Summary: This is the twenty-third episode of the StackOverflow podcast, wherein Joel and I discuss the following: The Stack Overflow team will be in New York City from the 24th to the 28th. It's partly business, and partly a reward to our team for their hard work on the site. What are some cool geeky things for us to do in NYC? We wonder: do newscasters wear pants? Joel describes his upcoming Inc. magazine article enumerating the seven development mistakes we made in building Stack Overflow. I think by seven he meant zero. Most of the reviews of Cuil and Knol are negative because "I tried it for what it was intended to be used, and it didn't work." The power of short informal code reviews in bridging the skill gap between beginning and expert software developers. Good developers think of this as self-preservation, because today's beginner code is tomorrow's code you'll have to maintain. There have been a lot of requests for a packaged, customized version of Stack Overflow, but we have some reservations about the difficulty of delivering a packaged solution, and whether the current design will scale down to smaller private communities at all. Should trusted users be allowed to close questions? Or should the community simply vote them down? I argue we need both of these methods; Joel feels we only need voting. It's ok to have some "fun" programming questions every now and then. It can't be a community if you don't stop every so often to have some (at least partially on topic) fun. We also answered the following listener questions: "How do you handle newbie questions?" Richard: "How do you cultivate programmer mentoring at a small company?" If you'd like to submit a question to be answered in our next episode, record an audio file (90 seconds or less) and mail it to podcast@stackoverflow.com. You can record a question using nothing but a telephone and a web browser. We also have a dedicated phone number you can call to leave audio questions at 646-826-3879. The transcript wiki for this episode is available for public editing.
