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My first six weeks working at Stack Overflow
- jonhmchan 13y agoTaking a peek behind the curtain. Also, shameless plug for our new portuguese site: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/ola-mundo-announcing-stack-overflow-in-portuguese/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2014/01/ola-mundo-announcing-s...
- jodrellblank 13y agoWhen I press escape on your blog page, I get redirected to a login page at "https://jon-chan-wz68.squarespace.com/config" https://jon-chan-wz68.squarespace.com/config" - is that normal?
- gtrubetskoy 13y agoStackoverflow runs on Windows, really?
- isuraed 13y agoThought this was well known. SO was founded by Joel Spolsky who was a long time MS employee.
- mjibson 13y agoI believe Joel was a short time MS employee. And I think the MS stack was chosen because that's what Jeff Atwood and the other early folks knew best at the time.
- jaredsohn 13y agoYeah, relatively short. Spolsky was a Program Manager on the Microsoft Excel team between 1991 and 1994 (he drove Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications strategy.)
- benched 13y agoPeople seem to get a premium on their perceived 'time' spent at MS for being earlier employees, which often correlates with how important a system they worked on.
- sdegutis 13y agoI recently had an epiphany: operating systems are just operating systems. None are better than the others, they're just different. Having tried nearly all of them by now (MS-DOS, Windows *, Mac OS X, Linux), I regret having any loyalty to any of them.
- sdegutis 13y agoThat said, I tried out VS Express the other night, and I forgot just how neat it is after all these years (last one I used was VB6). Certainly starting to prefer it over Xcode. And I'm loving Windows 8's UI/UX innovation over OS X's lack thereof lately. But the tides will change, and one day I'll probably be writing software using some awesome tools in an OS that hasn't been invented yet, by a future startup-turned-monopoly.
- sdegutis 13y agoHow are comments ordered? I thought it was the points you see, but this one has 4 points and [other] has 6 points (at time of writing), but [other] is below this one. Is it based on absolute number of upvotes (without subtracting downvotes)? [other]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7146156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7146156
- roryokane 13y agoAs far as I can tell, it’s based on a combination of upvotes and time since posting. New comments start at the top of their tree and, as time passes, settle into where they would be if sorted by upvotes. So yours is above the other one because it’s more recent, but in a week, if the upvotes don’t change, the other one will be on top. It’s probably a similar algorithm to Reddit’s published “hot” algorithm (http://amix.dk/blog/post/19588 http://amix.dk/blog/post/19588).
- OlivierLi 13y agoOSes are complicated and gigantic engineering projects. Some of them are most definitely better than others in some respects. Saying that they are all absolutely equal is like declaring every CPU ever designed completely equal. It's true that most users will be well served by most OSes but that's more a statement about users than about OSes.
- justathrow2k 13y agoPeople are still surprised that people write software that runs on Windows, really?
- acchow 13y agoMoving on from Windows is taking longer than we thought, but will happen a lot sooner than you think. Most new applications live in the browser (even MS Office and Intuit Quickbooks) or on your smartphone/tablet.
- justathrow2k 13y agoShrug. No rush from my side of the room. I have found developing Windows application and web apps on the MVC .Net stack to be quite enjoyable.
- loudmax 13y agoWill the servers be running Mono instead of .Net, or are parts of the site being rewritten in a different language? What about the databases?
- dijit 13y agoI'm a unix fanboy, but I hear MSSQL is best in class, comparable with postgresql and maybe contending with oracle a little.
- jodrellblank 13y agoTo say the new MS Office lives in the browser is a bit of an overstatement. There is some support in SkyDrive and SharePoint for opening Office documents in-browser, (in some cases, I think requiring Internet Explorer), but it's feature limited. Office 2013 is very much a Windows Desktop program. And now a Windows RT App, too.
- acchow 13y agoHow about Office 365?
- toddan 13y agoAnd what wrong with that? The site is scaling extremely good and for a long time the whole application was running on only two servers.
- TacticalCoder 13y agoSO / SE is one of the posterchild of C# / .Net. However at the beginning they were really Windows only while now there's really a lot of Linux in there. HAProxy running on Linux, for example. There was a recent post about the various technologies using by the entire stack and there have also been SO/SE employees detailing the stack here on HN. So it depends what you mean by "runs on Windows". Certainly the scalability issues are handled, at least in part, by Linux.
- kops 13y agoOh man!!!! How will you sleep tonight ;-?
- jonhmchan 13y agoYep - it's incredibly performant. As I mentioned in the post, I was pleasantly surprised having been a die-hard python/mongo/os x/etc developer.
- tim333 13y agoQuite a lot here on why Stackoverflow is on windows http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-ruby.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-ruby.html
- isuraed 13y agoGood article. Always interesting to read how others approach learning new technologies.
- Oculus 13y agoIs it a Microsoft stack all the way down or are there parts of the codebase that are written in other languages? In my mind, when a company gets big enough you usually get different teams writing in different code bases if it fits into their problem domain better.
- mwsherman 13y agoThere are several codebases now, yes. The main Q&A and Careers sites are C#. We have other projects in Node and Go as well. (We also rely on Redis, HAProxy and Elastic Search on non-MS platforms.)
- Oculus 13y agoThat's cool, I never knew Stack Overflow was using Node in production.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jonaldomo 13y agoHow do you like working on a Mac on a Windows stack? I work on a Mac on a Linux stack and it's very straightforward. We have some Windows applications have have to rely on remote desktop.
