YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Atwood

lines on the record
123
first
2018-11-29
most recent
2018-11-29
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “That strict typing of variables would have caught. And now you have this thing called TypeScript for Microsoft from the guy who built C sharp Anders, who's one of the greatest minds in software development, right? Like in terms of language design, and says, no, no, no, we want to bolt on a strict type system to JavaScript because it makes things better. And now everybody's like, oh my God, we deployed TypeScript and found 50 latent bugs that we didn't know about, right? Like this is super common. I think there is a truth in programming that strictness, it's not the goal. We're not saying be super strict because strictness is correct. No, it's no, no. Strictness produces better results. That's what I'm saying, right? So strict typing of variables, I would say you almost universally have consensus now is basically correct. Should be that way in every language, right? Duck equals five should generate an error because no, you didn't declare, you didn't tell me that duck was an integer, right? That's a bug, right? Or maybe you mistype, you type duck, right? Instead of duck, right? You never know this happens all the time.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think to use Tech Overflow, you have to have the idea that okay, strict systems ultimately work better. And I do think in programming, you're familiar with loose typing versus strict typing, right? The idea that you can declare a variable, not declare a variable, rather, just start using a variable and, okay, I see it's implicitly an integer, bam, awesome. Duck equals five. Well, duck is now an integer five, right? And you're like, cool, awesome, simpler, right? Why would I want to worry about typing? And for a long time, like in the Ruby community, they're like, yeah, this is awesome. Like, you just do a bunch of unit testing, which is testing your program's validity after the fact to catch any bugs that...”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Rather than having 10 copies of the question and the answer, because if you have 10 copies of the question and the answer, this also devalues the reputation system, which programmers hate, as I previously mentioned. You're getting reputation for an answer that somebody already gave. It's like, well, it's an answer, but somebody already gave that answer. So why are you getting reputation for the same answer as the other guy who gave it four years ago? People get offended by that, right? So the reputation system itself adds tension to the system. In that the people who have a lot of reputation become very”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “From a computer science perspective, how do you even begin to solve that? And it happens all the time. People are super good at this, right? Accidentally at asking the same thing in like 10, 20 different ways. And the other complexity is we want some of those duplicates to exist because if there's five versions with different words, have those five versions point to the one centralized answer, right? It's like, okay, this is a duplicate, no worries. Here's the answer you wanted over here on this, the prime example that we want to have.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “It's a very, very hard computer science problem, and partly because people are very good at using completely different words. It always amazed me on Stack Overflow. You'd have two questions that were functionally identical, and one question had like zero words in common with the other question. I'm like, oh my God.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Really representative, right? Like, I think as a beginner, you want a totally different set of tools. You want live screen sharing, live chat. You want access to resources. You want a playground, like a playground you can experiment in and like test and all this stuff that we just don't give people because that was never really the audience that we were designing Stack Overflow for. That doesn't mean it's wrong. And I think it would be awesome if there was a site like that on the internet or if Stack Overflow is said, hey, we're going to start doing this. That's fine too. I'm not there. I'm not making those decisions. But I do think the pressure, the tension that you described is there for people to be, look, I'm a little nervous because I know I got to do my best work, right?”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And since you're a busy professional, certainly when you ask a question, you're going to ask the best possible question, right? Because you're a busy professional and you would not accept anything less than a very well-written question with a lot of detail about why you're doing it, what you're doing, what you researched, what you found, right? Because you're a professional like me, right? And this rubs people sometimes the wrong way. And I don't think it's wrong to say, look, I don't want that experience. I want. Just a more chill place for beginners. And I still think Sacroville is never designed for beginners, right? There's this misconception that.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Who am I to judge, right? So that's fine, it's not precluded from happening, but there's a certain big city ethos that we started with of like, look, we're New York City. You don't come to New York City and expect them to be, oh, welcome to the city, Joe. How's it going? Come on in. Let me show you around. That's not how New York City works, right? I mean, and again, New York City has a reputation for being rude, which I actually don't think it is having been there fairly recently. It's not rude. People are just like going about their business, right? They're like, look, I have things to do. I'm busy. I'm a busy professional, as are you.