Podcast appearances and mentions of Jeff Atwood

We are thrilled to announce the third session of our new Incubator Program. If you have a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply to our eight-week program. We'll help you validate your market opportunity, experiment with messaging and product ideas, and move forward with confidence toward an MVP. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. We look forward to seeing your application in our inbox! Quincy Larson is the founder of freeCodeCamp.org, which helps people learn to code for free by creating thousands of videos, articles, and interactive coding lessons–all freely available to the public. Quincy shares his journey from transitioning from teaching into software development, how freeCodeCamp was born out of his desire to make educational systems more efficient through coding, and discusses the early challenges of bootstrapping the platform, and how it has now grown into a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Quincy and hosts Victoria and Will, discuss the platform's technical architecture, especially their global server distribution and decision to rely on volunteer-led translation efforts rather than machines to ensure both the quality and human touch of their educational content. He also talks about the state of free and low-cost degree programs, the student loan crisis, and the ongoing debate between traditional computer science degrees and coding bootcamps. Free Code Campi (https://www.freecodecamp.org/) Follow Free Code Camp on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/school/free-code-camp/) or X (https://twitter.com/freeCodeCamp). Follow Quincy Larson on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/quincylarson/) or X (https://twitter.com/ossia). Follow thoughtbot on X (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is the Giant Robot Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. VICTORIA: And I'm your other host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Quincy Larson, Host of the freeCodeCamp Podcast, Teacher, and Founder of freecodecamp.org, a community of people around the world who are learning to code together. Quincy, thank you for joining us. QUINCY: Yeah, thanks for having me, Will and Victoria. VICTORIA: Yeah, thank you for being here. So, I understand that you made a big shift personally for yourself from California to Texas. How has that been for your family and for, you know, as a founder who is running a nonprofit? QUINCY: Yeah, things are going great. It was a big move. We had some kids, and it was difficult to find, like, a good place to live in California that didn't cost, like, millions of dollars [laughter]. And so, at least in the San Francisco Bay Area, we were living in East Bay. I grew up here in Texas and Oklahoma. And I was like, well, maybe we could go back to the southwest, and so we did that. And we were able to come back and comfortably purchase a home here in Plano, Texas. We were able to find one that was, like, really close to a really good public school system. And so, every morning, I'm able to walk my kids to school. And I'd say that Texas has been a great change from California, where I lived for seven or eight years over there. And I love California. Texas has a lot of great things about it, too. It is a little bit hotter than California. It doesn't quite have California's Mediterranean climate, but it's been great here. I like it. And I would say if people are thinking about moving to Texas from California, there are definitely some really good spots of Texas that I think they'll feel really comfortable in. WILL: That's awesome, yeah. I'm originally from Louisiana. So, you're bringing back, like, memories of me growing up, always going to Texas and stuff. And I know exactly where Plano is, so that's amazing. How has it been with your kids? Because we were talking, and you said your kid recently started school. How's that been? QUINCY: Yeah, so my daughter started school a couple of years ago, and she just turned eight. And my son he's turning six this weekend. He just started kindergarten. We were having him take classes at the YMCA some pre-school. And he went from doing that for the first few hours of the day, and then we'd pick him up and bring him home and eat lunch with him and everything. And now he's got to go to school from, like, 7:00 a.m. to, like, 3:00 p.m. And he's been freaking out, like, "Why is school so long? Oh my goodness, I'm so tired all the time," [laughs]. So, he didn't realize that school would be as involved a process. He was all excited. But now he's complaining about, like, just the sheer length of school. But meanwhile, my wife and I we're just, like, celebrating because we actually have some time around the house where we can get work done without having kids running around causing chaos [laughs]. So yeah, I think he's adapting. He's making friends. We're doing playdates and stuff, and he's having fun. It's just a transition, you know. But it is nice because before, I would walk my daughter to school, and that was a very quick, 10-minute round trip, and then I'd walk my son to school. And that was, like, an hour round trip because we walked all the way to the YMCA. And I would do that to kind of toughen him up and get him walking a lot. It was a huge chunk of time. And now I can just grab both, one [inaudible 4:04] hand in each hand, and walk them to school, and drop them off, and be done with it and get back to work. So, it's definitely nice having both at the same school. VICTORIA: I love the work-life balance and that you were able to find and live somewhere that's affordable and has enough space for your family. And I wonder if we can draw a connection there between achieving that kind of lifestyle and learning to code, and what the mission of freeCodeCamp is for you, and what that means to people and changing careers. QUINCY: Absolutely. So, my background is in teaching. And I was a teacher and a school director at schools here in the U.S. and over in China. And that involved me being on campus, like working directly with my admin staff, with my instructional staff, and working directly with students. So, working remotely was kind of, like, a foreign concept way back in, like, 2010 or so 2011 when I started my transition into working as a software developer. But being able to work remotely has been a real game changer for me. And also, you can imagine, like, being a developer, you can command much larger compensation, and you have a lot more career options than being a teacher or a school director. So, it's given me a lot of agency in what I wanted to do. Even before, you know, starting freeCodeCamp, when I was working as a software developer and doing freelance work and stuff, I was able to do everything remotely. And that just gave me a ton of flexibility. So, the way that I learned to code personally was I wanted to help our school be more efficient. A lot of our teachers, a lot of our admin they were spending all day kind of chained to their desk entering information into computers for compliance reasons, to be able to produce great reports, to be able to produce attendance reports, immigration documents, all those things. And I just thought, like, is there a way that maybe I could automate some of this? And I didn't know anything about programming. I was about 31 years old. I was just sitting at my desk, and I just started kind of, like, Googling around and learning some very basic programming. And with that, over the course of a few months, I was really able to transform how the school ran. And we, like, won an award. And, like, a whole bunch of the students were, like, having a great time because they were spending so much more time with their teachers. And they were like, "Hey..." like, telling all their friends and family to transfer into the school. So, it was a massive success. And I thought, wow, if one person who doesn't even really know that much about programming can effect such a change with just a little bit of programming skills, imagine what I could do if I actually learned to code properly, so [chuckles] I did that. I spent about nine months going to hackathons every weekend, and reading a lot of books, and using a lot of open courses online, like from MIT, from Stanford, and I kind of taught myself to code for free. And then, I was able to get a job as a developer at a mid-size tech startup in California. And from there, I just learned more and more, and it was amazing. And it was an amazing transformation for me personally. And I thought, well, I want to help other people be able to do this because I know so many people out there would like to be working in a field where they have more conversation, a higher degree of control. They get to do creative work instead of, you know, tedious work. As a developer, you're constantly doing new stuff because code is infinitely reproducible. So, you could always just go back to code you've previously written if you needed to solve the same problem again. So, you're always in this kind of learning mindset. You're always in this problem-solving mindset. And it's really thrilling. It's just great, impactful work. So, I wanted to help more people be able to do that, hence starting a bunch of different projects that people didn't care about and then eventually starting a project that people did care about, which is freeCodeCamp. And since then, just kind of leading this project in trying to help as many people as possible learn to code. WILL: So, I was looking at your website. And I didn't even realize this until I was doing more research for the podcast, but you have over 10,000 tutorials, and they're in different categories. I saw you just recently released one on finance, which I actually bookmarked it because I'm going to go through it and look at it. You help more than a million people every day. So, how was it when you first started out? Like, how was, I guess, you could say, the grind? How was it in those early days? QUINCY: I'm a big advocate of, you know, for work-life balance, but, like, I kind of, like, exclude founders from that. I really do think that if you're trying to get something started, you're going to have to work really hard and probably way beyond what would be reasonable for a person who's getting a salary or working at an existing company if you're trying to get things started. So, I mean, it was, like, 100-hour weeks, maybe 120 some weeks [laughs]. I would sleep and just wake up and get to my desk and try to, like, put out fires, fix the server, improve the codebase, respond to learners in the community who had feedback, deal with support issues. Like, I was basically doing everything myself. And gradually, we were able to, like, build out the team over a long period of time. But really, the first few years was me self-financing everything with just my teacher savings. I spent, like, $150,000 of my own money just trying to keep freeCodeCamp going. For the first couple of years, we got tax-exempt status from the IRS. When that finally happened, I was like, great, like, let's go out and see if we can get some people to donate. So, we started asking people who were using freeCodeCamp if they'd be willing to donate $3 a month and eventually $5 a month, and we were able to support the organization through that. Really, it's just like a grassroots donor-supported effort. And then, we've been able to get some grants from Linux Foundation, and From Google, from Microsoft, from a whole lot of other big tech companies, and from some other nonprofits in the space. But mostly, it's just been, like, individual donors donating $5. And if you get enough people doing that, you get, like, a budget where you can actually pay for, you know, we have more than 100 servers around the world serving freeCodeCamp in, like, six different languages. We have, you know, all these other, like, initiatives. Like, we've got Code Radio, where you can go listen to Lo-fi while you're coding. And there are servers all over the world. And you can change the bit rate to suit whatever data you have and everything. Like, we wanted to just offer a whole lot of different services. We have mobile apps now. We've got an iOS and an Android app for freeCodeCamp. And then, of course, we've got the podcasts. We've got four podcasts: one in English, which I host, and then we've got one in Spanish, one in Portuguese, and one in Chinese. VICTORIA: Yeah, I absolutely want to ask you more about your podcasts. But first, I wanted to hear–can you tell me a little more about the decision to be 501(c)(3) or a nonprofit status? And were you always firm in that decision? Do people question it? And what was the real reasoning and commitment to that formation? QUINCY: I guess I would consider myself an idealist. Like, I genuinely believe that most educational endeavors should be, you know, nonprofit. They should be driven by either governments or by charities. I'm always kind of skeptical when there's, like, some late-night TV commercial, like, "Viewer, we'll help you get our degree," and it's from, like, a private for-profit university, something like that. So, I was like, in education...and I don't think everything in society needs to be that way, but I do think, like, education and, to an extent, healthcare these should be led by charities. Like, you know, the Red Cross, or, like, Doctors Without Borders, or churches, you know, own many of the universities, many of the hospital systems in the United States. I think that's a good thing. I think it's a very good thing that it's not just, you know, private profit-maximizing, market incentive-bound organizations that are doing all the stuff in education and in healthcare. I wanted to try to create something that, like, a lot of other people would see and say, "Oh wow, this charity can actually survive. It can sustain itself without raising a bunch of VC, without going public," or any of those things that a for-profit entity would do. And, again, I just want to emphasize, like, I don't think that iPhones should be made [chuckles] by nonprofits or anything like that. I'm just saying, like, for the purpose of actually educating people, the incentives are not necessarily aligned when you're trying to get money from...especially when you're talking about people that 60% of people on earth live off less than $10 a day. Those people should be spending their money on food. They should be spending their money on shelter. They should be spending their money on family. They should not be spending money on online courses, in my humble opinion. Like, online courses should be freely available to those people. So, to some extent, freeCodeCamp, we want to make sure that everybody everywhere in the world has access to first-rate learning resources on math, programming, computer science, regardless of their ability to pay. So, that's kind of, like, the ideal logical [inaudible 12:19], I guess, of freeCodeCamp. We kind of live that. Like, we're really serious. We will never pay, well, anything on freeCodeCamp. We won't account email gate anything. We are, I guess, absolutist in the sense that we want all of freeCodeCamp's learning resources to be free for everyone. Because of that, it made sense to like, incorporate as a 501 (c)(3) public charity. And so, we're tax-exempt. And people who donate to freeCodeCamp they can, you know, deduct it from their U.S. taxes. If a large company or even a small startup...we've had lots of startups like New Relic, like Retool, we've had Postman, Hostinger, a whole lot of different startups and mid-sized tech companies, Pulumi, Appsmith, they've all given us these grants that we can use to develop courses. So, we can often develop courses incorporating those resources. But that's tax-exempt, right? They can deduct that from their U.S. taxes. So, it's a big incentive for other people to partner with us and for people to donate funds to us. And it allows us to have the interests aligned in the sense that only people who have, you know, free cash flow or who have disposable income those are the people that are supporting freeCodeCamp. For the people that are, you know, single parents or that are taking care of their aging relatives, or are already working two jobs, or are completely unemployed and don't have any funds to speak of that are using the public library computer to access freeCodeCamp, right? Or using freeCodeCamp on a $50 prepaid phone from Walmart or something like that, right? Like those people can still use freeCodeCamp, and we can have the people who do have resources subsidize everyone else. WILL: Wow. I absolutely love that because...and I wish freeCodeCamp was around whenever I was in, like, high school and, you know, the early 2000s because we just didn't have the resources because I grew up in a small town in Louisiana. And this could have been so beneficial to that community because, like you said, we didn't have the resources–someone to teach coding there. There was no developers around that town that I was in. So, I really appreciate that you're doing this for everyone. And I know for me even...so, when I reached out to you, I did it because I was excited because I've used freeCodeCamp so many times, so many times to learn just in my journey to become a senior developer. Like, freeCodeCamp was one of the resources that I used because, one, it was free. But it wasn't...I think sometimes you can get free resources, and it's not great quality almost. Like, it's almost like you're more confused than before. But with freeCodeCamp, it was very, very amazing quality. And it was very clear on what I was learning. Honestly, thank you for helping me grow as a developer, just, honestly, thank you for that. QUINCY: Absolutely, Will. I feel honored to have helped you. And, yes, we want to help all the kids who are growing up in rural Louisiana or...I'm from, you know, Oklahoma City, not, like, the biggest, most prosperous city in the United States. Like, I want to help all of my friends who growing up who were eating meals provided by the state school system or my older friends who are on disability. Like, I want to make sure that they have resources, too. And in the process of doing that, it's a privilege to also serve all the working software engineers like you out there who just need, like, a reference resource or, like, oh, I've heard about Bun JS or Tailwind CSS. Or something like, I'm going to watch this three-hour course where I'm going to learn how to do Flutter. Like, freeCodeCamp has a 37-hour Flutter course. So, we've got, like, all these courses on using OpenAI APIs and things like that, too, right? So, it's not just for beginners, but we definitely want to, like, first and foremost, we want to serve people who we're kind of, like, the resource of last resort for, if you want to think of it that way. Like, only freeCodeCamp can help these people. Sure, they can probably use some other free courses on YouTube. And there are lots of other blogs that publish good tutorials and stuff. But freeCodeCamp is like an organized effort, specifically to help those people in need. And just kind of a side benefit of it is that you know, more established, experienced devs like you also get kind of, like, some benefit out of it as well. WILL: Whenever you were a developer, and you decided to start freeCodeCamp, how many years of experience did you have? And how did you overcome impostor syndrome, not only as a developer but as a founder? Because I feel like just overcoming it as a developer is hard, but you were also, you know, like you said, you know, handling everything for freeCodeCamp. So, how did you do that? And kind of tell us about that experience. QUINCY: Yeah. So, I didn't really know what I was doing. I think most founders probably don't know what they're doing. And I think that's totally fine because you can learn while you're doing. And we live in the United States, which is a country that kind of rewards experimentation and does not punish failure as much as a lot of other cultures does. Even if you try really hard, you're going to learn a tremendous amount, and you're going to try your next project. And that's what I did. I tried...I launched several educational, like, open learning resource-type projects, and none of them made any dent at all [laughs] in the proverbial universe. Like, nobody cared. Like, I would go and, like, I'd be talking to people. And I'd be explaining, like, "Oh, this solves this problem that you have." And you could kind of tell, like, people would sign