Year / 2019

by Joel Spolsky

So, how’s that retirement thing going, anyway?

For the last couple of months, Prashanth Chandrasekar has been getting settled in as the new CEO of Stack Overflow. I’m still going on some customer calls and have a weekly meeting with him, but I have freed up a lot of time. I’m also really enjoying discovering just how little I knew about running medium-sized companies, as I watch Prashanth rearrange everything—for the better. It’s really satisfying to realize that the best possible outcome for me is if he proves what a bad CEO I was by doing a much better job running the company.

Even though I live in Manhattan’s premier NORC (“Naturally Occurring Retirement Community,”) I’m thinking of this time as a sabbatical, not retirement. And in fact I’m really, really busy, and, in the interest of deflecting a million questions about what I’m doing nowadays, thought I’d update my long-suffering readers here.

This adorable little fella, Cooper, is two. If your web app needs a mascot, apply within.

I’m chairman of three companies. You probably know all about Stack Overflow so I’ll skip ahead.

Fog Creek Software has been renamed Glitch, “the friendly community for building the web.” Under CEO Anil Dash, they have grown to millions of apps and raised a decent round of money to accelerate that growth. I think that in every era there has to be some kind of simplified programming environment for the quiet majority of developers who don’t need fancy administration features for their code, like git branches or multistep deployment processes; they just want to write code and have it run. Glitch is aimed at those developers.

The third company, HASH, is still kind of under the radar right now, although today they put a whole bunch of words up on their website so I guess I can give you a preview. HASH is building an open source platform for doing simulations. It’s a great way to model problems where you have some idea of how every agent is supposed to behave, but you don’t really know what all that is going to add up to.

For example, suppose you’re a city planner and you want to model traffic so that you can make a case for a new bus line. You can, sort of, pretend that every bus takes 50 cars off the road, but that’s not going to work unless you can find 50 commuters who will all decide to take your new bus line… and the way they decide is that they check if the bus is actually going to save them time and money over just driving. This is a case where you can actually simulate the behavior of every “agent” in your model, like Cities: Skylines does, and figure out the results. Then you can try thousands or millions of different potential bus routes and see which ones actually reduce traffic.

This kind of modeling is incredibly computationally intensive, but it works even when you don’t have a closed-form formula for how bus lines impact traffic, or, in general, how individual agents’ behavior affects overall outcomes. This kind of tool will be incredibly useful in far-ranging problems, like epidemiology, econometrics, urban planning, finance, political science, and a lot of other areas which are not really amenable to closed-form modeling or common “AI” techniques. (I love putting AI in “scare” “quotes”. There are a lot of startups out there trying to train machine learning models with way too little data. Sometimes the models they create just reproduce the bad decision making of the humans they are trained on. In many cases a model with simulated agents running a white box algorithm is going to be superior).

Ok, so those are the three companies I’m still working on in some way or another. That still leaves me with a couple of free days every week which I’m actually using to work on some electronics projects.

In particular, I’m really into pixel-addressable RGB LEDs, like those WS2812b and APA102-type things. Right now I’m working on designing a circuit board that connects a Teensy 3.2 controller, which can drive up to 4416 LEDs at a high frame rate, to a WizNET Ethernet adapter, and then creating some software which can be used to distribute 4416 pixels worth of data to each Teensy over a TCP-IP network in hopes of creating huge installations with hundreds of thousands of pixels. If that made any sense at all, you’re probably already a member of the LEDs ARE AWESOME Facebook group and you probably think I’m dumb. If that doesn’t make any sense, rest assured that I am probably not going to burn down the apartment because I am very careful with the soldering iron almost every time.

by Joel Spolsky

Welcome, Prashanth!

Last March, I shared that we were starting to look for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. We were looking for that rare combination of someone who could foster the community while accelerating the growth of our businesses, especially Teams, where we are starting to close many huge deals and becoming a hyper-growth enterprise software company very quickly. This is not something I’m particularly good at, and I thought it was time to bring on more experienced leadership.

The Board of Directors nominated a search committee and we went through almost 200 candidates. It speaks to how well respected  a company Stack Overflow is that we found ourselves in the rare position of having plenty of highly qualified executives who were excited about the opportunity. Nevertheless, one of them really stood out, and we are pleased to let you know that we have selected Prashanth Chandrasekar as our next CEO. His first day will be October 1st.

Prashanth was born in Bangalore, India, the city with the highest number of Stack Overflow users in the world, one of the global capitals for software developers writing the script for the future. He started out as a software engineer before moving over to management. He has a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Maine, a Masters in Engineering Management from Cornell, and an MBA from Harvard. He worked at Capgemini as a management consultant and Barclays as an investment banker in their technology group before joining Rackspace in San Antonio, Texas.

At Rackspace, Prashanth really proved his mettle, creating from scratch a completely new business unit inside the company, the Global Managed Public Clouds Business. This group serves companies around the world who need help running on AWS, Azure, Google, and so on. Under his leadership, Rackspace successfully pivoted from a leading managed hosting company to a cloud services company. And he did this while working with developers both inside Rackspace and outside, so he understands our vision of “writing the script for the future” better than anyone I’ve met.

