Joel on Software

Area 51 is now in beta

Area 51 is now in beta. This is the promised place where the community comes together to invent new Stack Exchange sites.

Benofsky from Hacker News writes:

Seems overly complicated, I have no idea what's going on when I visit Area 51, I guess this is their strategy for turning away uncommitted users.

Also, how are they going to make money?

I’m glad you asked, benofsky! The answer is simple. Volume.

(transcript)

Well, I’m not one to take Internet chat board comments seriously. After all, the Anonymous Nostradamus’s over at Code Project reacted thus when Stack Overflow itself launched:

I think the UI sucks. I can't imagine this site being around in a year.

We all know how stunningly accurate that prediction was:

Benofsky is onto something, though. Area 51 is not for everyone. If you don’t know what it’s for, or why it’s going to work, or you can’t figure it out, it’s not, actually for you.

Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? I wrote a tutorial for my favorite DVCS, Mercurial. It’s called Hg Init—check it out!

Want to know more?

You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make FogBugz, an enlightened project management system designed to help great teams develop brilliant software, Kiln, which provides distributed version control and code reviews, and Fog Creek Copilot, which makes remote desktop access easy. I’m also the co-founder of Stack Overflow.