Stack Overflow

If you are interested in technology-agnostic software development practices, then you should definitely check out Jeff Atwood’s blog “Coding Horror“. I’ve been a reader for years and, even if I might not necessarily agree on all his points, it’s very interesting to have a discussion about the art and science of building high quality software without focusing on particular technologies or programming languages.

Now, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, author of another popular blog, inspired by the way these kinds of discussions are driven on the Web, decided to go a step further and build a whole community around that. They called it Stack Overflow, and they  concretized in a web site where people can freely ask and answer questions related to computer programming. What’s so special about that, you might think. Well, what they came up with is not quite the usual forum you are used to. It’s actually much more than that.

The basic idea is to build a community made from programmers to programmers, whit a desire to share their knowledge and expertise, independently of their technology or programming language of choice. This is also a collaborative effort, much like a Wiki is, where anyone can edit the questions and answers that are being posted. There are some other elements in it, like a voting system to rate questions and answers, but the main concept is that this is a self-sustained community. You can read more about the details on the their about page.

I have been active on Stack Overflow for a little more than a week and I have to say I really like it. The site has a nice & clean design and make extensive use of AJAX to improve responsiveness. I highly recommend you to check it out.

/Enrico

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Enrico Campidoglio

Hi, I'm Enrico Campidoglio. I'm a freelance programmer, trainer and mentor focusing on helping teams develop software better. I write this blog because I love sharing stories about the things I know. You can read more about me here, if you like.