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

“Now, again, there's always more than one way to do it. There's complete flexibility in the system around that. But where it falls down is stuff like poker and LEGO. Like we had, if you go to Stack Exchange.com, we have an engine that tries to launch different Q&A topics, right? And people can propose Q&A topics, sample questions. And if it gets enough support within the network, we launch that Q&A site. So some of the ones we launched were poker and Lego, and they did horribly, right? Because, I mean, there might still be there lingering on in some form, but it was an experiment. This is like a test, right? And some subjects work super well on the stack engine and some don't. But the reason Lego and Poker don't work is because they're so social, really. It's not about what's the rule here in poker. It's like, well, you know, what kind of cigars do we like to smoke while playing poker? Or, you know, what's a cool set of cards to use when playing poker? Or what's some strategies? Like say I have this hand come up, what's some strategies I could use? It's more of a discussion around like what's”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, part of it is based on the realization the stack overflow is only good for very specific subjects where there's sort of it's based on data effects and science, where answers can be kind of verified to be true. Another form of that is there's the book of knowledge, like the tome of knowledge that defines like whatever it is. You can refer to that book and it'll give you the answer. There has to be It only works on subjects where there's like semi-clear answers to things that can be verified in some form.”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you begin to resent that. You're like, well, that's not fair. And it isn't. At some level, they're correct. I mean, I empathize because, like, it's not correct to get reputation for that versus here's a really gnarly regular expression problem. And here's a really clever, insightful, you know, detailed answer laying out, oh, here's why you're seeing the behavior that you're seeing. And here, let me teach you some things about how to avoid that in the future. That's great. Like that's gold, right? You want people to get reputation for that, not so much for, wow, look at this funny thing I saw, right?”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so 10 years, and the system has trended towards strictness. There's a variety of reasons for this. One is people don't like to see other people get reputation for stuff as they view they view as frivolous, which I can actually understand because if you saw a programmer got like 500 upvotes for funniest programming cartoon or funniest comment they had seen in code. It's like, well, why do they have that reputation? It's because they wrote Getting a bunch of reputation based on someone else's work that's not even like programming, it's just a joke, right? It's a related program.”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're like, okay, I have a problem. And I want to learn about stuff around this problem having, right? And it could be theory, it could be compiler theory, it could be other stuff, but I'm having a compiler problem. Hence, I need to know the compiler theory, that aspect of it that gives me to my answer, right? So kind of a directed learning. So we had to backfill all these rules as we sort of figured out what the heck it was we were doing. And the system came very strict over time. And a lot of people still complain about that. And I wrote my latest blog entry, what does stack overflow want to be when it grows out?”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where you're just like, oh, I'll just browse some things. And oh, wow. You know, did you know tree frogs only live three years? I mean, I just made that up. I don't know if that's true. But I didn't really set out to learn that. I don't need to know that, right? It's accidental learning. It was more intentional learning.”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As what's your favorite programming food? What's the funniest programming cartoon you've seen? And we had to sort of backfill a bunch of rules about why isn't this allowed, such as is this a real problem you're facing? Like nobody goes to work and says, wow, I can't work because I don't know what the funniest programming cartoon is. So sorry, can't compile this code now. Right, it's not a real problem you're facing in your job that was run rule. And the second, what can you really learn from that? It's like what I call accidental learning or Reddit style learning.”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stuff has a lot of value, so the reputation system came from that. So we were sort of Frankensteining a bunch of stuff together in Stack Overflow, like stuff we had seen working and we knew worked. And that became Stack Overflow. Over time, we realized it wasn't really discussion. It was very focused questions and answers. There wasn't a lot of room on the page for, let me talk about this tangential thing. It was more like, okay, is it answering the question? Is it clarifying the question? Or could it be an alternative answer to the same question because there's usually more than one way to do it in program, there's like, say, five to ten ways. And one of the patterns we got into early on the stack overflow was there were questions where there would be like hundreds of answers. We're like, well, how can there be a programming question with 500, 200, 500 answers? And we looked at those and we realized those were not really questions in the traditional sense. They were discussions. It was stuff that we allowed early on that we eventually decided wasn't allowed.”