Learning from StackOverflow.com
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited for Joel's account of how Stack Overflow's design and community thinking were figured out from the start.
What it is
Joel Spolsky's 2009 Google Tech Talk on why StackOverflow was built, how it addresses the mess of searching for programming help, and the community design behind it. He also takes jabs at paywalled answer sites.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2009 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Recommends pbiggar · 2011-02 · on “Expert Exchange gets narky after snub from Q/A site review”
> Just figure out what EE did, and then do the exact opposite. Even if that was the mantra, that's figuring it out from the start. That wasn't the mantra though; EE was only one of the influences. Watch Joel's tech talk [this video] - they really did figure a ton of it out at the start. See Joel's tech talk
Cites asmosoinio · 2009-04 · on “Talk about StackOverflow”
The page contains little more than a link to this GoogleTechTalks video: [this video] Haven't watched it yet...
Cites w1ntermute · 2009-06 · on “Stackoverflow Eating Away at Experts-Exchange”
Yes, Joel took quite a few potshots at the "hyphenated site", as he put it, during his talk at Google about StackOverflow ( [this video] ). Also, Jeff mentions it in his intro to StackOverflow Coding Horror post ( [LINK] ): Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming)
Cites tejaswiy · 2011-02 · on “Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).”
This is what I don't get. ASP.NET scales pretty well as Joel opines. Why do people think .NET is bad just because it feels enterprise-y? More: [this video]
Cites lukasm · 2014-02 · on “Stack Overflow is down”
I think that was this talk. [this video] Joel says that according to MS study there are 9mln people that write code. [LINK]
Cites jasode · 2015-02 · on “My Love-Hate Relationship with Stack Overflow”
To me, I see this strange contradiction in how stackoverflow is evolving. Joel Spolsky (one of the founders) gave a very interesting presentation[1] in 2009. The key takeaway I've always remembered from his comments was the idea of "anthropology". The science of trying to really understand human behavior and make the website amplify good communities. What I see 6 years later is a lot of " why is this question closed as 'not constructive' when it has 500 upvotes?!?! " There is clearly a disconnect between the way the end users see stackoverflow and the way the moderators see it. These days, it seems like the stackoverflow guys (not necessarily Joel specifically) are inexplicably blind to huma
Cites codeulike · 2021-06 · on “Kinda a Big Announcement”
Spolsky and Atwood had a podcast when they were putting Stackoverflow together and they talk at length about what they wanted to achieve. Its amazing actually to see they had a very precise idea of what they wanted to do and they absolutely hit their own objective. Podcast 1, April 2008 [LINK] One thing we are noticing is that the book market, the programming book market has just completely vanished. It is falling apart, catastrophically. The programmers I know don't really learn new technologies from a book any more. What they do is they find a tutorial on the web -- maybe -- and they try to do something and then they page fault in knowledge. Basically, they get stuck on something and they