SE Podcast #35 – A Biscuit Away from Jerry Stiller

Welcome to Stack Exchange podcast #35 with special guest Scott Hanselman. We also have your loyal cohosts, Jay Hanlon and David Fullerton. And Joel Spolsky?

• What exactly would Scott say that he does here?

• Scott Hanselman runs a podcast that doesn't waste your time… unlike we have for the first nine minutes.

• Let's talk about Scott's recent presentation at Webstock! