a network of 33 Q&amp

Lunch 28 Apr
What do you do for lunch every day? Exactly where do you eat it? With whom?

I’ve been on teams that consume jointly each day, and it is great. I’ve been on teams that really do not, and lunch each day is, at finest, lonely.

A large amount of large tech organizations have cafeterias, both free (Google) or low-cost (Microsoft). At these companies, some teams truly make an effort to eat together every single day. But a great deal of teams really do not. In case you wander about these places at lunchtime, you’ll see some big groups, plenty of pairs of people who've scheduled a “lunch meeting,” but you are going to also see a distressing amount of loners consuming by by themselves. Perhaps they are reading through a book or checking their e-mail while they consume so that they really do not appear sad. Maybe they took their lunch back to their desk so they wouldn’t must sit in the cafeteria by themselves. Probably they genuinely really do not like individuals and they’re content to eat alone. Or maybe they are just telling you that.

At Google and Microsoft, the cafeterias can get so crowded that the loners genuinely have to sit with other groups due to the fact there is not sufficient area to sit at a table by on their own. Sometimes, the group they sit down with makes an hard work to incorporate the loner in their conversation. A lot more usually, the loner is obligated to pretend to become utterly engrossed in playing Farmbook on their smartphone, so regarding offer a pretext to stop needing to make social contact. Excuse me, I’d like to introduce myself to you, but it’s very important that I update my cabbage.

Where and with whom we try to eat lunch can be a much greater offer than most of the people care to acknowledge. Clearly, psychologists will inform us, clearly it goes again to childhood, and specially school, particularly Junior Substantial, in which who you consume with is of monumental relevance. Currently being in any clique, even if it is just the nerds, is vastly preferable than eating on your own. For loners and geeks, obtaining folks to eat with within the cafeteria at college is usually a enormous source of tension.

The value of eating together with your co-workers is not negotiable, to me. It is too critical to be left to likelihood. That is why we consume together at lengthy tables, not a bunch of tiny spherical tables. That is why when new folks start perform at the company, they’re not allowed to sit off by themselves inside a corner. Once we have guests, they eat together with everyone else.

Even although Stack Trade and Fog Creek are fully separate firms, we take benefit with the undeniable fact that our offices are within the exact same developing to consume with each other each day. I’m glad that we've a chance to try and do this, despite the fact that a lot of people are inclined to clique-up and sit using the same individuals day soon after day.

There’s lots of stuff that’s accidental about Fog Creek and Stack Exchange, but lunch just isn't certainly one of them. Ten decades back Michael and I set out using the rather ambitious objective of making an excellent location to function. Consuming jointly is a vital part of what it signifies to become human and what it indicates to have a humane workplace Discount Office 2007, and that’s been a part of our values from day a single.
The podcast is back! 27 Apr
Jeff Atwood and We have resumed our weekly podcast, formerly referred to as the Stack Overflow Podcast, now generally known as the Stack Exchange Podcast!

Here are some methods to discover us:
On iTunes. In case you have an iPhone or iPod that you simply sync to iTunes, it is possible to set this up to instantly download each and every week. iTunes link to Stack Exchange Podcast On SoundCloud. SoundCloud is sort of like a sound edition of Twitter, an incredibly awesome strategy to subscribe to audio. Stack Trade Podcast on SoundCloud Or you can simply subscribe to your Stack Exchange Weblog Office 2010 Serial, in which the podcast will arrive each Wednesday at about 3PM EST, comprehensive with show notes and listener feedback.
Special due to Particular Agent Alex Miller, who is, in his spare time, the brand new producer of the podcast. We’ll be creating lots of technical improvements towards the podcast more than the following couple of months, so remain tuned... it’ll be genuinely exciting.
Stack Overflow (the organization) is now Stack Trade 09 Mar
The snack room at Stack Exchange obtained a wee upgrade right now:


Find out why (and go through to your stop to locate out how to get your own StackExchange sticker) in the Stack Overflow Website.
Careers two.0 (by Stack Overflow) 23 Feb
One day, you’ll be telling your grandchildren about getting a programming work, version one.0. You'll deliver a “resume” to a “recruiter.” It incorporated all sorts of foolish data required by the esoteric resume ritual (foreign languages spoken, whether you play greatest Frisbee, Microsoft-veteran position). This so-called “information” was utterly useless at identifying whether you might program or not, but when you spelled everything correct and utilized acceptable fonts, you might are available in for any day of interviews at which you'll be asked to execute mundane programming tasks on the whiteboard.

Careers 2.0 is here!

Does your employer very own your side jobs? 11 Feb
There’s a astonishing quantity of misinformation around about whether or not software program businesses individual the perform that a programmer does within their spare time.

From my response towards the issue on solutions.onstartups.com:
Being an employee of the substantial tech company whose item is intellectual means that you might have made the decision which you desire to sell your intellectual output.
Read the entire point right here:
If I'm working at an organization, do they have intellectual residence rights towards the things I do in my spare time? FogBugz/Kiln Demo 03 Feb
If you weren’t able to produce it to your FogBugz/Kiln world tour, a video of my presentation is up now on YouTube.


(When you have a high bandwidth connection, attempt the “720p” option, which displays the display far more plainly.)
Stack Overflow 2010 recap 24 Jan
(reposted from your Stack Overflow blog)

2010 was an definitely wonderful 12 months right here at Stack Overflow. We grew from 7 million website visitors to around sixteen million, placing us in Quantcast’s top rated 400. We raised $6 million in venture capital, and we went from a few entire time staff to 27. We constructed a 7500 square foot workplace in Ny, and we released a lot of new functions and internet sites, like Stack Exchange, a network of 33 Q&A sites on diverse topics from cooking to computer science. Stack Exchange grew 51% in December alone. Wow.

The expert Q&A model that Stack Overflow pioneered is genuinely functioning. The statistic I’m proudest of is the percentage of questions that get a good answer Office 2007 Standard, more than 80% (and many with the new Stack Trade web sites have 100% response rates!)
Traffic
The true measure of success for any Internet business is how frequently people come approximately me in swank hotel lobbies and offer to buy me meals, let me use their corporate jet, etc. But since there is really a fantastic deal of disagreement regarding how to measure that, we track a reasonable proxy called “eyeballs,” on the theory that if a site is useful, individuals will load it up within their browsers and eyeball it.


Traffic to Stack Overflow grew 131% in 2010, to 16.six million global monthly uniques. *Uniques* are counted by cookies, so the number of human beings is less. We also measure the variety of page views (best level pages loaded, which doesn’t count images and supporting files), which has similarly grown from 31.8 million per month to 72.8 million per month, i.e. 129% growth.

Based on the variety of folks who do occur up to us in hotel lobbies, we’re pretty sure that ALL the programmers within the planet use Stack Overflow. (Supply: completely made up. But seriously, when was the last time you met a programmer who didn’t use “El Stack”?) In order to keep growing and making the Internet much more brilliant, we now have to expand into new subject areas, like Molecular Biology and Harley Davidson Belt Buckles. That’s what Stack Exchange is all about. Stack Trade growth is insane. In six short months, we’ve gone from zero to 1.5 million monthly site visitors, growing 51% in December.


If, as planned, we continue growing at 51% a month, we will be bigger than Facebook in 15 months. We’re ALREADY greater than ocn.ne.jp (No, I’ve never heard of that possibly. But we’re even bigger). Jeff and I are already planning who will play us while in the Aaron Sorkin movie. (Tyler Labine and Zac Efron, clearly.)

Now, certainly, all this TRAFFIC is not worth a factor if people aren’t obtaining answers to their questions. That is why our favorite issue to measure is “percent of questions answered.” And not just any answer will do, either: to count a issue as “answered”, both the original poster has to accept the reply, or a third party has to upvote the solution. This is wherever Stack Overflow really shines compared to other Q&A web sites: we really get questions answered. 3 of our sites in fact have 100% solution rates Windows 7 Enterprise!

New Internet sites
Last summer, we relaunched Stack Exchange as a democratically-driven network of sites on topics chosen by our users. Some of these websites are directly related to programming (for example, Game Development), but some are quite far afield, from English Language toCooking.


