Anticipating StackOverflow.com

For the past several months, I’ve been listening to a weekly podcast by two very popular software developers - Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror. The podcast began about the time that these two guys announced that they were going to be building a new programming community website. As much as I enjoy the podcast, I was a bit skeptical at first because I’ve never really found a ‘good’ programming community online. For example, Experts Exchange is a site that comes up a fair amount on many Google search results. The actual site is way too busy, you have to pay for membership, and there are too many advertisements on the site. It’s irritating to use and too hard to find the information that you want. From the get go, Jeff and Joel said that Stack Overflow will not be another Experts Exchange.

Last week, Jeff and Joel started sending out emails for those of us that had signed up for the private beta of the website. For several days now, a bunch of other developers along with myself have been using the site - asking questions, giving answers, discussing what things should be done different prior to the public release, etc. I’ve got high hopes that Stack Overflow is going to be the first successful online programming community.

First off, the site is language agnostic. It is not a site for fan boys debating whether or not Java is better than C++. It’s a site about asking a question - from the beginner level to the expert level - and getting answers. I’ve seen questions that range from “How do I write a FOR loop in C#” to the technical details of how “database indexing works.” The fact that you get such a wide array of questions means that you’re likely to be able to not only help others out while browsing the site, but you’re likely to learn some things while participating.

Secondly, the site is no frills - there are no ads, and the primary content that you see are the list of questions in order that have been posted along with the relevant tags that categorize the post. Basically, if you see a question that you’d like to read or answer, it’s a simple matter of clicking on the question. You’ll be taken to a page that includes the questions, the given answers, and then a text box in which you can type your answer. Furthermore, each question reports its number of votes (as given by the community), how many answers it has, and how many views it has had. You can also view all of the questions on the site, or you can sort them via popularity, date asked, number of answers, or you can view the unanswered questions.

Finally, there is a badge system that rewards you based on various things that you do around the site. It isn’t necessarily meant to help you, say, level-up against your peers, but it’s meant to help others see your level of participating in various areas around the site, and to provide you a relatively passive way to keep participating - it’s fun to get badges even if they don’t get you anything in the end.

There are a handful of other features that I’ve not discussed, but those that I’ve mentioned are the ones that I think will separate Stack Overflow from other attempts at establishing a programming community. Overall, I’ve really enjoyed participating in the beta of Stack Overflow and am eager for the doors to be open to the public. It’s got potential to be an awesome place to get solutions to problems faced in all languages and areas of software development.

This entry was posted on August 05th, 2008 and is filed under Personal Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.