This week's StackOverflow Podcast is up: episode 19.

Jeff and I spent some time talking about the home page for StackOverflow. What goes there? What does it mean to vote on a question?

We also talked about Aaron Swartz's article on How to Launch Software. Big-bang launches can be disasters (viz.: cuil); quiet, gentle launches without announcements where you slowly build can work a lot better (viz.: Gmail). Will StackOverflow's launch overwhelm our servers and underwhelm our audience?

“Another programmer came to us. ‘I thought you should know that people are really unhappy,’ he said bluntly, ‘and it’s starting to make it so that people just complain all day, instead of doing their work, and that’s not good.’”

From my latest Inc. column: How I Learned to Love Middle Managers

When Apple’s iPhone 3G came out, I was pretty sure I’d get one. It had all the features I was waiting for. But the lines just weren’t going away.

I searched Twitter. For a week, then two, every day brought fresh reports of five-hour waits.

And then the reports of bugs started coming in. The Exchange synchronization features weren’t up to snuff, I heard. The phone crashed regularly, I heard. Basic operations were painfully slow. Battery life was abysmal.

Adam Curry suggested getting a Nokia E71. I had never heard of this thing. Nokia? Really? For years I had always thought that Nokia made chunky Europhones that were always just one button short of a usable user interface.

But, no, the more I investigated, the more it seemed that the E71 was a truly credible alternative to the iPhone 3G. The reviews coming in from Europe were stellar. There was one hitch: it didn’t seem to be on sale over here.

There was one last hope. Around the corner from the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue, Nokia had opened a pricy boutique where they sold unlocked, unsubsidized cell phones, mostly to foreign tourists who invaded New York to take advantage of our banana-republic currency.

“Do you have the E71?” I asked.

“I have a demo model you can look at,” the guy said.

It seemed very sleek. Smaller than the iPhone, all metal, nothing chintzy… with the best keyboard I’ve ever used on a phone.

“They’re not on sale until tomorrow… if we have any left after tonight’s super-exclusive launch party. Which is invite only,” he emphasized.

I’m shameless. “How do I get invited?”

“Well, um, put your name on this list.” He gave me a blank piece of paper. “And come back at 6 pm.”

Which I did. There was a short line of a dozen Nokia fans—a somewhat ghetto version of the five hour iPhone lines. Within minutes, I had my E71, and they even helped me with the arduous task of popping in the SIM.

Plink! It worked!

I’ve been using it for a month now, and I’m completely sold. This is the best phone I’ve ever had. I love it.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I think the iPhone is brilliant. The Apple iPhone is truly an inspired piece of design that pushed the state of the art and then went about ten steps further. If the iPhone competed in the Olympic swimming tournaments, Michael Phelps would have just retired on the spot and given up swimming for life.

For many people, the iPhone 3G is perfect. I thought that it meant “game over” for all the other handset makers. But Nokia is a fantastic company and they weren’t going to give up that easy. Their new E71 is a fantastic phone, clearly inspired by the competition, and the game is not over.

There were three reasons I was looking to upgrade.

1. I wanted a phone with a decent MP3 player, so I don’t have to carry two devices.
2. I wanted to be able to use the phone’s internet connection to get online with my laptop on the train out to the Hamptons (there’s tolerable 3G coverage on AT&T for the first two hours of the trip).
3. I needed great Exchange synchronization, not just an IMAP client. For the last few weeks I’ve been desperately trying to get Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero concept working and you need a great Exchange client, not a 1.0 Exchange client.

The E71 met most of these requirements. It’s got a decent music player, a built-in podcasting client (so I can download podcasts directly instead of going through my desktop PC), and it’s even got an FM radio. There’s a third party software app called JaikuSpot which uses the 3G connection and the WiFi in the phone to turn your phone into a mobile hotspot so you can surf from your laptop. When I tried JaikuSpot, it kept dropping the connection, so I can’t say that was the perfect experience, but I’ll keep trying.

Nokia’s built in Exchange synchronization is very 1.0. It doesn’t know about folders, which means there’s no way to get things out of my inbox into an archive folder after I deal with them. This was unacceptable. It meant I would have to go through all those emails again when I got back to my desk. But there’s a third party app, DataViz RoadSync, which handles Exchange synchronization and does support folders, and that works perfectly.

There are some other great features I discovered when I really got into this phone.

