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Learning from Others
In a few weeks time we’ll move StackTrace out of beta and release it to the public at large. It’s an important milestone and the team is looking forward to its reception. I wanted to offer a bit of background on the product and why I’m excited for its potential.
When I started as a professional developer in 1997 I was definitely not great. I worked for a small multimedia shop as part of a two-man software team. I was responsible for a suite of educational CD-roms authored in Macromedia Director. This was before the dot com bubble, before extensive online communities and well before the likes of Stack Overflow. Learning and growing your capabilities was much more constrained than today. I had a hive-mind of one office mate and a monthly local user group to bounce ideas off of. Googling for solutions wasn’t even a consideration.
One day, however, I happened across a reference to the Direct-L listserv. (For those that don’t know, listservs are email-based mailing lists allowing for threaded conversation between groups of people. Like prehistoric discussion boards.) Upon subscribing, my mailbox was regularly populated with questions and answers from folks all over the world working through their day-to-day Director problems. Initially I rarely participated, but by reading the questions from newcomers and the responses from experts I found myself rapidly improving my own skills. While many questions were not immediately pertinent to my own daily challenges they provided thought-provoking fodder and made me consider alternatives otherwise outside of my grasp. There was so much knowledge to be gained from the interactions of others in the community.
Over time, the web became a much larger community and with it abundant access to high-quality information. In 2008, Stack Overflow launched and forever changed the face of software development. However, at its core, Stack Overflow is the same as my cherished Direct-L mailing list. It is learners and experts sharing questions and answers. And in those conversations is a world of knowledge waiting to be consumed. I offer that there is as much value in the questions you haven’t thought to ask yet as there are in the questions you immediately have.
And so we come to StackTrace. A new face on StackOverflow. An experience primarily focused on learning from the discussions of others. StackTrace is more about reading and learning than it is about finding immediate answers to your current programming challenge. Sure, you can search for answers to specific questions just as you can on the Stack Overflow site. And absolutely, the UX is optimized for tablet consumption. However, our goals are different than just presenting an alternative Stack Overflow experience. We want to encourage folks to spend time reading seemingly irrelevant questions about areas they are interested in. You may not be in the midst of selecting the most appropriate Javascript framework or trying to figure out how to edit a commit message in git, but trust me. You won’t regret the education. It’s a pretty enriching way to spend time waiting for your bus.
If you’re interested in signing up for our private beta, or to be notified when the app goes live (not long I promise!) do so here. Or reach out to us on twitter. We’d love to hear from you.