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Have a problem. Oh, you have a problem. Okay. A problem. That's great, right? Like, you need specifics, right? Like, so it's trying to help you make a good question title, for example. That step will be broken out. All that stuff. But one of those steps in that wizard of asking could say, hey, I'm a little nervous. I've never done this before. Can you put me in a queue for special mentoring? You could opt in to a special mentor. I think that would be fantastic. I don't have any objection to that at all in terms of being an opt in system because there are people that are like, you know, I just want to help them. I want to help a person no matter what. I want to go above and beyond. I want to spend like hours with this person. It depends what their goals are, right?”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Someone tried to ask a question. That's the point at which you need the most help. And we just didn't adapt with the times. But the good news is they're working on this from what I understand. And it's going to be a more wizard-based format. And you could envision a world where as part of this wizard-based program, when you're asking a question, it's like, okay, come up with a good title. What are good words to put in the title? One word that's not good to put in the title is problem, for example.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I don't think stack overflow can totally change the way it works. One thing they are working on finally is the ask page had not changed since 2011. I'm still kind of bitter about this because I feel like you have a Q&A system and what are the core pages in a Q&A system? Well, first of all, the question, all the answers and also the ask page, particularly when you're a new user or...”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “That's a tough sell, right? Because people are like, well, I don't really care about the community. What I care about is my problem. And that's fair, right? It's sort of that, again, that tension, that balancing act of we want to help you, but we also want to help everybody that comes behind you, right? The long line of people are going to come and say, oh, I kind of have that problem too, right? And if nobody's ever going to come up and say, I have this problem too, then that question shouldn't exist on Stack Overflow because the question is too specific. And even that's tension, right? How do you judge that? How do you know that nobody's ever going to have this particular question again? So there's a lot of tension in the system”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “It's not a free. That stuff doesn't come for free, right? It's not like we all have perfect answers and nobody will have to get their feelings hurt or nobody will have to get downvoted like that it doesn't work that way, right? Like,”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “We know that works. Wikipedia is an amazing resource. Blogging, the idea of ownership is so powerful, right? Like, oh, I, Joe wrote this. And look how good Joe's answer is, right? Like all these concepts we're rolling together. Researching all the things that are out there that were working and why they were working and trying to fold them into, again, that Frankenstein's monster of what Stack Overflow is. And by the way, that wasn't a free decision because there's still a ton of tension in the stack overflow system. There's reasons people complain about stack overflow because it's so strict, right? Why is it so strict? Why guys always closing my questions? It's because there's so much tension that we built into the system around like trying to get good, good results out of the system. And, you know,”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “So look at all the failures. Don't just look what everybody looks at, which is like, oh gosh, look at all these successful people. Look at the failures. Look at the things that didn't work. Research the entire field. And so that's the research that I was doing that led me to Robin, right? Was that? And then when we, for example, when we did Stack Overflow, we were like, okay, well, I really like elements of voting and digging Reddit. I like the Wikipedia, everything's up to date. Nothing is like an old tombstone that has horrible out-of-date information.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “There is prototyping. So there's tons of research. There's tons of research. Like, what's out there that failed? Because a lot of people look at successes. Oh, look at how successful X is. Everybody looks at the successes. Those are boring. Show me the failures because that is what's interesting. That's where people were experimenting. That's where people were pushing. And they failed.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “And say, I'm excited about this too. Same thing with Joel, right? I mean, Joel is a legend in the industry, right? So when he walked through and said, I'm excited about this problem, I was like, Me too, man. We can do this, right? So that to me is the most important step. It's like having an idea you're super excited about and another person, a co-founder, right? Because again, you get that dual leadership, right? Of like, am I making a bad decision? Sometimes it's nice to have checks of like, is this a good idea? I don't know, right?”