I was recently interviewed by Bob Walsh and Patrick Foley for The Startup Success Podcast, episode 25. We cover a wide ange of topics including: microISVs, conversion ratios, being specific, PerfectTablePlan, usability, the global recession, software award scams, ‘works with vista’ certification, stackoverflow.com and twitter. I wonder how much I have to pay them to edit out the ‘ums’?
Tag Archives: stackoverflow.com
stackoverflow.com goes public
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.
Stackoverflow.com
Über bloggers Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky are joining forces to launch stackoverflow.com .
According to Jeff Atwood:
Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.
According to Joel Spolsky:
We’re starting to build a programming Q&A site that’s free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions, free to read, free to index, built with plain old HTML, no fake rot13 text on the home page, no scammy google-cloaking tactics, no salespeople, no JavaScript windows dropping down in front of the answer asking for $12.95 to go away. You can register if you want to collect karma and win valuable flair that will appear next to your name, but otherwise, it’s just free.
There is nothing there yet, apart from a podcast. But, with their combined talents and high profiles, it could be a great resource for software developers. I will be watching with interest.
Successful Software 