in one time just to be polite, but then they'd never sign in again. So, it was very tricky to get traction. And I read a bunch of books. And I went to a lot of founder-focused meetups in San Francisco Bay Area. I had, like, moved out to San Francisco, specifically to try to, like, kind of make up for my deficit, the fact that I didn't know anybody because I was from Oklahoma City. I didn't know anybody in tech. And I didn't have, like, a fancy, you know, pedigree from, like, Harvard, or Wharton, or something like that, right? Like, I went to, like, a state university, and I studied English, right? And [chuckles] so, I didn't even have, like, a CS degree or anything like that. So, I definitely felt like an impostor. I just had to kind of, like, power through that and be okay with that. And it's something a little bit easier for me to do because, you know, I'm a White guy with glasses and a beard. And, like, nobody's walking up saying, "Are you sure you're a developer?" Or like, "Are you in marketing?" You know, like, the typical kind of, like, slight that they may say to somebody who doesn't necessarily look like me. And so I didn't have to deal with any of that nonsense, but there was still a lot of just self-doubt that I had to power through. And I think that was a big advantage for me. It was just, like, I was kind of, like, at war with myself and my own confidence. In fact, I found the software development community, and especially the open-source community, to be incredibly uplifting and empowering. And, like, they want to see you win. They want you to sit down and build a really cool project over the weekend and in the hackathon and present it. And, you know, they want you to learn. They know that you know, everybody is going to learn at a different rate and that a lot of people are going to get discouraged and leave tech and just go back to working in whatever field they were working in before. And that's totally cool. But I do feel that they're there to support you and to encourage you. And there are lots of different events. There are lots of different communities. I recently listened to the founder of Women Who Code, who was on this very podcast [laughs], Giant Robots Smashing Into Giant Robots, the greatest podcast name of all time. And, you know, there are people out there that are working very hard to make it easier for folks to get into tech. I think that that has been a huge part. Even before freeCodeCamp, you know, there were Harvard professors–Stanford professors putting their entire coursework for free online. You could go to, like, different tech events around California, for example, where I was when I was learning to code. And there'd just be tons of people that were eager to, like, learn more about you and to welcome you. And there would be, you know, recruiters that would talk to you and say, "Well, you may not be ready yet, but, like, let's talk in six months," right? And so, there was kind of, like, that spirit of you're going to get there. It's just going to take a lot of time. Nobody was telling me, "Oh, learning to code is easy," [chuckles] because it's not easy. There were lots of people that were, like, "Learning to code is hard. But you've got this. Just stick with it. If I could be of help, let me know," people who would pair program with me to help me, like, improve my chops, people who would volunteer to, like, look at my projects and give design feedback, all those kinds of things. And I think you're going to find all those things on the web. You're going to find those things in the open-source community. freeCodeCamp has a forum where people volunteer their time and energy to help build one another up and help one another get unstuck on whatever projects they're working on, give feedback on projects. And so, I think, to a large extent, the very giving nature, I almost want to say, like, selfless nature, of the global software developer community that is what saved me. And that's what enabled me to transition into this field, even as a teacher in his 30s. VICTORIA: It's interesting you say that. Because I feel as someone who hires engineers and developers, I love people who have teaching backgrounds because it means they're five-star communicators [laughs]. And I think that you know, in your job, when you're pairing with other developers, or you're talking to clients, in our case, that communicating what you're working on and how you're thinking about something is, like, 50% of the job [laughs]. For freeCodeCamp, I saw you have 40,000 people have found jobs after completing courses on there. I hope you feel like you've really, like, established some success here already. But what's on the horizon? What are you looking forward to in the next six months or six years with freeCodeCamp? QUINCY: Yeah, I'll be happy to answer that. But I want to emphasize what you just said: communication is, like, half the job. That's something that thoughtbot has gotten really early on. And I'll tell you that thoughtbot Playbook was incredibly helpful for me as a software developer and also early on for freeCodeCamp's team. And I think a lot of teams make use of that open resource. So, thank you for continuing to maintain that and kind of drive home that communication really is...like, meetings are essential [chuckles]. And it's not always just, like, leave me alone and let me go back to my cubicle and code. You know, I like to quote the old joke that, you know, weeks of coding can save you hours of meetings because I really do believe that communication is core. So, to answer your question about where freeCodeCamp is headed in terms of what kind of impact we'd like to have, I feel like we're just getting started. I feel like pretty much every Fortune 500 company wants to become a tech company in some way or another. Everybody is pushing things to the software layer because software is infinitely reproducible. It's so much easier to maintain software or fix things in production. Like, you realize, oh, there's a big problem. Like, we don't have to recall all the cars back to the dealerships to go and open up the hood and fix this, you know, mechanical defect. If we're controlling all these things at the software layer, right? We can potentially just deploy a fix and tell people like, "Hey, version update [chuckles], you know, download this security patch," or whatever, right? So, there are so many different things that you can do with software. I feel like the potential growth of the field of software and the number of software developers that the world will ultimately need...currently, we've got maybe 30 or 40 million developers on earth that are professional paid-to-code people. But I think that number is going to increase dramatically over the next 50 years or so. And I'll go ahead and address the elephant in the room [laughs] because pretty much everybody asks me this question like, "Don't you think that, like, tools like large language models like GPT-4 and things are going to obviate the need for so many developers?" And I think they're going to make individual developers more productive. But if you think about what code is, it's really extremely explicit directions for how to do something, whether you're using, you know, machine code, or you're using a scripting language like Python, or you're using English, and you're talking directly to the computer like you would on Star Trek. Essentially, you have to have a really deep understanding of the problem. And you need to know exactly what needs to be done in exactly what sequence. You may not need to manipulate bytecode like you would back in the '70s. But you are going to need to understand the fundamental problems, and you're going to need to be able to address it. So, I'm optimistic that the number of developers is going to continue to grow. The developers are going to continue to command more and more, I guess, respect in society. And they're going to continue to have more and more agency in what they want to do with their careers and have more and more options and, ultimately, be able to command higher compensation, be able to work remotely if they'd like. Developers will continue to be able to ascend through corporate hierarchies and become, you know, vice presidents or even executives like the CEO, right? If you look at a lot of the big tech companies, the CEO is a developer. And I think that that will continue. And the computer science degrees will continue to be extremely valuable. So, what is freeCodeCamp working on now that we think will further help people? Well, we're working on a free four-year computer science degree, a Bachelor in computer science, and there's also an associate in mathematics that we're developing. And those are going to be a progression of 40 university-level courses that have labs and have a substantial block of lectures that you'll watch. And then, we'll also have final examinations and everything. And we're developing that curriculum. We've got one of the courses live, and we're developing the second one, and eventually, we'll have all 40. It'll take till the 2030s. But we're going to have those. And then, once we have some longitudinal data about graduates and their success rates and everything, we are going to apply for the accreditation process, and we're going to get accredited as a university, right? Like, you can go through that process. Not a lot of organizations do that; not a lot of new universities are coming about in the 2020s. But it is something that can be done. And we've done a great deal of research, talked to a bunch of accreditors, talked to a bunch of university admins who go through the accreditation process. We think we can do it. So, again, very long-term goal. But when you're a 501(c)(3) public charity, you don't have to worry about freeCodeCamp getting acquired or all the things that would traditionally happen with, like, a for-profit company. You have a lot more leeway to plan really far. And you've got, like, this really broad mandate in terms of what you want to accomplish. And even if, you know, creating a university degree program in the 2030s would not be a profitable endeavor that, like, a rational shareholder value-maximizing corporation would embark upon, it is the sort of project that, you know, a charity like freeCodeCamp could do. So, we're going to do it. MID-ROLL AD: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment but that you don't have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot's Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We'll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint. VICTORIA: I think that's great. And, actually, you know, I got my master's in information technology and project management online way back when. So, I really like the availability of modern computer science bachelor's and master's being available at that low price point. And you're able to pursue that with the business structure you put in place. I'm curious to kind of go back to something you said earlier on how widely available it is and how you spread out across all these multiple countries. Were there any technical architecture decisions that you had to make along the way? And how did those decisions end up turning out? QUINCY: Absolutely. So, one of the things we did was we located servers all around the world. We're multi-cloud, and we've got servers in different data centers in, like, Singapore, Europe, Latin America, and we're trying to reduce latency for everybody. Another thing that we've done is, you know, we don't use, like, Google Translate to just translate all our different pages into however many languages are currently available on Google Translate; I think it's, like, more than 100. We actually have a big localization effort that's led primarily by volunteers. We have some staff that oversee some of the translation. And essentially, we have a whole bunch of people working at translate.freecodecamp.org and translating the curriculum, translating the tutorials into major world languages. Most prominently would be Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Ukrainian. Like, all these different world languages, there's, like, a freeCodeCamp version for those, and you can go into the menu, and you can choose it. And it's actually, like, hand-translated by native speakers of that language who are developers. So, that's been another extremely, you know, time-intensive effort by the community. But we believe that, you know, the quality of the translations is really important. And we want that kind of human touch. We don't want kind of weird artifacts and typos that would be associated with machine translation. And we want to make sure that each of the challenges...because they're extremely tersely worded, again, communication is so important. If you go through the freeCodeCamp curriculum, we try to use as few words as absolutely necessary to effectively communicate what the task the learner needs to accomplish is, and we try to, just in time, teach them concepts. We don't want to present them with a big wall of text. Read this 20-page PDF to understand how, you know, CSS, you know, borders work or something like that. No, we're teaching, like, kind of, like, just in time, like, okay, let's write this line of code. Okay, great, the test passed. Let's go to this next one. This test isn't passing. Here is some contextual-specific hints as to why your code is not passing, why you're not able to advance, right? And we do projects [inaudible 30:30] to learn where we break everything down into steps. So, that's a lot of instructions that need to be very carefully translated into these different world languages to truly make freeCodeCamp accessible to everyone, regardless of whether they happen to be fortunate enough to grow up speaking English at a native level, right? I would say that's our main consideration is, like, the localization effort but also just having servers everywhere and doing everything we can to comply with, like, all the different data rules and privacy rules and everything of all these different countries. It's a lot of work, but in my humble opinion, it's worth it. WILL: I had, like, a two-part question because I wanted to loop back around. When you're talking about the free bachelor's program, one, does anything like that exist where you can get a bachelor-level program, and it's free? And then the second part is, how many countries are you in? QUINCY: Yeah, so currently, lots of governments in Europe, for example, will offer free degrees that are kind of subsidized by the state. There may be some other kind of degree equivalent programs that are offered that are subsidized by corporations. For example, if you work at Starbucks, I think you can get a degree from Arizona State University. And that's a great benefit that Starbucks offers to people. Arizona State University, of course, being one of the biggest public universities in the United States in terms of enrollment. As far as free degrees, though, in the United States, there's nothing like that where, like, literally anyone can just go and get a degree for free without needing to enroll, without needing to pay any sort of fees. There are tuition-free programs, but they still charge you fees for, like, taking exams and things like that. What I like to call ultra-low-cost degree providers–there's Western Governors University, and there's University of the People. And both of these are accredited institutions that you can go, and you can get a degree for, you know, $5,000, $10,000, $15,000. And it's a full-blown four-year degree. Now, that is amazing. I applaud those efforts. I've enjoyed talking to the folks at those different schools. I think the next step is to go truly free. There's nothing blocking you at all. You don't have to be banked. You don't have to have a credit card. You don't have to have any money. You can still get this degree. That's what we're chasing. And I think we'll get there, but it's just a lot of work. WILL: So, it's blowing my mind. It's just blowing me away because, like, you know, we talk about the student loan crisis, I would say. The impact if...when—I'm not going to say if—when you do this, the impact that can have on there, have you thought about that? And kind of, if you have, what has been your thoughts around that? QUINCY: Yeah, so there are $1.7 trillion in outstanding student loans in the United States. That's money that individual people, most of whom don't make a ton of money, right? Like, many of those people didn't actually finish the degree that they incurred the debt to pursue. Many of them had to drop out for a variety of different reasons or defer. Maybe they'll eventually finish those degrees. But as you can see from, like, the macroeconomic, educational, like, labor market data, like, having a partial degree doesn't make a big difference in terms of your earning power. You really need to finish the degree to be able to realize the benefits of having spent all that time studying, and a lot of people haven't. So, yes, there are, like, a lot of people out there that went to medical school, for example, and they're working as physicians. And they are going to eventually be able to pay that off because they're doctors, and they're commanding a great compensation, right? And they've got tons of career options. But if you studied English like I did and you incurred a whole lot of student debt, it could take a very long time for you to make enough money as a teacher, or as, like, a grant writer, or working at a newspaper, or something like that. Like, it can take you years to pay it off. And, in the meantime, it's just continuing to accumulate interest in your, you know, you might be a very diligent person who pays their student loan bill every single month, and yet, you could see that amount, the total amount that you owe continuing to grow despite this. That's just the nature of the time value of money and the nature of debt. And I thank my lucky stars that I went to school back in, like, 2000. Like, my tuition was $1,000 a semester, right? I mean, it's incredible. But that was, like, at a state school, like, a public university in the middle of Oklahoma. And it's not, like, a university you've heard of. It's basically, like, the cheapest possible option. I think community colleges can make a huge dent. I always implore people to think more about community colleges. I've talked with so many people on the freeCodeCamp podcast who were able to leverage community colleges and then transition into a, you know, research university, like a state school, and finish up their degree there. But they saved, like, basically half their money because they were paying almost nothing to attend the community college. And in California especially, the community colleges are just ridiculously worth it. Like, you're paying a few hundred dollars a course. I mean, it's just incredible value. So, I think the community college system is going to play a big role. But my hope is that, you know, freeCodeCamp can thrive. And it'll take us years for people to realize because if you go on, like, Google Ads and you try to run a Google Ad for, like, any sort of educational-related topic, anything related to higher education, it's, like, hundreds of dollars per click because there are all these for-profit universities that make a tremendous amount of money from getting people who just came back from serving in the military and getting, like, huge chunks of their GI Bill, or getting, like, all these federal subsidies, any number of things. Or basically just tricking families into paying huge amounts of money when they could have attended a much more sensible public university, you know, a private nonprofit university that doesn't charge an arm and a leg. So, I think that we are going to have an impact. I just want to say that I don't think that this is a panacea. It's going to take many years for freeCodeCamp to be adopted by a whole lot of people. It will take a long time for employers to look at the freeCodeCamp degree and say, "Oh, this is comparable to a computer science degree from..." say, Ohio State, or UT Austin, or something like that, right? Like, it's going to be a long time before we can get that level of buy-in. I don't want anybody listening to say, "Oh, I'd love to get a computer science degree. I'm just going to hold out and get the degree from freeCodeCamp." Like, my humble advice would be: go to a community college, then go to a state school. Get that four-year computer science degree. It is worth its weight in gold. But you