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It's age some, right? Like the behavior's a little different in there of Twitter, but it was awesome. It was very funny and it was like a game. It was like an RPG and it had a forum attached to it. So it was like a game about forums with a forum attached to it. It's like, this is awesome, right? This is so cool. And the founder of that company or that project, it wasn't really a company, contacted me, this guy, Robin Ward from Toronto and said, hey, you know, I saw you been talking about forums. And like, I really love that problem space. It's like, I'd still love to build really good forum software because I don't think anything out there is any good. And I was like, awesome. At that point, I was like, we're starting a company because like I couldn't have wished for a better person to walk through the door.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I would be proud to have the software on my site. So that was the genesis of discourse feeling very strongly about their needs to be a good solution for communities. So that's step one. Genesis, when I do you feel super strongly about, right? And then people galvanize around the idea, like Joel was already super excited about that idea. I was excited about the idea. So with the forum software, I was posting on Twitter. I had researched as part of my research, I start researching the problem, right? I found a game called Forum Wars, which was a parody of Forum. It's still very, very funny of like forum behavior or circle like I would say 2003.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “The process of building this thing for discourse, it was like, look, there's no good software for communities to just hang out and do stuff, right? Like whether it's problem solving, whatever forms are such a great building block of online community and they're hideous. They were so bad, right? It was embarrassing. Like I literally was embarrassed to be associated with this software, right? I was like, we have to have software that you can be proud of. It's like this is competitive with Reddit. This is competitive with Twitter. This is competitive with Facebook, right?”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Got great data, but the experience is hideous, right? It's trying to trick you. It feels like you used car salesman, it's just bad. So I was like, oh, that's awesome. It feeds into community. It feeds into we can make a Creative Commons. So I think the core is to have a really good idea that you feel very strongly about in the beginning, that there's a wrong in the world, that we will, an injustice that we will write.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “In that case, it was experts exchange. I mean, Joel's original idea because I approached Joel's like, look, Joel, I have all this energy behind my blog. I want to do something. I want to build something. But I don't know what it is because I'm honestly not a good idea person. I'm really not. I'm like the execution guy. I'm really good at execution, but I'm not good at blue skying ideas. It's not my forte, which is another reason why I like the community feedback, because they blue sky all day long for you, right? So when I can just go in and cherry pick a blue sky idea from community, even if I have to spend three hours reading to get one good idea, it's worth it, man. But anyway, so the idea from Joel was, hey, experts exchange.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Well, I can talk about it in the context of OzTech Overflow and Discourse. So I think the key thing initially is there is a problem. Some state of the world that's unsatisfactory to the point that you're upset about it, right?”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “So, for me, the scarier choice was to say no. I was like, well, no, let's just see where this is going, right? Because then I own it. I mean, it belongs to me. It's my thing. And I can just take it and to some other logical conclusion, right? Because imagine how different the world would have been had I said yes and sold the blog. It's like there probably wouldn't be Stack Overflow. You know, a lot of other stuff would have changed. So for that particular decision, I think it was that same rule of like what scares me a little bit more.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “And this guy contacted me out of the blue from this bug tracking company. He's like, oh, I really want to buy your blog for like, I think it was around $100,000. It might have been like $80,000, but it was a lot, right? And that's, you know, at the time, like I would have a year's worth of salary all at once. So I had to really think about like, well, and I remember talking to people at the time. I was like, wow, that's a lot of money. But then on the other hand, like, I really like my blog, right? Like, do I want to sell my blog? Because it wouldn't really belong to me anymore at that point. One of the guidelines that I like to, I don't like to give advice to people a lot, but one of the pieces of advice I do give because I do think it's really true and it's generally helpful is whenever you're looking at a set of decisions like, oh gosh, should I do A, B, or C, you got to pick the thing that's a little scarier in that list because not like jump off a cliff scary, but the thing that makes you nervous because if you pick the safe choice, it's usually you're not really pushing. You're not pushing yourself. You're not choosing the thing that's going to help you grow.