One year with Stack Overflow

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”.