james mckay dot net

Half a dozen or so of us from work were at the London Stack Overflow Dev Days event with several hundred other developers today. I’ve been pretty impressed with the way Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky’s enterprise has turned out to be such a resounding success, and I’ve also been an avid reader of Jeff’s blog, Coding Horror, for several years now, so I was naturally delighted to get the opportunity to go.

Encountering Joel and Jeff in real life was an interesting experience, since I’ve only ever read their blogs and Twitter feeds up to now. Over the past year or so, I’ve had to get used to seeing certain people in real life that most people only ever see on TV or on the Internet, but it still seems a bit odd when you do. It certainly gives you a totally different impression of them from what you had before though. You can certainly see why Joel and Jeff in particular are both so successful in what they do: as well as being excellent online communicators, they are both brilliantly engaging and entertaining public speakers. So too was Jon Skeet, who gave a very funny talk about localisation entitled “Humanity: Epic Fail,” assisted by a sock puppet called Tony the Pony. Joel’s talk on FogBugz was a pretty hard sell, but it certainly looks impressive, boasting a feature set that makes Trac look like Notepad.

The other talks included an introduction to Python by Michael Sparks of the BBC, who explained to us Peter Norvig’s 21 line spelling corrector (it didn’t escape my attention that Jon Skeet spent the lunch break porting it to C#); introductions to mobile development for no less than three rival platforms (Google Android by Reto Meir, iPhone by Phil Nash, and Qt/Nokia by Pekka Kosonen); introductions to jQuery (Remy Sharp) and Yahoo! Developer Tools (Christian Heilmann); and an academic talk on “How not to design a scripting language” by Paul Biggar, who recommended the book “Engineering a Compiler,” by Cooper and Torczon as a superior alternative to the Dragon Book.

I spoke to Jeff during the afternoon break and asked him if he had any plans to publish the best of Coding Horror in a book. He said he’d thought about it a bit, but wasn’t entirely convinced it was worth doing. It’s something I’ve recently thought that he’d do well to do—a lot of his posts are ones I’d consider “must-reads” for every working developer, and if he did, I’d buy it in a shot. He wouldn’t be the first person to do something like that either—after all, Joel did it (twice), and so did Raymond Chen. It was interesting what he asked me when I told him I work for Parliament—he was most interested to know whether Britain is part of Europe or not. It’s a good question, that. Officially we are, but unofficially I sometimes think that as a country, we’re not entirely sure ourselves.

There were just two disappointments to the day. One was the catering. I was half expecting something along the lines of a buffet lunch—after all, I do tend to think of the Fog Creek Way as one where they go the extra mile to get these things perfect—but it turned out to be the kind of mass produced sandwiches that you get in a motorway service station that are all ridiculously overpriced, taste exactly the same as each other, and don’t meet with my approval anyway because they’re spread up with margarine. The other disappointment was the venue itself. Kensington town hall simply is not big enough for however many of us (800? 1000?) were there today. Consequently it felt very crowded and claustrophobic, and even a little bit uncomfortable, especially during the breaks when we all crowded into the foyer and had to form a queue stretching seemingly all the way to Barking and back to get to the food.

The day ended at about ten past six and I came away with a whole lot of freebies: a Qt rucksack, a copy of the Aardvark’d DVD, a handful of FogBugz pens, and a handful of Stack Overflow, Server Fault and Superuser stickers. All in all, it was a pretty full day (I had to get up half an hour earlier than usual and I got home an hour and a half later than usual, and sitting through seven hours of talks was pretty intense) but it was well worth it.

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Posted at 23:00 on 28 October 2009.
Tagged: Stack Overflow

I’ve been checking out the private beta of the new Stack Overflow website from Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. You need to sign up for an invitation if you want to get involved with the beta, and they’re only sending out a hundred or so invitations a day, so you may have a bit of a wait, but from what I’ve seen it looks fairly promising.

The concept is fairly simple: it’s a programmers’ question and answer website, a bit like a cross between Yahoo Answers and Digg. You can vote answers up and down, with popular answers appearing at the top and useless answers falling to the bottom. This means that it should help to filter out answers of the type “I’m having the same problem too” which render Google search results for pretty much 100% of the problems you encounter in software development totally useless. However, it is not well suited for discussions — there are some questions where people have been posting answers in response to other answers, but it can be a bit difficult to follow the thread of the discussion.

Another interesting twist, however, is that you can vote questions as well as answers up and down. This is based on the premise that the old adage “There are no stupid questions” is wrong. This is a common sentiment in geek — especially hacker — circles, and I have mixed feelings about it. Yes, vague and misdirected questions can be an irritation, but they usually come from newbies who don’t know any better, and highlighting newbies’, er, newbie-ness, could be a bit off-putting to them. Having said that, it could — and probably will — work out fine, but the site may need some kind of equivalent to the Wikipedia policies of “Don’t bite the newbies” and “Assume good faith” to avoid the hacker types from getting too carried away with themselves there.

You can also earn “badges” and reputation points, for a whole lot of things such as answering questions, getting a certain number of votes on your answer or question, or having your answer judged as the best one by the person asking the question. You need a certain number of reputation points in order to do certain things — for example, you can only vote questions and answers up and down if you have 25 or more reputation points.

At the moment, there are just under a thousand users on the site, and since it’s populated by the kind of people who have actually heard of Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, the questions and the answers are on the whole pretty smart ones. How much this changes in a month’s time or so when it opens to the public and its eternal September gets underway, remains to be seen. There is always the possibility that it will see an influx of the kind of morons that hang out on Digg, or people asking questions such as “Help, I deleted the database and we didn’t have a backup, how do I get it back before my boss finds out?” but hopefully the moderation system will keep it on track, mitigate that, and preserve the flavour of a community of developers who actually know what they are doing and can give constructive answers to questions.

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Posted at 22:09 on 10 August 2008.
Tagged: Stack Overflow