The GPS is great fun. It doesn’t work indoors. It doesn’t work in the city where the sky is a distant memory. But it works when you’re out in the country, and it’s really fun to get Google Maps satellite images showing exactly where you are. That is, if you’re not so far out in the country that there’s no cell reception. Combined with the 3 megapixel camera, if you’re really lucky, you can snap pictures and then upload them directly to your Flickr account, and the picture will be tagged with its exact location. You have to be pretty lucky for this to work: getting the GPS to find enough satellites is not always possible.

The pictures are, um, well, cellphone quality. I uploaded a few sample pictures. It's for snapshots and memories, not photography.

The fit and finish of this phone is amazing. It’s the slimmest Nokia I’ve ever seen: smaller in every dimension than an iPhone. It feels solid. The keys on the keyboard are really clicky and extremely easy to type with, especially combined with the predictive word autocomplete. (Why don’t desktop word processors have autocomplete yet?)

The battery lasts a couple of days under heavy use, and is easy to replace, so I keep a spare around for those days when I forgot to charge the phone.

The call quality is the best I’ve ever experienced. After years of using junky phones I literally did not know cell phone calls could be this good. The external speaker (for hands-free operation) is the loudest I’ve ever heard. The phone will announce your callers by name using a synthesized voice. There are probably dozens of other features buried in here which I haven’t found. I think there’s a second camera in front for video calls but I’m way too old to figure out how to make that work.

The music player is adequate, but not great. It’s amazing how something as simple as playing MP3s is so fraught with minor problems… Apple makes it look easy to build an MP3 player, so when someone else tries, it’s always surprising to see just how hard it is to get right. On the E71:

• The sound quality is not quite as good as Apple
• It takes too many steps to shuffle music
• You hear unexplained static in the headphones when no music is playing.
• The volume control has exactly ten choices. It reminded me of those old AT&T public telephones with three amplification choices for the hearing impaired. You have to choose between too soft and too loud.
• When you’ve listened only to a part of a long podcast, the phone doesn’t remember where you were up to, so if you go back to it, you have to search around for the point where you left off.

The built-in browser was decent, but ignore that… just install Opera Mini, which is stellar. I still haven’t found a website which doesn’t display respectably on this phone with Opera Mini. There's a built in GPS map application, which always freezes. Ignore that, too. The free Google Maps is better.

This phone is inevitably going to be compared to the Apple iPhone 3G, so I might as well list the big pros and cons of each.

• The iPhone has a bigger, touch-sensitive screen, which makes the browsing experience better. On the other hand, the Nokia E71 has a fantastic physical keyboard that makes it very easy to reply to email. This is just a tradeoff; you’re going to have to decide whether the browsing or the typing is more important to you.
• The iPhone apps are easier to use and simpler. Apps on the Nokia tend to have more features (for example, there is true multitasking, so you can listen to podcasts while working on email and downloading web pages in the background, and then you can take a picture without losing a beat). In general I think that geeks will prefer the Nokia for its functionality, while the iPhone is totally the phone for people who are less technical and don’t want to spend any time setting up their phone and downloading software to get it exactly the way they want it.
• The Nokia has a replaceable battery and a replaceable storage card which may make it fit your lifestyle better if you’re a heavy user.

In any case, it’s the best phone I’ve ever had and I’m loving it.

This week's StackOverflow Podcast is up: episode 18. It was the first chance I've gotten to speak to Jeff since the beta went live, which is, honestly, exceeding even my highest expectations. Performance is terrific. The site is crisp and clear. Even with our tiny beta audience, you get great answers quickly. The bizarre wiki/q&a/discussion/reddit hybrid system does a great job of bubbling the right answers to the top, and the ability to edit old questions and answers means that answers just get better and better. It's fantastic.

“I pass six Starbucks every morning on my walk to work. Just to clarify, that's counting only the Starbucks that are actually on the west side of Eighth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. I think there are some branches on the east side, but that side remains terra incognita for me; for most New Yorkers, micro-optimizing the walk to work is a matter of habit, and I have no reason to cross the street. For all I know, the other side of Eighth Avenue consists of nothing but pachinko parlors and flea circuses. Wouldn't surprise me one bit.”

From my latest Inc. article: Good System, Bad System

PS: I've got a new book out: More Joel on Software is the second collection of articles from the archives of this site.

We've already got a great lineup of speakers for the Business of Software conference:

• Seth Godin
• Eric Sink
• Steve Johnson
• Richard Stallman
• Paul Kenny
• Tom Jennings
• Dharmesh Shah
• Mike Milinkovich
• Jessica Livingston
• Jason Fried
• and me!

