Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #54, with special guest Sara J. Chipps! Joining us today also is CFO Michael Pryor. Your hosts as usual are Jay Hanlon, David Fullerton, and Joel Spolsky. Today’s episode is brought to you by /r/husky!

• We’ll start out with Site Milestones. We have one: Ham Radio will be in public beta by the time this podcast goes live. Turns out there are tons of ham radio enthusiasts even today. Ham!
• New Features
  • The big thing we’re currently working on is the new topbar. It hasn’t changed in years… until now! David walks us through the new features on the upcoming new version. You can see our mockups on MSO.
  • We finally released our open source status dashboard, Opserver. It’s got all sorts of awesome stuff, and you can check it out.
  • We’re still working on our mobile apps for Android and iOS. The Android alpha is out, and you can sign up - it’s great. The iOS alpha is coming soon(ish), so keep an eye out for signups.
• Let’s talk to our guest, Sara J. Chipps! (She’s impressed with the legitimacy and professionalism of our podcast setup.) She’s a cofounder of Girl Develop It, a system of low-cost software development classes geared toward women (but guys are welcome too). It’s judgement-free, for total beginners who want to take their first few steps into the world of software development.
• Sara recently left her role as CTO of Levo League to focus on getting Girl Develop It’s board and 501(c)(3) status together (Levo League is a professional community for Generation Y women, and it is awesome).
• This fall has been the Sara Chipps world tour - she’s been traveling all around to talk about hacking hardware with JavaScript. Check out NodeBots and Johnny-five. Sara, David, and Michael are all big nerds about hacking hardware. Check out Dorby the DoorBot (github) and the Christmas sweater that talks to the internet.
  • Relevant: A Hundred People Coming Out of a Factory: The Movie!
• Moving on: let’s talk about women in technology. In 1984, 37% of CS degrees went to women. In 1998, it was 34%. In 2010-11, it was 12%.  Sara walks us through some of the stuff she’s working on that will make technology visible and appealing to girls and young women (and wearable technology that isn’t ugly).
• Practically, what can we as humans be doing now to help the situation better for women developers?
  • Getting involved in projects that are already happening is a great way to start.Girls Who Code and Black Girls Code are good resources
  • JSConf EU has started reaching out to women to find speakers and had a 50/50 conference.
  • Sara says another important aspect of workplace diversity is keeping them on your team: praise them publicly, and redirect them privately.
  • And get rid of the Well, Actually culture.
• How can Stack Overflow specifically help the situation?
  • We currently do an okay job of creating a safe space for everyone and putting our emphasis on the content of a post instead of the person who posted it.
  • The “over-moderation” we’re often criticized accidentally helps a lot with these issues, too – it makes us focus only on merit.
  • Sara says we should consider hiring beginner developers and training them ourselves if we aren’t getting enough applications from female senior-level developers.

Thanks for listening to the Stack Exchange Podcast with special guest Sara J. Chipps, along with Stack Exchange CFO Michael Pryor, brought to you by /r/husky.

SE Podcast #54 - The One With All The Anachronisms [ 1:08:15 ] Download

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We’ve spent a good portion of the year trying to build out our teams to handle the increasing load of work here at Stack Exchange. A big part of this has involved bringing on new community managers: with both a larger number of sites *and* greater numbers of users on those sites, we hadn’t exactly been keeping up with the demand for help and guidance across the network. Tim Post signed on in the spring, followed by Jon Ericson, Gabe Koscky and Pops “Kevin” Chang.

Community Management at Stack Exchange is primarily a support role: assist folks in learning how to use the software, then help them learn to work together as they work to build something awesome. Our goal is to facilitate more than to dictate: if you’ve spent some time on a mature site, you know what we’re all working toward, but sometimes folks need a bit of help figuring out how to get there. Jon compares the job to the art of bonsai: patient observation, deliberate and judicious intervention and correction, more patient observation. We’ve been very lucky to attract so many patient, observant gardeners thus far, and I’m excited to announce that we’ve just hired one more:

Ana Hevesi was raised in New York and socialized on The Internet as much as in “real life”. She grew to be wildly fascinated with how social norms developed on the web, finding the factors that led people to bond, collaborate or conflict with one another to be endlessly intriguing. She was a drama major at a competitive performing arts high school before studying web design and development in college. Dropping out to pursue a more self-directed path as a programmer, Ana attended events and got to know people within the (then rather small) New York tech community. Her new friends threw a wrench into her dev career plans by repeatedly asking for help in managing their relationships with customers. She was hired as the first community manager at Shapeways, helping designers and engineers share their 3D printing expertise and sell their designs. It was at Shapeways where Ana was first introduced to Stack Exchange, observing with interest our approach to community development. She gained further experience in community management at Nodejitsu, as well as knowledge of running a tech support team and the idiosyncrasies of the JavaScript and Node.js communities.

