One of the world's largest question-and-answer sites, how Stack Exchange Fosters

Editor's note: This article is from the link http://joelonsoftware.com/, the Chinese version is compiled by Heaven Zhuhai Branch Rudder. The article describes the founder of Stack Overflow's $40 million investment this year, during which he described the entire process of stack overflow growing to stack exchange, and let's enjoy ...

Today we stack exchange is delighted to announce the good news that we have just raised $40 million, and much of it is attributed to Andreessen Horowitz.

Everyone may be curious about how we will use the money. First of all, of course we need to run the company already old Aeron seats are plated a layer of gold, and then we will upgrade our aging game room, and we have already sent to our star users to celebrate the cake.

However, these are still first pressed without a table. First of all, let's take a look at some of the things that stack exchange has gone through since it was created.

In 2008, Jeff Atwood and I were still in the white head about how to answer questions from developers. At the time, finding the answer to the question of a programming class was a very painful thing to do. Because the answers we want are often hidden behind a wall of money-a paid website, or in a pile of hundreds of-year-old stink bars that have been dormant.

So we were all about obsessive-compulsive and passionate about creating a better question-and-answer website for the vast majority of programmers who now see the stack overflow.

The meaning and value of Stack overflow today is to make it easier for programmers to work. We allow members to vote on the answers, so that we can give priority to the best-scoring answers. We do not welcome the opinionated way of questioning, because it can easily lead to the outbreak of a mountain of war, and it is not helpful to other users who want to get an immediate answer. At the same time we have to be cautious to prevent stack overflow above the text content in the direction of commercialization, because the business is too heavy to lose the user's trust in us.

People will find it even more incredible that we don't allow any animated ads to appear here, although it's a standard practice on many other websites. But not for us, we don't want to distract the programmer's gaze from reading the answer to your animated ad in the great Gangnam Style. In other words, if we are distracted by the programmer's monkey-like left-jumping right-hop, we cannot guarantee that the programmers will be able to provide better services, at most only 98% levels of service, perhaps you would say that the equivalent of China's Cnbeta and other advertising has been very good! But, you need to know that we are all paranoid, if we can only do 98%, we may as well directly to the stack overflow shut down and then everyone run bird Uncle Home Open Party forget.

Anyway, finally we did it! This is entirely due to you. Your class of scary developers stand out as the torch bearer of knowledge transfer and offer a lot of help to everyone. Because of your contributions, Stack overflow soon became the world's largest and most trusted community site for programming knowledge.

Very soon, Jeff and I found that to provide services to programmers, it was not enough to just encode the appropriate question and answer service. So we followed up with the server Fault and Super User. When you find that this is still not enough for your needs, eventually stack Exchange begins, and the entire community expands different sites to serve you according to different themes. So when you want to help the next-door girl build a server, or install a PC, or a database, or set up an Ubuntu, or make an iphone new meaning, you can first come to our website to find those who can help you solve the problem of the great God or they provide the answer, And then go to the next-door Meimei home to do their skill.

But everyone should be very clear about the program ape This group is how the matter, they are all the good and conscientious people ah, so it is easy to accidentally set up a family of children groups. So parenting and taking pictures of kids. These things are often not a good thing to program apes, so our users are starting to create the appropriate stack Exchange sites for these unrelated programming topics, such as parenting and photography. Because the programs we serve ape often want to have a place to know more about the nanny and buy milk powder related knowledge! -duang, these Web sites that are as good as stack overflow can meet the special requirements of program apes to learn how to baby-feed and shoot art photo for children.

Because we're so thoughtful about this bunch of apes, some smart non-ape groups start staring at us: "Stop it!" I need that extra feature! "And of course we will be very patient to tell them, brother!" You have to know that all the things that are appropriate for the program ape should also be suitable for everyone else, as long as you are willing to follow the programmer's thinking to think about the problem, and if you try, you have to know that the programmer's way of thinking is the best way of thinking in the world. So here we are on all that want to join the stack
People in the Exchange family will be greatly welcomed by the open door. and the sites they create are designed to serve a community they identify with, such as bicycle mechanics, and other things you can think of. As long as your site is a "programmer thinking" that is to make the life of the program apes more secure, you go to provide bicycle machinery knowledge to help the hardship of the need to ride to work of the program ape to repair their often strike bike and why not?

