Stack Overflow

Description

Rachel Botsman:

'Stack Overflow reports more than 24 million unique visitors a month and around 5,500 questions are submitted to the site every day.

Voting on and editing questions are just two ways in which users can earn reputation points on Stack Overflow. "Reputation is earned by convincing your peers that you know what you are talking about," Spolsky says. "The reason why the site is 100 per cent spam-free and that around 80 per cent of all questions get answered is entirely a function of the community. The way we do that is as you earn more reputation points, you get more powers on the site."

Shortly after the site launched, Atwood and Spolsky heard that programmers were putting their Stack Overflow reputation scores on their CVs, and headhunters were searching the platform for developers with specific skills. "A CV tells you what schools they went to, what companies they worked for and how well they did on a standardised test when they were teenagers," Spolsky explains. "But if you read the writings of someone on Stack Overflow, you immediately know if they are a skilled programmer or not." In February 2011, Stack Overflow launched Careers 2.0, an invitation-only job board where companies can find skilled programmers.

Stack Overflow demonstrates how a person's reputation score created in one community is starting to have value beyond the environments where it was built. By answering questions in an expert forum, you create more opportunities to find a better job." (http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/09/features/welcome-to-the-new-reputation-economy?)

History

Nadia Eghbal:

"GitHub became a watering hole for people to work on code together. But what about the hours of frustration and coding between successful commits? Developers ask each other for advice and share knowledge all the time. Programming books are extremely popular for this reason. Sometimes, conversation happens over private emails or mailing lists. But there was no dedicated place to talk about the nitty gritty of code.

In 1996, Experts-Exchange, piggybacking off the first dot-com boom, launched as a way for IT professionals to ask each other for help and network. (Why the annoying hyphen? It was originally called http://expertsexchange.com, until enough people pointed out it could be misread as “Expert Sex Change”, so they moved to http://experts-exchange.com and hyphenated their name.)

Experts-Exchange had a premium membership model and went bankrupt in 2001, following the dot-com crash. Some blamed venture capital: JP Morgan took 51% of the company for $5.5M in financing, and made Experts-Exchange grow faster than it was meant to. The site still lives on under new ownership today.

But the idea was good, and in 2008, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky decided to launch a more open version of the original site, calling it Stack Overflow.

Developers now had a place to ask each other questions and get help, whether about picking a language or a bug they couldn’t figure out. Stack Overflow was so successful that it eventually expanded to a whole network of Q&A sites, including mathematics, Ubuntu and cryptography. They called the network Stack Exchange.

Now developers had all the tools they needed. In the 1980s, they had to use a scattered combination of IRC, mailing lists, forums, and version control systems.

By 2010, they had Git for version control, GitHub to collaborate, and Stack Overflow to ask and answer questions." (https://medium.com/@nayafia/we-re-in-a-brave-new-post-open-source-world-56ef46d152a3#.q5cj3gmhm)