We launched three new Stack Exchange sites this week!
We’ll have three more for you next week, too.
“We decided that individually-branded sites felt more authentic and trustworthy. We thought that letting every Stack Exchange site have its own domain name, visual identity, logo, and brand would help the community feel more coherent. After all, nobody wants to say that they live in Housing Block 2938TC. They want to live in Colonial Manor. Never mind the connotation of, well, colonies.”
Want to know how to export mail from Gmail? Or delete your Facebook account? Or send giant files via email?
Well, the new Web Applications Stack Exchange is for you. It’s a part of the Stack Exchange network, so it has the clean, elegant design that made Stack Overflow a phenomenal success.
The newest member of the Stack Exchange Network is the first one to go through the community site-creation process called Area 51. There are more great sites in the pipeline, but they have to demonstrate that they can reach critical mass or we won’t create them.
Neil has posted a video of Don Norman (most famous for his book The Design of Everyday Things) speaking at the Business of Software conference last year in San Francisco.
“Imagine you’re on the first slide of your powerpoint presentation and want to move to the next slide. Your remote control has two buttons. They are unmarked, but one button points up and one button points down.
“Which button do you press?”
It turns out half the people press up, half the people press down, and everybody thinks their choice is obvious. It’s a great talk.
The early bird discount for the Business of Software 2010 (Boston, October 4-6) saves you $400, but it expires this week, so this is the right time to sign up for my favorite conference.
Area 51 is now in beta
. This is the promised place where the community comes together to invent new Stack Exchange sites.
Benofsky from Hacker News writes:
Seems overly complicated, I have no idea what's going on when I visit Area 51, I guess this is their strategy for turning away uncommitted users.
Also, how are they going to make money?
I’m glad you asked, benofsky! The answer is simple. Volume.
Well, I’m not one to take Internet chat board comments seriously. After all, the Anonymous Nostradamus’s over at Code Project reacted thus when Stack Overflow itself launched:
I think the UI sucks. I can't imagine this site being around in a year.
We all know how stunningly accurate that prediction was:
Benofsky is onto something, though. Area 51 is not for everyone. If you don’t know what it’s for, or why it’s going to work, or you can’t figure it out, it’s not, actually for you.
My friend Noam at Harvard Business School does annual surveys of executive compensation in tech companies. The surveys are a great way to figure out how much to pay that VP of Sales you were thinking of hiring, or whether your equity grant as CTO is fair.
You can buy the studies for $999, or you can participate in the survey and get free access to the results when they’re published.
Paul Kenny is a regular speaker at the Business of Software. He’s an expert on sales, especially high tech sales, and both Red Gate and Fog Creek hire him all the time to train our sales teams and build our sales organization.
Here’s a video of his talk at last year’s conference:
The next Business of Software conference will be in Boston, October 4th-6th.
FogBugz 7.3 is a pretty huge release, despite the modest version number. It has a bunch of features that almost everyone will find useful on a daily basis.
I’m a long-time Kathy Sierra fan. Her talk at the Business of Software 2009 was amazing, even though, in retrospect, I realize now that she had a slide making fun of Stack Overflow’s terrific new VC-backed business model. She even got the unicorn!
Watch the whole talk here. The next Business of Software conference will be in Boston, October 4th-6th.
“And the best answer we could come up with was, let’s make the damn thing free, and get some VC somewhere to pay for it.”
Announcing the Stack Overflow Series A financing
Over the last 10 years I’ve written 1082 articles on this site about software development, management, business, and the Internet. To make it easy to find the best ones, here are some reading lists, sorted by topic.
Read the archives in dead-tree format!
Many of these articles have been collected into four books,
available at your favorite bookstore. It’s an
excellent way to read the site in the bath, or throw it at your
boss.
There’s a software company in New York City dedicated to doing things the right way and proving that it can be done profitably and successfully. Fog Creek Software. Here’s the story:
I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. More about me.
Need a better career? We’re bringing together the best software developers with the best companies on the Joel on Software / Stack Overflow Job Board. You can search job listings or even file a CV and let employers find you.
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Jeff Atwood and I have a weekly podcast where we chat about software development and the new developer Q&A website we built, stackoverflow.com.
Get answers to programming questions at StackOverflow, a site I co-founded with Jeff Atwood.
Chat about software on the discussion groups
Share interesting links with other readers at The Joel Reddit
Meet me at the annual Business of Software Conference, a conference I co-host with Neil Davidson. There’s also a year-round Business of Software discussion group
For my day job, I’m the CEO of Fog Creek Software, a bootstrapped software company in New York, NY. We’re proving to the world that treating developers well can be profitable.
We make FogBugz, a bug tracking system that actually works and can be used to manage everything your development team does, from bug tracking to customer email to feature management to project scheduling and so much more. Free online trial.
We also make Kiln, a web-based version control and code review system based on Mercurial and tightly integrated with FogBugz. Free trial. Wondering about Mercurial? I wrote a tutorial.
Fog Creek Copilot lets you control someone else’s computer (with their permission, of course) over the Internet. It's the best way to fix someone's computer problems remotely. There’s nothing to install, it’s simple as heck, and it works through any kind of firewall, NAT, or proxy situation with zero configuration. More
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