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Bad First Impression
Joel Spolsky is a really smart guy; and while the frequent reminders of how awesome he and his company are can get a bit old, I really enjoy reading his blog and the articles he writes elsewhere. When I first started following his blog 3 years or so ago, I couldn't bring myself to use any RSS reader that was around, so I signed up for email alerts for new blog posts. I saw a new email after getting home from work today
It certainly looked to me like he was bashing the results obtained on Stack Overflow. I had seen the site mentioned elsewhere earlier today, and with an admittedly short look-through it looked pretty damned nifty. I was getting all fired up to see what bad things Joel could possibly be saying about the site that would overcome the 'niftyiess' I had seen. As it turned out, he was actually a part of launching the site, and the excerpt for the email was just chosen really poorly (it was actually referring to your average general search engine result). I wonder if anyone else still relies on email alerts for his blog, and how many of them would make the same assumption as me and never bother looking Stack Overflow because of that.
Subject: [JoelOnSoftware] Stack Overflow launches today
"If you're very lucky, on the fourth page of the search results, if you have the patience, you find a seven-page discussion with hundreds of replies, of which 25% are spam advertisements posted by bots trying to get googlejuice for timeshares in St. Maarten, yet some of the replies are actually useful, and someone whose name is Anon Y. Moose has posted a decent answer, grammatically incorrect though it may be, and which contains a devastating security bug, but this little gem is buried amongst a lot of dreck."
Announcing the launch of Stack Overflow:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/09/15.html
--
Joel Spolsky
joel@joelonsoftware.com
It certainly looked to me like he was bashing the results obtained on Stack Overflow. I had seen the site mentioned elsewhere earlier today, and with an admittedly short look-through it looked pretty damned nifty. I was getting all fired up to see what bad things Joel could possibly be saying about the site that would overcome the 'niftyiess' I had seen. As it turned out, he was actually a part of launching the site, and the excerpt for the email was just chosen really poorly (it was actually referring to your average general search engine result). I wonder if anyone else still relies on email alerts for his blog, and how many of them would make the same assumption as me and never bother looking Stack Overflow because of that.
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