Welcome to episode 49 of the Stack Exchange Podcast! We are welcoming special guest Matt Grum, as well as usual suspects Joel, David, and Jay.  Matt is the top rep user on Photography. He’s got 957 answers (and has never asked a question)! He’s a photographer and a developer, so his exposure to the Photography site came from his involvement with Stack Overflow

• First, some site milestones! Blender is in public beta. (Matt is way more qualified to tell you what Blender is than any of the rest of us.) Also, the second attempt at a Freelancing site is successfully moving to public beta.
• In graduation news, Salesforce is going to fully graduate after a very quick run through the beta process. Also, Christianity graduated, and its design is beautiful and you should check it out (nice job Jin!).
• And lastly (and sadly), Libraries is closing.
• What privileges does Matt remember getting? He thinks he remembers when he learned he could edit other people’s posts, but he’s generally stayed away from the management of the site and just focuses on answering photography questions instead.
• The Chicago Sun-Times fired all its photographers and told its journalists to use iPhones. Matt and our hosts have opinions on this intersection of journalism and amateur photography.
• Google Glass is interesting in this context. What if taking a photo is now even more accessible than just taking out your phone?
• Jay wants to ask a question that might be terrible for our site but great for a podcast: if someone had an old point-and-shoot camera and wanted to upgrade, what should they do?
• Speaking of shopping questions… Photography is much more lenient with them than other sites on our network. Weirder yet, it seems to be working.
• Photography exists at the intersection of art and technology. Since Matt is a developer and a photographer, he kind of exists at that intersection too (and so did his thesis).
• Sometimes our sites are difficult to use, but if you want to use our site to learn something interesting, check out Matt’s answers. They are extremely high-quality. This one is his most highly voted answer.
• Matt photographs weddings and tells us about some of the coolest ones he’s seen. (Costume weddings are classy and fancy, not, like, Darth Vader-themed.) As a wedding photographer, you’ve got to dress to fit in, and interact and have fun with the guests in order to get great casual shots. Also, don’t use a spy satellite.
• We have a user question!  @moneywithwings wants to know if Stack Overflow has a rule against editing somebody else’s code. Matt says we encourage collaboration and want to make sure we have the best information available; Jay wants to hire him on the spot. (By the way, we’re hiring! and also, you can ask your own user questions at s.tk/podcastquestions.)

Thanks for listening to the Stack Exchange podcast, and thanks to our guest Matt Grum and his band Juno for the outro music!

SE Podcast #49 - The One Where We Edited Out The Title Reference [ 49:44 ] Download

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Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #48! Our guest today is Jorge Castro, member of the Community Team at Canonical (of Ubuntu fame). We also have Robert Cartaino, our very own Director of Community Development, here at Stack Exchange, as well as the usual suspects – David Fullerton, Jay Hanlon, and Joel Spolsky..  Our guest Jorge Castro works on Ubuntu, at Canonical. He says to pretend it’s double Os instead of U’s: Ooboontoo. (David, Jay, and Joel work on Stack Exchange, at Stack Exchange.)

• So, Jorge! What does a Community Manager at Canonical do? What’s the role, and what does that actually mean day to day?
• At Canonical, the Community Team is a part of the engineering department, not the marketing department. They are tasked with doing things that help engineers do their job and help people improve Ubuntu.
• Jorge usually wears pants to work. Usually. The whole team is distributed, and they use IRC, Trello, and Google Hangouts to keep everything moving remotely.
• This is all well and good, but what do community managers actually do? Nobody is really sure, either at Canonical or at Stack Exchange. Jorge walks us through the team’s core responsibilities.
• Robert gives his view on the core role of a Community Manager (by the way, we are hiring community managers!)
• Jorge’s team just terminated an experiment with crowdsourcing feature requests and ideas. It was the Ubuntu Brainstorm, and it was originally written by an enthusiast who just kind of decided that it should be done, and Ubuntu picked it up.
• Side note: You can’t handle the Knuth.
• To finish the Brainstorm story, last month it was decided that… it wasn’t really working. The barrier to contributing to Ubuntu is getting lower and lower, so people with features to dicuss can just show up to the Developer Summit. The moral of the story is that it’s in the process of being shut down, but it’s not ideal to just close all of the communication channels (because sometimes users have great ideas). We discuss the advantages and pitfalls of crowdsourced feature requests.
• Jay bought this last week.
• Anyway. The barrier to participate in Ubuntu is getting lower, so it’s easier to get peopletruly involved – instead of halfheartedly participating in the Brainstorm and feeling like they’re involved.
• Ask Ubuntu is one of our sites! It’s our fourth biggest site by number of questions, with 140k questions, and 3rd for traffic with 231k visits per day. Jorge has been involved with it just about from the start, but he’s not a moderator – just a 20k user.
• One initial problem was the cyclical nature – every time a Ubuntu release came out, there was a flood of new users asking new questions and the answer rate plummeted to the bottom of the list. Then the review queue came and saved the world!
• Jorge has a feature request: custom review queues. He even went through the proper channels and proposed it on Meta!
• Robert walks us through Community Self-Evaluations. The system picks out a certain number of questions, and the community goes through and gauges whether or not the information available is better than the other information out there on the internet. We discuss it for a while.
• So what’s missing for Ask Ubuntu? What could we build that would make it work better? Jorge says the biggest problem the site is having right now is user confusion about what is a bug report and what’s a configuration issue.
•  Site launches! As of this recording, Open Data and Network Engineering are in public beta. Go check ‘em out!