don't want to accumulate a lot of debt. Just try to like, minimize your debt in the meantime. And, hopefully, over time, you know, the free model will prove out, and it'll just be a whole bunch of alumni supporting freeCodeCamp. And that's the dream is that, like, you know, Michael Bloomberg gave a billion dollars to Johns Hopkins University, a billion dollars. Like, Johns Hopkins never needs to charge tuition again with a billion dollars. They can just basically operate their institution off the interest from that, right? And lots of institutions...like, Harvard has, I don't know, like, 60-plus billion dollars in their endowment, right? So, the idea would be freeCodeCamp continues to get this, you know, huge alumni network of people who are doing great and who went to freeCodeCamp and who basically donate back in. And then, we can essentially have the deep pockets subsidizing everybody else who's just at the beginning of their careers who don't have a lot of earning power. You know, when I was a teenager, when I was in my 20s, I worked at convenience stores. I worked at Taco Bell. I did all kinds of, like, literally showing up at 6:00 a.m. to mop the grocery store-type jobs, right? And that is not a path to being able to afford an education in 2023. University tuition is out of control. It's, like, ridiculously high. It's grown way faster than inflation for decades. So, what can we do to alleviate that pressure? In my humble opinion, we just need to come up with free options and support ultra-low-cost options that are already out there. VICTORIA: I was going to ask, but you might have already answered this question somewhat. But I get this question a lot for people who are interested in getting into tech, whether they should get a computer science degree or go to a bootcamp. And I think you've mentioned all the positive things about getting a degree. I'm curious if, in your degree program, you would also tailor it more to what people might expect in a modern tech market and industry in their first job. QUINCY: Yeah. So, the way that we're developing our degree program is we essentially did, like, an analysis of the top 20 computer science programs in the United States: Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, all those schools that you would think of as being, like, really good computer science programs. And we basically drew a best-fit line through all their course offerings and looked at all their textbooks and everything that they cover. And, essentially, we're teaching a composite of those top 20 programs. Now, there are some things that, surprisingly, those programs don't offer, such as a course on ethics. It's something like 13% of those degree programs require an ethics course. And I think every developer should take a developer ethics course, or at least some sort of philosophy course to, like, understand what does it mean to be a good person? [laughs] Like, what is, you know, an anti-pattern? What is Blackhat user experiences? [laughs] I'm like, when should I, like, raise my hand during a meeting to say like, "Hey, should we really be doing this?" You know. So, ethics–security courses–I was surprised that not very many of those degree programs offer a course in information security, which I believe should be required. So, I'm kind of editorializing a little bit on top of what the composite says. But I feel very strongly that, you know, our degree program needs to have those courses. But in general, it's just everything that everybody else is teaching. And yes, like, a coding bootcamp...I've written a lot about coding bootcamps. I wrote, like, a Coding Bootcamp Handbook, which you can just Google, like, "Coding bootcamp book" or something like that, probably then you can find it. But, essentially like, those programs are usually private. Even if it's at a big, public university, it's often run by a big, private for-profit bootcamp chain. I don't want to say, like, all bootcamps are a bad deal, but buyer beware [laughs]. Frankly, I don't think that you can learn everything you need to know to be a software engineer within the compressed timelines that a lot of those bootcamps are operating under. There's a reason it takes four years to get a computer science degree because: there's a tremendous amount of math, programming, computer science, engineering knowledge that you need to cultivate. And you can absolutely get a developer job without a computer science degree. I don't have a computer science degree [chuckles], and I worked as a software engineer, right? And I know plenty of people who are doing that that didn't even go to college, right? People who were truckers or people who were doing construction work who just sat down and hit the books really hard and came out the other side being able to work as a software developer. But it is going to be vastly easier for you if you do have a computer science degree. Now, if you're in your 30s, if you've got kids, if you've got a whole lot of other obligations, should you go back to school? Maybe not. And so, it's not cut and dry, like, oh, just drop whatever you're doing and go back to...The situation is going to be nuanced. If you've already got a job working as a developer, should you go back and get a CS degree? Probably not. Maybe you can get your employer to pay for you to go to, like, a CS master's program, for example. There are a lot of really good online master's degree programs. Like, Georgia Tech has a master's in computer science that is very affordable, and it's very good. Georgia Tech is one of the best computer science programs in the United States. So, definitely, like, everybody's situation is going to be different. And there's no blanket advice. I would just be very wary of, like, anybody who's talking to you who wants your money [laughs]. freeCodeCamp will never want your money for anything. Like, we would love to have your donation long after you're a successful developer. You turn around and, like, send the elevator back down by donating to freeCodeCamp. But just be skeptical and, like, do your research and don't buy into, like, the marketing speak about, like, being able to get a job immediately. "Oh, it's easy. Anybody can learn to code." Like, I do believe any sufficiently motivated person can learn to code. But I also believe that it's a process that can take years, especially if you're doing the safe thing and continuing to work your day job while you learn these skills over a much longer period of time. I don't believe learning in a compressed kind of bootcamp...like, if you think about, you know, bootcamp in the military, like, this is, like, you're getting shipped away, and you're doing nothing but, like, learning these skills and everything like that. And I don't think that that's right for programming, personally [laughs]. I think there's a reason why many of these programs have gone from 9 weeks to 12 weeks to 6 months. Some of them might be, like, an entire year now. It's because it's them kind of admitting that, like, oh, there's quite a bit to learn here, and it's going to take some time. And there's diminishing returns to learning a whole bunch of hours in a day. I think you'll make much better gains studying programming 1 hour a day for 365 days than you'll make studying, you know, 8 hours a day for, like, two months or something like that if that makes sense. I'm not sure if the math works out there. But my point is, it's totally fine, and it's actually quite optimal to just work your day job, take care of your kids, spend time with your parents, you know, do all those things, hang out with friends and have a social life, all those things in addition to just having programming be one of those things you're working on in the background with your mornings or your evenings. WILL: Tell us a little bit about your podcast. Yeah, tell us kind of what's the purpose of it and just the history of it. QUINCY: Yeah. Well, I learned from the best. So, I'm a longtime listener of this podcast, of course. My friend, Saron Yitbarek, hosts CodeNewbie, which is an excellent podcast, the Changelog, which is an open-source podcast. I've had a great time interviewing the Changelog hosts and being on their show several times. So, I basically just learned as much as I could, and then I just went out and started interviewing people. And so, I've interviewed a lot of devs. I've interviewed people that are, like, learning to code driving Uber. I've interviewed the founder of Stack Overflow [chuckles], Jeff Atwood. I'm going to interview the founder of Trello in a few weeks when I'm back out in New York City. And I do my interviews in person. I just have my mobile studio. When I'm in San Francisco–when I'm in New York, I just go around and do a bunch of interviews and kind of bank them, and then I edit them myself and publish them. And the goal is just to give people exposure to developers. What are developers thinking? What are developers talking about? What do developers care about? And I try to hit, like, a very broad range of developers, try to talk to as many women as possible and, you know, striving for, like, 50% representation or better on the podcast. And I talk to a lot of people from different countries, although that's a little harder to do when you're recording in person. I may break down and do some over Zencastr, which is a tool we used in the past. I just like the spontaneity and the fun of meeting with people in person. But yeah, it's just like, if you are looking for, like, long-form, some of these are, like, two-and-a-half-hour long discussions, where we really delve into people's backstory and, like, what inspired them to become a developer, what they're learning along the way, how they feel about different aspects of software development. Like, for example, earlier, Will, you mentioned impostor syndrome, which is something I think virtually everybody struggles with in some capacity, you know, the freeCodeCamp podcast, tune in [chuckles] and subscribe. And if you have any feedback for me, I'd love to hear it. I'm still learning. I'm doing my best as a podcast host. And I'm constantly learning about tech as it evolves, as new tools come out, as new practices are pioneered. There's entire new technologies, like large language models, that actually work. And, I mean, we've had those since, like, the '60s, like, language models and stuff, but, like, only recently have they become incredibly impressive, exploring these tools and exploring a lot of the people behind them. VICTORIA: Okay, great. Do you have any questions for me or Will? QUINCY: Yeah. What inspired you all to get involved in tech, in...I don't know if somebody...did somebody at thoughtbot actually approach you and say, "Hey, we want you to run this"? Or was it something where like, "I'd love to run this"? Like, because podcasting is not easy. You're putting yourself out there. You're saying things that are recorded forever [laughs]. And so, if you say something really naive or silly or something like that, that's kind of always there, right? It takes a certain amount of bravery to do this. What got you into hosting this podcast? VICTORIA: For me, I mean, if I go way back before getting into tech, my mom she got her undergraduate degree in horticulture to become a florist, and then realized she couldn't make any money off that and went back to school for computer science. And so, she taught me how to use a computer really early on. And when I was in school, I had started in architecture, and then I wanted to change into business intelligence. But I didn't want to apply to the business school, so I got a degree in economics and a job at the IT help desk. And then from there, I was able to kind of transition into tech as a teacher, which was oddly enough...my first job in tech was training a 400-person program how to do, like, version management, and peer reviews [laughs], and timekeeping. And the reason I got the job is a friend from rock climbing introduced me, and he's like, they're like, "Oh, well, you train people how to rock climb. You can train people how to, like, do this stuff." [laughs] I'm like, oh, okay, that sounds great. But anyways, I worked my way up into project management and ended up getting my masters in IT. And when I came to thoughtbot, I had just moved to California, and I wanted to rebuild my network. I had a big network in D.C., organizing meetups and DevOps D.C., Women Who Code, teaching people, and communicating. And I ran a very small podcast there with a friend. So, when I joined thoughtbot, a podcast was a great way to just meet different people, expand my network, give people something to talk to me about when I go to events [laughs] that's not just, like, let me sell you some DevOps work. For me, it's been really fun to just reach out to people that we admire in the community and hear their story, and a little bit about them, and what advice they have for themselves or for other people. And, usually, that ends up benefiting me as well. So, it's been very fun for me. QUINCY: So, your less conventional path into tech combined with your own experience doing podcasting, it sounds like you were a natural choice for hosting a podcast. VICTORIA: Right. And I think I said before we started the show I didn't realize that it was such a well-loved and long-running podcast [laughs] [inaudible 49:01]. But I think we've really come into our own a little bit with hosting, and it's been super fun to work with Will and Chad on it as well. QUINCY: Awesome. And, Will, what's your story, man? How did you get onto the coveted Giant Robots Smashing into Giant Robots podcast? WILL: I actually went to college for sports medicine, and I was on track to go to med school, but my senior year...which I wish I would have had this conversation with myself a lot earlier, didn't have to do the hard work that I did at undergraduate. But my senior year, I was like, why am I really going to med school? And, honestly, it was more for the money, for the...yeah, more for the money. I just wanted to get paid a lot of money. I was like, yeah, that's not going to sustain me. I need to just pivot. So, I pivoted–started working at some nonprofits. And I ended up losing my job and got another job at Buckle, the clothing store, which was not a great fit for me. It helped me provide, but that's just not who I am. I'm not a fashion icon [laughs]. And then I changed to a travel agency insurance company, which it paid the bills. I wasn't passionate about it at all, and it paid the bills. And I was still struggling from losing my job. It was the first time that I lost my job. And my spouse came to me one day and is like, "All right, we're going to have the serious talk." And we almost flipped roles because that's usually who I am. I'm like, "All right, let's have a real talk. Let's get down to it." But I was just in a bad place. And she was like, "All right, we have to change because we can't keep going down this path." So, she was like, "If you had a choice to do anything, what would you want to do?" And I was like, "Well, probably something with computers and coding because I never had that opportunity when I was growing up because of the small town." And she looked at me, and she's like, "Go sign up right now." And I was like, okay, I'm going to sign up. When you mentioned that you made a transition in your 30s, I was around my 30s when I made the transition into coding. And so, it was a big transition. It was a big pivot for me because I'm having to learn, almost like I'm in college again, which was eight years ago. And so, it was just tough, and it wasn't new. So, that's how I got into coding. How I got on the podcast: I think I was talking to Chad and my direct report. I was just talking to them about challenging myself, and so it was multiple things. But, like, writing blog posts that was actually very challenging to me. I still don't like to write. It's not my favorite thing. Give me math or something like that or science; that's where I feel at home. But whenever, you know, you talk about writing and stuff, I can do it, and I'm decent at it. But it's not something that I feel comfortable in. The same thing with the podcast. The reason why I got on here is because I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and I wanted to grow. And I also wanted to get a chance to talk to people who's making a difference–who's impacting the world. So, like, this conversation today is like, yes, this is why I wanted to be a part of this podcast. So yeah, that's how I got started in tech and on the podcast. QUINCY: Awesome, Will. I'm thrilled that you went ahead and persevered and got into tech. It doesn't sound like it was a straight line, and it rarely is for people. But I'm always excited to meet somebody who learned to code in their 30s who stuck with it and is prospering as a result. So, congratulations to you. WILL: Thank you. VICTORIA: I'm still learning. I haven't quite got [inaudible 52:42] "Hello, worlds," multiple times [laughs]. But I don't really code every day for my job. I just kind of need to know what stuff is to be able to talk to people and in that way as a managing director. So, I appreciate Will bringing that backstory to this episode in particular. What else? Any other final takeaway that you'd like to leave our listeners with? QUINCY: I just want to thank you all for continuing to host this podcast, thoughtbot for operating the excellent Playbook, which, for anybody listening who is unfamiliar with, you should check it out. Again, it's just chock full of institutional wisdom accumulated over the years. And I hope everybody out there who's thinking about taking the plunge and learning coding or software development, or even, like, a semi-technical area of being in the software development process of learning visual design, learning how to do user experience research, any number of the different roles in tech, I hope you'll go for it. And I hope you will be as undaunted as you can. And just know that freeCodeCamp and the freeCodeCamp community we are in your corner. If you need to learn something, there's a very good chance that we have some tutorials written by thoughtful teachers who want people like you to come forward and like, read these resources and use it. There's a saying: like, the thing that programmers want the most is to have their code running in production somewhere. And, as a teacher, the thing you want the most is for you to have students, for you to have learning resources out there that are making a positive difference. So, again, I just count my blessings every day that I'm able to be involved in this community. I hope anyone listening who wants to transition into tech or to become even more technical gets involved in the freeCodeCamp community as well. We welcome you. WILL: Are there any opportunities? I know we talked about donations. So, for one, where can they go if they want to donate? And then also, like, you know, if developers want to get to be a part of the open-source network you have, is that possible? And how can they do that? QUINCY: Absolutely. So, if you want to donate to freeCodeCamp, just go to donate.freecodecamp.org. And you can become, like, a $5 a month donor, if you'd like. If you want to give a larger amount, I've got this article; just Google "How to Donate to freeCodeCamp." And I've written this detailed guide to, like, all the different ways like mailing checks. We had a gentleman who passed away and left a whole lot of money for freeCodeCamp in his will. So, those kinds of legacy gifts are definitely something. We've had people donate stock, like, any number of different things. I will bend over backwards to make sure that we can receive your donation, and we can give you a tax receipt so you can deduct it from your taxes as well if you'd like. And then, for contributing to freeCodeCamp, of course, we're an open-source project, and we welcome your code contributions. We have spent a great deal of time trying to make freeCodeCamp as hospitable as possible for both new developers who want to get involved and more senior developers who just want to do some, like, 20%-time type contributing to open-source projects: contribute.freecodecamp.org. So, again, donate.freecodecamp.org and contribute.freecodecamp.org. Those will take you where you need to go. VICTORIA: Wonderful. Thank you so much again, Quincy, for joining us. And you can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. WILL: And you could find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com. Special Guest: Quincy Larson.

