Stack Overflow

One day, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky decided to help the programming community. Along the way, other guys joined them (Jarrod Dixon, Geoff Dalgas, Jeremy Kratz and Brent Ozar) and they came with the absolutely fantabulous Stack Overflow.

From their About page

Stack Overflow is a programming Q & A site that’s free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions, free to read, free to index, built with plain old HTML, no fake rot13 text on the home page, no scammy google-cloaking tactics, no salespeople, no JavaScript windows dropping down in front of the answer asking for $12.95 to go away. You can register if you want to collect karma and win valuable flair that will appear next to your name, but otherwise, it’s just free. And fast. Very, very fast.

It’s definitely that: fast. For the last weeks, I’ve been browsing a lot through the hot questions tab and I barely found unanswered questions. It’s amazing how fast you can get an answer and, for what I’ve seen, it’s usually the best.

The voting up and down associated with comments mechanism is also great, as you can learn through the answerer but also by everyone else’s knowledge. And they also have a badge system which rewards you depending on your attitudes (actually, by now I only have 8 bronze badges..).

This thing has been growing so fast that even the most famous programmers are getting into it. Alan Kay, for instance, is already one of them.

So, they have lots and lots of information there, go check it out!

Ah, and don’t forget to check these:

• What’s your favorite programmer cartoon – The greatest achievement on indexing all programming cartoons out there!
• Hidden features of Python
• Convert list of ints to one number – This question is fantastic not for the question itself but for the answer this guy received. The one with the chart is incredible!
• Pretty graphs and charts in Python – Some of them use CairoPlot!