Stack Overflow Podcast
the 2008 run
34 episodes • Apr 17-Dec 18 • from “what should we build?” to a living developer community
Audio quality eras
#1-4 Office phone recording - roughest audio
#5-24 Skype/Pamela - clearer, but overlap can drop voices
#25 onward Local tracks + studio headset
★Key arc: launch week, the audio upgrade, or a standout founder interview.
| # | Date | What it captures | Guest(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Apr 17 | The idea: Joel and Jeff explain what Stack Overflow could become. | Joel + Jeff |
| 2 | Apr 23 | Podcast purpose, RSS, spam, licensing, scale, and learning C++. | Joel + Jeff |
| 3 | Apr 30 | Skype recording, reading lists, font rendering, ASP.NET, DSLs, logo contest. | Joel + Jeff |
| 4 | May 7 | ASP.NET MVC, Wikipedia, reputation design, Creative Commons, logo. | Joel + Jeff |
| 5 | May 14 | Private-beta target, monetization, AdSense, and washing electronics. | Joel + Jeff |
| 6 | May 20 | Computer History Museum, MVC vs Web Forms, jQuery, OpenID, mobile. | Joel + Jeff |
| 7 | May 28 | Home vs office work, multiple monitors, frameworks vs rolling your own. | Joel + Jeff |
| 8 | Jun 4 | Programming tribes, Clay Shirky, databases, Geoff Dalgas joins. | Joel + Jeff |
| 9 | Jun 11 | WWDC, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, tags, beta seeding, Google Answers. | Joel + Jeff |
| 10 | Jun 19 | Experts Exchange, CC-Wiki, badges, reputation editing, Mercurial/Git. | Joel + Jeff |
| 11 | Jun 26 | Postmortems, load tests, search, Markdown/XSS, Silverlight vs Flash. | Joel + Jeff |
| 12 | Jul 2 | Fog Creek management reading list: Peopleware, usability, persuasion. | Joel + Jeff |
| 13 | Jul 10 | Badges, reputation scoring, The Joel Test; beta slips two weeks. | Joel + Jeff |
| 14 | Jul 16 | Minimalism, blog comments, and choosing LINQ to SQL as the ORM. | Joel + Jeff |
| 15 | Jul 24 | Developer-to-manager shifts, code reviews, regions, interview puzzles. | Joel + Jeff |
| 16 | Jul 30 | Hiring a designer, OpenID, estimation uncertainty, shipping a small v1. | Joel + Jeff |
| 17 | Aug 13 | Dev-team special: distributed collaboration and beta challenges. | Geoff Dalgas + Jarrod Dixon |
| 18 | Aug 21 | Forum/wiki/voting hybrid, mobile browsing, and regex tools. | Michael Pryor |
| 19 | Aug 28 | Question voting, XSS incident, SQL deadlock fix, server scaling. | Joel + Jeff |
| 20★ | Sep 3 | Log4Net deadlock delays launch; trolls and asking good questions. | Joel + Jeff |
| 21★ | Sep 11 | Launch set for Sep 15; team road trip and badges as incentives. | Joel + Jeff |
| 22★ | Sep 18 | Day-one results: 1,500 questions, 62,000 visitors; moderation. | Josh Millard |
| 23 | Sep 24 | Cuil/Knol reviews, mentoring via code review, and “fun” questions. | Joel + Jeff |
| 24 | Oct 1 | NYC roundtable: DreamHost error, Friday ships, ads, reputation. | Dixon + Dalgas + Pryor |
| 25★ | Oct 9 | Google culture, language design, marketing for programmers. STUDIO | Steve Yegge |
| 26 | Oct 16 | Listener Qs: reputation systems, weighted votes, startup staffing. | Joel + Jeff |
| 27★ | Nov 1 | Reddit: Lisp-to-Python, scaling, anti-abuse, permissive moderation. | Alexis Ohanian + Steve Huffman |
| 28 | Nov 6 | Windows Azure, SQL Server 2008 search trouble, project management. | Joel + Jeff |
| 29 | Nov 13 | Google vs site search, localized languages, just-in-time learning. | Joel + Jeff |
| 30 | Nov 20 | UserVoice, feature voting, NP-complete and hard CS problems. | Richard White |
| 31 | Nov 27 | NP-completeness follow-up, math, standups, lean economic times. | Joel + Jeff |
| 32 | Dec 4 | The “2⁵ episode”: piracy, Apple/Microsoft ads, ideal offices. | Joel + Jeff |
| 33 | Dec 11 | Buy vs cloud, database version control, favorite SO questions. | Babak Ghahremanpour |
| 34 | Dec 18 | RAID 10, support rotations, easter eggs, proposed bounties. | Joel + Jeff |