Stackoverflow Blog Podcast

Back in September, I blogged about how I’ve become a podcast addict. I said I’d follow up with short posts on the podcasts I listen to and why I give some of the precious little time I have to listen to them. I look forward to the stackoverflow blog podcast each week, so here’s why.

blog.stackoverflow.com – The Feed

Joel Spolsky (joelonsoftware.com, Fog Creek) and Jeff Atwood (codinghorror.com) started up the stackoverflow.com programmer’s Question and Answer site in 2008 and they’ve been running a podcast in which they talk about the site, the community that’s built up around it, software development and whatever else they feel like talking about.

Topics and Focus

The Stackoverflow.com Site

The design of the site and the decisions that the team made back then, and how those decisions have played out from the private beta to a site with over a million pageviews per day. I’ve not seen anywhere else you can get this kind of insight into a real project.

The Stackoverflow Community

From the initial programmer’s site, there’s now serverfault.com (sysadmin Q and A), superuser.com (for the family’s computer expert), meta.stackoverflow.com (Q and A about Q and A), careers.stackoverflow.com (jobs and careers stuff), and stackexchange.com (hosted stackoverflow engine providing Q and A site hosting on a paid-for basis), so there’s a lot of discussion about building and serving communities online.

Interviews

Over the past few months, there have been more episodes with software luminaries from outside the stackoverflow team, talking about what they do and their views on the sites.

The Transcript Wiki

Pretty much every word in every episode has been transcribed by listeners (there’s that community thing in action again), which means that the content can be accessed by search engines and people with impaired hearing.

Frequency

Weekly, only a couple of missed weeks over the life of the podcast.

Audio Quality

Always excellent, very clear and easy to listen to.

What’s Not So Good

Might be tricky to get into if you haven’t been following it, as I think there are a few recurring topics and in-jokes. I don’t think there’s much of that though, so I’d listen to a couple of episodes to give it a go if you’re interested in the topics.

Well, I think that about sums it up, cheers!

Author: brabster

Software developer in the North of England View all posts by brabster