Ben is the longest tenure Stack Overflow employee and got started at the company because he was a reader of Coding horror and he hung out on Meta and ended up building a unicorn webservice for an early April fools joke. The early story of stack overflow and how Joel and Jeff talked it out on a Skype podcast are something I wasn't aware of.
The other thing that's interesting though, is how Jeff and Joels efforts to build a Dev First place ended up backfiring in way. Ben opinion was devs, including him, became sort of assholes to other employees and even to each other on lesser teams because they were elevated so much.
The discussion of "How do I move the turtle in LOGO?" [1] is where Stackoverflow became what it is rather than what it could have been.
They were hard to find ten years ago when I listened to them. Maybe they are still around somewhere, but they were obscured by SEO last time I tried finding them a couple of years ago.
> What kind of questions are appropriate? Well, thanks to the tagging system, we can be rather broad with that. As long as questions are appropriately tagged, I think it’s okay to be off topic as long as what you’re asking about is of interest to people who make software. But it does have to be a question. Stack Overflow isn’t a good place for imponderables, or public service announcements, or vague complaints, or storytelling.
> Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
The emphasis on "good" in "with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world." is in the original.
Yep.. that's the site. Used to allow all questions and even jokes. It was laid back and then it became a "that's not the right question." type of place.
You can do that if the site remains small. Look over at MathOverflow and TeX stack exchange sites - they have fun questions. The key difference being that there is a much smaller set of people asking questions and of those who are active on the site there is a much higher rate of community moderation.
It is easy to moderate a site where you an read every post every day. Not so much when there's no hope of that.
The problem is that they aren't fun to moderate and without moderating them you end up with a site that is /r/programmingmemes making it less useful for the programming questions that you want to find and providing a place where people can ask questions of the subject matter experts.
The other thing that's interesting though, is how Jeff and Joels efforts to build a Dev First place ended up backfiring in way. Ben opinion was devs, including him, became sort of assholes to other employees and even to each other on lesser teams because they were elevated so much.