Our guest this week (after she joins a bit late) is Zuly Gonzalez – Stack Exchange moderator and power user.  As usual, we also have David Fullerton, Jay Hanlon, Joel Spolsky and (Fake) Producer Alex!

• Things are a mess over here, not just because we have to remember to stop masticating long enough to talk about podcast things. We’re moving offices! The office is full of crates into which we have to pack all our stuff before we move.
• The new office is going to be awesome. It has hexagonal offices, and we don’t remember if we’ve talked about this before.
• We have three chefs competing to be the chef for the new Stack Exchange office, and it’s apparently a very desirable position, because they keep bribing Joel with treats.
• What’s really going on? Our Tridion site went into public beta. It’s different from the one that sounds like Magneto!
• For very small and/or very new sites, Joel thinks it might be useful to be able to email opted-in users every time a new question comes in.
• Let’s talk about the new user homepage, shall we? It’s exciting! We’ve been doing a lot of work about new user experience, and the homepage new users now see will finally be optimized for helping them figure out what to do next.
• Meanwhile, our guest has arrived! Welcome, Zuly! She’s a moderator on OnStartups as well as a co-founder of Light Point Security, a web security startup that provides malware protection through the use of cloud-based web browsing.
• Zuly walks us through some of the history of OnStartups, the things that make the site work really well and ways in which the site could be improved.
• So what’s the prognosis? Zuly would like to see people get more involved with the community aspect of the site, and with moderation.
• Moving on to questions of security. Zuly (and Joel) observe a move in the field of IT Security away from detection and protection against major threats and toward isolation (the Battlestar Galactica defense).
• Jay thinks everyone screaming homophobic slurs into Xbox headsets is German. Nobody is completely sure why.
• Jay wonders, what about real people? What things should normal people be thinking about in terms of security that most people still don’t do?
• One other very serious question: Is Zuly’s dog cuter than Joel’s dog? Dog Talk ensues!
• Time to discuss a Meta question: how can we stop premature deletion?

That’s a wrap! You’ve been listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #46 with special guest Zuly Gonzalez and the rest of the regular gang! Join us next time from our brand new podcast studio – it’s going to be awesome (but the podcast will still be terrible).

SE Podcast #46 - The Podcast That Sounds Dirty But Isn't [ 52:32 ] Download

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Our guest this week is Eric Lippert – language architect extraordinaire and famous for all his work at Microsoft in developing their languages

• Eric joined Microsoft right out of college and was originally working on VB
• It’s time for everyone’s favorite game: Name the Worst Feature of that Microsoft Technology!
• If you’re a non-programmer and still listening, make sure to email us for your free prize
• Eric now builds “static analysis” programs which actually means something real when he’s talking about it
• We actually have some listener questions this week!
• First up – what problems with C# would Eric fix with magical genie powers?
• But wait, there’s a second one he wants to change too!
• David has some interesting stuff to talk about! Make sure to check out Sustainable Living
• Check out the meta question (its a problem we have to deal with a lot): Lots of not-always-useful but well-intentioned answers
• A public service announcement: please don’t forget how to dog
• Make sure to check out Eric’s great blog at EricLippert.com
• Our designer Jin points out that Eric is not only a contributor to Stack Exchange, but also to the popular tumblr: Programmer Ryan Gosling

Join us next week!

SE Podcast #43 - Keeping it Sharp [ 56:15 ] Download

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It’s time once again to cast your vote for the next Stack Overflow moderators. The primaries have just ended, and the top ten candidates can be found here: http://stackoverflow.com/election.

Why more moderators?

We’re running the election now (rather than a year from the last election in June) because veteran moderator Tim Post is stepping down in order to work with us as a Community Manager! While we’re extremely lucky to have his hard-working brilliance brought to bear on the problems we face managing all these sites, his transition does create an immediate need for a replacement on the SO mod team.

But of course, we’d be running an election soon anyway; as amazing as the current Stack Overflow moderators are, the workload continues to grow:

What moderators do

Jeff laid out the basic philosophy in A Theory of Moderation:

Moderators are human exception handlers, there to deal with those (hopefully rare) exceptional conditions that should not normally happen, but when they do, they can bring your entire community to a screaming halt — if you don’t have human exception handling in place.

As the previous graph indicates, flags – the primary embodiment of those exceptions – are a fairly frequent occurrence on Stack Overflow, purely because of its size. That said, a lot of flags aren’t identifying things that are particularly exceptional: in particular, posts that need to be closed (duplicates, off-topic questions, etc) or are of extremely poor quality aren’t all that uncommon on a site that gets over 7000 new questions and 11K answers each day. While moderators are well-equipped to handle these quickly, they don’t actually require moderators when a sufficient number of experienced users are willing and able to help.