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “A lot of bad outcomes. So, part of the game is like, oh, I got a bad outcome. Go back one step, go back one further step. Like, how did I get here, right? Like, it's a sequence of decisions. And this is true of life, right? Like every decision is a sequence, right? Individually, any individual decision is not necessarily right or wrong, but they lead you down a path, right? So I do think there's some truth to this particular decision, the blog had gotten fairly popular. There's a lot of RSS readers that I discovered.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Right. So one of the things I love is the choose your own adventure books, which I loved as a kid, and I feel like their early programmer books because they're all about if-then statements, right? If-this, then this. They're also very, very unforgiving. Like there's all these sites that map the classic Chujaran Victor books and how many outcomes are bad.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “And I want to talk about it some more. And you get the, I mean, you're not claiming credit for that idea, but it gives you something interesting to talk about that's kind of evergreen, right? Like you don't have to go, what should I talk about? So just go dig up some old classic programming books. Find something that, oh, wow, that's interesting. Or how does that apply today? Or what about X and Y, or compare these two concepts?”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “So ideas, right? So I think you got to have the concept that there's so many interesting things in the world. Like, I mean, my God, the world is amazing, right? Like you could never write about everything that's going on because it's so incredible. But if you can't come up with like, let's say, one interesting thing per day to talk about, then you're not trying hard enough because the world is full of just super interesting stuff. And one great way to mine stuff is go back to old books because they bring up old stuff that's still super relevant. And I did that a lot because I was like reading classic programming books in a lot of the early blog posts were like, oh, I was reading this programming book. And they brought this really cool concept.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “You have to have the attitude of like, you know, no matter what happens, I want to do this for me, right? It's not about you. It's about me. I mean, in the end, it is about everyone because this is how good work gets out into the world. But you have to be pretty strict about saying, like, you know, I'm selfish in the sense that I have to do this for me. You know, you mentioned Stephen King, like his book on writing, but one of the things I do, for example, when writing is like, I read it out loud. One of the best pieces of advice for writing, anything is read it out loud. Multiple times and make it And sounds good”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “There's going to be suffering. I mean, I won't kid you. Like, well, the work is suffering, right? Like doing the work, like even when you're every week, you're like, okay, that blog post wasn't very good or, you know, people didn't like it or people said disparaging things about it.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Every time you write something, think how am I going to screw myself? Because you will constantly, right? So that icon was like, oh yeah, I need to constantly hold that mirror up and look and say, look, you're very fallible. You're going to screw this up. Like, how can you build this in such a way that you're not going to screw it up later? Like, how can you get that discipline around making sure at every step, I'm thinking through all the things that I could do wrong or that other people could do wrong because that is actually how you get to be a better programmer a lot of times, right? So that sidebar illustration, I loved it so much. And I wrote Steve before I started my blog and said, hey, can I have permission to use this? Because I just really like this illustration. And Steve was kind enough to give me permission to do that and continues to give me permission. So, yeah.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “It was. One of the smart things I did, it's from a book by Steve McConnell Code Complete, which is one of my favorite programming books, still probably my number one programming book for anyone to read. One of the smart things I did back then, I don't always do smart things when I start stuff. I contacted Steven and said, hey, I really like this. It was a sidebar illustration indicating danger in code, right? Coding horror was like, watch out. And I love that illustration because it spoke to me. Because I saw that illustration go, oh my God, that's me. Like, I'm always my own worst enemy. Like, that's the key insight in programming is.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “So they're very, oh, yeah, super strict system of rules that lets me get what I want. That's programming, right? That's what Stack Overflow is.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “And then, you know, discipline around look, you know, we're trying to do a very specific thing here on Stack Overflow. We're not trying to solve all the world's problems. We're trying to solve this very specific Q&A problem in a very specific way, not because we're jerks about it, but because these strict set of rules help us get really good results, right? And programmers, that's an easy sell for the most part because programmers are used to dealing with ridiculous systems of rules constantly. That's basically their job.