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I like this blog post, this is the vision of Stack Overflow that I bought into when I started posting. However, it's hard not to read this blog post as a diplom
by Flimm 8y ago
I like this blog post, this is the vision of Stack Overflow that I bought into when I started posting. However, it's hard not to read this blog post as a diplomatic pushback to the current efforts of SO leaders to make it more welcoming. Jeff Atwood says that SO is "supposed to involve a healthy kind of minor [...] anxiety".
This section in particular stands out to me:
> This is why I cringe so hard I practically turn myself inside out when people on Twitter mention that they have pointed their students at Stack Overflow. What you'd want for a beginner or a student in the field of programming is almost the exact opposite of what Stack Overflow does at every turn:
> * one on one mentoring * real time collaborative screen sharing * live chat * theory and background courses * starter tasks and exercises
> These are all very fine and good things, but Stack Overflow does NONE of them, by design.
If this were on the official SO blog, I would be very surprised.
- codinghorror 8y ago> not to read this blog post as a diplomatic pushback to the current efforts of SO leaders to make it more welcoming Not at all, at least, that is not my intent. I do feel like the key items articulated there (SO as wiki, duplicate danger, competitive system of peer review, for practicing programmers) are not well understood by outsiders and peripheral members of the community, though. Note that the Stack Overflow tour (which was and is quite good!) that explains what Stack Overflow is was perma-demoted to the footer... well, that used to be true, but actually I just checked now and it's gone altogether? The word "tour" doesn't appear on the SO homepage in incognito mode, at all. You can visit "help" (which is in the footer) and then, and only then, will it appear as a topbar. https://stackoverflow.com/tour https://stackoverflow.com/tour