build a Q&A site about {topic}? Our answer was Stack Exchange. Pay us $129 a month (and
remote work
When I first chose my own adventure, I didn’t know what working remotely from home was going to be like. I had never done it before. As programmers go, I’m fairly social. Which still means I’m a borderline sociopath by normal standards. All the same, I was
ruby
I have what I would charitably describe as a hate-hate relationship with email. I desperately try to avoid sending email, not just for myself, but also in the code I write. Despite my misgivings, email is the cockroach of communication mediums: you just can’t kill it. Email is the
microformats
I recently added microformat support to the free public CVs at careers.stackoverflow.com by popular demand. Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. The official microformat “elevator pitch” tells us nothing useful. That’
community
That Stack Overflow thing we launched a year ago? It’s been going pretty well so far. Of course, everyone knows you could code Stack Overflow in a long weekend. It’s trivial. Assembling a worldwide community of smart, engaged software developers? That’s a whole different ball of wax.
software engineering
I was utterly floored when I read this new IEEE article by Tom DeMarco (pdf). See if you can tell why. My early metrics book, Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement, and Estimates [1986], played a role in the way many budding software engineers quantified work and planned their projects. In
regular expressions
Markdown was one of the humane markup languages that we evaluated and adopted for Stack Overflow. I’ve been pretty happy with it, overall. So much so that I wanted to implement a tiny, lightweight subset of Markdown for comments as well. I settled on these three commonly used elements:
social media
Is anyone else as sick as I am of all the mainstream news coverage on Twitter? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a Twitter fan, and I’ve been a user since 2006. To me, it’s a form of public instant messaging – yet another way to maximize the
unix
Unix turns 40: The past, present and future of a revolutionary OS is fascinating reading. Forty years ago this summer, a programmer sat down and knocked out in one month what would become one of the most important pieces of software ever created. In August 1969, Ken Thompson (pictured at
motivation
There’s an inherent paradox in motivating programmers. I think this Geek Hero Comic illustrates it perfectly: It’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed even in myself. Nothing motivates like having another programmer tell you they’re rewriting your code because it sucks. Dave Thomas has talked about this for