Podcast #58 – Pack ”Em In Like Bees

Welcome to Stack Exchange Podcast #58 brought to you by the Stack Exchange iOS app! Our hosts Joel Spolsky, David Fullerton, and Jay Hanlon are joined this week by our guests, the Stack Exchange Design Team: Jin Yang, Stéphane "The French Guy" Martin, Courtny Cotten, and Josh Hynes.

Let's kick things off with Community Milestones (assuming Joel knows where he is).

• Joomla!

  • IHOP dot com is a Joomla! site.

• Unrelated: Donald Knuth mentioned our TeX site in a recent TUGboat.

• Earth Science

  • Why do snowflakes form into hexagonal structures?

  • What is the status of the Raymo & Ruddiman idea that Tibet cooled the Earth?

  • Joel had a rock computer when he was a kid. We're not sure that's a real thing. (UPDATE: it is!)
• Academia has graduated and has a beautiful new design, thanks to designer Stéphane Martin.

New Features

• The iPhone app is coming! [Ed: it has now been released!]

• We're also working on instant automagical refresh in the apps.

• The MSO/MSE split happened! But we already talked about it.

• We're busy breaking Super User by trying to migrate it over to CloudFlare.

• Coming soon... Careers 2.0 City Pages!

Community of the Week: Travel

• Why do people on airplanes often have tomato juice as a drink?

• OK we're all adults here, so really, how on earth should I use a squat toilet?

• Why are airline passengers asked to lift up window shades during takeoff and landing?

• How to avoid drinking vodka?

And now we turn to our special guests! Jin Yang is the founding member of the design team. Stéphane Martin is the French guy, and he's in the U.S. for the first time! Courtny Cotten is from Indiana, and Josh Hynes is from Pennsylvania. Those places aren't as cool as France (apparently).

So, what does the design team do? Jin gives us his memorized elevator pitch for what Stack Exchange designers do all day. (It includes beer pong, but probably not in the way you're thinking.) Stéphane designed the new look and feel for Academia and tells us about the process creating the look and feel for that fully graduated community. Courtny's worked on the new Careers 2.0 city pages, and Careers search results. Josh worked on reporting, messaging for Careers, and the new user profile page on the Q&A sites. Both of them are working on new features for Careers right now. We also delve deeper into Stack Exchange design culture and history. Anecdotes! Anecdotes galore!

Thanks for listening to Stack Exchange Podcast #58, brought to you by our iOS app... and Jay's crappy Batman drawing.

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