Ana has a keen eye for patterns in social interaction, and delights in finding ways to help folks work together more effectively. When she’s not working, she can be found hanging out in her Brooklyn neighborhood, finding the weirdest and most fun electronic music, hacking on small projects, organizing developer conferences, or digging into a sci-fi novel or a book about behavioral psych.

We’re still in the process of introducing Ana to all of our communities, so please join me in giving her a warm welcome when she drops in on yours.

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Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #53 with special guest Gabe Koscky, our new Brazilian community manager, and usual suspects Jay Hanlon, Joel Spolsky, and David Fullerton. Today’s show is brought to you by the National Security Administration!

• Site Milestones: We launched Astronomy, which is not the same thing as the Space Exploration site we’d previously launched.
  • You can ask questions about gravity (the force) on Astronomy. You cannot ask questions about Gravity (the movie).
  • Astronomy and Physics have a lot of overlap, and that’s okay!
  • Also, you can’t say Count Dooku in Portuguese. This is an adult-only podcast.
• We also launched Tor, a Q&A site about The Onion Router, a protocol for people who want more privacy and anonymity on the internet. There’s been a lot of press lately about the nefarious deeds you can do thereon, but there are legitimate reasons to use it, too.
• Our last new site is almost definitely not by the NSA: Pets. The site is doing very well. It’s extremely high-activity so far.
  • This is David’s favorite question.
• And now, this week’s Featured Site: The Workplace. It’s still in beta, and we don’t usually talk about betas in our featured site segment, but this site is especially interesting because its answers are much less factual than most other sites… and yet it’s still successful.
  • Get to the point!
  • How do I deal with difficult but talented employees? is relevant to David’s daily work life.
  • There’s some good information on workplace transitions. Joel says it’s a self-help group for commiserating. Jay disagrees!
• It’s time to find out everything Gabe knows about Portugal, where he doesn’t live, and has never visited. (Gabe was hired to correct Jay when he calls the language “Brazilian”, or the South American country “Portugal”.)
• He’s been with us for a few months now as our very first Portuguese-speaking community manager as we work on getting Stack Overflow available in other languages.
• So why do we need Stack Overflow in Portuguese? Why not just let everyone speak English? Lots of Brazilian programmers simply don’t speak English, and won’t learn – but while so many of the world’s resources about programming are in English, they’re out in the cold.
• Aside: Joel got a milkshake delivered from Shake Shack, thanks to WunWun, which is extremely confusing.
• There’s an Area 51 proposal for the site, and we’ll almost certainly be rolling Stack Overflow in Portuguese out to Area 51 committers first – so check it out if you’re interested.

Thanks for listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #53 with special guest Gabe Koscky, brought to you by the NSA (they’re listening). Tune in next time for our chat with special guest Sara Chipps!

SE Podcast #53 - Let's Go Rio [ 49:57 ] Download

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We’ve been busy! So busy, in fact, that this post only takes us through the hires we made in June and July. More announcements are coming soon … in the meantime, get to know these 13 wonderful people who now call Stack Exchange home.

Jon Ericson, Community Manager, Burbank, CA

As an Air Force brat, Jon grew up all over the world but has lived in the Los Angeles area since attending UCLA, marrying his college sweetheart, and starting a family. He taught himself GW-BASIC on the family Tandy 1000, learned Pascal and FORTRAN in the classroom, C on the job, Perl on Usenet, and a bunch of other stuff on Stack Exchange. Fifteen years after getting his dream job subcontracting for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, he leaves with an unblemished record in terms of spacecraft unplanned planetary impact maneuvers. Read more about Jon here.

Dean Grant, Senior Account Executive (Ad Sales), New York

Dean joined Stack Exchange this summer after spending 10 years in the Wall Street Journal’s ad sales department. Originally from Texas, Dean graduated from Iona college and now resides in Eastchester, NY with his wife and 2 kids (aged 17 and 15).  For fun, Dean loves to go fishing, and he coaches his son’s baseball team in his spare time.