This is an exciting time for Stack Overflow, and we have some big goals for the year ahead. We want to make Stack Overflow more diverse, inclusive, and welcoming. And we want to make it possible for knowledge workers everywhere to use Stack Overflow to get answers to the proprietary questions that are specific to their organizations and teams. We’re doing great work and making great progress in these areas, and I’m confident that Prashanth has some great ideas about how to move forward faster on all our goals.

As you know, I’m keeping my job as Chairman of the Board, so I’ll continue to be closely involved. Being Stack Overflow’s CEO has been an honor, and I can’t wait to see the things the team accomplishes in the year ahead. This will be a great new chapter for Stack Overflow.

by Joel Spolsky

The next CEO of Stack Overflow

Big news! We’re looking for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. I’m stepping out of the day-to-day and up to the role of Chairman of the Board.

Stack Overflow has been around for more than a decade. As I look back, it’s really amazing how far it has come.  

Only six months after we had launched Stack Overflow, my co-founder Jeff Atwood and I were invited to speak at a Microsoft conference for developers in Las Vegas. We were there, I think, to demonstrate that you could use their latest ASP.NET MVC technology on a real website without too much of a disaster. (In fact .NET has been a huge, unmitigated success for us, but you kids go ahead and have fun with whatever platform you want mkay? They’re all great, or, at least, above-average).

It was a giant conference, held at the Venetian Hotel. This hotel was so big that other hotels stay there when they go on vacation. The main ballroom was the size of, approximately, Ireland. I later learned there were 5,000 developers in that room.

I thought it would be a fun thing to ask the developers in the room how many of them had visited Stack Overflow. As I remember, Jeff was very much against this idea. “Joel,” he said, “That is going to be embarrassing and humiliating. Nobody is going to raise their hand.”

Well, I asked it anyway. And we were both surprised to see about one-third of the hands go up. We were really making an impact! That felt really good.

Anyway, I tried that trick again whenever I spoke to a large audience. It doesn’t work anymore. Today, audiences just laugh. It’s like asking, “Does anyone use gravity? Raise your hand if you use gravity.”

Where are we at after 11 years? Practically every developer in the world uses Stack Overflow. Including the Stack Exchange network of 174 sites, we have over 100 million monthly visitors. Every month, over 125,000 wonderful people write answers. According to Alexa, stackoverflow.com is one of the top 50 websites in the world. (That’s without even counting the Stack Exchange network, which is almost as big.) And every time I see a developer write code, they’ve got Stack Overflow open in one of their browser windows. Oh and—hey!—we do not make you sign up or pay to see the answers.

The company has been growing, too. Today we are profitable. We have almost 300 amazing employees worldwide and booked $70m in revenue last year. We have talent, advertising, and software products. The SaaS products (Stack Overflow for Teams and Enterprise) are growing at 200% a year. That speaks to the fact that we’ve recruited an incredibly talented team that has produced such fantastic results.

But, we have a lot of work ahead of us, and it’s going to take a different type of leader to get us through that work.

The type of people Stack Overflow serves has changed, and now, as a part of the developer ecosystem, we have a responsibility to create an online community that is far more diverse, inclusive, and welcoming of newcomers.

In the decade or so since Stack Overflow started, the number of people employed as software developers grew by 64% in the US alone. The field is going to keep growing everywhere in the world, and the demand for great software developers far outstrips supply. So a big challenge for Stack Overflow is welcoming those new developers into the fold. As I’ve written:

One thing I’m very concerned about, as we try to educate the next generation of developers, and, importantly, get more diversity and inclusiveness in that new generation, is what obstacles we’re putting up for people as they try to learn programming. In many ways Stack Overflow’s specific rules for what is permitted and what is not are obstacles, but an even bigger problem is rudeness, snark, or condescension that newcomers often see.

I care a lot about this. Being a developer gives you an unparalleled opportunity to write the script for the future. All the flak that Stack Overflow throws in the face of newbies trying to become developers is actively harmful to people, to society, and to Stack Overflow itself, by driving away potential future contributors. And programming is hard enough; we should see our mission as making it easier.

The world has started taking a closer look at tech, and understanding that software and the internet are not just tools; they are shaping the future of society. Big tech companies are struggling with their place in the world. Stack Overflow is situated at the right place to be influential in how that future develops, and that is going to take a new type of leader.

new dog, too

It will not be easy to find a CEO who is the right person to lead that mission. We will, no doubt, hire one of those fancy executive headhunters to help us in the search. But, hey, this is Stack Overflow. If there’s one thing I have learned by now, it’s that there’s always someone in the community who can answer the questions I can’t.

So we decided to put this announcement out there in hopes of finding great candidates that might have been under the radar. We’re especially focused on identifying candidates from under-represented groups, and making sure that every candidate we consider is deeply committed to making our company and community more welcoming, diverse, and inclusive.

Over the years, Fog Creek Software created several incredible hits and many wonderful memories along the way. It is great to watch Trello (under Michael Pryor) and Glitch (under Anil Dash) growing into enormously valuable, successful, and influential products with dedicated leaders who took these products much further than I ever could have, and personally I’m excited to see where Stack Overflow can go and turn my attention to the next thing.