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I know, right? And a lot of people don't remember it anymore, which is great. Like, that's the measure of success. When people don't remember the thing that you were trying to replace, then you've totally won. So it was a place to get answers to programming questions, but it wasn't clear if it was like focused Q&A, if it was a discussion. There were plenty of programming forums. So we weren't really sure. We were like, okay, we'll take aspects of Dig and Reddit, like voting were very important, reordering answers based on votes. Wiki style stuff of like being able to edit posts, not just your posts, but other people's posts to make them better and keep them more up to date. Ownership of blogging of like, okay, this is me. I'm saying this in my voice. You know, this is the stuff that I know. And, you know, your reputation accrues to you. And it's pure recognition. So you asked earlier, like, what motivates programmers? I think peer recognition motivates them a lot. That was one of the key insights of Stack Overflow was like recognition from your peers is why things get done, not necessarily money, necessarily your boss, but like your peers saying, wow, this person really knows their stuff.”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really? I mean, kind of, well, we didn't know. We had an idea of like, okay, these are things that we see working online. We had a goal, right? Our goal was, uh,”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me start from the very beginning. So, Stack Overflow is a very structured WikiSyl QA for programmers, right? And that was the problem we first worked on. And when we started, we thought it was discussions because we looked at like programming forums and other things. But we quickly realized we were doing Q&A, which is a very narrow subset of human communication.”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of both, really, right? Like, and the idea with discourse, the reason I'm so passionate about is because I believe every community should have the right to own themselves, right? Like they should have their own software that they can run that belongs to them. That's their space where they can set the rules. And if they don't like it, they can move to different hosting or whatever they need to happen can happen. But like this idea of a company town where all human communication is implicitly owned by WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. And it's really disturbing too because Facebook is really smart. Like I said, they're great at execution. Buying in WhatsApp and buying Instagram were incredibly smart decisions. And they also do this thing, I don't know if you know, but they have this VPN software that they give away for free on smartphones and it indirectly feeds all the data about the traffic back to Facebook so they can see what's actually getting popular through the VPNs. They have low level access to the network data because users have let them have that.”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, those are tied together in my mind. Let's say hardware and passion. Like for me, like, I just really love the problem discourse is setting out to solve because, in a way, it's like there's a vision of the world where it all devolves into Facebook basically owning everything and every aspect of human communication, right? And this has always been kind of a scary world for me first because I don't, I think Facebook is really good at execution. I got to compliment them. They're very competent in terms of what they're doing. But Facebook has not much of a moral compass in terms of Facebook cares about Facebook, really. They don't really care about you and your problems. What they care about is how big they can make Facebook, right?”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here is the program by which I arrived at the conclusion that I'm going to reach, right? It's one thing to say, like, this is a decision that's final. Deal with it, right? That's not usually satisfying to people. But if you say, look, you know, we've been thinking on this problem for a while. Here's some stuff that's happened. Here's what we think is right. Here's our goals. Here's what we want to achieve. And we've looked at these options. And we think this of the available options is the best option. People will be like, oh, okay, right. Maybe I don't totally agree with you, but I can kind of see where you're coming from. And like, I see it's not just arbitrary decision delivered from a cloud of flames in the sky, right? It's like a human trying to reach some kind of consensus about goals. And their goals might be different than yours. That's completely legit, right? But if you're making that clear, it's like, oh, well, the reason we don't agree is because we have totally different goals, right? Like how could we agree? It's not that you're a bad person. It's that we have radically different goals in mind when we started looking at this problem.”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you have to walk people through your decision making, right? Like you have to, this is where blogging is really important, and communication is so important. Again, code, language is just another kind of code.”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, want to do most people want to do the right thing. I do believe that. I mean, there might be a handful of sociopaths out there that don't, but most people, they want other people to think of them as a good person. And why wouldn't you, right? Like, do you want people to despise you? I mean, that's just weird, right? So you have that little voice that sort of the angel and devil on your shoulder sort of talking to you about like what you're doing, how you're doing. How does it make you feel? And I think having some attunement to that voice is important.”