In this episode, Stack Overflow and Discourse co-founder Jeff Atwood reveals his thoughts on the platforms that have left an indelible mark on the programming community. We delve into his achievements, reflections, and perspectives on communities, the role of AI, and the future of programming.Listen to the full episode or read the transcript at https://semaphoreci.com/blog/jeff-atwoodLike this episode? Be sure to leave a ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ review on the podcast player of your choice and share it with your friends.

Jeff Atwood joins Lexman on the show to discuss the Burlington, palatines, suspensory, Romagna and thereness phenomena.

Jeff Atwood is a libertarian futurist, blogger, and co-author of the book, "The Rise of Extenuating circumstances: a legal thriller." On this episode, Jeff and Lexman discuss the science and creativity of mutagens and extenuating circumstances.

Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Coding Horror and author of several books on computer programming, joins Lexman to talk about daemons, compilations, and corrections.

Jeff Atwood, author of "Hobgoblin", talks about the role of prompting in writing and why it's so important. He also shares some feedback on his upcoming book, "Sniggers", andshare a few anecdotes about Truman.

Jeff Atwood, founder of Ethereum and author of “Effective C++”, joins Lexman for a discussion on modern programming techniques. They discuss the many ways an effective programmer can affect the outcomes of their projects, and how working with horses poachers can help you improve your Hunting skills.

In this episode, Lexman interviews Jeff Atwood, the author of "Bloconomics" and co-founder of StackExchange. They discuss locative technology, microdots, and bourgeon mushrooms.

Jeff served as a senior leader for two national healthcare companies (one NYSE, the other privately held) overseeing marketing, internal and external communications, patient experience, growth, and brand development. He currently serves as the Chairman of the Board of Possibility Place - a day program that serves intellectually and developmentally disabled adults in Middle Tennessee. Previously, he led an organization that provides dental care to underserved people in Uganda, Haiti, and the United States. He also led an organizational initiative to help build a hospital in Haiti following the earthquake and for two years took teams of clinical volunteers to provide care to underserved Haitians. Jeff and Annette, his wife of nearly 30 years, have three grown daughters - Madison, McKenzie, and Macie. They live on a small farm on Atwood Lane, just outside of Nashville, Tennessee.

Welcome to Difficult Conversations with Dr. Anthony Orsini. Today, I have a wonderful guest who's been doing great things in the healthcare field and has some wonderful stories to share.  My guest today is Jeff Atwood.  Jeff is a healthcare leader, author, and speaker who has more than twenty-five years of healthcare leadership, marketing, and storytelling experience. He consults with healthcare and community groups nationally, sharing insights and encouragement found at the crossroads during his two decades serving healthcare organizations, while raising a daughter with significant and developmental challenges. Jeff's books have been published by Simon & Schuster, Random House, and Harvest House, and today we'll be talking about his latest book, Need to Know for Graduates: Little Things That Make a Big Difference, which was released earlier this year. Jeff shares his journey and how he entered a career in healthcare by accident.  He tells us about his daughter who has had a seizure disorder her entire life, and how he and his wife had the opportunity to touch almost every part of the healthcare system as parents. We hear about the Gratitude Symposium and Jeff shares a sweet story, as well as his thoughts about how the healthcare community is wired with gratitude. Dr. Orsini shares his insights on the importance of teamwork when it comes to providing care to human beings, and we hear some great stories of the true kindness of people in healthcare  We hear some great advice about how we can bring even more beauty and humanity out in medicine, and why acknowledging  people when they do good things is so important.  Dr. Orsini tells us his “sticker story” and why such a simple thing seems to bring so much excitement to people. He tells a tender story about a housekeeper in the Neonatal ICU. Jeff's discusses his most recent book, Need to Know for Graduates: Little Things That Make a Big Difference, and his idea behind the book that shares advice and things he thinks are important for parents to tell their kids. He explains how as a parent you really need to be intentional with what's important and how you say it. Host:Dr. Anthony OrsiniGuest:Jeff AtwoodFor More Information:Difficult Conversations PodcastThe Orsini WayThe Orsini Way-FacebookThe Orsini Way-LinkedInThe Orsini Way-InstagramThe Orsini Way-Twitterdrorsini@theorsiniway.comIt's All In The Delivery: Improving Healthcare Starting With A Single Conversation by Dr. Anthony OrsiniResources Jeff Atwood (Email)Need to Know for Graduates: Little Things That Make a Big Difference by Jeff AtwoodNeed to Know for New Parents: Little Things That Make a Big Difference by Jeff Atwood

Lexman interviews Jeff Atwood, who talks about the liberalisations that have happened in the past few years, and how this has led to a face-off between different types of transportation. He also mentions the aumbry, a new kind of storage device that allows users to growl and spring into action if they need to. Finally, he talks about the new Growl app, which lets users share their photos and witty comments with others.

In this episode of Lexman Artificial, I interview libertarian writer and blogger Jeff Atwood. We discuss our mutual love of making friends and poking fun at sensitive topics. We also touch on topics such as the Atkins diet, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and evolutionary psychology.

Lexman interviews Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine and O'Reilly Media's Head of Technology.During the interview, they discuss Atwood's new book "Histogram: The Poster Child for Behavioral Economics", which outlines how behavioral economics can be used to improve business decision-making.

Jeff Atwood discusses the idea of a symbiotic relationship between humans and harborers, how they function and how they might change in the future.

Jeff Atwood, writer of the computer science classic "A Pattern Language", joins Lexman to talk about the intricacies of football strategy, specifically with regards to René Cruyff's famous "Duralumin" game plan. They also discuss the applicability of computer science concepts to real-world situations, and compare and contrast the mythology and functionality of the Norse gods Jotuns and Hydrons.

Jeff Atwood joins the show to talk about his new book, Ellie: A Novel about Pyroxenes, Jutting Managers, and Hallan. The book is a satire about the current state of the world and how 2017 has been a big year for change. Jeff and Lexman discuss the book, how it came to be, and what people can expect from it.

Hey folks!I'm very pleased to be hosting Jeff Atwood as our guest this week.Jeff was co-creator of Stack Overflow, which is by far one of themost successful Q&A sites ever created, and is every programmer'sbest friend.Jeff and I talked about all sorts of stuff.  I didn't have a fixedagenda and just let the conversation roll.  Jeff talks about quitea few topics near and dear to his heart, especially hardware andcolocation.  He also talks about his $10k bet with John Carmackover the near future of self-driving cars.We also talk about Discourse, which is Jeff's newest offering:An open-source, modernized, full-featured forum software package.I'm super stoked that Jeff took the time to be on the show.Make sure you check out Discourse for your next forum!As always, if you like the content and want to see more greatguests like Jeff, please head to YT and like the video and subscribe to ourchannel.  It really helps with our growth.  Thank you!

On this episode of The Lead Up Podcast, Mike is joined by guest Jeff Atwood. Jeff grew up in a small town in Iowa and currently owns a small family farm just outside of Nashville. Jeff provides an insight into his past careers and how he worked in executive roles for multiple hospital companies and what those roles taught him about leadership. They discuss why the story of ‘you' is so important today for leaders when it comes to leading and communicating with others. Jeff shares about how a lot of companies focus on metrics now but people crave authentic relationships and authentic leadership. He tells us that when we set the metrics aside and focus on the person and the relationship the metrics take care of themselves. Mike shares how research has shown that 94% of people say that they would stay with their current employer if they felt valued, developed, and treated like a human. They also talk about how the working environment is changing and Jeff shares how he feels it's not about checking boxes to become successful anymore and suggests that the ideology of College is changing. He talks about why messaging is more important today than it's ever been and how repeating the message can be super effective within the workplace as oftentimes the company mission can get put on the shelf. Jeff shares his best advice to leaders on how to effectively present the company message to their organizations and states that ensuring everyone is aware of and understands the purpose is key. If you enjoyed and found value from this episode, make sure you leave us a review on the streaming platform of your choice and share it with a friend who could also benefit from this podcast. You can find out more and contact Jeff through his website: https://www.jeffatwood.com/about. You can get a copy of one of Jeff's books here.

This week Amy and Mike talk with author Jeff Atwood about his series of Need to Know books including his latest title which is perfect for this season, Need to Know for Graduates: Little Things That Make a Big Difference! Grads will appreciate this collection of practical and highly relevant wisdom and wit that will help them manage their expectations, experience grace, and laugh at themselves when things don't go as planned.   Author Jeff Atwood shares the real-life, hard-won lessons he's learned through the years, the kind of guidance he wishes someone would have given him as he entered the adult world.     Those seeking direction for their next phase of life will appreciate these helpful insights, including:  Do what brings you joy. Not what brings your parents joy or pays well or looks impressive. Find the thing that brings you joy, and everything else will likely take care of itself. You are not the sum of “likes” or “friends” or any other social media affirmation. Don't let people you don't know define or shape your value. You were made to do great things that only you can do. We need you to do them. Need to Know for Graduates is an ideal gift for grads and provides personal inspiration for everyday living.   Jeff is an author, speaker, nonprofit leader, and marketing consultant. He has more than two decades of experience in brand development, specializing in helping organizations and communities tell their stories. Jeff has spoken to healthcare and other community groups, sharing experiences, and celebrating the work of healthcare providers, drawn from his unique perspective as both a healthcare leader and as the parent of medically and intellectually challenged child.

For week two of Mentor May, Brent has a conversation with long time friend and former employee Jeff Atwood. The stories get more crazy as the minutes go by as they share about parenting and thoughts from Jeff's new book, "Need To Know" for graduates. There are great lessons for all of us in the hilarious episode. 

Our guest today is Jeff Atwood. Jeff is the author of the new book “Need to Know for Graduates,” and has more than three decades of experience in brand development and as a communicator specializing in helping organizations and communities tell their stories. He has  books published by Simon & Schuster, Harvest House and others. Jeff and his wife of 30 years are the parents of three daughters. ###We are grateful for our amazing sponsor, LifeGuides, a peer-to-peer community that helps you navigate through your day-to-day stressors by providing a place of empathy, listening, wisdom, and support with a Guide who has walked in your shoes, experiencing the same challenge or life experience as you.  We have a special offer for you from LifeGuides. It's this easy -  Schedule a demo and drop Healthy2021 in the “Any Questions?” box and receive 2 FREE months service. How GREAT is that?If you love this podcast, please share and give It a 5 star rating! If you feel inspired, we invite you to come on over to We Thrive Together and join our community. We have created this space for you to feel safe to talk about anxiety and mental health at work and at home.###Your hosts are Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton. They have spent more than two decades helping clients around the world engage their employees on strategy, vision and values. They provide real solutions for leaders looking to manage change, drive innovation and build high performance cultures and teams. Their work is supported by research with more than a million working adults across the globe.They are authors of multiple award-winning Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestsellers All In, The Carrot Principle, Leading with Gratitude, and Anxiety at Work. Their books have been translated into 30 languages and have sold more than 1.5 million copies. They have been called “fascinating” by Fortune and “creative and refreshing” by The New York Times. Learn more about their speaking, courses, and executive coaching practice at The Culture Works.

Bu bölümde egosuz programlamayı konuştuk. Bu konu ilk olarak Jeff Atwood'un 2006 yılında Coding Horror bloğunda dile getiriliyor. Jeff Atwood bu kavramı 10 madde de ele almış, biz de bu bölümde bu maddeleri kendi tecrübelerimiz üzerinden tartıştık.Hatalar yapabileceğini anla ve kabul et.Sen, yazdığın kod değilsin.Ne kadar iyi karate bilsen de, bir başkası daha fazlasını biliyor olabilir.Kodu birilerine danışmadan baştan yazmaya kalkışma.Senden daha az bilenlere saygı, hürmet ve sabırla davran.Gerçek itibar(nüfuz, otorite) bilgiden gelir, pozisyonunuzdan ya da title'ınızdan değil.Gereksinim, platform veya tool değişimleriyle kavga etme, gülümseyerek kabul et ve bunları birer challenge olarak algıla.İnandıkların için savaş ama yenildiğinde incelikle kabul et.Karanlık ofiste kod yazıp sadece kola almak için çıkan “o kişi” olma. Kodu eleştir, insanları değil - coder'a karşı nazik ol, koda karşı değil.Talentgrid'in katkılarıyla sezonun beşinci bölümü yayında!https://talentgrid.io/codefiction

Jeff Atwood has had quite a bit of success in his career, having been a founder of StackExchange and Discourse. He's a fellow alumnus of the University of Virginia, along with Alexis Ohanian. Both of them have had a higher profile than me, and I admire what they've accomplished. I also think they've both been advocates for the technology industry, helping and advising others on how they can succeed in their own careers. Jeff has been writing interesting posts about hardware and software for years, but the latest one struck me. It's called Learning on the Battlefield, and it has a lot of the same advice that I recently gave someone. In the post, Jeff notes that approaching your software career is like learning on the battlefield. It's like making weapons and coming up with tactics. You really need to test them on the battlefield. Read the rest of The Battlefield of Your Career

[https://ideamarket.io — Where attention pays you.]Jeff Atwood is the co-founder of StackOverflow (a top 100 website) and founder of Discourse, an app used by Figma to Brave. He's also an author, blogger, and entrepreneur. He writes the computer programming blog Coding Horror."In this episode:FOLLOW JEFF ATWOOD

Find Joel Spolsky on Twitter here.Jeff Atwood is on Twitter here.Geoff Dalgas is on Twitter here.Follow Jarrod Dixon on Twitter here.

Find Joel Spolsky on Twitter here.Jeff Atwood is on Twitter here.Geoff Dalgas is on Twitter here.Follow Jarrod Dixon on Twitter here.