The effects of improved community moderation tools

I mentioned last year that we were working on tools that would help to distribute the load more evenly between the elected moderators and the community as a whole. Well, eight months after their introduction, I’m happy to report that the revamped Review system is doing exactly that:

As Jeff wrote:

We designed the Stack Exchange network engine to be mostly self-regulating, in that we amortize the overall moderation cost of the system across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users.

That’s not empty rhetoric – on a site the size of Stack Overflow, it’s absolutely essential. Geoff Dalgas came up with the design for the new review system based on his observations of wikiHow’s Community Dashboard: individual tasks, each focused on a specific need with specific actions to be taken and specific guidance provided for new users. The philosophy: don’t just give people stuff to do – help them learn how to do it.

Geoff, Emmett and Kevin have done some amazing work in making these new tools as fast and effective as possible; while there have been some growing pains and a few unexpected challenges, it’s great to see folks jumping in to help so enthusiastically. In the past 30 days, we’ve seen:

• 9384 suspected low-quality posts cleared, 1608 deleted, 319 edited.
• 30339 suggested edits approved, 15497 rejected, 4949 improved
• 17434 posts that’d been voted or flagged for closure closed, 3308 left open, 376 edited
• 571 posts reopened, 2203 left closed, 56 edited

(a detailed breakdown of actions to first posts and late answers can be found here.)

That’s a lot of work being done by a lot of people… Heady stuff. To be sure, that still leaves a huge amount of work for elected moderators, but I think it demonstrates the ability of the whole community to step up and assist when the opportunity is provided, that thousands of you are still willing and able to work together to created and maintain the site that you want to be a part of.

So as you go to cast your votes today, looking over each candidate’s stats and reflecting on what they’d do as a moderator… Remember that moderation doesn’t start with winning an election.

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SE Podcast #43 - This Should Have Been #43 [ 1:01:59 ] Download

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We’ve been busy hiring more of the most talented people on the planet! Three cheers for the newest employees at Stack Exchange:

Max Horstmann, Web Developer (Careers 2.0)

New York

Max joins Stack Exchange as a developer on the Careers team. Originally from Denzlingen, Germany, he previously worked on the Windows team at Microsoft. On a recent one-year career break, he and his wife had a chance to travel to glaciers in South America, deserts in the Middle East, and jungles in Southeast Asia. His mission for the next five years is to sort all the pictures taken on this trip, write a few more mobile apps, and find out which German bar in New York City plays the best Blasmusik.

Oded Coster, Web Developer (Core)

London

A long time Stack Overflow user and contributor (Beta badge, baby!), Oded is highly familiar with the ins and outs of Stack Overflow and promises not to introduce too many bugs. Originally from Jerusalem, Israel, he now lives in London, England with his wife and two children.

Wendy Paler, Account Executive

New York

Wendy grew up in Wisconsin and has been living in New York for over five years.  She is very excited to move into the tech field as a member of the Stack Exchange team. Outside of work, you might find Wendy sharing a delicious meal with friends in a restaurant, checking out a concert, show, or museum, taking a spin or yoga class, or pretending to be a Food Network star in her Brooklyn kitchen.

Valentina Perez, Office Manager

London

Val was born in Argentina (won’t eat beef), grew up in Ottawa, Canada (hates snow), and has lived in London for 15 years and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. She has a certificate in Web Application Development from the Open University, and is mega excited to have the opportunity to work for Stack Overflow and set up the way the new London office will be run. On her spare time Val is part of the Jeerios, the jeerleading squad for the London Rollergirls. She also loves music, dancing, baking, and dinosaurs.

Shefali Shah, Sales Representative

Denver

Hailing from the bustling city of Mumbai, Shefali is an interesting mix of the East-and-West. Armed with a BS in Business Admin with an emphasis in Finance and Entrepreneurship from CU Boulder, she is excited to join and contribute to the Stack Exchange team. On the weekends you will find Shefali dancing with her East Indian Dance Company all over Colorado, or just catching a meal or a flick with her homies around town.

Michael Hardy, Account Executive

Denver

Michael is a native of Atlanta, GA who moved to Colorado 11 years ago to go CU Boulder.  He met his wife in while in school and decided to trade humidity for all four seasons and a plethora of microbreweries (Belgium, Aged Sours, Cask Ale… Yes Please!). On the weekends you will find Michael chilling with his family, trying a new breakfast joint, exploring the Rockies and/or playing competitive baseball.

Visit our careers page to learn all the reasons Stack Exchange is a ridiculously awesome place to work. Want to see your face in our next new hire announcement? Here’s who we need:

Web Developer (NYC or telecommute)

Product Designer (NYC or telecommute)

Sales Representative / Account Executive (London)

Sales Representative / Account Executive (Denver)

Sales Representative / Account Executive (NYC)

Community Manager (NYC)

Community Manager (telecommute)

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