Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky’s programmer’s Q&A site stackoverflow.com has now gone from private beta to public beta today.

I have been one of the private beta testers. I find the badges a bit patronising (I’m a 42 year old professional, not a boy scout), but otherwise I have been very impressed with the site. I think it is going to be a great resource for developers – assuming they can control the group dynamics of a large number of developers (the ‘herding cats problem’) while keeping the spammers at bay. A lot of thought has gone into the reputation system, voting, badges etc so it will be interesting to see what behaviour emerges.

Go and take it for a spin. It has been designed to be ‘low friction’ – you don’t even need a login to get started.