programming
The StackExchange Network
I
f you’re reading this, you’re most likely a programmer. And, like any programmer, you had to search for programming questions online. I’m sure you noticed something interesting: in the last few years, when we search for a programming question online, a link to StackOverflow will usually be somewhere among the first 3 results from Google.
This is no coincidence: StackOverflow has somehow entered the live of programmers, slowly but surely. We use it practically every day, but I noticed that most programmers don’t know too much about how this site was born, what principles it works on and why it’s so successful. StackOverflow is just one of the 119 sites of the StackExchange network, the two are not the same thing. In this article, we’ll discuss the philosophy on which this network is built and we’ll take a quick overview on how its mechanics allows it to basically function independently. I hope the details I will present here will offer more comfort in using this network and I also hope that we’ll see a stronger participation by the Romanian programmers.
The network’s philosophy History and motivation Before StackOverflow, it was very hard to find a (correct) solution to a programming problem, except to the relatively common ones. The reasons for this are: a. The people that wrote documentation for programming languages, frameworks or technologies were incapable of putting it on the web and make it easily searchable. b. The solution might have been in a programming book. But the reality is that most programmers don’t learn from books anymore. This industry is slowly dying. c. The answers on forums were buried in many pages of discussions and comments. d. In most places, the answers had a ton of problems: from bad advice and fixes that only worked for some people up to vulnerable code and solutions that were basically hacks. There was no way to change them, fix them or improve them. e. A lot of problems ended up being fixed by the platform or the framework, but you didn’t know that, because the old solution was still among the top Google search results. f. If the problem was rare (maybe an API behaving strangely in a certain situation), then the search engine’s page rank wasn’t very useful: the problem only affected a few people, so no one posted links to its solution; therefore it didn’t show up in search results. g. There are too many ways to formulate a question: you have to use the right words to even have a chance.
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no. 24/June, 2014 | www.todaysoftmag.com
To fix these problems and to have a much better availability of solutions online, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood decided in January 2008 to launch a Q&A website called StackOverflow. The site’s development started in April 2008 and was launched in August 2008 as a private beta site. After 4 weeks, in September 2008, StackOverflow became public. Joel’s blog was joelonsoftware.com and Jeff had his own blog too: codinghorror.com. These blogs were fairly popular and they proved to be part of StackOverflow’s success because, through these blogs, Jeff and Joel increased the popularity of their idea. This was important because they wanted new visitors to feel welcome and to actually find useful content when they reached the site. StackOverflow wants to be a combination between a forum, a blog, a wiki page and a news aggregator. The basic idea is for people to ask and receive answers, not just to add useless comments. It’s a place where quality is voted up and promoted and where useless content is pushed down and disappears. StackOverflow wants to collect as much knowledge and as many programming solutions as possible. The community evaluates them through voting. As the votes accumulate, experts and trustworthy people will surface and the community will trust them more and more. It was an instant success and this convinced the founders to launch ServerFault in April 2009, a site for system administrators based on the same philosophy as StackOverflow. SuperUser followed in July 2009, a site for computer enthusiasts and power users. The success of these sites has laid the foundation for the StackExchange network, which now includes a variety of sites, all following the same structure and philosophy that StackOverflow was built on. Editing and maintaining the content in an up-to-date state is crucial on StackExchange sites. Content accessibility is also very important, there are strong SEO techniques applied on the sites. StackOverflow’s popularity and the fact that most programmers hang out online has an interesting consequence: when a new technology or programming language is launched, support sites or forums no longer being created for them; instead, users are redirected to the relevant tags on StackOverflow.