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Stack Overflow : A Programming Hotspot Created for the Coding Enthusiasts

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Some people might say that the job opportunities in the IT sectors are gradually reaching a saturation level, but is it really true? Today, while the world is getting consumed by the trove of technology, IT sectors play the most important role in functioning and developing of our world. Even, if you are launching a small product in the market, you need to create certain algorithms, a website, and definitely, a user interface, for which one needs to hire developers. In this 21st century, coders are on demand! Be it a pure competitive programmer or a developer, their contributions to the IT sector is certainly the need of the hour.

And, to help out the programmers out there be it an expert or a beginner, an online Q/A platform, Stack Overflow was created 11 years ago. Stack Overflow, the flagship site of the Stack Exchange Network was mainly created to answer the queries of the programmers based on any programming language, and the user can solve problems on the website as well.

The two finest minds who created this platform for every coding enthusiast out there are Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky. They launched the site on 15th September 2008, eleven years from now, and today, the website witnesses over 50 million monthly visitors.

Stack Overflow Founders

About the Founders

Jeff Atwood is a software developer, who runs his own blogging site, Coding Horror, since 2004. Apart from co-founding Stack Overflow, he also launched his new company, Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., in 2013. He met Joel Spolsky after he started maintaining his programming blog.

Joel Spolsky is a software engineer and writer belonging to New Mexico. He maintains a blog called Joel on Software, and he is also the creator of Trello. Before founding Stack Overflow, he was a project manager of Microsoft Excel and also founded Fog Creek software.

Spolsky contacted Atwood on 2008 and together decided to set up a Q/A website related to coding.

The journey of Stack Overflow

Within months of the launch of Stack Overflow, it attracted a lot of coders from around the world, and even the beginners, who just wanted to learn something new. People helped each other by answering the doubts, learnt new things about any specific language, and even, if someone was showing off their coding skills, it worked out pretty well for the website.

Since both, the founders had their own personal blogs, they had enough number of subscribers. Atwood invited his subscribers to try the beta version of the newly released website, on 31st July 2008. And on 15 September 2008, the company announced the release of this beta version for public, where anyone could seek help and ask queries related to programming.

The website also incorporated a badge system for the users. For example, if you answered a question and your answer got upvoted you were given certain badges, that is, awards which upgraded your reputation. Thus, the more you answer, you are likely to gain certain incentives given that the quality didn’t drop.

But, it was noticed that a similar question was posted many times, giving rise to the same answers. Spolsky turned this drawback into a positive point, saying that if similar questions drove more traffic to the website, as it appeared on multiple search results, there is no harm in it after all.

The success of the website

In 2010, the company raised $6 million in Series A funding led by Union Square Ventures. In April 2009, the company added a feature called “timed suspension” which showed the user’s reputation at “1” because either they didn’t show enough interest to improve or engaged themselves in disruptive behaviour. After implementing this policy, 92% of the questions were answered within a few minutes.

In 2011, another $12 million was raised in Series B funding led by Index Ventures with the participation of Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Another $10 million was raised in Series C funding in 2013. Till now, the company has received around $70 million in funding.

Within five years of its launch, Stack Overflow answered 5 million questions related to coding, thus making the coding community even stronger. Around forty-four million visitors checked out the website every month by 2013.

Today, around 250 employees are working for Stack Overflow, with the majority working in head offices of New York, London and Munich. Around 14 million questions have been answered so far, and the site also partners with many big companies to help them recruit developers.

Majority of the queries that are posted on the website are regarding PHP, JavaScript, Java, Python, HTML, C#, jQuery and Android.

Houseparty : A Social Network that Claims to Connects People in More Real Way

Founder, Social media, start-up, Story, Tech Story / By

Social media not only provide you with the means to connect with your dear ones but is also a place where you can share your thoughts with the world. But with the rise of social media, the pressure on the users have also increased, and the originality of connecting with the people close to them has lost somewhere. Houseparty is also a social network which has been specially built to solve this problem.

The founder of Houseparty Ben Rubin and Sima Sistani, came together to build a platform, which is solely for the people who want to spend real time together even being physically apart. The app allows a group video chat of up to eight people, giving the feel similar to friends sitting in a living room.

The Founders

Ben is an entrepreneur of Israeli descent, who had joined the army when he was 18 years old. He had always intended to become an architect and even studied architecture but ended up building mobile applications.

When Ben was in the third year of his college, he was introduced to the famous social media platform Instagram, which became the inspiration for his first project ‘Yevvo’. Yevvo was a social media platform, which became popular in no time. Ben started adding new features to the app, but was unable to handle the pressure and soon he had to shut down the app.

Next startup app that Ben came with was Meerkat launched in February 2015. Meerkat was a social media app that enabled its users to tweet live videos and comment on the tweet.

Houseparty co-founders
Image Source: greylock.com

Sima Sistani is an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and was working as the head of media at Tumbler when she met Ben. The two got introduced through a common friend. Sima was already aware of his startup Meerkat and was quite impressed by the success of Meerkat.

After four months from the inception of Meerkat, Ben and the co-founder of Meerkat, Itai, realised that the tweeting live video was only working for people who were famous or were celebrities, and the common people were not getting much of the benefits from the service. At the time Sima had also joined the team Meerkat.

Founding HouseParty

The problem with meerkat was that it was not applicable for the common people, so it led the two future co-founders, Ben and Sima, brainstorm about the concept of live video streaming for the common people. Since it was clear that not many people are interested in watching common people live stream, they reached to the conclusion that why not make the live streaming more personal?

The answer to this question was the private synchronous social network Houseparty. In the first six months of its development, Sima went to different schools to test the features of the app and Ben was constantly working on adding relevant features to it, including personal notifications and locked room.

Houseparty is not only providing its service to common people for live video chats but also offers the advertiser a cheaper platform to advertise their services and products.

By September 2016, after a rewrite of the code, the company was serving over 1 million people in all 50 US states and other countries. Houseparty is mostly focused on Generation Z: 60% of its users are 16 to 24 years old. Currently, Ben is serving the board of the company, and Sima is promoted to the post of CEO of the company, who previously held the position of COO in the company. Till now the company has raised over $70 million from Silicon Valley investors and is growing at a rapid rate. For the success of Houseparty, Ben says that he is happy that his first two startups were failures and he came up with a more feasible business model, that has its own future.