We call it the Stack Trade network, and at StackExchange.com you will locate a directory of all of them, along with some hot questions, statistics, leaderboards, and other tools so which you can follow the sites and tags that you’re interested in.

We learned a long time in the past the only strategy to get questions answered promptly is to possess a crucial mass of knowledgeable users, so we've got an onerous process called Area 51 wherever websites are proposed, discussed, and voted on. If a proposed site doesn’t have vital mass, we just won’t create it. Whether or not it does get created, it has to maintain a certain level of traffic and quality or we’ll close it down.

So far, 13 websites have gone all the way through the Area 51 process and released. Dozens more are already in beta. Hundreds more are in active discussion and will launch when they reach a critical mass of interested participants.

The development team has been knocking out new features at a constant pace. They developed an incredible web-based chat system, and we’ve added literally hundreds of new characteristics and advancements for the core Stack Overflow engine which we roll out continuously.
The organization
At the beginning of the 12 months, Stack Overflow LLC was just three developers working from home. In the spring, we raised $6 million in venture funds from Union Square Ventures and a extended list of celebrity angel investors, which authorized us to expand rapidly. We hired a team of great people, including several with the high-reputation users that you just know from Stack Overflow.


We now have community managers, a sales team, two total time system administrators, and Really Critical Administrative Overhead like myself Windows 7 Enterprise, but most importantly, we have a great team of developers, in Ny and about the earth, creating the next generation of awesome functions, like the crucial “wheel of blame” feature, which we can run at any time to calculate precisely who's responsible for anything that went wrong. (Contrary to popular belief, it is not always Jason Punyon.)

To make room for all these folks, or, at least, those who live in Ny, we rented a 7500 square foot, class A, super-elite batcave in New york and then fixed it approximately be nice, with awesome furniture including Aeron chairs and height-adjustable desks, and a lot of glass to bring views and daylight deep into the batcave. And of course, we have private offices with a half dozen gigantic 453-inch monitors for each developer. And there’s an amazingly awesome Star Trek couch. Does your company have a Star Trek Couch? *I didn’t think so.* We also have Rovio, a little robot that our remote developers can use to visit the workplace “virtually.” (There. I said “virtually.” Are you satisfied now?)


Overall 2010 has been a real breakout 12 months for Stack Overflow, which is now the largest programmer website within the world (source: me) and the finest, fastest-growing Q&A website inside the world (source: also me). We’ve got an incredible team firing on all cylinders, so we’re actually looking forward to 2011.
The Wikipedia of Long Tail Programming Questions 05 Jan
“Have you ever noticed how certain questions come up again and again on Stack Overflow websites?”

— From your Wikipedia of Extended Tail Programming Questions, above on the Stack Overflow website.
Stack Exchange for Jewish Life and Learning 09 Dec

It seems like Stack Exchange is the perfect platform for questions about Jewish observance. Following all, most of the Talmud reads just like Stack Overflow: a issue, followed by multiple answers, usually with all the highest ranking answer appearing first. The number of questions is infinite.

If you'll be interested in participating in such a point, please commit towards the proposal right now.
Earth Tour - last possibility 21 Oct
Due to unexpected demand we’ve been functioning together with the venues for the upcoming FogBugz World Tour 2010 (incorporating DVCS University) to seek out much more place. We already have much more than 3154 folks signed up and in some cities, we moved to a larger venue to accomodate everybody.

That signifies there is still area in most cities should you haven’t signed up.

If you come, you will see me give a demo of FogBugz 8.0 and Kiln two.0, and we’ll give you a one hour introduction to distributed version control ... how it works, how it’s different than the edition control you know and love, and how you can set it as much as make your life easier. There will also be coffee and cookies, and an opportunity to meet Fog Creek people and other techies from your town.

Sign up now, it is no cost! Hurry up—it all starts next week. I appear forward to meeting you in person.

PS: In the event you get waitlisted, really do not despair. The night before each event, we will email everybody begging them to cancel if they know they can’t ensure it is, so that we can let in men and women from your waitlist. What happened last yr is that a few folks cancelled the night before allowing us to let in all or most from the waitlist.
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