Podcast #18

This is the eighteenth episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and I discuss the following:

• We finally get to meet Michael Pryor, the co-founder of Fog Creek Software, who is a special guest on this episode!

• Joel had good luck browsing our beta site using Opera Mini. I'm still incredibly impressed with the Mobile Safari browser on the iPhone, which renders our JavaScript-heavy site perfectly, as far as I can tell.

• Joel posted a Regex question on the Stack Overflow beta, and I can't help bringing up RegexBuddy, my favorite (and still best) regular expression tool for developers.

• Social websites are a bit unpredictable to build -- we intended Stack Overflow as a relatively straightforward question / answer site, but there's quite a bit of demand for inter-answer discussion. Our system is designed to float the best answers to the top via voting, but this makes conversations in the answers difficult to follow.

• Stack Overflow is a hybrid of a discussion forum, a wiki system, and a voting/reputation system. It's been a hit so far, but we are running into some design issues resulting from this unusual combination.

• I had the opportunity last week to meet Merlin Mann, who Joel and I are big fans of. Joel particularly enjoys their podcast, You Look Nice Today. Turns out Merlin is a fan of Joel's as well. We should form a mutual admiration society!

• If you'd like to sign up for the Stack Overflow private beta, which will run until the end of the month, use our Google Docs signup form.

We didn't get to any listener questions this episode, but we'll remedy that next time!

If you'd like to submit a question to be answered in our next episode, record an audio file (90 seconds or less) and mail it to podcast@stackoverflow.com. You can record a question using nothing but a telephone and a web browser.

The transcript wiki for this episode is available for public editing.

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