company October 12, 2008

A Question About Questions

Stack Overflow is a place for programming questions. We’ve been quite clear about this for as long as I can remember; the faq and about pages both try to make this point in the first paragraph: What kind of questions can I ask here? Programming questions, of course! As long as your question is: detailed…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company October 6, 2008

Solving the “Fastest Gun in the West” problem

Some Stack Overflow users are concerned about what they call the “Fastest Gun in the West” problem: Each question’s answers are sorted by descending score and then descending time of posting. This means that if a person sits down and answers a question in a long, thorough way, going through every nook and cranny, once…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company October 5, 2008

You’re My Favorite

We just implemented another highly requested feature — the ability to mark a question as a favorite. You might have already noticed it by now, as every question has a large, clickable favorite star just under the voting arrows. Click to favorite. Click again to un-favorite. Once favorited, these questions will show up in the…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company September 30, 2008

OK, Now Define “Answered

One thing we’ve learned on Stack Overflow is that asking questions is easy. But how do you tell when a question has been answered? For a community predicated on the value of getting answers to your programming questions, it’s sort of… important… to know when unanswered questions are hanging around out there in the ether.…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company September 30, 2008

I Don’t Give a Damn About My Reputation

Geoff Dalgas did a bang-up job implementing the #1 UserVoice requested item — and he did it all while we were away on our NYC trip, no less! You’ll notice there is a now a Reputation tab on everyone’s user page, which includes a graph of your reputation over time a summary of the actual…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
company September 21, 2008

What Was Stack Overflow Built With?

This question keeps coming up a lot on Stack Overflow for some reason: What was Stack Overflow built with? Some even wondered if Stack Overflow was built in Ruby on Rails. I consider that a compliment! This question has been covered in some detail in our podcasts, of course, but I know not everyone has…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
beta September 15, 2008

Then a Miracle Occurs – Public Beta

stackoverflow.com is now live and open to the public, as a public beta. Our heartfelt thanks to all the software developers who so patiently helped us test the site during the private beta. You are the true heroes of this project, contributing your time in creating over 8,500 questions in a month and a half…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
beta September 11, 2008

Help Us Beta Test

If you’d like to help us beta test Stack Overflow, in advance of the Monday launch, here’s how: Go to beta.stackoverflow.com Enter “twitter@twitter.com” and “falkensmaze” to gain access (note that this is NOT an account: it’s merely a password to gain access to the beta) Please do bear in mind the beta test guidelines. When…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
beta August 28, 2008

I Guess That’s Why They Call It “Beta

Just a quick note to the beta participants: We apologize for the recent spate of outages. We’re currently diagnosing a sporadic hang in the website that we haven’t quite got a handle on yet. Until we figure it out, we’re forced to restart the web service every few hours. I’ll update this post when we…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
beta August 1, 2008

Stack Overflow Private Beta Begins

And then a miracle occurred. We’re beginning the Stack Overflow private beta. I am sending out emails to the first 100 people for the private Stack Overflow beta; the email contains the password necessary to log in, as well as a link to this post. I will continue to email 100 people per day until…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
beta July 26, 2008

Stack Overflow Beta Design

Ever notice how most sites run by programmers have the worst designs ever? Yeah. We’re currently at the stage where we need to implement an actual design — for which I have recruited actual designers. Here’s a sneak peek at the beta design we’re furiously working on implementing at the moment. And even earlier: Trust…
Avatar for Jeff Atwood
Co-Founder (Former)
posts by author or