Since the 1990s, the web has been a publishing place for human-readable documents. Documents published on the web are in HTML. HTML has a little bit of structure, for example, “here is a paragraph” or “emphasize this word.” Then you stir in some CSS, which adds some pretty decorations to the structure, saying things like: make those paragraphs have tiny gray sans-serif text! And then people think you are hip. Unless they are older, and they can’t read your tiny gray words, so they give up on you. That’s “structure,” as far as it goes, on the web. Imagine, for example, that you mention a book o ..read more

You’ve probably seen web editors based on the idea of blocks. I’m typing this in WordPress, which has a little + button that brings up a long list of potential blocks that you can insert into this page: This kind of “insert block” user interface concept is showing up in almost every blogging tool, web editor, note-taking app, and content management system. People like it and it makes sense. We have seem to have standardized on one thing: the / key to insert a new block. Everything else, though, is completely proprietary and non-standard. I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if blocks were interchan ..read more

The other day I was talking to a young developer working on a code base with tons of COM code, and I told him that even before he was born, everyone knew that COM was already so deeply obsolete that it was impossible to find anyone who knew enough to work on it. And yet they still have this old COM code base, and they still have one old programmer holding onto their job by being the only human left on the planet with a brain big enough to manually manage multithreaded objects. I remember that COM was like Gödels Theorem: it seemed important, and you could understand it all long enough to pass ..read more

For the last couple of months, Prashanth Chandrasekar has been getting settled in as the new CEO of Stack Overflow. I’m still going on some customer calls and have a weekly meeting with him, but I have freed up a lot of time. I’m also really enjoying discovering just how little I knew about running medium-sized companies, as I watch Prashanth rearrange everything—for the better. It’s really satisfying to realize that the best possible outcome for me is if he proves what a bad CEO I was by doing a much better job running the company. Even though I live in Manhattan’s premier NORC (“Naturally ..read more

Last March, I shared that we were starting to look for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. We were looking for that rare combination of someone who could foster the community while accelerating the growth of our businesses, especially Teams, where we are starting to close many huge deals and becoming a hyper-growth enterprise software company very quickly. This is not something I’m particularly good at, and I thought it was time to bring on more experienced leadership. The Board of Directors nominated a search committee and we went through almost 200 candidates. It speaks to how well respected  a ..read more

Big news! We’re looking for a new CEO for Stack Overflow. I’m stepping out of the day-to-day and up to the role of Chairman of the Board. Stack Overflow has been around for more than a decade. As I look back, it’s really amazing how far it has come.   Only six months after we had launched Stack Overflow, my co-founder Jeff Atwood and I were invited to speak at a Microsoft conference for developers in Las Vegas. We were there, I think, to demonstrate that you could use their latest ASP.NET MVC technology on a real website without too much of a disaster. (In fact .NET has been a huge, unmi ..read more