Building Social Software for the Anti-Social
Jeff Atwood · 2011
In 2008, Jeff Atwood and a handful of developers built stackoverflow.com; 2 years later, it is one of the top 500 sites on the internet. A synthesis of wiki, blog, forum, and Digg/Reddit, Stack Overflow is a free programming Q & A site, collaboratively built and maintained by fellow programmers. Programmers are not exactly known for being a social bunch, and yet, Stack Overflow counts over 500,000 registered users today, who asked and answered over 1.2 million questions. In this talk, Jeff Atwood will share his experience designing Stack Overflow building social software for the anti-social. About the Speaker: I'm Jeff Atwood. I live in Berkeley, CA with my wife, two cats, and a whole lot of computers. I was weaned as a software developer on various implementations of Microsoft's BASIC in the 80's, starting with my first microcomputer, the Texas Instruments TI-99/4a. I continued on the PC with Visual Basic 3.0 and Windows 3.1 in the early 90's, although I also spent significant time writing Pascal code in the first versions of Delphi. I am now quite comfortable in VB.NET or C#, despite the evils of case sensitivity. I consider myself a reasonably experienced Windows software developer with a particular interest in the human side of software development, as represented in my recommended developer reading list. Computers are fascinating machines, but they're mostly a reflection of the people using them. In the art of software development, studying code isn't enough: you have to study the people behind the software, too.