Almost a year ago, I noticed that two of my favorite coding bloggers, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, had joined forces to create something with the wonderfully nerdy name Stack Overflow.
The idea was simple enough: build a site where programmers could ask questions, share knowledge and, ideally, help each other escape whatever miserable debugging hole they had fallen into at three in the morning.
I had been reading both Atwood and Spolsky for years and had lots of respect for them. Still, my first reaction was something along the lines of: Yeah, good luck with that.
The web was already littered with programming forums, digital graveyards filled with unanswered questions, broken code snippets and desperate posts from 2003 ending with, “Never mind, fixed it” (No explanation, naturally). Just the programming equivalent of finding an abandoned campsite with the fire still burning next to a smoking gun and a drunk squirrel. So I assumed Stack Overflow would eventually join them.
Thankfully, I was wrong. Fast forward twelve months and Stack Overflow has become enormously successful, and for good reason. The clever part is that it isn’t really a traditional forum at all. Atwood and Spolsky borrowed some of the better ideas from wikis, Digg and community-driven sites, threw away much of the usual forum baggage, and built something genuinely useful.
Questions get answers. Good answers float to the top. Bad answers are quietly beaten into submission by the voting system. Useful information gets refined instead of disappearing beneath seventeen pages of signatures, avatars and passive-aggressive arguments about Linux distributions.
The whole thing is clean, intuitive and remarkably free of bullshit. You don’t even have to register unless you want to. Jeff Atwood once described it rather perfectly: “We’re like Experts-Exchange, but without all the evil”.
After a year of Stack Overflow, that still seems like a pretty accurate description.
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