Global Nerdy

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.

And to think that it’s Apple that gets associated with the term “Reality Distortion Field”: here’s an internal Microsoft video featuring a faux Bruce Springsteen band singing about how the Vista sales team “saw lots of sales” can expect to see even more now that SP1 is out.

Surprisingly, it’s not the most painful Windows-related musical number in a Microsoft promo video. That honour belongs to “I’m using W-w-windows W-w-windows three-eighty-six” rap in this video (the musical number starts at around 2:19):

While this video wasn’t made by Microsoft and doesn’t have any music, it does feature Windows, cheese and Matthew Perry and Jennifer Aniston. It’s a Windows 95 Guide and it’s groan-a-riffic (sample dialogue: one of Aniston’s line is “Taskbar? Is that anything like a Snickers bar?”).

Here’s part one:

and here’s part two:

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Creative Labs’ PR nightmare (you can find out more here) continues. Consumerist covers the story in their piece, Creative Sparks Customer Revolt When It Tries To Silence Third-Party Programmer, in which they make the astute observation:

Rule of thumb for bad news in the mainstream media: release it Friday so it’s buried over the weekend. Rule of thumb for the web: don’t infuriate thousands of your customers right before you decide to tune out for 48 hours.

A boycott site has been set up: BoycottCreative.com.

And finally, the Creative Labs forum posting that started it all, Message to Daniel_K, has grown to 171 pages as of this writing, most of it being “I will never buy a Creative Labs product again”-type messages.