- jonhmchan 13y agoIt's not really that bad. I'm running a parallels VM running Windows 8. The major difference between that and running a straight Windows environment is that we switch off from Vagrant (running a VM within a VM is pretty rough)
- jc4p 13y agoThat was my top question during my interview. I'm seriously amazed at how nice Parallels runs now a days (and on fast machines) though.
- slg 13y agoThis might be a left over from my experience from older (slower) VMs, but I am curious why you went that route over Boot Camp. Looking at the stack it seems like you would spend almost all your time in Visual Studio or SQL Management Studio without much need for native OSX software. Why not get the speed boost of a non-virtualized environment in the OS you would be spending an overwhelming majority of your time in?
- thisisdallas 13y agoThat's actually what I am doing (I'm an oddball, I prefer Apple hardware and Microsoft software). I have an iMac running windows 8.1 and an external Cinema Display. So far, everything works and runs great. I would suspect if I did anything graphically heavy, I would run into some problems though.
- guiomie 13y agoI'm wondering the same. Visual Studio can be quite demanding (especially with Demon installed and Resharper)
- scrabble 13y agoOne of the reasons the MS stack gets a bad rap is that it has been adopted by a lot of enterprises and a lot of poor developers. You can write something inefficient in any stack, but it seems like there's a larger proportion of unskilled to skilled developers working in the MS stack. Edit: To clarify, I work in the MS stack 9-5.
- pc86 13y agoThis has not been my experience at all. In terms of the unskilled:skilled ratio alone (again, in my experience), the Microsoft stack has more highly skilled developers than PHP by at least an order of magnitude, but not quite as many as the more "academic" languages such as Haskell and the like. I've seen a lot of hesitance on the part of unskilled developers to venture into the MS stack as it has historically been hard to set up and expensive to get the software and server(s).
- couchand 13y agoI think your second point applies equally to skilled developers. The MS stack is hard to set up and use. Actually, it probably applies more to experienced developers who've seen the alternative.
- mehrdada 13y agoI'm not sure if "MS stack is hard to set up and use" is the right way to characterize it. SQL Server is probably the easiest full-fledged RDBMS to get up and running, for instance, and Visual Studio is among the most friction free environments I've seen (for getting started at least). However, I wholeheartedly agree that MS stack, mostly Windows, is hard to configure, monitor, and administer when you want to horizontally scale, primarily because of the GUI driven configuration mindset and proprietary nature.
- guiomie 13y agoI think the MS stack has a bad reputation because a lot of developpers come from an academic (undergrad) background, and not that many institutions use MS products (licence fees). When I got out of school I was young and arrogant (still kinda am), and since I only did Java at school in terms of OO languages, I immediately dismissed C# as not good enough. Then theres the whole anti-MS movement out there that will simply bash MS stack because is it by MS.
- kylec 13y agoI'm curious what the licensing costs are for their Microsoft stack. Stack Exchange was in BizSpark early on so they got a pretty good discount, but they can't be anymore since it's been more than 3 years.
- df07 13y agoThe only thing that really hurts are the SQL Server licenses. Everything else (MSDN licenses for devs, OS licenses, etc.) are small percentages on the cost of hiring a dev or building a server. SQL Server pricing is a beast -- they know you're locked in, and it's carefully priced just under the "what if we just hired several people to do nothing but move us off of SQL Server" price point. With that said, we're getting amazing performance out of SQL Server without having to shard, etc: all of Stack Overflow runs off a single server, and most of the rest of Stack Exchange runs off a second server.
- buckbova 13y ago"Stack Overflow runs off a single server" that is a cluster of how many physical servers with how many processors and how much ram? Three Dell R720xd database servers (two in New York City, one in Oregon, using SQL AlwaysOn Clustering) (Global "Sites" DB & Stack Overflow dedicated): - 2x Intel Xeon Processor E5-2680 @ 2.70 GHz - 384 GB RAM - 21 drives - Mirrored Pair for OS - 16+1 Intel 710 200GB SSD RAID10 for databases - SQL Server 2014 CTP2 - 2x 10Gb network team
- noselasd 13y agoThe hardware specs as of December 2013 are here: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/10369/which-tools-and-technologies-are-used-to-build-the-stack-exchange-network http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/10369/which-tools-an...
- kmontrose 13y agoDavid means a single primary, there's a read-only replica for in DC failover and a read-only replica in our other DC for "New York is getting hit by another hurricane"-failover. A few services hit the read replicas instead of the primary (our API, for example, moves what it can when it can), but the code for stackoverflow.com is almost entirely querying a single (quite beefy) box. We can and do sometimes run without either replica in the AG, though we prefer not to except for scheduled maintenance.
- thebouv 13y agoI'm surprised. I thought everything was written in JavaScript nowadays.
- timlin 13y agoWhat is the arch-shaped object to the left of his keyboard in the picture of his new Mac? Edit: Nevermind, found it under Accessories on Apple.com. It's a BookArc Pro by Twelve South - http://store.apple.com/us/product/HA242ZM/A/twelve-south-bookarc-pro-vertical-desktop-stand http://store.apple.com/us/product/HA242ZM/A/twelve-south-boo...
- mattfenwick 13y agoVery interesting read, thanks for posting. Out of curiosity, since you mentioned you're a self-taught programmer -- what did you major in at college?