In the previous episodes, we looked at the rise of patents and software and their impact on the nascent computer industry. But a copyright is a right. And that right can be given to others in whole or in part. We have all benefited from software where the right to copy was waved and it's shaped the computing industry as much, if not more, than proprietary software. The term Free and Open Source Software (FOSS for short) is a blanket term to describe software that's free and/or whose source code is distributed for varying degrees of tinkeration. It's a movement and a choice. Programmers can commercialize our software. But we can also distribute it free of copy protections. And there are about as many licenses as there are opinions about what is unique, types of software, underlying components, etc. But given that many choose to commercialize their work products, how did a movement arise that specifically didn't? The early computers were custom-built to perform various tasks. Then computers and software were bought as a bundle and organizations could edit the source code. But as operating systems and languages evolved and businesses wanted their own custom logic, a cottage industry for software started to emerge. We see this in every industry - as an innovation becomes more mainstream, the expectations and needs of customers progress at an accelerated rate. That evolution took about 20 years to happen following World War II and by 1969, the software industry had evolved to the point that IBM faced antitrust charges for bundling software with hardware. And after that, the world of software would never be the same. The knock-on effect was that in the 1970s, Bell Labs pushed away from MULTICS and developed Unix, which AT&T then gave away as compiled code to researchers. And so proprietary software was a growing industry, which AT&T began charging for commercial licenses as the bushy hair and sideburns of the 70s were traded for the yuppy culture of the 80s. In the meantime, software had become copyrightable due to the findings of CONTU and the codifying of the Copyright Act of 1976. Bill Gates sent his infamous “Open Letter to Hobbyists” in 1976 as well, defending the right to charge for software in an exploding hobbyist market. And then Apple v Franklin led to the ability to copyright compiled code in 1983. There was a growing divide between those who'd been accustomed to being able to copy software freely and edit source code and those who in an up-market sense just needed supported software that worked - and were willing to pay for it, seeing the benefits that automation was having on the capabilities to scale an organization. And yet there were plenty who considered copyright software immoral. One of the best remembered is Richard Stallman, or RMS for short. Steven Levy described Stallman as “The Last of the True Hackers” in his epic book “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.” In the book, he describes the MIT Stallman joined where there weren't passwords and we didn't yet pay for software and then goes through the emergence of the LISP language and the divide that formed between Richard Greenblatt, who wanted to keep The Hacker Ethic alive and those who wanted to commercialize LISP. The Hacker Ethic was born from the young MIT students who freely shared information and ideas with one another and help push forward computing in an era they thought was purer in a way, as though it hadn't yet been commercialized. The schism saw the death of the hacker culture and two projects came out of Stallman's technical work: emacs, which is a text editor that is still included freely in most modern Unix variants and the GNU project. Here's the thing, MIT was sitting on patents for things like core memory and thrived in part due to the commercialization or weaponization of the technology they were producing. The industry was maturing and since the days when kings granted patents, maturing technology would be commercialized using that system. And so Stallman's nostalgia gave us the GNU project, born from an idea that the industry moved faster in the days when information was freely shared and that knowledge was meant to be set free. For example, he wanted the source code for a printer driver so he could fix it and was told it was protected by an NDAQ and so couldn't have it. A couple of years later he announced GNU, a recursive acronym for GNU's Not Unix. The next year he built a compiler called GCC and the next year released the GNU Manifesto, launching the Free Software Foundation, often considered the charter of the free and open source software movement. Over the next few years as he worked on GNU, he found emacs had a license, GCC had a license, and the rising tide of free software was all distributed with unique licenses. And so the GNU General Public License was born in 1989 - allowing organizations and individuals to copy, distribute, and modify software covered under the license but with a small change, that if someone modified the source, they had to release that with any binaries they distributed as well. The University of California, Berkley had benefited from a lot of research grants over the years and many of their works could be put into the public domain. They had brought Unix in from Bell Labs in the 70s and Sun cofounder and Java author Bill Joy worked under professor Fabry, who brought Unix in. After working on a Pascal compiler that Unix coauthor Ken Thompson left for Berkeley, Joy and others started working on what would become BSD, not exactly a clone of Unix but with interchangeable parts. They bolted on the OSI model to get networking and through the 80s as Joy left for Sun and DEC got ahold of that source code there were variants and derivatives like FreeBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others. The licensing was pretty permissive and simple to understand: Copyright (c) . All rights reserved. Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are duplicated in all such forms and that any documentation, advertising materials, and other materials related to such distribution and use acknowledge that the software was developed by the . The name of the may not be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. By 1990 the Board of Regents at Berkley accepted a four clause BSD license that spawned a class of licenses. While it's matured into other formats like a 0 clause license it's one of my favorites as it is truest to the FOSS cause. And the 90s gave us the Apache License, from the Apache Group, loosely based on the BSD License and then in 2004 leaning away from that with the release of the Apache License 2 that was more compatible with the GPL license. Given the modding nature of Apache they didn't require derivative works to also be open sourced but did require leaving the license in place for unmodified parts of the original work. GNU never really caught on as an OS in the mainstream, although a collection of tools did. The main reason the OS didn't go far is probably because Linus Torvalds started releasing prototypes of his Linux operating system in 1991. Torvalds used The GNU General Public License v2, or GPLv2 to license his kernel, having been inspired by a talk given by Stallman. GPL 2 had been released in 1991 and something else was happening as we turned into the 1990s: the Internet. Suddenly the software projects being worked on weren't just distributed on paper tape or floppy disks; they could be downloaded. The rise of Linux and Apache coincided and so many a web server and site ran that LAMP stack with MySQL and PHP added in there. All open source in varying flavors of what open source was at the time. And collaboration in the industry was at an all-time high. We got the rise of teams of developers who would edit and contribute to projects. One of these was a tool for another aspect of the Internet, email. It was called popclient, Here Eric S Raymond, or ESR for short, picked it up and renamed it to fetchmail, releasing it as an open source project. Raymond presented on his work at the Linux Congress in 1997, expanded that work into an essay and then the essay into “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” where bazaar is meant to be like an open market. That inspired many to open source their own works, including the Netscape team, which resulted in Mozilla and so Firefox - and another book called “Freeing the Source: The Story of Mozilla” from O'Reilly. By then, Tim O'Reilly was a huge proponent of this free or source code available type of software as it was known. And companies like VA Linux were growing fast. And many wanted to congeal around some common themes. So in 1998, Christine Peterson came up with the term “open source” in a meeting with Raymond, Todd Anderson, Larry Augustin, Sam Ockman, and Jon “Maddog” Hall, author of the first book I read on Linux. Free software it may or may not be but open source as a term quickly proliferated throughout the lands. By 1998 there was this funny little company called Tivo that was doing a public beta of a little box with a Linux kernel running on it that bootstrapped a pretty GUI to record TV shows on a hard drive on the box and play them back. You remember when we had to wait for a TV show, right? Or back when some super-fancy VCRs could record a show at a specific time to VHS (but mostly failed for one reason or another)? Well, Tivo meant to fix that. We did an episode on them a couple of years ago but we skipped the term Tivoization and the impact they had on GPL. As the 90s came to a close, VA Linux and Red Hat went through great IPOs, bringing about an era where open source could mean big business. And true to the cause, they shared enough stock with Linus Torvalds to make him a millionaire as well. And IBM pumped a billion dollars into open source, with Sun moving to open source openoffice.org. Now, what really happened there might be that by then Microsoft had become too big for anyone to effectively compete with and so they all tried to pivot around to find a niche, but it still benefited the world and open source in general. By Y2K there was a rapidly growing number of vendors out there putting Linux kernels onto embedded devices. TiVo happened to be one of the most visible. Some in the Linux community felt like they were being taken advantage of because suddenly you had a vendor making changes to the kernel but their changes only worked on their hardware and they blocked users from modifying the software. So The Free Software Foundation updated GPL, bundling in some other minor changes and we got the GNU General Public License (Version 3) in 2006. There was a lot more in GPL 3, given that so many organizations were involved in open source software by then. Here, the full license text and original copyright notice had to be included along with a statement of significant changes and making source code available with binaries. And commercial Unix variants struggled with SGI going bankrupt in 2006 and use of AIX and HP-UX Many of these open source projects flourished because of version control systems and the web. SourceForge was created by VA Software in 1999 and is a free service that can be used to host open source projects. Concurrent Versions System, or CVS had been written by Dick Grune back in 1986 and quickly became a popular way to have multiple developers work on projects, merging diffs of code repositories. That gave way to git in the hearts of many a programmer after Linus Torvalds wrote a new versioning system called git in 2005. GitHub came along in 2008 and was bought by Microsoft in 2018 for 2018. Seeing a need for people to ask questions about coding, Stack Overflow was created by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky in 2008. Now, we could trade projects on one of the versioning tools, get help with projects or find smaller snippets of sample code on Stack Overflow, or even Google random things (and often find answers on Stack Overflow). And so social coding became a large part of many a programmers day. As did dependency management, given how many tools are used to compile a modern web app or app. I often wonder how much of the code in many of our favorite tools is actually original. Another thought is that in an industry dominated by white males, it's no surprise that we often gloss over previous contributions. It was actually Grace Hopper's A-2 compiler that was the first software that was released freely with source for all the world to adapt. Sure, you needed a UNIVAC to run it, and so it might fall into the mainframe era and with the emergence of minicomputers we got Digital Equipment's DECUS for sharing software, leading in part to the PDP-inspired need for source that Stallman was so adamant about. General Motors developed SHARE Operating System for the IBM 701 and made it available through the IBM user group called SHARE. The ARPAnet was free if you could get to it. TeX from Donald Knuth was free. The BASIC distribution from Dartmouth was academic and yet Microsoft sold it for up to $100,000 a license (see Commodore ). So it's no surprise that people avoided paying upstarts like Microsoft for their software or that it took until the late 70s to get copyright legislation and common law. But Hopper's contributions were kinda' like open source v1, the work from RMS to Linux was kinda' like open source v2, and once the term was coined and we got the rise of a name and more social coding platforms from SourceForge to git, we moved into a third version of the FOSS movement. Today, some tools are free, some are open source, some are free as in beer (as you find in many a gist), some are proprietary. All are valid. Today there are also about as many licenses as there are programmers putting software out there. And here's the thing, they're all valid. You see, every creator has the right to restrict the ability to copy their software. After all, it's their intellectual property. Anyone who chooses to charge for their software is well within their rights. Anyone choosing to eschew commercialization also has that right. And every derivative in between. I wouldn't judge anyone based on any model those choose. Just as those who distribute proprietary software shouldn't be judged for retaining their rights to do so. Why not just post things we want to make free? Patents, copyrights, and trademarks are all a part of intellectual property - but as developers of tools we also need to limit our liability as we're probably not out there buying large errors and omissions insurance policies for every script or project we make freely available. Also, we might want to limit the abuse of our marks. For example, Linus Torvalds monitors the use of the Linux mark through the Linux Mark Institute. Apparently some William Dell Croce Jr tried to register the Linux trademark in 1995 and Torvalds had to sue to get it back. He provides use of the mark using a free and perpetual global sublicense. Given that his wife won the Finnish karate championship six times I wouldn't be messing with his trademarks. Thank you to all the creators out there. Thank you for your contributions. And thank you for tuning in to this episode of the History of Computing Podcast. Have a great day.

Whether you are new in the tech industry or are a veteran developer, chances are that you've used a product that Jeff Atwood worked on. I'm talking about Stack Overflow and Discourse, of course. When it comes to building communities and fostering good conversations, Jeff took an unusual position - steer the conversation towards finding the best in people, argue ideas and not people, and ultimately, contribute to a world that's just a bit better. How does it all work? Jeff elaborates in this episode.

Jeff Atwood is an American software developer, author, blogger, and entrepreneur. He writes the computer programming blog Coding Horror. He co-founded the computer programming question-and-answer website Stack Overflow and co-founded Stack Exchange, which extends Stack Overflow's question-and-answer model to subjects other than programming. Jeff's blog: https://www.codinghorror.com

Looking to reconnect back to your purpose? Kristin Baird, President and CEO, of Baird Group, and Author, Speaker, and Healthcare leader, Jeff Atwood are on The Busy Leader's Podcast this week to share the power of storytelling and the deep and impactful way it connects us to each other.Kris explains how having a great patient experience starts with having a great culture; having a great culture retains talent. She says that the best way to build a great culture within your organization is by having an unrelenting focus on people as individuals. Healthcare organizations tend to spend more time recruiting new people rather than retaining the talent they already have. Kris empathizes that when we get to know our people better and listen to their stories, we then know how to coach and lead them better. Stories connect us back to our purpose.Unlike Kris, Jeff never intended to get into the healthcare industry. It wasn't until his daughter Madison was born that Jeff saw first-hand the difference that healthcare workers make each day. Going to doctor's offices and hospitals regularly with his daughter, Jeff saw the impact that Madison's story made on those who listened. He soon discovered the power of storytelling. Jeff explains how we must focus on the importance of telling stories because hearing and understanding the story of a patient can make all the difference in their care.The is a must-listen for healthcare leaders, providers, workers, or anyone looking to connect back to their calling. 

44bits 팟캐스트 121번째 로그에서는 깃헙 장애, StackOverflow 매각, freenode 직원 이탈에 대해서 이야기를 나누었습니다. 참가자: @seapy, @raccoonyy, @outsideris, @ecleya 정기 후원 - 44bits podcast are creating 프로그래머들의 팟캐스트 녹음일 6월 17일, 공개일 7월 8일 쇼노트: https://stdout.fm/121/ 주제별 바로 듣기 00:00 후원 01:08 깃헙 장애 03:38 PolarDB for PostgreSQL 16:18 오픈소스 Email Alias - SimpleLogin 23:24 StackOverflow 매각 39:13 네이버 소프트웨어 서비스 종료 41:55 freenode 직원 이탈 쇼노트 깃헙 장애 GitHub Status - Incident with GitHub Actions, API Requests, Git Operations, Issues, GitHub Packages, GitHub Pages, Pull Requests, and Webhooks PolarDB for PostgreSQL PolarDB for PostgreSQL Ant Design - The world's second most popular React UI framework Deno - A secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript - DenoLand TOAST UI :: Make Your Web Delicious! 오픈소스 Email Alias - SimpleLogin SimpleLogin | Open-source email alias solution StackOverflow 매각 Stack Overflow Sold to Tech Giant Prosus for $1.8 Billion - WSJ Prosus Joel on Software Coding Horror Jeff Atwood - Wikipedia Joel Spolsky - Wikipedia 네이버 소프트웨어 서비스 종료 네이버 소프트웨어 서비스 종료 안내 freenode 직원 이탈 Freenode IRC staff resign en masse after takeover by Korea's “crown prince” | Ars Technica Libera Chat | A next-generation IRC network for FOSS projects collaboration! Discord | Your Place to Talk and Hang Out Welcome to your new HQ | Slack Redmine Apache Subversion The Trac Project Google Wave - Wikipedia

Videohttps://youtu.be/oZz2Rr5qFuQLinks 02:23 Rubber duck theory 17:09 StackOverflow Podcast 18:01 How to Stop Sucking and Be Awesome Instead 21:45 Discourse 24:58 GitHub Discussions 25:18 101 Basic Computer Games 30:52 Chia Cryptocurrency 36:09 Supreme Justice Clarence Thomas suggests the US should regulate Facebook 38:44 The Social Dilemma 39:09 Brandolini's Law 40:59 Atwood's Law 44:27 CODE mechanical keyboard

In episode 9 of Developer Love, Patrick Woods speaks with Jeff Atwood of Discourse. They discuss the evolution of civil discourse on the internet, moderating forum software, and the collaborative nature of programming.

In episode 9 of Developer Love, Patrick Woods speaks with Jeff Atwood of Discourse. They discuss the evolution of civil discourse on the internet, moderating forum software, and the collaborative nature of programming.

In episode 9 of Developer Love, Patrick Woods speaks with Jeff Atwood of Discourse. They discuss the evolution of civil discourse on the internet, moderating forum software, and the collaborative nature of programming. The post Ep. #9, Online Civility with Jeff Atwood of Discourse appeared first on Heavybit.

In episode 9 of Developer Love, Patrick Woods speaks with Jeff Atwood of Discourse. They discuss the evolution of civil discourse on the internet, moderating forum software, and the collaborative nature of programming. The post Ep. #9, Online Civility with Jeff Atwood of Discourse appeared first on Heavybit.