Max Holley, Account Executive (Careers 2.0), Denver

Max grew up in Austin, TX and survived on live music, breakfast tacos, and Tex-Mex. After graduating from Arizona State in 2009, he moved to Denver where he’s mostly lived ever since (excluding a brief stint in Florida). His career history is almost entirely in IT sales. Max’s hobbies include distance running, basketball, tennis, and biking.

Joshua Hynes, Senior Product Designer, Mechanicsburg, PA 

After growing up with a love for art and problem-solving, Josh has been designing online experiences since 1999. After graduating from Cedarville University, he spent 10 years crafting experience for clients before joining Stack Exchange. A proud husband and father of 3, Josh enjoys reading books, listening to music, being involved at his church, watching baseball (especially the Boston Red Sox), and getting to know new people.

Marvin Medrano, Kitchen Assistant, New York

Marvin graduated from John Jay College. His past employers include East End Kitchen on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he met his current kitchen coworkers, Shanna Sobel and Philip Sireci. Marvin loves auto mechanics and custodial maintenance, and he has four beautiful little girls.

Jessica Nothnagle, Sales Representative (Careers 2.0), Denver

Jessica was born and raised in Rochester, NY and just recently made the move to Denver last July. Prior to Stack Exchange, she was working at Paychex for two years. She knew she wanted to relocate to Denver and all the cards fell into place when she got a promotion with Paychex that transferred her there. Outside of work, Jessica enjoys pretending she knows how to cook, hanging out with friends, and exploring all that her new city has to offer.

Angela Nyman, EMEA Marketing Manager, London

Angela was born and raised in Sweden but decided to leave it all behind at the age of 18. She lived in the US for a year before heading off to a private university in Italy. She worked as a marketing manager in Spain, France, and the UK, fitting in a couple of ski seasons in between, before deciding to travel the world. In 2009 she settled down in what is now properly her home: London!  Angela has a background in marketing for the gaming industry, having run one of Europe’s largest poker tours, The WPT, for years. She is super excited about taking on another challenge in a new industry doing what she loves. Outside of work, Angela loves exploring new places and doing everything yoga, fitness, mind & health related.

Samo Prelog, Web Developer (Core), Ljutomer, Slovenia

Samo (left) grew up in Ljutomer, studied in Maribor, and now lives in Lenart – all in the “head” of Slovenia’s chicken-like geography. He got into programming by maintaining his high school’s website and developing applications for organizing karate competitions. Besides hanging out with his wife, he also enjoys making music, practicing & judging karate, other (normal) sports, and learning new things by answering questions on Stack Overflow. As an active SO user since 2009, Samo wasn’t able to resist the temptation any longer, and he clicked on the ‘woof from home‘ ad – once.

Tania Rahman, Sales Representative (Careers 2.0), London

Born and raised in a tiny village in Hampshire complete with thatched-roofed cottages, Tania has been living in London in the heart of the Olympic Village for over 4 years. Tania designed an award winning doughnut aptly named ‘Death By Chocolate’ which was available in petrol (gas) stations across the UK for a limited period. Due to the over consumption of doughnuts, Tania decided the best way to work the extra calories off was by running the London Marathon, which she did in 2013. When she’s not busy checking out the latest pop up restaurant she can be found with her nose in a good book or learning to swim…sometimes both!

Phil Sireci, Executive Chef, New York

Phil graduated from the French Culinary Institute. His impressive career includes stints at the Gramercy Tavern and Union Square Café; he also owned a restaurant in Provincetown, MA in the past. East End Kitchen was where he met his assistant, Shanna Sobel. Phil loves to play the guitar and has played in a couple of bands. He loves his 2 dogs, PJ and Dinny.

Shanna Sobel, Assistant Chef/Pastry Chef, New York

Shanna graduated from FIT with Bachelor in Fine Arts. She went on to receive a degree for Pastry Arts from the Art Institute of Culinary Education. Shanna has worked at NYC hotspots Colicchio and Sons, Stanton Social, and East End Kitchen, which is where she met Marvin and Philip. Shanna owns an online cookie company called Couture Cookies LLC, and she enjoys volleyball and abstract painting in her spare time. She’s also a huge Dave Matthews Band fan!

Angela Toney, Account Executive (Careers 2.0), Denver

Angela grew up in the American Southwest, attended college in rural Virginia, and now calls Denver home. Her sales career started at an educational technology company, and five years later, she is ready to dive in to her role at Stack Exchange! In her free time, Angela enjoys hiking with her husband and dogs, anything fitness-oriented (latest obsession is stand-up paddle boarding), and visiting all the great breweries and restaurants in the Mile High City.

