Tools & Technologies IT

The snack room at Stack Exchange got a wee upgrade today: Find out why (and read to the end to find out how to get your own StackExchange sticker) at the Stack Overflow Blog. Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? It has been a huge productivity boon for us, so I wrote Hg Init, a Mercurial tutorial—check it out! You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies. I’m Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, an enlightened bug tracker designed to help great teams develop brilliant software, Kiln, which simplifies source control and code revie...

It seems like Stack Exchange is the perfect platform for questions about Jewish observance. After all, most of the Talmud reads just like Stack Overflow: a question, followed by multiple answers, usually with the highest ranking answer appearing first. The number of questions is infinite. If you would be interested in participating in such a thing, please commit to the proposal today. Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? It has been a huge productivity boon for us, so I wrote Hg Init, a Mercurial tutorial—check it out! You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies. I’m Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a ...

One day, you’ll be telling your grandchildren about getting a programming job, version 1.0. You would send a “resume” to a “recruiter.” It included all kinds of silly information required by the esoteric resume ritual (foreign languages spoken, whether or not you play ultimate Frisbee, Microsoft-veteran status). This so-called “information” was utterly useless at determining whether you could program or not, but if you spelled everything right and used suitable fonts, you could come in for a day of interviews at which you would be asked to perform mundane programming tasks on a whiteboard. Careers 2.0 is here! Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? It has been a huge productivity boon for us, so I wrote Hg Init, a Mercurial tutorial—check it out! You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and ru...

(reposted from the Stack Overflow blog) 2010 was an absolutely amazing year here at Stack Overflow. We grew from 7 million visitors to over 16 million, putting us in Quantcast’s top 400. We raised $6 million in venture capital, and we went from three full time employees to 27. We built a 7500 square foot office in New York, and we launched a ton of new features and 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 really working. The statistic I’m proudest of is the percentage of questions that get a good answer, over 80% (and many of the new Stack Exchange sites have 100% answer rates!) The true measure of success for any Internet company is how often people come up to me in swank hotel lobbies and offer to buy me meals, let me use their corporate jet, etc. But since there is a great deal of disagreement as to how to mea...