Server Fault
http://serverfault.com/

stackoverflow, but for sysadmin

A system administration Q&A community created by the same guy as Stack Overflow (Jeff Atwood).

Social site for Sys Admins to ask questions

Server Fault is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for system administrators and IT professionals – regardless of platform. It's 100% free, no registration required.

Google Tech Talk April 24, 2009 ABSTRACT Presented by Joel Spolsky Until recently, searching for help on highly technical programming problems has been a mess. A lot of what the search engines found was old discussions in forums, where you have a lot of wrong answers and out-of-date answers that you have to sift through yourself. You also found a lot of answers at sites that were hidden behind a pay wall, which uncloaked themselves for Google and then demanded membership fees to see the answers. StackOverflow.com is a programmer's Q&A site that launched last September to address these problems. It incorporates more modern ideas about community such as voting and public editing, and even a few ideas from game design, to create a much more successful way to get help with programming problems. In a few short months, it has grown to 14 million page views a month and reaches 3 million unique programmers every month.

No, you couldn't. Why programmers say this sort of thing, hilariously dissected.

Very interesting look at what`s really required to have a complete web app.

Good rant about how the little touches that make great things great are invisible to many engineers (and users). It's strange that he thinks that this blindness is peculiar to the open source community, though.

"Do you have five minutes? No. Why? Because I’m lying. It would take much longer than five minutes. That’s the eternal optimism of programmers."

Very good critique of the notion that a web app which at its core may just be an interface to a couple of database tables is a trivial thing that can be banged out in a few days. While it's possible to put up a basic front-end that quickly, all the extras that go on top of that to make a real, usable application take much, much longer. User interface matters.

why it's hard to clone a major s/w site (stackoverflow)

Nice article by Benjamin Pollack in the discussion about cloning Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow Architecture | High Scalability

Stack Overflow is a much loved programmer question and answer site written by two guys nobody has ever heard of before. Well, not exactly. The site was created by top programmer and blog stars Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. In that sense Stack Overflow is like a celebrity owned restaurant, only it should be around for a while. Joel estimates 1/3 of all the programmers in the world have used the site so they must be serving up something good.

Super User is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for computer enthusiasts – on any platform. It's 100% free, no registration required.

Super User is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for computer enthusiasts – on any platform. It's 100% free, no registration required

blog on uxftw

Solace is a fully open-sourced multilingual support and knowledge exchange platform written in Python.

open source version of FAQ oftware

The development of Solace is inspired and has been guided in support of our mission on creating a truly open and vibrant social service that users feel wholly responsible for shaping into what it is today. Plurk has been using this same spirit of user involvement since late 2007 with its Plurk Collaborative Translation Project and continues to build upon those roots today.

"Solace is a fully open-sourced multilingual support and knowledge exchange platform written in Python. "

development then? (Tony whispers) Oh, I see. He's not very good at magic either – his repertoire is extremely limited. Basically he's a one trick pony.

A few reasons why writing software is hard

Stack Overflow careers!

genius

If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes. HTML-plus-regexp will liquify the n​erves of the sentient whilst you observe, your psyche withering in the onslaught of horror.

Heh. "The only moral of this story is that you should never attempt to parse HTML with a regular expression, but there are some occasions when it is unavoidable".

amazing guide to Vim commands

awesome answer

Advanced technique in VIM, don't just JKHL!

Monday, September 15, 2008 You know what drives me crazy? Programmer Q&A websites. You know what I’m talking about. You type a very specific programming question into Google and you get back: A bunch of links to discussion forums where very unknowledgeable people are struggling with the same problem and getting nowhere, A link to a Q&A site that purports to have the answer, but when you get there, the answer is all encrypted, and you’re being asked to sign up for a paid subscription plan, An old Usenet post with the exact right answer—for Windows 3.1—but it just doesn’t work anymore, And something in Japanese.

You know what drives me crazy? Programmer Q&A websites. (…) You type a very specific programming question into Google and you get back: A bunch of links to discussion forums where very unknowledgeable people are struggling with the same problem and getting nowhere, A link to a Q&A site that purports to have the answer, but when you get there, the answer is all encrypted, and you’re being asked to sign up for a paid subscription plan, An old Usenet post with the exact right answer—for Windows 3.1—but it just doesn’t work anymore, And something in Japanese. The hardest thing about making a new Q&A site is not the programming—it’s the community. You need a large audience of great developers so you have the critical mass it takes to get started. Without critical mass, questions go unanswered and the site becomes a ghost town. I thought the combination of my audience and Jeff’s would bring enough great developers into the site to reach critical mass on day 1

>You know what drives me crazy? Programmer Q&A websites. You know what I’m talking about. You type a very specific programming question into Google and you get back: …

design of the discussion system on Stack Overflow (programming Q&A)

Awesome, Stack Overflow release all of their public web data under a CC license.