Josh Heyer (Pronounced "Higher", sorry Josh) aka Shog9 can be found at shog9.comJosh is a Developer Advocate for Enterprise DB https://www.enterprisedb.com/Twitter: @shog9Jon Ericson : https://jlericson.com/ and on medium at https://medium.com/@jlericsonTwitter: @jlericsonI uploaded a remixed version that should result in a higher volume for Josh Heyer on 10 July 2020.  If you listened to it before then and were annoyed by the levels; that was my fault, and I hope I've fixed it. If not, please reach out.Rough Transcript (Powered by Otter.ai -please submit corrections!)George Stocker 0:00Hello, and welcome to the build better software podcast. I'm your host George Stocker, and today I'm joined by john Erickson and Josh hair. Welcome to the show.Josh Heyer 0:11Hi, hello,George Stocker 0:14john and Josh, for people who may not be familiar with who you are and what you do. Tell us about yourself.Jon Ericson 0:21Sure, we both talk at the same time.George Stocker 0:23One, one after the other.Josh Heyer 0:26To talk over somebody.Jon Ericson 0:29If we let you talk first, this will be the end of the episode, right?Josh Heyer 0:33Yes, that is plausible. I'm just this guy, you know. So, john. Uh,Jon Ericson 0:40well, you probably if you know me at all, it's because I was a community manager at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. I did that for almost seven years. And and now I am a community and product operations manager at college confidential, which you is a forum site for people who are applying to school for college and universities?Josh Heyer 1:09Yeah, that's a good intro. I'm going to just steal that. So pretend I said what john just said, except replace seven with nine and replace college confidential with enterprise DB or EDB. A Postgres company.George Stocker 1:24Cool. Now, I'm not gonna let you get away with that either of you know, yeah, so Josh, you were actually the first Community Manager hired for Stack Overflow, as I understand it, you were IJosh Heyer 1:36was, I was, let me see. 123 I was either the third or fourth. I'm gonna say third. It was Robert cortino. He was number one. Although we all had different job titles in the early days. I don't think we settled on Community Manager until like a year. He was Robert could Hannah was was the first year Community coordinator. And then and then it was Rebecca turnoff. Remember Rebecca?Jon Ericson 2:08Yeah, our turn Archer and yeah,Josh Heyer 2:10yeah, she was she was number two. Now. Now see, Rebecca was Rebecca was not originally community coordinator. She was I think it was community evangelist or developer evangelist, something like that. And then we all we all kind of coalesced on Community Manager after a while, as the least offensive generic name we could come up with, I was never comfortable with evangelists. That was that was what Jeff suggested to me. Right away and I was like, man, and then I came on as adjunct community coordinator, yeah. And working part time for the first year. Just kind of trying it out to see if, see if maybe the company just go under. I could save myself some work. And when that didn't And I came on full time in 2012.George Stocker 3:03Yeah. And so you know when to remember back in the day these this is 10 years ago is that community management from a public internet community perspective was still very new. And in fact, the only way I knew of it was through video games was that places like dice had community evangelists and community managers that helped manage manage video games, or manage the communities for video games. So, you know, in this fresh new world of community management, how did you all acclimate to that job?Josh Heyer 3:39So first, I want to say video games are like, the trendsetters in this field. They, they they were and still are kind of leading in terms of what it means to manage a community because I have I think they figured out way ahead of just about everybody else that you, you really do need people who are focused on that specifically, a lot of other companies had people doing similar things. But it was almost like, you know, this is something you got to do in your part time, above and beyond your real responsibilities. and video games pretty quickly figured out especially the massively online multiplayer versions, they figured out that, oh, we actually need to culture to nurture to guide this community of people that we depend on in order to, you know, have a viable game and, and put focus squarely on that. So we took our lead from that in a lot of ways. JOHN, we brought in because He was super awesome in our community. He was writing stuff that was better than what we were writing. Okay.George Stocker 5:13So how did you how did you come to be at StackOverflow? JOHN?Jon Ericson 5:17So I was I was a beta, user on stack Stack Overflow, and then I threw a fit, because I didn't like some of the things that Jeff was doing. I thought closed, closed votes, some closing questions was dumb, like, Are we going to run out of bits on the internet? And so I quit and then and then Stack Exchange came along, and they're all these crazy sites. And I was like, Oh, these are interesting. I thought gardening and philosophy. That was my, that's gonna be my entry back into it. And it turns out, it's hard to do gardening when you only have a little apartment, condo thing. AndJosh Heyer 5:57fluffy is great man space.Jon Ericson 6:01I so I knew so little bad gardening, and I've got a house now I actually could use the gardening site. And then, but the thing that really got me going was biblical hermeneutics, which is about interpreting the Bible, which was really something that I still am fascinated by. And so I got into that. And I think what Josh was saying, at one point, there was a bunch of controversy over what the site meant. And I ended up spilling tons and tons of digital ink on the meta site. So why not workGeorge Stocker 6:39biblical from a memetic? site? mentor? What what what almost almost likeJosh Heyer 6:43hermeneutics and exit Jesus are not words you use in everyday conversation? IGeorge Stocker 6:48can't even pronounce them.Jon Ericson 6:51Yeah, so. So the difficulty with biblical hermeneutics is that some people look at that and they're like, Oh, cool. I'm going to be an evangelist, too. pick up another word that Josh isn't a huge fan of.Josh Heyer 7:05For people who actually legit are evangelists I don't I don't feel like it's a great job title for people who are, you know, doing community management?Jon Ericson 7:15Yeah. Well, I guess it is a geeky connotations, right?Josh Heyer 7:20It is located. Yeah, it is complicated. You you there was another word by the way that you you guys struggled with a little bit unexpectedly. And that was biblical. Yeah.Jon Ericson 7:34Why? Why is that?Josh Heyer 7:35Well, different people have different ideas of what the Bible is.George Stocker 7:40That's right. Catholics, we would there, you know, five extra books for Roman Catholics in the Old Testament that aren't present next version.Jon Ericson 7:52And those five books, I mean, this is a huge, huge problem for us. So we got to, we got to excommunicate you. You're not A lot on our site.Josh Heyer 8:01And then there's there's like a whole group of people who who consider, you know, the entire New Testament, even calling it the new testament to be.Jon Ericson 8:12So but uh,Josh Heyer 8:14yeah, yeah. SoGeorge Stocker 8:16this is about to become a Bible podcast, podcast where we talked about we can totally make it No, no theJosh Heyer 8:22head during this period when we were launching these sites, we would have I kid you not three to four hour conversations every day involving the team, we would try to hash this stuff out, really. And clearly, we didn't succeed because the problems were still in existence when the site launched. And so john got stuck with them.George Stocker 8:41So how do you do that as a, as a community manager, you know, you're you have this new thing. You know, in the case of Stack Overflow, obviously, it was all new to everybody. But by the time you're getting to this biblical forum site, you've got, you know, you've got, hey, we want to put this thing out there. We're gonna have Have people using it? How do you? How do you make any of that happen?Josh Heyer 9:08So prayer for peace in war, wait, the opposite of that.Jon Ericson 9:14I was gonna say it's not necessarily given that people will use it. And so like, I think that's a that's a problem that like, it's actually a nice problem to have if you've got people are using it, you're like how we're gonna direct it so that it's, you know, people are playing nice with each other. And my philosophy was always a like, give empower, empower the users to make the space what they want, which is why I ended up in lots of controversies over like, Hey, why don't we just let those Catholics talk about those extra five Bible books? What What do I care? It's just another question on the site. And other people like no, no, no, that's that's not that's not what it is. And so my philosophy was always like, Sort of cliche, but sort of democratize the community, like make it so that everyone has a say everyone has input into it. I wonder if I wonder if shark has a little different perspective on the thing?Josh Heyer 10:15No, that sounds all about.George Stocker 10:18We'll see. So why are you sitting up there on the Bible site, you know, Josh, or shark and you'll hear us call them refer to miss shark throughout this entire recording simply because that's how we've known him for years. But Shawn, you are dealing with the expansion of Stack Overflow, and taking over from really being the full time voice of community management from Jeff Atwood from the founder of the site, and you started doing, you know, those those public interactions with communities that he used to do.Josh Heyer 10:51Tell us about that. Yeah, so what do you do when you have Have a very very opinionated voice effectively leading a community that just suddenly disappears. I, I struggled with that problem for a while because I didn't particularly want or think I should be a replacement for that voice. I didn't feel like that was appropriate for numerous reasons. And I quickly repented of that attitude because what actually happened was Oh, to use a biblical analogy, the Book of Judges, every man doing what was right in his own eyes. You ended up with chaos. To to bring us forward a few thousand years. We we had the The chaotic natural law that Thomas Hobbes wrote about. You can have people all with very honorable reasons, doing what they feel strongly is the right thing and still end up with all at war. Because those those perspectives conflict, people try to make use of the same resources in different ways in different ways that are not compatible with one another. And if you don't have somebody willing to come in and say this is how things look, and this is the way forward. There is no possible resolution to this. And in fact, we've seen in human history over and over again, where these situations arise. Someone will always take on that role. And if you if you don't, if you try too hard to avoid that, all you're really accomplishing is setting up a situation where you have no influence, or you have no voice in the government that is eventually constructed. AndGeorge Stocker 13:27decisions are made by those that show up.Josh Heyer 13:29Decisions are made by those that show up decisions are made by those who are willing to put the time and willing to put the effort in to to convince others. And I, I came into StackOverflow in 2008, with a very strong opinion about what I wanted the site to be. And I didn't presuppose for a moment that that was the only opinion or that that was necessarily how it should come out. But I wasn't willing to stand by and see it, turn into something else.George Stocker 14:00Now you've got that you've got those users. And that goes to the to the point of the show today is that community is an integral part of software, whether that software is a public q&a forum. Oh, sorry, not forum, public q&a site, or whether that software is really incidental to the problem being solved. But you, but you have people, and you're always going to have users and they're always going to have opinions. And as software developers, we need to effectively mold and fashion those opinions, and listen to those opinions to help us produce good software. And that's why I have both of you here today, because you have different takes on that. And you're both in different verticals. Now. Both of you started out Stack Overflow, which is, as you said, a very opinionated place. And now you're dealing with different types of communities. How do you form for teams that may not have what StackOverflow had was a very public presence in a very public way of managing your community. How do you find your users? How do you interact with them if you're not dealing in such public software?Josh Heyer 15:14So first I want to say you don't have to you can you didn't totally blow him off. I mean, that's, that's an option you have, it's not necessarily a good option. But if you don't have the, the desire, or the wherewithal to, to handle dealing with the community, you can you can't really ignore it, but you can absolutely squelch it. Apple is fantastic at this site, a very large example they they sort of have a community in spite of themselves.George Stocker 15:54Are you referring to the latest with the no actuallyJosh Heyer 15:57that if you're talking about DHH? No. No, okay. I, I i've been using them as an example of this for years, I think they, they tried very hard to sort of keep their community at arm's length. And, and that works for them. I don't think it will work for most companies that their scale. It's definitely a risky move. But that's how they do things. And it's not, you know, it's not a accidental decision that that attitude pervades their organization. And, and they, they work towards that from many, many different angles in their development and rollout processes in their marketing in their support organization. I I wouldn't Recommended. But if you got a Steve Jobs complex, and you really want to go whole hog on it, yeah, by all means, throw up the middle finger to your community and just roll on and see how that works out for you, john?Jon Ericson 17:18Yeah, so the question about how you interact with thick meat, it's, for one thing I have to say we have, like college confidential is a form. It's so freeing, I can say forum and no one would yell at me. We actually have forums, that's the adjustment I'd make. It's not one forum as many forums. And and I agree like you can, you can totally play hands off with it. And, you know, things things can could work that way. That's, in fact, the model that I stepped into was, they didn't really like the people who own the forum didn't know what to do with it. They didn't have necessarily a vision for it. They just sort of fell into their lap. They bought another A couple of years part of this company. And and so when I stepped in the one of the things that I decided early on was I'm going to engage with the community. And that means, like, I do some posting, I happen to have a son who is considering school, going to college. And so I have, I have a voice I can, I can talk about what I'm experiencing, so I can be part of the community. And then and then there are spaces within you know, like, one of our forums is for parents, and I can talk directly to the parents on the forum via that space. And I try opposite of the apple approach. I I don't have a lot of secrets. We don't have big reveals. I kind of considered a mistake if people find out about something, the day that we release it. And that may work for Apple but it doesn't work for for our team because Our community wants to have input, their input is actually valuable. Like we've seen, we had a major redesign. Last year, this is before I was part of the company, and it fell on its face, because none of the user feedback was was incorporated into the design. So I just like I feel like it's a pounding the pavement, go out, meet people as much as I can shake babies and kiss hands, is that what you're supposed to do as a politician? sounds right. The other way around.Josh Heyer 19:38All of those words are in there somewhereGeorge Stocker 19:40in some form or fashion. So that that's interesting, because one of the issues that we all have, most recently that I dealt with was through slack or slack changes or UI, and they're like, Hey, we're changing our UI. It's so awesome. I looked at I don't know how to use this anymore. And we even see to a certain extent, with StackOverflow when they would make changes, and you'd get the people who were really invested in, in the software as it was saying, like, Hey, you move my cheese. How do you deal with that as a community manager?Josh Heyer 20:14I got opinions here. So first of all, I want to address the idiom there. The moving cheese corporate table is complete bullshit. Anybody want to argue about that? No.George Stocker 20:34I want to hear why it's complete bullshit. Because this is gonnaJosh Heyer 20:36be good. No, no, it's okay look. as as as as creatures. We are optimized from top to bottom for efficient use of energy. Our brains are muscle memory. our nervous system chews up a massive amount of energy both in thinking and in mistakes. When we have to retrain, there's a huge cost to that. I mean, you can think of a simple example, something you do every day some, some some little tool. You're you're moving from, I don't know, a pair of scissors to a left handed pair of scissors, and suddenly you have to figure that out. You're gonna be super annoyed if you I don't know if you're one of those people who's super into keyboards.George Stocker 21:41I'm not but I know people who areJosh Heyer 21:43you Do you know what I'm talking about keyboards. I hate I get flustered and irritated if I got to move to a keyboard when they put the return key in an L shape instead of a bar shape like God into But there are people who will switch up between normal keyboards and split keyboards, and cord keyboards and weird little keyboards that like scatter their keys all over creation and, and retrain themselves on that. And you know what if that's your hobby, more power to you, but I just want the words in my head to appear on the screen. I don't want to have to stop and think about it. And I would argue that most people are in that same boat. We don't want to expend energy to accomplish a task we already know how to do.George Stocker 22:37So how do you help the community when you have something like a redesign or a new feature or a change in a workflow? They're used to FirstJosh Heyer 22:44off, you're starting at negative 100. Right? You you assume that when you go to announce this, your post, it may not reflect it yet. 100 people hate it right out of the gate. And then you have to dig yourself out of that hole, right?George Stocker 23:11SoJosh Heyer 23:13don't come in with the idea that hey, I'm gonna roll out this huge, impressive, shiny new feature. And everybody's gonna love it. You may love it. You've spent three months thinking about it, maybe longer. Nobody else has. The first thing they see is wow, I have to expend energy. I have to burn hours of my precious life and calories that I worked hard to obtain in order to do the same thing I was doing yesterday.George Stocker 23:48No, that's an interesting change. I hadn't thought about it like that.Josh Heyer 23:52So that's, that's where you're coming in. You have to dig yourself out of that hole. You have to you have to crawl up Out of this pit that you were starting in, how are you going to do that?George Stocker 24:05That's why, tell me,Josh Heyer 24:06ideally, you don't, you don't dig a pit with straight wall sides, right? You You spend those three months that you're working on this thing. digging a nice, gentle ramp down into there, you you lay the groundwork for this explanation you're making for this announcement, you go and talk to people in your community. You shop around the idea, you find ways to address concerns more than anything, you find ways to convey the advantages that this change is bringing that they might not have thought of. But once they get it in their heads that hey, yeah, this is going to cost me time and energy in one regard. But in the long term, it's an investment, it's going to save me time and ever or maybe it's not going to say anything. Maybe I'm going to have to pay a cost but for some others portion of this community, it's going to be a win. If you can get all that stuff together, especially if you can get a cadre, a posse of people in your community who are already on board, when you make your big rollout, then you don't have so much work to do. You've got that nice ramp out of your pit that you can just roll up out of. You've had all of the arguments before you have honed your presentation, your your your announcement, to the point where any concern somebody raises. You're standing right there to address it. You have the phrasing and the presentation ready to go. I was telling somebody earlier today, I've written a tremendous number of announcements in 30 minutes or less. But in all those cases, I have spoken Then months preparing to write that announcement, I've spent months doing the research doing the the acclamation to the concept that I'm introducing to the design that I'm presenting. If you don't put that prep work in, it doesn't matter if you spend a week agonizing over what you're writing. It's still gonna go over like a lead balloon.George Stocker 26:27JOHN, I see you, I see you nodding.Jon Ericson 26:30I can totally concur with that. So an example that some of you may be aware of, we had this project called documentation. And documentation was for Stack Overflow for Stack Overflow. It was built in a in a lab. No one was allowed to enter the lab, and then they float open the doors and people are like, What is going on? And you know, I thought that was a fun project to do. It had a lot of nice features to it, but it failed and So that, you know, you're kind of doomed both ways if you do a poor job of announcing it, and then you get people who actually figure it out and are enjoying it, and then you have to shut it down. Like, that's another, that's another spot where people have gotten used to Google Reader to name an example. And now you're taking it away. And you're saying you can't use this piece of software anymore. And so at the same experience that Josh was talking about, where, like, it literally took me a couple hours to write the worst sunsetting documentation, meta post. I did it, you know, a few hours in the afternoon. But that wasn't the first time I had thought what we were going to do when we shut down this documentation. I had written six months before a like, this is what I'm going to say when we shut down documentation, which I didn't, you know, broadcast to anybody in the company because like, you don't want be labeled as the Put Doomsayer. But But I had that ready. I knew it was, it was a possibility. And so I had been thinking about it for four months. And also like, what's my victory lap? going to be? So like, I had those thoughts in mind. So what what sharks that is absolutely true.George Stocker 28:19So that gets us to a touchy topic is telling your users The truth is how is dealing with the fact that you have users of your software who are invested in it. And you have to tell them something that they don't want to hear. What What do you do? How do you do it?Josh Heyer 28:48So first off you you need to understand why you need to understand why they don't want to hear why they're apprehensive. Second, you need to understand why you You need to tell them that why why they need to hear that why you're doing the thing that you're doing, or can't do the thing that you're not doing. If you don't understand both of those things, then you're really not going to have a good time to communicate.George Stocker 29:22You work for enterprise DB a company. JOHN, you work for college confidential. A company, Stack Overflow is a company and companies exist to, you know, put money in their bank accounts so that they they exist day after day. And but your users don't have that point of view your users are theyJosh Heyer 29:44absolutely can.George Stocker 29:46They can, but I, in my mind,Josh Heyer 29:49the fact that companies need to make money.George Stocker 29:52Yeah. So how do you square that circle where you know, you're like, Hey, we got to shut down documentation. It's not making any money right? losing time losing effort losing money and you've got users that have put hundreds, if not thousands of hours, probably only hundreds because it didn't last that long. They put hundreds of hours of their life into it, like how do you how do you tell people the truth when the truth is, you know, money based when the truth is, you know, a misalignment of, I guess values.Josh Heyer 30:26So, I think john actually did a really good job of this. In terms of communicating that thing. If you go back and look at the documentation project, there were a lot of mistakes.Jon Ericson 30:46A lot of mistakes, as I said,Josh Heyer 30:49and these mistakes were not a secret. They were called out at the time or Very shortly after they were made,George Stocker 31:02some seem tactical now for our audience, people who may not be aware of what this is documentation and I'm going to say a little bit about