Codelog

I have been talking about Stack Overflow and it’s beta. So, what is this Stack Overflow. It is a site for programmers to come by and discuss about their problems, post questions, answer other’s questions and solve problems together. It was started by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky who were doing the Stack Overflow podcast for over 4 months. It was launched into a private beta late July.

The interface is really simple - nice big fonts, lot of numbers displaying information about the post like votes, views, answers, etc., a list of tags, everything you would find in a normal Web 2.0ish site.

But what is important is that there is a really good community around it and the number questions are mostly answered within an hour.

Stack Overflow screenshot

Once a user goes to the site, he can do one of the following things:

• Read other’s questions
• Provide answers to the questions
• Ask your own questions
• And as you keep participating in the site, upmod/downmod questions/answers, edit other’s questions/answers, etc.

All these can be done without even logging in. The inertia to begin using and participating in the site is almost zero. All your user details are tracked with a cookie on your browser. So you can always claim your account by logging in (using openid) anytime later.

One incentive for the users to keep coming back to the site is the reputation system. For every action of the user which is of some value to the community, he is rewarded with reputation points. For eg: if your answer is upvoted/downvoted, selected as the best answer, etc., all will earn and make you lose points. It really works and I am addicted to it and find it hard to find questions which I can answer before others.

Along with this, there is also the badges system. If your answer gets one upvote, if you answer someone’s question, if you edit someone’s answer/question, etc. Yeah, you did read that right. You can edit someone’s questions and answers provided you have the right reputation points. So as Jeff said, “the system automatically learns to trust you as you keep participating“. It is a mix of a wiki, forum and reddit like site.

The site almost has more than a thousand users and has pretty good volume of questions and answers and it would soon grow to be a huge repository of programming knowledge. Right now the questions and the user base is skewed to C#, .NET and Microsoft technologies, but other open source languages too are answered and I guess once it becomes public the entire crowd from proggit will come over here.

There are still some features which I miss like, but the dev team is working on

• RSS Feeds
• Subscribe to interesting questions
• Links to voted questions

There are however a huge list of suggestions/bugs/features that others want which can be reached over at the Uservoice site. If you have a beta pass to the site, how do find the site? What are the things you think that could go wrong? How do you think the SOFlow team should proceed?

Stack Overflow is a new website that Jeff Atwood (of CodingHorror) and Joel Spolsky (JoelOnSoftware) have started together. It is a wiki + forum kind of a site where anyone (no signup required) can ask any question in programming and the community around the site will answer it. The owner of the question has the power to choose one or more right answers and others can vote up/down the questions and answers. 

A pretty simple site and I have been listening to the podcast right from the beginning and I wanted to be on the beta. Last week Jeff opened up a private list of beta testers and the dev team has been listening to all bugs and feedback using the uservoice service (which we also use here at blogial). 

I am happy to note that the site is now up for public beta and getting onto the beta list is simple. Just fill in your name and email address at a Google Spreadsheet form and you are done. 

Reading this review of the private beta, I think the dev team has done a great job. Waiting for the beta link and will try to post a review as soon as I get my hands dirty.