Digital Dave

Gotcha.

So these two clever guys (you might know ‘em), Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, teamed up back in April for a new adventure.  They’ve got themselves a pretty clever idea to assist programmers out here, and the future programmers that come into the world, learn the different tools of our trade.

Even though I really enjoy going over to Borders to poke around at some books, there is no doubt that the programmer reliance on books has dwindled down to fairy dust.  I really just started programming in 2005, and even though I do collect a few books, I can’t remember a time that I actually found a solution to my problem in any of them.  Typically, I’ll jump into Google.  Or now that I actually have a developer ring, I will ask one of my buddies for their perception on the issue.

But you’ve got to admit that the sources for those answers are scattered all over the place.  Sure, Google might make you lucky, but realisticlly, it would be incredibly nice to have one user generated source for programmers.  Think, SearchForHelp->Digg(Wikipedia(ExpertsExchange)) returning a myrid of answers, but one that stands above them all with a bonafied user approval rating.  People come in to ask questions.  People who have been a reliable source to the website can provide their solution to their question.  And then other users can rate those answers, essentially moving them up the pedistal of uberness.

It actually sounds really nice and I am really hoping that this works out. It’s still under development, but I’ve been listening to their podcasts all day (Moving to #12 now, oomph!), while doing some reading on programming.  I highly recommend the podcasts.  They discuss some pretty interesting things revolving web technologies, careers, and programming.  They also answer questions at the end.  Plus, it’s just nice hearing programmers BS a bit.  I’m still in the academic world, so I don’t hear much of this unfortunately.

Check it all out at http://blog.stackoverflow.com