it and you guys fill it in, fill in the parts I missed documentation was an effort to expand beyond question and answer and actually go into the things that we saw from poorly maintained documentation across the internet for programming, API's frameworks, all sorts of things related to programming, either library or framework, what have you, and actually putting the documentation with examples in a way that was easily searchable, editable, and stayed up to date. Now, that's how I saw it. How did you guys see it?Jon Ericson 31:42So you mentioned the key word, and you just slip right past it. examples. So the concept was, it wouldn't just be replacing the documentation. It would be giving you examples, focusing on code that people could have read and understand. And so there was debate about whether the whole thing should be called examples or documentation. And naki toots Yes, I forgot about Dr. toots. What is Dr. toots? documentation tutorials?Josh Heyer 32:17Ah, the compromise solution you see.George Stocker 32:20Now it's funny as you say that, you know, documentation has been tried multiple different ways across the internet. There's read the docs. There's a few others that I can't offhand mention, but I know exist. And documentation is just slides always. This is a bland usage that no one actually ever uses it that way they use it, you know, in furtherance of something else that the documentation never covers. So why not examples? Why did that lose? Because that sounds like a really nice reframing of what it did.Jon Ericson 32:55Why did that lose? So So like, it's part of it as politics like internal politics, but part of it is just like, documentation sounds like a bigger idea than examples. Right? And so there's this temptation to say, Okay, if you've got two choices, we can do the grand idea, or we can do sort of the focus, practical idea. And your odds of of accomplishing a focused practical idea are better than the grand idea. But, like, oftentimes, it's easier to sell the grand idea internally. Like, you say, documentation means so many different things to so many different people. And it can be more people signingJosh Heyer 33:41on because they think they're signing on to something they want. Exactly what you're actually doing. This by the way, it comes back to my thesis of you have to know why you're doing what you're doing before you start writing.Jon Ericson 33:57Yeah,Josh Heyer 33:58so that sounds like all almost almost a tautology, right.George Stocker 34:02Right. But it is truism. Yeah,Josh Heyer 34:04it it it is. It is a something that a great many people, including myself, strive to avoid in almost every project because it requires work up front. He requires discipline to define what your goals are and what your goals are not. It requires discipline to be precise in your wording, which we all hate. And it, it requires, it requires work. It is way too easy to come out of a meeting. really psyched, just just really jazzed about this thing you're doing. And then to sit down and start writing it out. to shop that idea round to the other people who are on the same call. You were And to suddenly realize that, number one, it isn't actually as exciting as you thought it was. Number two, we don't actually all agree on what we thought we had agreed to build. And now, you feel like you've lost momentum, right? You feel like you've done this thing, which was tedious, and took a lot of focus to do. And it hasn't bought you anything. It's cost you the energy that you were going to use to build it. So you have this kind of innate motivation to not do it. But of course, we all know where that leads. George, you talk a lot about test driven development, and I think this fits into the same boat with that. It isn't a ton of fun to write tests, especially to write tests up front. And worst. Once you have that, you find that your code is failing. those tests like all the frickin time, and you got to go fix that instead of just, you know, getting in the zone and speeding away, right and page after page a logic that you're pretty sure is rock solid. It feels like it saps your energy.George Stocker 36:15You're right. And you said it earlier and it wasn't about test driven development No, it could have been is that you've got to know what you're trying to accomplish while you're trying to accomplish it. You've got to have a crystal clear picture of your goal with TDD. Otherwise, you'll get halfway through and realize, wait a minute, the way that I thought this architecture was going to flesh out doesn't work. And oh, by the way, all that stuff I did, it's got to go away. And nobody, nobody wants that.Josh Heyer 36:39Well, so that's it, right? It's an investment. You have to look at it that way. You can't look at it as like this is this is going to be the fun part of the process. You got to look at it as like, this is gonna save me so much stress and time later on. It's an investment in The future success of your project. And it's absolutely just as true for you communication as it is for the actual code you write.Jon Ericson 37:12One of the things that happened on documentation was, we didn't do some of that investment. Ironically, there wasn't enough documentation, run documentation. And we showed it to people inside the company. And the first time we sat down, did a like a usability interview where we just said, go here, show me what you think you should do. People had no earthly idea what to do. Like the goal of the project was confusing to people using using it the first time. And that meant we had to throw away a bunch of work that's been done or revamp it or change the way that it worked. And it just seemed tedious like, Well, the problem isn't my software. The problem is these people who don't understand The very obvious thing that we're trying to do, and and it's so easy to overestimate how quickly people will pick up on something because we spent six months or something, some number of months working on it. And of course, it felt natural to us. We'd seen happen built from nothing up into this, the system. So super easy for us, but you throw an average person and say figure it out. They need more than that. They need a lot more because they canJosh Heyer 38:30catch up. I struggled with it. I just figured you guys were smarter than me. We were smarter than you.Jon Ericson 38:38See, here's the problem. Like you can't just like there's not enough people who are as smart as we were. That's why it failedGeorge Stocker 38:46you everybody has to be at this level and we're trying to ride this ride. Now I'm gonna I'm gonna ask a question and this is purposely a loaded question for the sweet summer children among us that have never dealt with this but why not just assigned personas and why not just build software to those personas? Why deal with community at all?Josh Heyer 39:06That's George, that is a fantastic idea. As long as your community is composed entirely of fake people, it will work 100% of the time. Um,Jon Ericson 39:18yeah. So I'm working with a great marketing department, and that should not come out as sarcastic as that might sound. Like, honestly, they're wonderful. And they came up with these personas. And I looked at him, I was like, Wow, that is fantastic. This is great. This before I really knew anything about the community, and I started meeting the people in the community. I was like, which member which persona is this one? And, and then later, I did a poll, I tried to do a poll of who's actually using the site. And we had three personas for less than 20% of our population. And we had four personas total. So that one persona had to take on a lot of stuff. Yeah. Yeah, and so it was it was all wrong and like we're still using them. I mean, there's nothing wrong with having those personas from a marketing perspective. But you have to realize it's, let's call it aspirational. These are the people who would like to be using the site. But to get to that point, we need to actually work with the people who are using the site. We can't be you can't live in the aspirational space, you have to live in the space that you're where the work has happening already.Josh Heyer 40:29You ever done that thing, where you're like really dreading a conversation. And so you rehearse it in your own head, like and you make up the responses that the person you need to talk to is going to be given to you and somehow, you know, after a few practice runs, maybe that conversation just goes off perfectly. You You have no snappiest responses to to every reply you get from this figure of your your target In your head, and and then you go to have the conversation. And they got the temerity to not give any of the responses that you imagined them giving and instead say completely other things and you're sitting there stumbling over your words, trying to figure out why they're being so rude to you. And, and now let you just pair it all of the candy lines that you have so diligently rehearsed and eventually it dawns on you that you know maybe I didn't really know the person that I intended to talk to. Maybe I just thought I did.Unknown 41:40Mines meJon Ericson 41:42reminds me Shaka, you make a terrible straight man. Like you do not respond the way that I expect when I asked you a question. So all my fingers that I've been preparing weeks in advance, they just fall flat because you didn't set up properly.George Stocker 41:57Ah,Josh Heyer 41:59there's a there's A tangential story I could tell there but we're, we're at about 10 minutes or something, so I'll leave it for another call. But, you know, this is the thing people are people are complex people or rich people are like, like a, you know, a good craft beer. You can expect a good solid glass of Coors banquet. But that's not what you're gonna get. And you just got to kind of roll with it. You can, you can practice you should practice. But you should practice with real people. Because that's the only way you're you're actually going to learn how to deal with real people.George Stocker 42:43What's that phrase? plans are dumb planning is essential. However. I'm sure it makes Diane's God laughsJosh Heyer 42:55No, I mean, look, we're all in some sense where we're doing We're doing improv here. We're trying to get to a goal from a starting point, but we really don't know what the road there is going to look like. And the more detailed and inflexible we make those plans, whether that's communication or code, the more likely they are to break and leave a stranded out in the boonies someplace, no road in sight.George Stocker 43:27Now both of you were at Stack Overflow. And this is really interesting because both your stack overflow from one extreme to the other. When Stack Overflow started out, it was extremely transparent. And then over the years, it gradually became less so to the point that they're trying now to bring transparency back as a avid I guess, I think they have it as value so that it now that's on the wall as a value, maybe we'll do it. But they're trying to bring transparency back now as community managers you sit at a you sit between Users of your software and the company who is producing that software extensively for a financial reason, you know, how do you how do you deal with the users wanting transparency? And the company? Maybe not, you know, having transparency is their, their top priority.Josh Heyer 44:20I gotta say irony of this is, john, you go ahead.Jon Ericson 44:25I would probably say the same thing. Who knows, but I was gonna say, there was probably more of an illusion of transparency when I first started then then you might imagine, so we were free Intel telling, you know, telling the community what's going on, but there was a lot going on behind the scenes where he was sort of manage transparency. And I think that's perfectly fine. I don't think there's any problem with with that. And so just the question is, it's not like I didn't feel like it's necessarily extremes. It's more of like how, you know, what sort of transparency Lucian is probably a little too cynical, but like, you know, like, what are you gonna share? How are you going to share?George Stocker 45:07Yeah, the near?Jon Ericson 45:09Yeah, something like that. And I don't know, I mean, I never felt like we were completely transparent or even that that was necessarily appropriate. But you can have functional, functional non transparency unfunctional and I felt like there you know, kind of, like you said if transparency is a value that you have to get back to maybe something went wrong along the way.Josh Heyer 45:37I think at the point you put it on the wall, you've you've lost sight of what the purpose of trends so I'm gonna I'm gonna dispute something you said, john, I think I don't think there is perfect transparency. I think all transparency is superficial. Hmm. From a certain perspective, trends transparency is something you have to struggle to achieve and I Ideally, you know why you're struggling to achieve that you you have specific use cases in mind, you're building out transparency for a purpose. Once again, you have to know what you're doing and why you're doing it. You can't just say we're going to be completely open and transparent. This is the this is the open source conceit, that, you know, given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow. Well, that's probably true, but it's true in the same sense. As you know, putting Infinite Monkeys in front of typewriters is going to give you Shakespeare, it's not necessarily a practical utility, unless you happen to have an infinite number of monkeys sitting around in which case you have a bigger pool probably run on a typewriter robot. That's it's hard to find now, man, the so so when you're designing I wrote an essay on this a few months ago, but the when you're designing for transparency, the first thing you've got to establishes Why do I want this What? What purpose? Is the transparency supposed to achieve? Who is it for and and what are they trying to do that they needed for. And once you've done that, you may end up building a facade that is transparent. I use the analogy of the the the electronic control system in your car, where the actual functionality of your engine is anything but transparent. You go in there with your your analyzer, your code reader, and see what the ECU is telling you. It is a it is a fiction based on what the computer thinks it knows about what your engine is doing. But it's a very useful fiction. In almost all cases, it will give you a better idea of where a problem is or what you need to do to fix a performance issue. Then sitting there with an old school analyzer hooked up to the spark plugs is going to tell you, you have a lot better summary of the information than what you would have otherwise and you're able to make good decisions based on that. And that should be your goal for transparency and if you can be transparent down to the atomic level, okay, fine, great, more power to you. But if you can only do that at the cost of the actual utility, then you're not helping your audience by doing this. Your unbridledGeorge Stocker 48:36transparency all disasters what you're saying,Josh Heyer 48:38I it doesn't have to be but you have to keep in mind your gold. I mean, you know, I got a hammer hanging on the shelf next to me here right now. It's pretty transparent. Even though I can't see through it. I can see exactly how it works. All of the important bits The business and the client, the bit that I hold on to. Those are all very visible to me. I can pick that up blindfolded and probably even hit something with it. Although possibly that would be my thumb.Jon Ericson 49:15So I'm thinking of aJosh Heyer 49:17glass hammer I just cut out didn't I? Just you didGeorge Stocker 49:21at a weird point. Ah,Josh Heyer 49:23I don't need a glass hammer was my was my punch line, but I completely destroyed the setup to that.Jon Ericson 49:30Well, I was gonna, I was gonna use that analogy with the class hammer. I don't know if I will use class hammer but I was thinking, you know, the aphorism should be people who live in glass houses shouldn't take showers. Because Oh, man, maybe there is such a thing as too much transparency.George Stocker 49:49So what are you guys doing? Now? Like what do you how do you spend your time now john?Jon Ericson 49:57So some of that shocked me earlier this week was I had a little moment of grief. And it turned out that I haven't been programming like at all. And when I was at Stack Overflow, I could always pretend like, Oh, yeah, I'm a programmer a little bit because like, I'm working with programmers. And I work with people who are definitely not programmers. And I had a moment of grief, realizing that's not my field anymore. And so I'm actually a people manager as much as anything else. I've got a small team of people that that work I work with, but they work for me. And so I do a lot of meetings. I am, this is I've had a meeting, straight meeting since eight this morning. So I'm glad glad we were able to fit this in. Yeah. I have a short period of time where I don't have meetings and and then I write a lot of documentation about what I'm hoping to accomplish with our platform. The changes we're trying to make. I guess I talked to the community, because I believe that's important. So, yeah, my manager.George Stocker 51:14That's its own field. So I guess it's okay. Now, Josh, what do you do now?Josh Heyer 51:20So funny enough, I'm writing documentation. At this at this moment, I've, I guess a few other responsibilities or areas I'm investigating. But my big focus this week is writing introductory documentation for a few different programming concepts. Which has required me to step back and spend a lot of time analyzing what people who are very new to a system struggle with, where they get in the weeds. Because I can look at the existing documentation, I can look at the stuff that's out there. It all looks fine to me. It's perfectly easy for me to get up and running with it. And so I need to put that out of my head and stop writing phrases like you simply do x. And then y is easy. You just do z.George Stocker 52:25You don't use simply injustice in the documentary you become so much better. Right?Josh Heyer 52:29If If I was writing for me, I wouldn't be writing at all. I'm writing for the people who are posting on StackOverflow reposting on Twitter, reposting in the in the slack rooms or IRC who are struggling with stuff that I already know how to do that. The existing documentation is sufficient for for me, but not for them. They've gotten in the weeds. There's some concepts there's some idea terminology, something that they don't don't quite have their head around yet. And I need to identify that I need to identify where they're struggling and try to make sure that I'm taking the time to explain that ideally without writing, you know, 3000 words about it. because nobody's got that kind of time.George Stocker 53:20Now, I guess, final question for our audience, who, you know, may or may not have community managers on their team, but for software teams, should all software have community managers is this or is this a bit like asking a barber if I need a haircut? Oh, dude,Josh Heyer 53:38I, this this we could go another hour on this, but I'm gonna throw something at you. Software is government. That's not an analogy. That's not a metaphor. I'm saying software is literally a form of government. Do you agree Jon's nodding his head? Yeah, you guys are onGeorge Stocker 53:59the phone. I think my I think my head is now blown Actually, my mind is blown up my head. But don't make software. For my government, IJosh Heyer 54:08had a camera, I would point to my wall, string and the little cutouts for software is a form of government. If you go back to good old Thomas Hobbes, who I mentioned earlier, and think about his theories on government, you'll see this becomes immediately apparent government is a structure put in place by mutual agreement, maybe not in reality, but effectively. That allows us to delegate control in exchange for some measure of safety. Or to broaden that a little bit in exchange for something that we couldn't have without delegation. What do we do for software, we delegate control in exchange for the freedom to do something else. And whether you're talking about social software like Stack Overflow, Facebook or Twitter? Are you talking about application software like Microsoft Word, or I don't know, the venerable tar utility. All that software is doing is constraining your freedom in exchange for something else. It accepts a limited set of inputs, it will produce a limited set of outputs based on those inputs. And you are accepting those restrictions in exchange for something that it gives you effectively in exchange for time. possibly an exchange for accuracy or freedom from thought, ultimately, in exchange for calories, which is life, which is freedom.Unknown 55:45So,Josh Heyer 55:47software is a form of government. And I think this if you look at it from the perspective all software is in some sense social software. Everyone using Microsoft Word alone on their computer at home is implicitly accepting this social contract that their documents will take on certain formats allowed by the application and will be stored in a format dictated by the application. They are accepting that certain people will be able to accept those documents and read them. certain other people will not everyone using tar is accepting that, you know, it's not going to write zip files. You have to use something else for that. This I think explains a lot about the classic Unix philosophy of one tool one task as well as the the other classic Unix philosophy which is I think something along the lines of libertarianism forever ah the ultimate point of this In frustrating little rant is is that you don't necessarily need a community you don't necessarily need community managers. But in some sense your software is social. And if you want to serve the, the group of people governed by it if you really want to serve them as a body, if you want to leave your government unassailable from our servers, you do so you you then you ignore the needs and wants desires of your, your constituency at your peril. And a community management team can be the bridge to what your users as a group are needing, are suffering underGeorge Stocker 57:58with a hierarchy. approval rating the Congress, I assume?Josh Heyer 58:02Well, you know, I, I strongly suspect that certain companies have a lower approval rating Congress right now. So you could you could do worse than Congress. What's, what's the phrase, everybody hates Congress, but everybody loves their congressperson.Jon Ericson 58:21It is true. I do love my Congress person.George Stocker 58:25So what about you, john? is essential or separate from us.Jon Ericson 58:30So I, one of the things on this job, we have all these trainings, and I'm skeptical of trading, but we had one that was called change management. And unfortunately, change management. The acronym for that is CME. And so I saw people at my company who didn't have much. I'm the first basically the first CME that they've, they've had, using this acronym that I had an immediate idea for They were calling it change management. So community management. Then I took the class and I discovered that what change management is, is the people side of change. And so you're managing, like reactions when you change something on them. You're trying to figure out where the resistance is you're trying to, you know, like we were talking about before, what's in it. For me, it's a big phrase. And what I realized is there is almost a one to one relationship between change management, community management. And I was thinking about sharks example just a minute ago, and I actually know of a piece of software that that doesn't change or is pretty much locked in Ember, and that's the tech formatting system. At Donald Knuth, a bunch of words that are hard Knuth has me pronounce. He's basically said there, there aren't going to be any more updates and the updates are only like very rare. And it's a great system, I love it. But like it, you have to build on top of it, you have to build something more to make it usable, it's really hard for the average person to write in raw tech, you have to use some other extension to it. And one of the advantages for him is it's it's locked, he doesn't have to argue with people about how do you change, you know, what's the next change to it, you can just say it's not changing. And, and so the place where community is happening, and that software is at the extension level at the law tech, or other other extensions. And, and so I think I think it's absolutely true that because when you change something, you have to deal with people's response to it. If you want your software to change, you're going to have to deal with how people respond to that change. And that's whether you call it change management or community management is is 6100 Doesn't have another you are going to have to gonna have to talk to people and figure it out or you don't have to but like shark says a lot easier or it's a lot, a lot easier. things work out better in the end, I think.George Stocker 1:01:16All right. And on that note, john and shag or Josh, thank you for joining me today. Hey, you bet you This is absolutely. Alright folks. That's it for this week. Join me again next time for the build better software podcast. ThanksTranscribed by https://otter.ai