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Was it a pharmaceutical company? And I just love this stuff to an absurd degree. So I was like, I'll just blog about it and then I'll find an audience and eventually found an audience, eventually found Joel, and eventually built Stack Overflow from that one core of activity, right? But it was that repetition of feeding back in, feedback from my blog comments, feedback from Joel Feedback from the early Stack Overflow community. When people see that you're doing that, they will follow along with you, right? It's like, oh, cool, you're here in good faith. You're actually not listening to everything because that's not impossible. That's impossible. But you're actually waiting our feedback in what you're doing. And why wouldn't I? Because who does all the work on Stack Overflow? Me, Joel?”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “But you can go back to my blog. There's the poll where we voted and Stack Overflow became the name of the site. And all the early beta users of Stack Overflow were audience of my blog plus Joel's blog, right? So we started from like, if you look at the Genesis, okay, I was just a programmer who said, hey, I love programming, but I have no outlet to talk about it. So I'm just going to blog about it because I don't have enough people to work to talk to about it. At the time I worked a place where programming wasn't the core output of the company”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “I felt in the early days of my blog, which I started in 2004, which is really the genesis of Stack Overflow. If you look at all my blog, it leads up to Stack Overflow, which was I have all this energy in my blog, but I don't like 40,000 people were subscribing to me. And I was like, I want to do something. And then I met Joel and said, Hey, Joel, I want to do something. Take this ball of energy from my blog and do something. And all the people reading my blog saw that. It's like, oh, cool. You're involving us. You're saying, look, you're part of this community. Let's build this thing together. Like they pick the name. Like we voted on the name for Stack Overflow on my blog. Naming is super hard. First of all, the hardest problem in computer science coming with a good name for stuff, right? Yeah.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “And you have to stick to that schedule. Because until you do that for several years, you're never gonna get anywhere. It just takes years to get to where you need to get to. And part of that is having the discipline to stick with the schedule. And it helps, again, if it's something you're passionate about, this won't feel like work. You're like, I love this. I could talk about this all day, every day, right? You just have to do it in a way that's interesting to other people. And then as you're growing the community, that pattern of participation within the community of like generating these artifacts and inviting other people to help you collaborate on these artifacts, like even in the case of blogging, like.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “Think when you're starting with an N of one. I mean, I think it's persistence and also you have to be interesting. Like somebody I really admire once said something that I always liked about blogging. He's like, here's how you blog. You have to have something interesting to say and have an interesting way of saying it, right? And then do that for like 10 years. So that's the genesis is like you have to have sort of something interesting to say that's not exactly what everybody else is saying. And an interesting way of saying, which is another way of saying kind of entertaining way of saying it. And then, as far as growing it, it's like ritual. You know, like you have to say you're starting a blog, you have to say, look, I'm going to blog every week, three times a week.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Good improvements to your core product that are not super hard to get to and actually make a lot of sense. And my favorite is about 5% of those stuff. I didn't even see coming. It's like, oh my God, I never even thought of that. But that's a brilliant idea, right? And I can point to so many features of Stack Overflow that we derive from Metastack Overflow feedback and meta discourse, right? Same exact principle of discourse. We're getting ideas from the community. I was like, oh my God, I never thought of that, but that's fantastic, right? Like I love that relationship with the community.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “And you and a group of people can go deep on whatever it is that you're into. And this works for startups, right? Startups are a group of people who go super deep on a specific problem, right? And they want to talk to their community. It's like, well, install this course, right? That's what we do at Discourse. That's what I did at Stack Overflow. I spent a lot of time on metastack overflow, which is our internal public community feedback site. And just experiencing what the users were experiencing, right? Because they're the ones doing all the work in the system. And they had a lot of interesting feedback. And there's that 90-10 rule of like 90% of the feedback you get is not really actionable for a variety of reasons. It might be bad feedback. It might be crazy feedback. It might be feedback you just can't act on right now. But there's 10% of it that's like gold. It's like literally gold and diamonds where it's like feedback of really”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Control the experience because community is also about ownership, right? Like if you're meeting at the Barnes Noble every Thursday and Barnes& Noble says, get out of here, you guys don't buy enough books. Well, you're kind of hosed, right? Barnes& Noble owns you, right? Like you can't. But if you have your own meeting space, your own clubhouse, you can set your own rules, decide what you want to talk about there. Generate a lot better information than you could, like hanging out at Barnes Noble every Thursday at 3 p.m., right? So that's kind of the vision of discourse is a place where it's fully open source. You can take the software, you can sell it anywhere.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “But not so much about the interest. So I think that's the linchpin of which forums and communities are built on that I personally love. Like I said, leadership is about passion, right? And being passionate about stuff is a really valid way to look at the world. And I think it's a way A lot of stuff in the world gets done. Like I once had someone describe me as, he's like, Jeff, you're a guy who you just get super passionate about a few things at a time and you just go super deep in those things. And I was like, oh, that's kind of right. That's kind of what I do. I'll get into something and just be super into that for a couple years or whatever and just learn all I can about it and go super deep in it. And that's how I enjoy experiencing the world, right? Like not being shallow on a bunch of things, but being really deep on a few things that I'm interested in. So forums kind of unlock that, right? And you don't want a world where everything belongs to Facebook. At least I don't. I want a world where communities can kind of own themselves, set their own norms, set their own rules.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “He went into a lot of great detail that was really interesting. And to me, that oatmeal post, if you read it, is the genesis of pretty much all interest communities I just really love this stuff. So, like, for me, for example, there's yo yo's, right? Like, I'm into the yo yo communities, and there's these interest communities are just really fascinating to me. And I feel more connected to the yo-yo communities than I do to, you know, friends that I don't see that often, right? Me, the powerful thing is the interest graph. And Facebook kind of dabbles in the interest graph. I mean, they have groups. You can sign up for groups and stuff. But it's really about the relationship graph. This is my co-worker. This is my relative. This is my friend.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “I think there's a lot of power in connecting people that love the same stuff around that specific topic, meaning Facebook's idea of connection is just any human that's related to another human. Like through friendship or any other reason. Facebook's idea of the world is sort of the status update, right? Like a friend of yours did something ate at a restaurant, right? Whereas discussion forums were traditionally around the interest graph, like I love electric cars specifically, I love Tesla, right? Like I love the way they approach the problem. I love the style of the founder. I just love the design ethic. And there's a lot to like about Tesla. I don't know if you saw the oatmeal. He did a whole love comic to Tesla. And it was actually kind of cool because I learned some stuff. He was talking about how great Tesla cars were specifically, like how they were built differently.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “We really wanted to run that actually. They pinged us about it. I don't think we got it, but I really would have liked to have gotten that one.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Patrons, whatever it is, it was all really bad. It was like stuff that I would be embarrassed to recommend to other people. And yet, that's where I felt they could get the biggest and strongest, most effective input for what they should be doing with their product, right? It's from their users, from their community, right? That's what we did on Stack Overflow.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Just an opportunity to hang out and discuss. So, discourse was a way to address that and say, look, you know, Discussion form software was very, very bad. And when I came out of Stack Overflow in early 2013, early 2012, it was still very, very bad. I expected it improved in the four years since I last looked, but it had not improved at all. And I was like, well, that's kind of terrible because I love these communities of people talking about things that they love, you know, that there's just communities of interest, right? And there's no good software for them. Startups would come to me and say, hey, Jeff, I want to, you know, I have this startup. Here's my idea. And the first thing I would say to them is like, well, first, why are you asking me? Like, I don't really know your field, right? Lennys necessarily, like, why aren't you asking the community, like the people that are interested in this problem, the people that are using your product, why aren't you talking to them? And then they say, oh, great idea. Like, how do I do that? And then that's when I started playing sad trombone, because I realized all the software involving talking to your users, customers, audience.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Happening, like with Lego, you know, same thing. Like, here's this cool Lego set I found. Look how awesome this is. And like, yeah, that's freaking awesome, right? It's not a question. There's all these social components to the discussions that don't fit at all. Like we literally have to disallow those in Stack Overflow because it's not about being social. It's about problems that you're facing in your work that you need concrete answers for, right? Like you have a real demonstrated problem that's sort of blocking you in something. Nobody's blocked by what should I do when I have a straight flush, right? Like it's not a blocking problem in the world.”

    2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source