stackoverflow.com

Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, notorious bloggers from Joel on Software and Coding Horror, have started a new project, stackoverflow.com. Stack overflow, great name. It reminds me of the good old times where we had 64K for data, bss, heap and stack... lots of non-recursive stack overflows there, as you may imagine.

Here's why they did it, according to Spolsky:

Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. [...] Instead, they happily program away, using trial-and-error. When they can't figure something out, they type a question into Google.

The google-away first, try and invent later is not always a bad idea. But I understand the limitations of confining the solution space to that approach.

Every week, Jeff and I talk by phone (he's in California, I'm in New York), and we're going to record those phone calls and throw them up on the web for you to listen in on, and call it a podcast. We have a lot of trouble keeping on topic, so the podcast may be interesting to you even if you don't want to hear about stackoverflow.com

I must confess: I was expecting a little bit more from a joint production from Spolsky and Atwood. Given the high hopes, it was just good enough to keep me downloading the podcast. The sound quality does not excel, but the quality of the expected contents will undoubtly keep be downloading.

In my opinion, and as podcasters, Spolsky and Atwood are probably more "reachable" then over their blogs. Possibly more "human", more "doubtful". On the downside, they didn't exhibit that "radio sparkle" on this first episode, but hopefully they will soon get it right.

Best wishes for StackFault.com :)

 

<update>

How strange is the world we live in, where even the tech blogosphere is starting to be globalized...

</update>

 

PS: they didn't fill the "Album" property on the podcast, so I'm having some problems browsing for the file on my Zen. Hopefully the next episode gets "Album" filled up.