Neil Davidson was looking for a way to bring in a handful of extra interesting speakers for very brief presentations just to keep the conference more dynamic and hear from different corners of the world. I had recently read about Pecha Kucha. The speaker gets 6 minutes and 40 seconds: no more, no less. You submit exactly 20 slides. Each one is shown for exactly 20 seconds and then flips automatically. At the end, even if you're almost done and just have one more thing, the mic cuts off and you sit down.

It sounded like a good idea. Speakers have to plan very carefully and rehearse repeatedly to make sure their speech is going to synchronize correctly with the slides, which makes for a more polished speech. They have to edit mercilessly to boil their subject matter down to 400 seconds, which makes it more interesting and dynamic. And if they suck, well, you don't have to wait very long for them to go away!

45 people submitted applications to speak. There were a lot of terrific applications. Somehow, Neil and I narrowed it down to 8 very impressive finalists who will speak in Boston. I can't wait!

Here at Fog Creek Software we get a lot of requests for a tour of the office, which we usually have to decline: we have this unusual obsession with giving programmers quiet working conditions.

But once a year, we do have an open house. It's a rare chance to peek behind the curtains and meet the people behind FogBugz and Copilot.

This year, we're only a month or so away from moving (to a much larger space downtown) but we didn't want to skip the annual tradition, so the open house will be held anyway at the old office:

Thursday, July 17
5:00 - 7:00 pm

535 8th Ave. (cross street: 37th)
18th Floor
New York, NY 10018

You'll get a chance to meet the Dingos (class of '08 interns), the SMTPs, our new sales department, the developers behind FogBugz, Copilot, and Wasabi, and the rest of the team. Some kind of food-like snack will be served. Tiny cheddar-cheese-flavored crackers in the shape of fish, maybe. Don't skip lunch.

A long time ago, it became fashionable, even recommended, to disable menu items when they could not be used.

Don't do this. Users see the disabled menu item that they want to click on, and are left entirely without a clue of what they are supposed to do to get the menu item to work.

Instead, leave the menu item enabled. If there's some reason you can't complete the action, the menu item can display a message telling the user why.

A reader wrote in to ask what kind of desks we're going to be using for the new office.

The ergonomics experts always want you to have your feet flat on the floor. So you have to adjust your seat height first. Then, your arms are supposed to be horizontal while you're typing. This means you need an adjustable-height keyboard.

Most of the adjustable height keyboard trays are extremely annoying... they're floppy, flimsy, and limit the keyboard to one location. Therefore we decided to get desks where the entire worksurface can be raised and lowered.

Finally, a lot people praise the benefits of standing up for a part of the day, even if you spend the whole day at a computer, so we wanted desks where the worksurface could rise all the way to "counter height" so you could stand and work. And if you are going to be standing up and sitting down it's best to have a desk with a pushbutton, electric motor so you don't get lazy about doing it.

Eventually we settled on the Details adjusTables Series 7. We didn't like the desk surface that those came with (with rounded corners and a chubby profile, it's just too blah) so we ordered a custom desk surface from Steelcase with something called a knife edge profile. That makes the desk look paper-thin:

Yes! I'm still doing those weekly podcasts with Jeff. We've already done eight of them.

We're moving, though, to IT Conversations, a huge network of terrific audio shows about technology. Just looking at all the great shows they have there makes me feel a bit like a kid in jeans and a T-shirt with a dirty slogan who just walked into Chez Panisse.

The new feed, IT Conversations-based feed is at http://rss.conversationsnetwork.org/series/stackoverflow.xml.

“We lost some time because a deal to expand at our current location fell through -- it turned out that the extra floor we wanted wasn’t actually, to use the real estate jargon, ‘available.’”

From Adventures in Office Space, my latest column in Inc. Magazine.

P.S.! Neil reminds me that you've only got until the end of the week to register for the Business of Software conference at the low early rate ($1395 instead of $1795).

It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft's bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that "Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work together on your behalf and under your control."

What was it, really? The idea that the future operating system was on the net, on Microsoft's cloud, and you would log onto everything with Windows Passport and all your stuff would be up there. It turns out: nobody needed this place for all their stuff. And nobody trusted Microsoft with all their stuff. And Hailstorm went away.

I tried to coin a term for the kind of people who invented Hailstorm: architecture astronauts. "That's one sure tip-off to the fact that you're being assaulted by an Architecture Astronaut: the incredible amount of bombast; the heroic, utopian grandiloquence; the boastfulness; the complete lack of reality. And people buy it! The business press goes wild!"

The hallmark of an architecture astronaut is that they don't solve an actual problem... they solve something that appears to be the template of a lot of problems. Or at least, they try. Since 1988 many prominent architecture astronauts have been convinced that the biggest problem to solve is synchronization.

