To Dev or not to Dev

I have been actively and religiously following the StackOverflow initiative started earlier this year by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. I have been listening to every podcast, finding the content of their discussions informative and interesting, often bringing some reality and realism to the world of development and IT.

Jeff e-mailed me a link to the beta about 2 weeks ago, however due to my own personal commitments with Tech-Ed South Africa I was not able to spend a lot of time on the site. I have since spent some time looking at what the site has to offer and I must congratulate him and his team on some very innovative ideas and a lot of hard work.

The Architecture

The first thing that makes StackOverflow interesting is it's architectures. Jeff and the team opted to go with the new ASP.Net MVC platform to develop the site and from what I can see so far it has been a huge success. The site loads extremely fast and pages and navigation is a breeze. For me, that fact that a still "experimental" technology has been introduced into running a future major website and it has proven stable enough to work. When fairly established developers tackle a project like StackOverflow with platforms like MVC it also makes huge leaps in convincing developers to actively research and use the technology, ensuring it's growth and establishing it in the developer toolbox.

The Idea

StackOverflow is a questions and answers site focussing on all development languages, and even covers some IT Pro products. With a small list of beta testers currently spending a lot of time populating the site with questions, the overall feeling and response to the site has been extremely positive. The ability to vote for answers and questions, and building reputation points is also well implemented, and there is some personal satisfaction when visiting the site and finding that your reputation score has gone up another 20 points.

The content so far has also been extremely informative, allowing a for a lot of discussion and detailed information being posted, providing accurate answers. The voting system also allows for correct information to filter to top, and eliminates the need for every person to provide an answer, instead just vote for the answer you agree with, eliminating duplication of answers and ensuring accurate information is always quickly accessible.

The Design

Can you spell Google? Jeff's design team has kept the site clean and neat, ensuring the focus of the site is on content. Clean and simple is the word of the day when navigating the site, and the use of existing external tools like Google Forms and Uservoice ensures that very little reinvention of the wheel is done as far as the design and development is concerned.

In Conclusion

I have to congratulate Jeff and his team on an awesome project, and I sincerely hope to see the site grow from strength to strength. It will definitely become a often used tool in my toolbox of internet research sites.

If you want to find out more about StackOverflow and the Beta head over to Jeff's blog here or the signup information found here.

Crossposted from Diago.co.za