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, right. Are you getting feedback? So, one way we do it, for example, in discourse, we have three co founders and we periodically talk about decisions before we make them. So it's not like one person can make a mistake or like, wow, there can be misunderstandings, things like that. So it's part of like group consensus of leadership is like it's good to have, I think systems where there's one leader and that leader has the rule of absolute law are just really dangerous in my experience. For communities, for example, like if you have a community that's run by one person, that one person makes all decisions, that person's going to have a bad day. Something can happen to that person, you know, something, you know, there's a lot of variables. So like first, when you think about leadership, have multiple people doing leadership and have them talk amongst each other. So they're giving each other feedback about the decisions that they're making. And then when you do get feedback, I think there's that little voice in your head, right? Or your gut or wherever you want to put it in your body. I think that voice is really important. I think most people who have any kind of moral compass.”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exhaustively, but like showing a real Passion for the problem, like, you know, not necessarily your solution to the problem, but the problem itself is just one that you really believe in. Like with discourse, for example, the problem that we're looking at, which is my current project, is how do you get people in groups to communicate in a way that doesn't break down into the howling of wolves, right? Like, how do you deal with trolling? Not like technical problems of how do you get people to post paragraphs, how do you get people to use bold, how to get people to use complete sentences, although those are problems as well. But like, how do I get people to get along with each other, right? And solve whatever problem it is they set up to solve or, you know, reach some consensus on discussion or just not hurt each other even, right? Like maybe it's a discussion that doesn't really matter, but are people yelling at each other, right? And why, right? Like, that's not the purpose of this kind of communication. So I would say, you know, leadership is about setting an example, you know, doing the things that represent what you want to be and making sure that you're actually doing those things. And there's a trick to that too, because the things you don't do also say,”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think a leader, it's all about leading by example, first of all, like sort of doing and being the things that you want to be. Now, this can be kind of exhausting, particularly when you have kids because you realize that your kids are watching you all the time. in ways that you've stopped seeing yourself like the hardest person to see on the planet is really yourself right it's a lot of you see other people and make judgments about them but yourself like you're super biased you don't actually see yourself the way other people see you often you're very very hard on yourself in a way that other people really aren't going to be so you know that's one of the insights is you know you got to be really diligent about thinking like am i behaving in a way that represents how i want other people to behave right like leading through example there's a lot of examples of leaders that really mess this up right like they make decisions that are like wow that's why would you know it just it's it's it's a bad example for other people so i think leading by example is one uh the other one i believe is working really hard and i don't mean like working”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be honest, I don't really write a lot of code anymore. What I do at discourse is managery stuff, which I always Kind of despised, right? Like as a programmer, you think of managers as people who don't really do anything themselves. But the weird thing about code is like you realize that language is code. Like the ability to direct other people lets you get more stuff than done than you could by yourself anyway”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then never switches, then always switches. Just compare, you would immediately see that you don't have to be smart, right? You don't have to figure out the answer algorithmically. You can just brute force it out with data and say, well, I know the answer is this because I ran the program a billion times and these are the data buckets that I got from it, right?”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, data is fun, too. Like, there's this thing called the shuffling problem, like the naive shuffle that most programmers write has a huge flaw. And there's a lot of articles online about this because it can be really bad if you're like a casino and you have an unsophisticated programmer riding your shuffle algorithm. There's surprising ways to get this wrong. But the neat thing is the way to figure that out is just to run your shuffle a bunch of times and see how many orientations of cards you get. You should get an equal distribution of all the cards. And with the naive method of shuffling, if you just look at the data, if you just brute force and say, okay, I don't know what's going to happen. You just write a program that does it a billion times and then see what the buckets look like of the data. And the Monty Hall problem is another example of that, where you have three doors and somebody gives you information about another door. So the correct answer is you should always switch in the Money Hall problem, which is not intuitive. And it freaks people out all the time, right? But you can solve it with data. If you write a program that does the money hall game.”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's puzzles, really. I think it's this idea of working on puzzles independently of other people and just solving a problem, sort of like on your own almost. Although nobody really works alone in programming anymore. But I will say there's an aspect of sort of hiding yourself away and just sort of beating on a problem until you solve it, like brute force, basically to me, is what a lot of programming is, is like the computer so fast, right? You can do things that would take forever for a human, but you can just do them like so many times and so often that you get the answer, right?”
2018-11-29 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Jeff Atwood: Stack Overflow and Coding Horror · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source