I was amused by the contrast between (on the one hand) Joel's long list of instructions and "how-to" hints in his blog post, and (on the other hand) the seeming

I was amused by the contrast between (on the one hand) Joel's long list of instructions and "how-to" hints in his blog post, and (on the other hand) the seeming absence of instructions/guidance on the site itself. The way I see it, the site is right now (mostly) good for two types of questions: Really basic programming questions that could be answered by reading some docs. Really domain-specific questions that are hard to find info on online. If you're working on something really interesting, but don't know enough about the domain to know where you should be looking or what you should be searching for, you can get really good guidance from the people on stack overflow who know what they're talking about. It's also good for getting an idea of consensus about certain technologies.