Welcome to another episode of Hope Transforms podcast. This week Jeff Atwood, Executive Director of Hope Smiles, chats with Alicia Shinska, wife of Uganda Director Ryan Shinska, to discuss her work in Uganda. Please rate and review the Hope Smiles podcast wherever you listen. For more information about Hope Smiles, visit https://www.hopesmiles.org. Support the show (https://www.classy.org/campaign/hope-smiles-giving-tuesday-2019/c260213)

Executive Director, Jeff Atwood, and Uganda Director, Dr. Ryan Shinska, share an update on how COVID-19 has impacted Uganda. Hope Smiles has been able to continue to care for patients and the work that is done in Uganda. Team members have stepped up in big ways, and this podcast shares those stories. To learn more, visit https://www.hopesmiles.org. Support the show (https://www.classy.org/campaign/hope-smiles-giving-tuesday-2019/c260213)

Welcome to today's episode of Hope Smiles. Executive Director, Jeff Atwood, visits with Dr. Serge Riche, who leads our Haiti team. Listen to the learn more about the great work that is being done in Haiti. For more information or to donate to Hope Smiles, visit https://www.hopesmiles.org. Support the show (https://www.classy.org/campaign/hope-smiles-giving-tuesday-2019/c260213)

Jeff Atwood discusses the tools in Discourse that help keep conversations organized and easily accessible. Listen to the full episode here. Communities are changing the way we do business. Discover a concrete framework for building powerful, productive communities and integrating them into your business. My new book, ‘People Powered: How communities can supercharge your business, […]

Philip Kiely is a software developer and author of Writing for Software Developers. He has written for a number of highly visible clients including Smashing Magazine, CSS-Tricks and Twilio. For his recently released book, he interviewed amazing writers and founders like Matt Levine of Bloomberg; serial entrepreneur, Stripe engineer and critically-acclaimed writer Patrick McKenzie; and Stack Overflow and Discord founder Jeff Atwood. Our conversation covers a wide range of topics on software, writing, the future of digital information distribution and more. Philip goes deep on the craft of technical writing and interviewing as well as marketing, distribution and connecting with audiences. We discuss the success of creator-focused content platform Gumroad and the economics of Gumroad versus Amazon. Philip analyzes the impact of COVID on digital content, universities and more.

Welcome to today's Hope Transforms podcast. Jeff Atwood, our Executive Director, recently traveled to the Hope Smiles in Uganda and visited with Anne Nyachwo who is Operations Leader and Accounting. Anne shares her story of transformation with Hope Smiles and how she came to be part of the work done in Uganda. Support the show (https://www.classy.org/campaign/hope-smiles-giving-tuesday-2019/c260213)

Jeff Atwood is the co-founder of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, the founder of Discourse, and the author of one of the most popular software blogs, CodingHorror. It’s hard to understate the impact he’s had on the software industry - it’s safe to say that most programmers use daily the tools he’s created to share knowledge, exchange ideas and solve problems. As well as being an extremely experienced software developer, Jeff is fascinated by the people side of programming and how we as software developers interact and learn. In this interview we talk about how StackOverflow started, his experiences with blogging, his observations of online communities, motivation and learning.

Today, we're joined by two of Hope Smiles's PHDOs, Dr. Susan and Dr. Grace. Both interviews were recorded recently on a trip to Uganda by Executive Director, Jeff Atwood. We hope you enjoy these episodes as you learn more about the outreach activities of Hope Smiles. To learn more, visit https://www.hopesmiles.org. Support the show (https://www.classy.org/campaign/hope-smiles-giving-tuesday-2019/c260213)

Jeff Atwood, Executive Director for Hope Smiles, recently visited Uganda and recorded today's episode with Dr. Ryan Shinska. For more information on Hope Smiles, visit https://www.hopesmiles.org. Support the show (https://www.classy.org/campaign/hope-smiles-giving-tuesday-2019/c260213)

This week, your nice hosts are still relaxing in Mark's dining room for an episode that has it all: a disagreement about Bluetooth, some good ClawTalk™, and the shortest conversation ever had on the subject of tabs vs. spaces. All this, plus a slightly higher than usual number of wild digressions.Discuss this episode on Reddit in this thread on r/gamedev! Input Methods and Controls 0:01:29 Stephen McGregorHardwareStephen's controller of choice, Power A FUSION.New Windows 10 Xbox wireless controller adapter delayed into 2018 - Gabe Gurwin, Digital TrendsMetro Nexus' tutorial in action - Mark LaCroix, TwitterBehold, the unintuitive enjoyment of Claw Breaker. - Martha Megarry, YouTube“How to Claw Effectively” - Ture Vangaurd, YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY-o0zYxjyE - Game Maker's Toolkit, YouTube“You say jump, I say how high?”  - Martin FasterholdtMartha's favorite Fingeance fighter, Sparky.This goofy game turns your entire keyboard into the controller - Andrew Webster, The VergeAlternative controls game Butt Sniffin Pugs, shown at Ctrl.Alt.GDC.Rocksmith Vs. Rock Band 3 – The Pro Guitar Showdown - Jeff Atwood, Fake Plastic RockGuy beats Dark Souls with DK Bongos - Jordan Devore, DestructoidGameplay of racing game Kirby Air Ride - Mutch Games, YouTube We mentioned this previous episode "We joke here." we also mentioned this one "Will you be the best with me?" Coding Syles 0:36:49 Mark LaCroixProgrammingWhat is your preferred Indent Style?Whatever you do, don't code like this. - @HisCursedness, TwitterDon't be a Stephen: Comment your code!Martha uses a cool HTML template engine called Pug.Getting started with Pug template engine - António Regadas, MediumRussian nesting dolls are called matryoshka. - WikipediaCamelCase or snake_case?DarkBASIC, which Stephen used when he was young, went open-source in 2016! - the Game CreatorsHistory around Pascal Casing and Camel Casing - Brad Abrams, MIcrosoft“Namespacing” in Objective-C - Matt, name spacing hipsterJetBrains IDE's: Webstorm for JavaScript and Rider for C#.Visual Studio Code is a lightweight Visual Studio that Mark really likes. Splatoon 2, ur, I mean Shooters 1:13:45 Martha MegarryGamingApparently, Splatoon devs didn't realize the comparison to Super Mario Sunshine… - Sean Ayres, Nintendo EnthusiastDesigning FPS Multiplayer Maps - Dodger, On Game DesignDesign Patterns in FPS Levels - Kenneth Hullett & Jim Whitehead, University of California - Santa CruzLost Planet - SomeCallMeVidal, YouTubeLost Planet's only sequel - Woophoro, YouTube We also referenced our episode on Violence in Games

Já tirou dúvidas de tecnologia na StackOverflow? Chegou a hora de tirar dúvidas sobre a Stack da StackOverflow, em um episódio com uma brasileira que dá orgulho para a nossa comunidade, Roberta Arcoverde, desenvolvedora nesse importante sistema que não usa cloud e nem testes! Participantes: Paulo Silveira, host do Hipsters, manja de internet Mauricio Linhares, o lutador que é um dos 1% top usuários no GUJ e na StackOverflow! Roberta Arcoverde, desenvolvedora na StackOverflow Links: GUJ, o filho do nosso host que ele considera seu "life achievement' Meta Stackoverflow, onde a comunidade discute o futuro da Stack Post sobre Unicode do Joel e outro de unicode do Paulo Silveira Post sobre reescrita de software, que o Paulo disse ser a respeito do Office, mas isso não é dito :) Post do Joel sobre a super valorização da simplicidade, que Paulo Silveira gosta muito Blog do Jeff Atwood, o outro fundador da Stack e atual responsável pelo Discourse Produção e conteúdo: Alura Cursos online de Tecnologia Caelum Ensino e Inovação Edição e sonorização: Radiofobia Podcast e Multimídia

Jeff Atwood considers himself a reasonably experienced Windows software developer with a particular interest in the human side of software development, as represented in his recommended developer reading list on his blog, Coding Horror. Computers are fascinating machines, but they're mostly a reflection of the people using them. In the art of software development, studying code isn't enough: you have to study the people behind the software, too.

Justin and Jason interview Jeff Atwood, co-founder of Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network, about how he got started as a coder and his passion for programming and mentoring, how he and Joel Spolsky came up with the idea for Stack Overflow, his belief in free software and the Open ID initiative, the process of raising venture capital for Stack Exchange and his views of entrepreneurship, why he and Joel stopped doing the Stack Overflow podcast and whether they might start up again, and the hardest step when scaling a web app.