Coding Horror: Code: It's Trivial - The Diigo Meta page

• 14 Aug 09
  

  Mert Nuhoglu

  design programming stackoverflow

  • Regardless of what your feelings may be on StackOverflow in general, most visitors seem to agree that the user experience is smooth, from start to finish
  • here is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable.
  • 7 more annotations...
  • • A developer, asked how hard something will be to clone, simply does not think about the polish, because the polish is incidental to the implementation.
    • given enough time, open source clones will begin to approximate what we've created with Stack Overflow
    • Not to write the best Stack Overflow code possible, but to create the best Stack Overflow experience possible. That's our mission: make Stack Overflow better, in some small way, than it was the day before
    • we try very, very hard not to suck -- and more importantly, we keep plugging away at it, day after day.
    • • synthesizing cleaner, saner HTML markup
        
      • optimizing our pages for speed and load time efficiency
        
      • simplifying or improving our site layout, CSS, and graphics
        
      • responding to support and feedback emails
        
      • writing a blog post explaining some aspect of the site engine or philosophy
        
      • being customers of our own sites, asking our own programming questions and sysadmin questions
        
      • interacting with the community on our dedicated meta-discussion site to help gauge what we should be working on, and where the rough edges are that need polishing
        
      • electing community moderators and building moderation tools so the community can police and regulate itself as it scales
        
      • producing Creative Commons dumps of our user-contributed questions and answers
        
      • coming up with schemes for responsible advertising so we can all make a living
        
      • producing the Stack Overflow podcast with Joel
        
      • helping set up logistics for the Stack Overflow DevDays conferences
        
      • setting up the next site in the trilogy, and figuring out where we go next
    • In fact, writing code is a tiny proportion of what makes most businesses successful.
    • But if you really want your code to be successful, you'll stop coding long enough to do all that other, even more trivial stuff around the code that's necessary to make it successful.
• 08 Jul 09
  

  Graham Perrin

  enterprise knowledge sharing development 2009

• 

  Joel Liu

  enterprise knowledge sharing development

• 07 Jul 09
  

  greenup greenup
  • There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable. A developer, asked how hard something will be to clone, simply does not think about the polish, because the polish is incidental to the implementation.

  • When you're young you don't think that time and money are fungible because you have more time than you know what to do with and very little cash on hand. Therefore the idea of paying for stack exchange seems silly when you could just sacrifice forty hours(or more) of your life and get it for free.

    
    
    

    As you grow older, and especially once you have kids, time and money become much more fungible. I'd rather pay stackexchange a grand than spend a weekend away from my kids writing code that's readily available and fully functioning.

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