StackOverflow.com

If you’re a reader of Coding Horror — and if you’re a programmer or aspire to become one, you should be — you’re probably aware that its author Jeff Atwood recently left his job to work on his own projects. Today he announced what one of those projects is: StackOverflow.com, a joint effort with Joel “Joel on Software” Spolsky.

Here’s his description of StackOverflow.com:

So what is stackoverflow?

From day one, my blog has been about putting helpful information out into the world. I never had any particular aspirations for this blog to become what it is today; I’m humbled and gratified by its amazing success. It has quite literally changed my life. Blogs are fantastic resources, but as much as I might encourage my fellow programmers to blog, not everyone has the time or inclination to start a blog. There’s far too much great programming information trapped in forums, buried in online help, or hidden away in books that nobody buys any more. We’d like to unlock all that. Let’s create something that makes it easy to participate, and put it online in a form that is trivially easy to find.

Are you familiar with the movie pitch formula?

Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home. Better programming is our goal.

Want to know more? They’ve recorded a podcast [MP3, 8.32MB, 46 minutes, 12 seconds] in which they describe their vision for StackOverflow.com.