Follow the story, here. I started picking on one company that appeared to be particularly astronautish: Groove, which was trying to rebuild Lotus Notes (a giant synchronization machine) in a peer-to-peer fashion.

Groove had some early success selling secure networks to the military-industrial complex, but didn't make much of a ripple outside that niche. Their real success was in getting bought by Microsoft, which brought Groove's designer and chief architecture-astronaut Ray Ozzie to the role of "Chief Software Architect" at Microsoft, supposedly the technical guy that would keep inventing the future after BillG left so that Steve Ballmer would have some new territory on which to build his next illegal monopoly.

And now Ray Ozzie's big achievement arrives and what is it? (drumroll...) Microsoft Live Mesh. The future of everything. Microsoft is "moving into the cloud."

What's Microsoft Live Mesh?

Hmm, let's see.

"Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about."

Wait a minute. Something smells fishy here. Isn't that exactly what Hailstorm was supposed to be? I smell an architecture astronaut.

And what is this Windows Live Mesh?

It's a way to synchronize files.

Jeez, we've had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I'm sorry. It seems like it should be. But it's not.

But Windows Live Mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. That's just the sample app. It's a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop. And synchronizing files is supposed to be, like, the equivalent of Microsoft Write on Windows 1.0.

It's Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can't stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.

And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn't stop him.

How on earth does Microsoft continue to pour massive resources into building the same frigging synchronization platforms again and again? Damn, they just finished building something called Windows Live FolderShare and I haven't exactly noticed a stampede to that. I'll bet you've never even heard of it. The 3,398th web site that lets you upload and download files to a place on the Internet. I'm so excited I might just die.

I shouldn't really care. What Microsoft's shareholders want to waste their money building, instead of earning nice dividends from two or three fabulous monopolies, is no business of mine. I'm not a shareholder. It sort of bothers me, intellectually, that there are these people running around acting like they're building the next great thing who keep serving us the same exact TV dinner that I didn't want on Sunday night, and I didn't want it when you tried to serve it again Monday night, and you crunched it up and mixed in some cheese and I didn't eat that Tuesday night, and here it is Wednesday and you've rebuilt the whole goddamn TV dinner industry from the ground up and you're giving me 1955 salisbury steak that I just DON'T WANT. What is it going to take for you to get the message that customers don't want the things that architecture astronauts just love to build. The people? They love twitter. And flickr and delicious and picasa and tripit and ebay and a million other fun things, which they do want, and this so called synchronization problem is just not an actual problem, it's a fun programming exercise that you're doing because it's just hard enough to be interesting but not so hard that you can't figure it out.

Why I really care is that Microsoft is vacuuming up way too many programmers. Between Microsoft, with their shady recruiters making unethical exploding offers to unsuspecting college students, and Google (you're on my radar) paying untenable salaries to kids with more ultimate frisbee experience than Python, whose main job will be to play foosball in the googleplex and walk around trying to get someone...anyone...to come see the demo code they've just written with their "20% time," doing some kind of, let me guess, cloud-based synchronization... between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can't think of a single useful thing to build for us, but they need another 3000-4000 comp sci grads next week. And dammit foosball doesn't play itself.

The next podcast is up. Today we talked about why we're doing a podcast in the first place, took some questions/suggestions from listeners, and got into a fight over whether programmers should learn C. Guess which side I took.

There are some improvements, already.

First, there's an RSS feed, so you can subscribe and get each weekly podcast pushed to you. Here's how you would subscribe using Apple iTunes, for example:

1. Run iTunes
2. Choose Advanced | Subscribe to Podcast
3. Paste in this URL: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/index.php?feed=podcast
4. There is no step 4.

Now, depending on your settings (under Podcasts in Preferences), iTunes will download the latest podcasts and put them on your iPod when you dock it. You don't have to do anything special. I'm not going to post here every time there's a new podcast; you'll have to subscribe.

A couple of people volunteered to help by typing up transcripts for the hearing-impaired, the pressed-for-time, and search engines. That's a great idea! I opened up a wiki where anyone can contribute to the weekly transcript. If you can spare a few minutes to transcribe even a part of the podcast, that would be greatly appreciated by the many readers for whom an audio podcast is inaccessible.

Jeff has a new blog for the podcast at http://blog.stackoverflow.com/ where the podcasts are posted. You can subscribe to that using a normal RSS reader and see the show notes, links to things we mentioned during the podcast, and there will be comments links for discussion.