So from the start of stack exchange, we have joined users who have created a total of 133 different communities. Of course, stack overflow is still the biggest big brother. This reminds me of the picture of this medieval era. This shows a bunch of smaller village houses around the city, the bustling metropolis of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is the big city in the middle of the picture. Because the Monkey Quiz website (equivalent to Jerusalem) actually works so well, people will start thinking about creating other topics in the same way, that is to say, we allow them to build other villages around stack overflow, the Monkey City of the program. Some sites start out as small villages and soon become another iconic city. Mathcities, for example, has almost no program ape in it, they speak the language of another animal. They are another "math-Jerusalem" city. These sites are our pride, even if they are not directly for the monkey service, but we are still deeply in love with them, will be like our own children will also for their growth and fever headaches and other tears, because they are like us, are in order to change the world, to make the world a better and hard.

One day, all the other small villages will eventually develop into a metropolis, so here we promise we'll keep their purity and escort their growth.
But let's go back and look at our programming session of the City of Jerusalem Stack Overflow--as you would expect--with a large number of programmed apes, all of which contribute to the future of human dreams. What you have to admit here is that the software is engulfing the world, and our handlers are writing the script for the future world when they write the software!

So if you agree with the importance of software and program apes, you should think that they will all have a colourful and satisfying job of deep love. In fact, unfortunately, this is not a common situation. Program apes are often engaged in very sad work, and their bosses often poke a sharp stick behind them and push us to get the monkey to work. They are actually carrying a horse-like job with a lower salary than they should have, and they will not have much time to learn other skills, they sometimes have too many qualifications in some areas, and sometimes they are simply not qualified in other ways. So we think that if we can help them find a better job, they should be able to make all the program apes live happier.

That's why we built the Web site of the stack Overflow job network. This is the only job site in the world that is built for developers rather than headhunters. We curried any possible headhunter into the community (no matter how much these headhunters are willing to pay to crush our program of Ape city gates to come in and "feed" our program apes, but tell them to die). We only serve the program ape here, there is no place for your spammers, get out of Here!

Came to 2015

The volume of our website visits is still soaring wildly. According to our calculations, the Stack
The Exchange network has been ranked among the top 50 in the United States, and these rankings are chosen by each of the non-acquaintance visitors, and our website visits are still based on 25% per year
The speed of the surge. Our company has more than 200 employees worldwide, such as in Denver, New York, London, and has a luxurious and comfortable office. Of course, there are a lot of great members who feel comfortable working at home and willing to work at home. (By the way, if you think 200 people seem to be more than enough to surprise you, I suggest you look at my next sentence and ask your cardiologist to watch: A large part of these 200 people are working for the "Stack overflow job NET"! )。
Of course, we can also choose to slow down the frantic recruitment steps and consider stopping to think about how to make money, but that means we need to give up some of the investment money that can help more developers. To be honest, the size of our present is not enough to provide our users with the features they want. The coding work of our employees has never stopped-we've been devoting a lot of resources to the core question engine. One of our goals this year is to improve the experience of our website for new and old users.

At the same time, we also don't forget the "Stack overflow recruitment network", if there is no exception, I think this will be the only one of the best platform for developers looking for job seekers, naturally this is the best for the recruitment company This is also a platform for them to find their maxima, oh, sorry, it should be Trinidad Ape. We still have a lot of service developers to do during this period, so far we've just warmed up.

That's why we accepted the new $40 million in the deal.

Here we are deeply grateful to Andreessen Horowitz investment company for our investment. Partners are very much in agreement with our view that the program ape will take over the world (in fact, the phrase "software is devouring the World" created by Marc Andreessen, one of the two founders of Andreessen Horowitz).

This is not the first time we have raised money, we are also proud of the former union Square Ventures, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, and Bezos expeditions investment companies. We will only consider accepting the investment outside in the following two situations:
-When we have all the confidence that investors are in agreement with our philosophy of treating procedural apes
-When our lawyers pass a rigorous series of actions (here embarrassed, investors) to ensure that our control of the company will not waver

Through the above two points of protection, we believe that no one can come in to undermine our fervent vision and purpose:
-wholeheartedly for the application of our website ape service.
-As always, recruit more experts to answer your questions to make the entire web world a better place.

Thank you very much for those friends who have been with us all the way through this incredible journey since the early days. Those newly added friends, welcome you. If you want more information, you can check here or ask here.

This article first Tiger Sniff headline: http://www.huxiu.com/article/112013/1.html

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One of the world's largest question-and-answer sites, how Stack Exchange Fosters