Podcast #61 – The “What Jay”s Done Wrong” Podcast

Welcome to the 61st installment of the Stack Exchange Podcast, brought to you by okra (yes, that okra). On our show today are David Fullerton, Jay Hanlon, and Joel Spolsky. It's been a long time since we last did a podcast, so let's get started.

• First point of business: we have an iPad app! It's got a snazzier feed and a fancy live preview in the Compose view. We've been getting more posts from mobile than we expected, because computing via iPad is the way of the future (according to Joel), so lots of features in the iOS app are now better optimized for posting as opposed to reading.

• Moving onto far more important business: Joel's dog Taco got 21,000 likes on Instagram.

• PSA: Always make sure your insurance will cover it before you travel to Kansas City. (Any Kansas City. We're not sure how many there are, or even which one Joel went to on his zombie visit.)

• Also, Garmin makes boats.

• By the way, we're still talking about the iPad app, apparently. We're collecting a lot of data about how our mobile apps are being used to help us gear them better toward the people who are actually using them. Our mobile team (led by Kasra) has been working really hard on making the apps shine (despite Joel's efforts to force random features nobody will use onto them). So try it out (iOS, Android) and let us know what you think. We love feedback.

• Moving on! We revamped our Be Nice policy after hashing it out with the community on meta. (We didn't handle the feedback part super well. Lessons were learned!) This discussion of it is about as long as the original draft was, so get comfortable.

  • A secondary point of interest: should comments stick around forever, or disappear after 21 days? I bet you can guess Joel's opinion. (This question is sheerly hypothetical. Nobody's actually proposing this now.)

  • A tertiary point of business: the numbering of the Ten Commandments really is disputed - Joel's not making this part up.

• Okay that's great. Next! Joel tries to bring up diversity (spoiler alert: we're pro-diversity), but we decide to devote more of a podcast to it later.

• Say, David, what is a Stack Snippet? We're glad you asked! It's essentially a loving knockoff of JSFiddle. They help us ensure that our content stays up-to-date and relevant, and they reduce mental friction.

• This is cool: we open-sourced our monitoring system. It's called "Bosun" (or "Boatswain", or "bo's'n", or "the first word of The Tempest", but we think it's easiest to stick with Bosun). Listen about it in this podcast, read about it on the blog or the Server Fault blog, or just get started. It's in alpha, but you can check it out. (Major credit to Matt Jibson and Kyle Brandt for their great work on this project.)

• We have a new Q&A site about Worldbuilding, and it's doing really well - despite the Community Team's misgivings about launching it. We've shifted toward letting most Area 51 proposals test their legs in private beta - as long as they don't embarrass us or duplicate or overlap significantly with other sites. That's why we decided to launch Worldbuilding even though we didn't understand it - and luckily, they proved us wrong.

  • Could a government control its people using frequencies?

  • Does the sun being blocked affect electricity?

  • How would an aquatic race develop computers?

  • Is Superman a peeping Tom? or Would x-ray vision be biologically reasonable?

  • How close to interstellar space travel could humans get in the near future?

• Worldbuilding is in public beta. So is:

  • The site currently known as Moderators but whose name may be changing soon

  • Startups

  • Emacs

  • History of Science and Math

• We closed down Web Design and Home Automation due to lack of activity.

• Salesforce is fully graduated with a beautiful new design. It's got all kinds of fonts and colors.

We've been going for HOURS (one hour), so it's time to wrap it up. Thanks for listening to the Stack Exchange Podcast episode 61, brought to you by okra!

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