We are at an unprecedented point in American history, and I'm concerned we may lose sight of the American Dream.
#stack overflow
36 posts
7 Jan 2025
28 Mar 2019
We’re looking for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. I’m stepping out of the day-to-day and up to the role of Chairman of the Board. Read more "The next CEO of Stack Overflow"
22 Oct 2018
I sometimes get asked by regular people in the actual real world what it is that I do for a living, and here’s my 15 second answer: We built a sort of Wikipedia website for computer programmers to post questions and answers. It’s called Stack
19 Sept 2018
This is more of a quick, explanatory “heads-up” post than anything else. On March 31st 2018, I started an experiment: I created a new Stack Overflow user called “Daisy Shipton” with no picture and a profile that just read “Love coding in C#” (or similar). I wanted to see how a new user presenting with … Continue reading Farewell, Daisy…
3 May 2018
New product: Stack Overflow for Teams lets you direct questions to members of your own team, company, or organization. Read more "Announcing Stack Overflow for Teams"
6 Apr 2018
I want to catch you all up on some stuff but mostly I want to tell the story of Stack Overflow in a not-completely-disorganized way. Read more "The Stack Overflow Age"
17 Mar 2018
This blog post was most directly provoked by this tweet from my friend Rob Conery, explaining why he’s giving up contributing on Stack Overflow. However, it’s been a long time coming. A while ago I started writing a similar post, but it got longer and longer without coming to any conclusion. I’m writing this one … Continue reading Stack Overflow…
26 Apr 2017
This is a brief post documenting a very weird thing I partly came up with on Stack Overflow today. The context is this question. But to skip to the shock, we end up with code like this: That just shouldn’t happen. You shouldn’t be able to create an instance of an open type – a … Continue reading Surprise! Creating…
23 Apr 2017
This post is an attempt to reduce the number of times I need to explain things in Stack Overflow comments. You may well be reading it via a link from Stack Overflow – I intend to refer to this post frequently in comments. Note that this post is mostly not about text handling – see … Continue reading All about…
7 Nov 2015
A very interesting problem that can be solved very easily with SQL is to find consecutive series of events in a time series. But what is a consecutive series of events in a time series? Take Stack Overflow, for example. Stack Overflow has a cool reputation system that uses badges to reward certain behaviour. As … Continue reading How to…
5 May 2015
There are many, many questions on Stack Overflow about both parsing and formatting date/time values. (I use the term “date/time” to mean pretty much “any type of chronlogical information” – dates, times of day, instants in time etc.) Given how often the same kinds of mistakes are made, I thought it would be handy to … Continue reading Common mistakes…
20 Jan 2015
Today Stack Exchange is pleased to announce that we have raised $40 million, mostly from Andreessen Horowitz. Everybody wants to know what we’re going to do with… Read more "Stack Exchange Raises $40m"
8 Aug 2014
I started writing a post like this a long time ago, but somehow never finished it. Countless posts on Stack Overflow are vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. Along with several other users, I always raise this when it shows up – this is something that really just shouldn’t happen these days. It’s a well-understood issue,and … Continue reading The BobbyTables…
3 Jun 2014
(Note that I’m not talking about "processing collections in parallel, which is definitely not an anti-pattern…) I figured it was worth starting to blog about anti-patterns I see frequently on Stack Overflow. I realize that some or all of these patterns may be collected elsewhere, but it never hurts to express such things yourself… it’s … Continue reading Anti-pattern: parallel…
20 Jan 2014
I see a lot of problems which look somewhat different at first glance, but all have the same cause: Text is losing “special characters” when I transfer it from one computer to another Decryption ends up with garbage Compressed data can’t be decompressed I can transfer text but not binary data These are all cases … Continue reading Diagnosing issues…
9 Mar 2011
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… Read more "Stack Overflow (the company) is now Stack Exchange"
23 Feb 2011
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… Read more "Careers 2.0 (by Stack Overflow)"
24 Jan 2011
(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… Read more "Stack Overflow 2010 recap"
5 Jan 2011
“Have you ever noticed how certain questions come up again and again on Stack Overflow sites?” — From The Wikipedia of Long Tail Programming Questions, over on the Stack… Read more "The Wikipedia of Long Tail Programming Questions"
9 Dec 2010
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,… Read more "Stack Exchange for Jewish Life and Learning"
21 Sept 2010
2 Sept 2010
The Stack Overflow Blog: “The Unix world loves to take sides. I don’t have to blog about this; Freud already did, in 1930. He called it ‘the… Read more "Fork it!"
31 Aug 2010
We’ve been opening new Stack Exchanges left and right on a variety of topics. In almost every case, the Stack Exchange appears to duplicate the content of… Read more "A new WordPress Stack Exchange"
7 Jul 2010
Want to know how to export mail from Gmail? Or delete your Facebook account? Or send giant files via email? Well, the new Web Applications Stack Exchange… Read more "Web Applications Stack Exchange now in beta"
22 Jun 2010
Area 51 is now in beta. This is the promised place where the community comes together to invent new Stack Exchange sites. Benofsky from Hacker News writes:… Read more "Area 51 is now in beta"
4 May 2010
“And the best answer we could come up with was, let’s make the damn thing free, and get some VC somewhere to pay for it.” Announcing the… Read more "News"
19 Apr 2010
Since announcing the new plans for Stack Exchange, there’s been a lot of discussion about what kind of new Q&A sites will work best on this platform.… Read more "Sites for experts"
13 Apr 2010
Like the small-town mayor who suddenly finds herself running an entire state, our ambitions for Stack Overflow keep growing. Our original idea of making the Internet a… Read more "Stack Exchange 2.0"
18 Feb 2010
New StackOverflow developer Kevin Montrose (6,878 reputation) added a neat feature to the career site that makes it a zillion times easier to file a CV if… Read more "Facebook / LinkedIn importers"
14 Feb 2010
A few people heard me on This Week in Startups (starting at 15:45) asking Jason if we should take money from the first VC who fell into… Read more "Raising money for StackOverflow"
13 Dec 2009
The higher someone’s Stack Overflow reputation, the more likely they are to have submitted a CV to Stack Overflow Careers: This is not entirely surprising, of course:… Read more "Stack stats"
2 Dec 2009
For as long as I’ve been in the industry, which is, I think, about 74 years now, the problem I’ve had with hiring programmers was not interviewing… Read more "Programmer search engine"
5 Nov 2009
Do you like your job? Do you enjoy the people you work with? Would you want to have lunch with them? Every day? Alex Papadimoulis thinks that… Read more "Upgrade your career"
3 Jun 2009
The Joel on Software Job Board has been working well since we launched it almost three years ago. It logs about 220,000 unique visitors every 21 days,… Read more "Get a job"
29 May 2009
Server Fault is now in public beta! When Jeff Atwood and I launched Stack Overflow last fall, we really wanted it to be a site for and… Read more "Server Fault now in public beta"
29 Apr 2009
Here’s a video of a talk I gave at Google last week about StackOverflow.