If you have any comments, ideas, or suggestions record a short MP3 and email it to podcast@stackoverflow.com. If you don't have the equipment to record an MP3, check out blogtalkradio to find a shockingly easy way to do it with a phone.

I've been working on a way to improve the audio quality. I don't want to make any promises, but next week we'll try to do the show using Skype to get better-than-POTS voice quality.

What is stackoverflow.com?

Nothing, yet.

But here's the concept:

Programmers seem to have stopped reading books. The market for books on programming topics is miniscule compared to the number of working programmers.

Instead, they happily program away, using trial-and-error. When they can't figure something out, they type a question into Google.

And sometimes, the first result looks like it's going to have the answer to their exact question, and they are excited, until they click on the link, and discover that it's a pay site, and the answer is cloaked or hidden or behind a pay-wall, and you have to buy a membership.

And you won't even get an expert answer. You'll get a bunch of responses typed by other programmers like you. Some of the responses will be wrong, some will be right, some may be out of date, and it's hard to imagine that with the cooperative spirit of the internet this is the best thing we programmers have come up with.

Jeff Atwood and I decided to do something about it. We're starting to build 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.

When I'm building a new product, my policy has always been to keep quiet about it until I have something to ship. But this isn't really a product. This is a free new community site for programmers around the world and we need your help to design it, to program it, and to build it. We want to hear your suggestions, hear your ideas, and we're going to build it right in front of your eyes. Thus, the vaporware announcement.

Every week, Jeff and I talk by phone (he's in California, I'm in New York), and we're going to record those phone calls and throw them up on the web for you to listen in on, and call it a podcast. We have a lot of trouble keeping on topic, so the podcast may be interesting to you even if you don't want to hear about stackoverflow.com. The first episode is up right now. Eventually I imagine we'll figure out this newfangled "RSS" technology and you'll be able to actually subscribe and get fresh episodes delivered into your ears automatically. All in good time.

Jeff's Announcement

PS I'm still CEO of Fog Creek full time. StackOverflow.com is a joint venture between Fog Creek and Jeff Atwood. He's the full time CEO which means he's calling the shots. I'm sort of a consultant on this one.

Registration is now open for Business of Software 2008 (the first ever Joel on Software conference). Neil has lined up great speakers:

1. Seth Godin, Business Week's "Ultimate Entrepreneur for the Information Age", is the best-selling author of 7 books (including Permission Marketing and Purple Cow) as well as the most popular eBook of all time.
2. Eric Sink, founder of SourceGear, author of "Eric Sink on the Business of Software" and the person who coined the term "Micro ISV"
3. Steve Johnson of Pragmatic Marketing and winner of last year's Software Idol competition
4. Richard Stallman launched the development of the GNU operating system, now used on tens of millions of computers today. Stallman has received the ACM Grace Hopper Award, a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer award, and the the Takeda Award for Social/Economic Betterment
5. Paul Kenny is one of the UK's top sales trainers, consultants and speakers. He has worked with many customers in three continents, including IBM, Perot Systems, The Guardian and tens of others.
6. Dharmesh Shah is a geek, serial entrepreneur, founder of HubSpot and blogger at OnStartups.com
7. Jessica Livingston is author of Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days and a founder of Y Combinator
8. Jason Fried is founder of 37signals (developers of Basecamp and Ruby on Rails) and Signal vs Noise blogger
9. Joel Spolsky, aka, "me," noted DJ, has over 600 karma points on the social news site "Reddit."

BoS2008 is in BOSton, September 3-4. Boston is absolutely beautiful in September. The weather is usually perfect. You can go kayaking on the Charles or take the duck tour if you're unambitious. Over 250,000 college students have just arrived, full of completely unjustifiable hope and optimism. The summer tourist crowd has mostly gone home so you can get into museums and historical sites. There are plenty of coffee shops that aren't NASDAQ-listed.

“If the flight attendants on the JAL 747 from Tokyo I'm on right now were to, in a remarkable lapse of Japanese standards of service, throw me off the plane with a parachute, I could do a pretty nice roll when I hit the ground.”

From my Inc. Magazine column for April (subscribe here). And with that, I promise to stop telling shaggy dog stories about my days in the army.

My new book is here! Apress has just published a new collection of 36 essays from Joel on Software, aptly named More Joel on Software. Get yours today! Available from Amazon.com or wherever fine cheese is sold.

About the Author: I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. Since 2000, I've been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site. For my day job, I run Fog Creek Software, makers of FogBugz—the smart bug tracking software with the stupid name, and Fog Creek Copilot—the easiest way to provide remote tech support over the Internet, with nothing to install or configure.

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