Almost a year ago I noticed that two of my favorite coding bloggers, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, were founding a company together with the amusing name Stack Overflow. Their aim was to create a site with useful information for fellow coders, generated by user content.

While I’ve been reading their blogs on a daily basis for several years and think highly of them both, I shrugged and assumed it would sadly be another one of all the short-lived programming forums that are flooding the web. I’m glad I was wrong.

Fast forward twelve months later. Stack Overflow is a great success and one of the most popular forums. But part of the success is due to the fact that it’s not a traditional forum. They have mixed elements from Wikis and Diggs and put together a really useful site with comments and voting system. It’s easy to use, intuitive and clean. Free registration is optional but not required.

To quote Jeff Atwood himself, “We’re like Experts-Exchange, but without all the evil”.

2 comments

  • avatar
    Martin Altenstedt
    03 May, 2009

    Well spotted,
    A good indication of the success is that the number of stackoverflow.com hits you get from just googling your current problem seems to be increasing all the time.
    (The first thing I do when in trouble is often to just google the exception message, a technique I’ve honed after years of coding myself into problems ;)

  • avatar
    03 May, 2009

    Yep, I’ve noticed it too.
    And I completely agree on the troubleshooting strategy. :)

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