Podcast #53 – Let”s Go Rio

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #53 with special guest Gabe Koscky, our new Brazilian community manager, and usual suspects Jay Hanlon, Joel Spolsky, and David Fullerton. Today's show is brought to you by the National Security Administration!

• Site Milestones: We launched Astronomy, which is not the same thing as the Space Exploration site we'd previously launched.

  • You can ask questions about gravity (the force) on Astronomy. You cannot ask questions about Gravity (the movie).

  • Astronomy and Physics have a lot of overlap, and that's okay!

  • Also, you can't say Count Dooku in Portuguese. This is an adult-only podcast.

• We also launched Tor, a Q&A site about The Onion Router, a protocol for people who want more privacy and anonymity on the internet. There's been a lot of press lately about the nefarious deeds you can do thereon, but there are legitimate reasons to use it, too.

• Our last new site is almost definitely not by the NSA: Pets. The site is doing very well. It's extremely high-activity so far.

  • This is David's favorite question.

• And now, this week's Featured Site: The Workplace. It's still in beta, and we don't usually talk about betas in our featured site segment, but this site is especially interesting because its answers are much less factual than most other sites... and yet it's still successful.

  • Get to the point!

  • How do I deal with difficult but talented employees? is relevant to David's daily work life.

  • There's some good information on workplace transitions. Joel says it's a self-help group for commiserating. Jay disagrees!

• It's time to find out everything Gabe knows about Portugal, where he doesn't live, and has never visited. (Gabe was hired to correct Jay when he calls the language "Brazilian", or the South American country "Portugal".)

• He's been with us for a few months now as our very first Portuguese-speaking community manager as we work on getting Stack Overflow available in other languages.

• So why do we need Stack Overflow in Portuguese? Why not just let everyone speak English? Lots of Brazilian programmers simply don't speak English, and won't learn - but while so many of the world's resources about programming are in English, they're out in the cold.

• Aside: Joel got a milkshake delivered from Shake Shack, thanks to WunWun, which is extremely confusing.

• There's an Area 51 proposal for the site, and we'll almost certainly be rolling Stack Overflow in Portuguese out to Area 51 committers first - so check it out if you're interested.

Thanks for listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #53 with special guest Gabe Koscky, brought to you by the NSA (they're listening). Tune in next time for our chat with special guest Sara Chipps!

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