Jonathan Zizzo, Account Executive (Careers 2.0), New York

Jonathan grew up in Ohio and attended college at The Ohio State University. He spent five years selling medical equipment before joining Stack Exchange this summer. Outside of work, Jonathan enjoys spending quality time with family and friends, traveling, and seeking adventure.

Visit our hiring 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 remote)

Senior Product Designer (NYC or remote)

Sales Representative / Account Executive (London)

Sales Representative / Account Executive (Denver)

Sales Representative / Account Executive (NYC)

Community Manager – bilingual English/Japanese (NYC or remote)

Recruiter (London)

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Stack Overflow officially launched on September 15, 2008. In five short years, you’ve answered over 5 million questions on more than 100 sites, and helped hundreds of millions of people find the answers they needed. Today, we want to celebrate how, together, we changed one small corner of the Internet for the better.

We want to hear your stories about how someone on Stack Exchange helped you.

“Then, a Miracle Occurs”

Before it went into beta, stackoverflow.com had a comic on the landing page that came to symbolize what we were setting out to do:

We knew what our goal was, and we had some idea how to start, but the entire thing working was predicated on that middle step: “then a miracle occurs”. The original vision statement was ambitious:

It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal. (from Introducing Stack Overflow, emphasis added)

It was a gamble: would people really take time out of their busy lives to answer other people’s questions, for nothing more than fake internet points and bragging rights?

It turns out that people will do anything for fake internet points.

Just kidding. At best, the points, and the gamification, and the focused structure of the site did little more than encourage people to keep doing what they were already doing. People came because they wanted to help other people, because they needed to learn something new, or because they wanted to show off the clever way they’d solved a problem.

Which was lucky for us.  Because here’s the crazy secret about gamification:  In the history of the world, gamification has never gotten a single person do anything they didn’t already basically like to do.

In the midst of everyone’s individual reason for coming, somewhere among the hundreds, and then thousands of people who showed up to answer each other’s questions and hammer out how the site should actually work, the miracle actually occurred.

An incredible number of people jumped at the chance to help a stranger

So far, you’ve provided helpful answers to over five million questions. Those answers are seen by forty-four million people looking for help each month.

To put those numbers in perspective:

• That’s more people helped each month than visit the New York Times, Bank of America, or Apple.com.
• If the people helped each month were a US state, it’d be bigger than California and almost twice as big as Texas.
• If they were a country, it’d be in the top 15% of nations in the world, with more people than Canada, Argentina, or Poland. It’d be practically two Yemens.
• If you put one frog in a football stadium for each of the 44MM people who get help here each month, that would be forty-four MILLION frogs. Think about that. But don’t say it out loud. People are quick to judge.

Making the Internet a Better Place

The next chapter of Stack Exchange is still being written. A few years ago, we widened our vision beyond programmers. Our new goal was simple, if a bit daunting:

Make the Internet a better place to get expert answers to your questions.

We asked people what other sites they wanted, and carefully started launching them, one at a time. Each time, we were counting on a group of experts to come together and start asking and answering each other’s questions. There have been a few failures along the way, but overall, the successes have been amazing.

We’re now up to 106 sites, including some outstanding ones on System Administration, Computers, Mathematics, Ubuntu, Video Games, and Cooking, and some young upstarts like our site for English Language Learners. If there’s a site you want to see that doesn’t exist yet, you can still propose it on Area 51.

At the same time, Stack Overflow is continuing to grow, and we are doing our best to keep it healthy. The short history of the internet is littered with communities that started out great, but slowly petered out under the weight of flame wars, mass-n00bocide, funny cat pictures, or just boredom waiting for the next big thing. We still need your help to keep Stack Overflow focused on its core mission: collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world.

Tell Us Your Story

We want to hear your stories. Looking at numbers is one thing, but hearing from real, live people about how someone’s effort here helped them is entirely different. So, if someone’s post here ever saved your day at work, or convinced you to buy your daughter an SLR and learn photography together, take a minute to recognize the person who wrote the answer that mattered to you.

If you’re somebody who mostly answers questions, share how you got involved and what keeps you coming back.  Or tell us about someone who taught you something before we even existed. They deserve to be recognized for the way their investment in you is getting passed on to others here today. If Stack Exchange got you interested in a new topic or taught you a new trick for an old one, we want to hear about it.

Stack Exchange has always been about a community of people helping each other out. It was a long shot when it launched, but you made it work. Now, let’s take a few minutes to recognize everything that we’ve achieved together.

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