Podcast #46 – The Podcast That Sounds Dirty But Isn”t

Our guest this week (after she joins a bit late) is Zuly Gonzalez - Stack Exchange moderator and power user.  As usual, we also have David Fullerton, Jay Hanlon, Joel Spolsky and (Fake) Producer Alex!

• Things are a mess over here, not just because we have to remember to stop masticating long enough to talk about podcast things. We're moving offices! The office is full of crates into which we have to pack all our stuff before we move.

• The new office is going to be awesome. It has hexagonal offices, and we don't remember if we've talked about this before.

• We have three chefs competing to be the chef for the new Stack Exchange office, and it's apparently a very desirable position, because they keep bribing Joel with treats.

• What's really going on? Our Tridion site went into public beta. It's different from the one that sounds like Magneto!

• For very small and/or very new sites, Joel thinks it might be useful to be able to email opted-in users every time a new question comes in.

• Let's talk about the new user homepage, shall we? It's exciting! We've been doing a lot of work about new user experience, and the homepage new users now see will finally be optimized for helping them figure out what to do next.

• Meanwhile, our guest has arrived! Welcome, Zuly! She's a moderator on OnStartups as well as a co-founder of Light Point Security, a web security startup that provides malware protection through the use of cloud-based web browsing.

• Zuly walks us through some of the history of OnStartups, the things that make the site work really well and ways in which the site could be improved.

• So what's the prognosis? Zuly would like to see people get more involved with the community aspect of the site, and with moderation.

• Moving on to questions of security. Zuly (and Joel) observe a move in the field of IT Security away from detection and protection against major threats and toward isolation (the Battlestar Galactica defense).

• Jay thinks everyone screaming homophobic slurs into Xbox headsets is German. Nobody is completely sure why.

• Jay wonders, what about real people? What things should normal people be thinking about in terms of security that most people still don't do?

• One other very serious question: Is Zuly's dog cuter than Joel's dog? Dog Talk ensues!

• Time to discuss a Meta question: how can we stop premature deletion?

That's a wrap! You've been listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #46 with special guest Zuly Gonzalez and the rest of the regular gang! Join us next time from our brand new podcast studio - it's going to be awesome (but the podcast will still be terrible).

Episode source