Thanks to Jorge Castro and Robert Cartaino for joining us, as well as the Usual Suspects (MINUS Producer Alex, who gets NO credit).

SE Podcast #48 - Sponsored by Powdermilk Biscuits [ 52:12 ] Download

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Community management at Stack Exchange is an… Interesting job. Parts sociologist, cat-wrangler, therapist, software analyst and cheerleader, this small band of dedicated people work daily to make sure each individual community has the tools and support you need to be as awesome as you are. Of course, we don’t do it alone: from the very start, Stack Exchange attracted some amazingly helpful and insightful folk who’ve donated their time and effort to help out – and I’m pleased to announce that we’re adding one of them, Tim Post, to our full-time staff of Community Managers.

Tim comes from a systems programming background, starting out way back in the dial-up BBS days. He’s been working with and managing communities of various sizes ever since, and describes finding Stack Overflow back in the winter of ’08 like “getting stuck in a huge spiderweb”. His fascination with the system itself (both the software and the game-like aspect that drives so much participation here) led him to become a moderator, first on Webmasters then on Stack Overflow in the spring of ’11. Since then, he’s been a constant help and guide to the many folks using Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange.

When he’s not working, Tim still enjoys programming (nowadays simply to satisfy his whims), photography, DIY projects and tinkering with whatever he can get his hands on. He resides in the Philippines, thus extending the reach of our global team into the west Pacific.

Tim’s been working with us on a trial basis for a little while now, and enjoyed our motley crew enough to sign on full-time. You’ll be seeing a lot more of him in the coming months, so please give him a warm welcome when he drops in on your site.

Think you have what it takes to manage the communities on Stack Exchange? We’re hiring community managers, and if you’re not near our NYC HQ, that’s okay – we love remote workers. You get to work with awesome people like Tim and help us guide Stack Exchange as it grows. (And on the off-chance you’re fluent in Portuguese, you should definitely apply – we have a special project for you…)

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Stack Overflow has always had a strong focus on individual merit. Although collaboration is encouraged to some extent by the editing features, attribution on posts and the design of user profiles all tend to emphasize rugged individuality, that lone wolf toiling away at a keyboard.

But most of us don’t actually work that way. We’re social creatures by nature, and the most challenging part of finding a good job can be finding the pack you want to run with. In spite of the dearth of features aimed at networking, folks have been using Stack Overflow to find and research potential colleagues almost since the day it launched – so a couple years ago, we started looking for ways to make this a bit easier. Well, now it’s done:

With Company Pages, we’ve focused on the best ways to tell an interesting company story. And what better way to tell your story than with massive photos of workstations, team outings, hackathons, local attractions, and the people who make the companies who they are? There are tightly designed sections to list your company tech stack and benefits, along with plenty of room to be creative and communicate what makes your company special, what awesome products you’re working on, and the philosophy that drives your team forward.
—Introducing Careers 2.0 Company Pages

Go check out the other wolf-packs… or show off your own on Careers 2.0.

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We’re Back!  It’s been a while since our last podcast (why you ask – listen to find out!) but we’re back now and “stronger” than ever.  It’s Joel, David and Jay (plus producer Alex and Abby) coming to you from the brand new SE Podcast Studio (check out the picture below)

• News of the day: we’re finally in our new office (and podcast studio). We’ve got hexagonal offices (and therefore crooked hallways), and a cool café area. AND HEATED TOILET SEATS. And a kitchen with a giant walk-in refrigerator, for our interns (which we don’t have).

Taping podcasts in our new “studio”!

• The new office has a nice event space. We’ve even done an event in it already!
• Last week, we had all of the remote developers, sysadmins, community managers, and sysadmins fly into New York to come hang out in the new office. We ate sushi and fried chicken and played a lot of ping pong, and also got some work done.
• Originally, we had planned these summits to be our Main Decision-Making Time, which ended up working terribly. We need to be able to make our decisions and do our brainstorming with remote team members regardless of whether or not they’re in the office.
• Jay, what’s happening with the Stack Exchange sites? We closed a couple of small sites - Arduino and Big Data. Everything on Arduino could have been discussed on Electrical Engineering anyway.
• We may have the same problem with Network Engineering (currently in private beta), but we’re more optimistic about that site. Likewise, we shut down Big Data, but currently have Open Data in private beta. Learn more about why one will survive where the other languished by listening in.
• Next topic: do tags belong in titles? Joel: “No.” Jay: “You’re wrong.” (there’s a bit more to it)
• This is a good discussion! You can weigh in in the podcast comments!
• David, do we have any new features? Check out our sites in an incognito window to see some stuff you may have missed.
• We’ll be debuting the new Help section soon! Previously, we’ve had all of our FAQ/help/how-to information spread far and wide across the network sites and their metas. No longer!
• Also, we’re working on some mobile apps. They’re vaporware at this point.
• Related: we’re hiring! Devs, front-end developers/designers (which is it?), community managers, sales people… everything.

That’s our show! Thanks for listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #47. See you in two weeks!

SE Podcast #47 - Do You Even Twitter Bro? [ 41:13 ] Download

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