Ahh, the wintry season…

The gatherings of family and friends, the giving and receiving of gifts, the making and/or breaking of New Year’s resolutions – however you and yours celebrate, the end of a calendar year heralds many traditions.

Here at Stack Exchange, we wanted to get each of you an awesome, personal gift, and mail it to you as our way of saying “thanks.” But our accountant pointed out that there are 4.5 million of you, which promptly reminded us that the holidays aren’t about gifts. The real spirit of the holidays can only be captured with…

Hats!

That’s right: Winter Bash is back for another three weeks of millinery-related holiday fun.

What’s new, you ask?

New hats:  There are over 30 new hats to earn this year. And by “hats,” we mean, “things you can stick on your avatar’s face.”

And it’s possible that there just might be a couple of secret ones, too. (By “it’s possible,” we mean  ”there definitely are, because we made them, like with computer code and everything, so there’s not really much doubt whatsoever.”)

Hats are transferrable: What? No, you can’t sell them to each other. Hats are transferrable across sites! You read that correctly: this year, if you earn a hat on any site, you can wear it on any participating Stack Exchange site. This was one of our most asked-for feature requests after last year’s event, and it’s a great way for everyone to highlight their achievements on their favorite site across the network.

Hat position is adjustable on your face: You remember how crushed you were after finally earning a mustache “hat,” only to discover that on your avatar, it was basically an extremely dapper unibrow? NEVER AGAIN.

You can finally reposition hats in the box until Don Draper’s suit fits as well it fits him. (I know, I know… “it’s not a suit; it’s a carousel.” Give it a rest, Don. Not everything is a carousel.)

Winter Bash 2013 will run from Monday 16 December 2013 through Friday 3 January 2014. During that time, participate on any Stack Exchange site to earn awesome hats (and other accessories!) Each hat has a different activity to trigger it. You can see all the hats and their triggers on the Winter Bash 2013 homepage. Still have questions? Of the kind that get asked… frequently?  Check out the  Winter Bash FAQ

All the hats will go back into storage at the end of Winter Bash, so get out there, earn some hats, and show them off while you can! Just be careful. We paid a deposit on them.

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The top bar of a Stack Exchange site has always been a bit of an odd place. It somehow combines user info, navigation, search, and a one-size-fits-all popup that includes hot network questions, a list of 100+ Stack Exchange sites, personal inbox messages, and other system notifications (lovingly referred to as The StackExchange™ MultiCollider SuperDropdown™).

It was, in retrospect, overdue for a face-lift which is why we’re excited to roll out a new top bar this week.

A Bigger, Blacker Bar

The first thing you’ll notice is that it’s really black*. When we originally conceived of the top bar with the Stack Exchange logo (way back in Ye Olde 2010), one of the main goals was to mark each site as a Gen-u-wine™ Stack Exchange site. Since then, however, we’ve created unique designs for over 40 different sites, and the Stack Exchange logo has started to get a bit… lost.

So, in the redesigned top bar, we wanted to make sure that it would look the same across all sites, and make it obvious that you’re on a Stack Exchange site. It turns out that when you try to pick a color to match 40 different site designs, you quickly realize you only have one real choice: black.

^{* Jin points out that technically it’s not quite black: it’s #212121.}

New Achievements popup

The biggest addition to the top bar is the brand new Achievements popup. Previously, if you wanted to know your reputation on every site you were active on, you had to visit every one of those sites. This led to some of us, well, compulsively cycling through sites and refreshing to see if we’d gained any rep. Now, there’s one convenient place to check from whatever site you happen to be on:

This new popup includes:

• A reputation counter at the top which sums all reputation you’ve gained on all sites since the last time you checked, updated in real-time
• Entries for reputation, badge, and privilege notifications, grouped by post and time
• A summary of reputation gained today
• Aggregation from every site in the network in one place

This should make it much easier to keep track of your reputation and badges across all the sites that you are active on.

New Sites List (aka “The Site Switcher”)

The old list of sites has gotten a new layout and is now its own distinct popup. The idea is to make it easy to switch between sites if you participate on several, or to find a new site that you don’t participate on regularly:

In the new “Site Switcher” you’ll find:

• The current site at the top, with meta, chat, and blog links for the current site (and Stack Overflow Careers when on Stack Overflow)
• A list of your top 5 sites, ordered by reputation*, with your reputation for each
• A searchable list of all sites, with a short description of each

^{* We’ll probably let you customize this list in the near future, so you can include sites you like to watch but don’t have much reputation on.}

New Global Inbox

The Global Inbox has been split out into its own popup as well, instead of a subsection of the Stack Exchange popup:

We’ve gotten rid of the confusing distinction between “inbox” and “notifications”. All messages will now appear in the inbox, except for reputation and badge events which are in the new Achievements popup. Inbox items also now have a new layout, which should be easier to scan.

Feedback Welcome

There are a few smaller changes to mention as well:

• Your name has been replaced with your picture, to make it easier to recognize at a glance that you’re signed in as you (and because some longer names just don’t fit).
• The help link is now a dropdown with links to the tour and the help center, with a short explanation of what each is.
• Click areas for everything are now the full-size of the row, to make them easier to click or tap on mobile.
• The hot network questions have moved to the sidebar on the homepage, since they aren’t really navigation or notifications.

The new top bar will be rolling out network-wide, including Area 51 and stackexchange.com, in the next few weeks. As always, meta is the place to go for feedback, suggestions, and bug reports.

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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

21 comments