ALTERNATE UNIVERSE DEV

The Stack Overflow Podcast

Podcast #55 – Don”t Call It A Comeback

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #55, recorded on Friday Thursday the 13th with your hosts Joel Spolsky, David Fullerton, and Jay Hanlon! Today's episode is brought to you by the city of Sochi, Russia.

  • It's been a long time since we last recorded, so we have a lot to talk about, and we're going to skip most of it. First we're going to talk about all our brand new sites, so Joel learn about them for the first time.

    • Pets is a site for (you guessed it) pet owners to wonder why their cats like to watch them making the bed. Also, we already talked about this site. Moving on!

    • We also launched Italian, which is very high quality but unfortunately very slow so far.

    • Jay thought Ebooks would be awful, but it has turned out to be extremely high quality and high engagement.

    • Hooray, beer! Our new Beer site is somehow different from Homebrew, so Joel quits.

    • We launched a Relationships & Dating site, but we broke up with it pretty quickly because it generated too many bad "commitment" jokes (and because the topic was a hard fit for our engine).

    • We launched a site for software recommendations. And discussed it at length. The good parts version: it's going much better than expected.

    • We almost forgot to talk about Aviation! It launched a while back, and it is a slam dunk for our engine.

  • It's time for our Site of the Week! (This week was apparently four months long.) Let's talk about Code Golf. It's a site for code golf (unsurprisingly!). Links discussed:

  • We already talked at length about the new topbar, but it has bred some interesting changes to other areas of our pages. For example: when we moved Hot Questions out of the MultiCollider and into the sidebar, Code Golf started getting huge boosts on their most interesting questions (as did other sites with broadly interesting topics). Code Golf is seeing 11-15% more answers due to the traffic coming in from other sites via the Hot Questions sidebar. Neat!

  • So! Let's talk about our most exciting new site: Stack Overflow em Português. Localizing our codebase was a dream of ours for a long time, and we finally did it. It's got 1304 perguntas at the time of recording this podcast. (If you want to know more about why we launched a non-English site, check out Jay's blog post.) The public beta so far is one of our most successful launches ever.

  • Also, you can go download our Android app or sign up to test our iOS app.

Thanks for joining us for Stack Exchange Podcast #55, sponsored by the city of Sochi, Russia - don't forget to visit the Friendship Tree. See you next time!

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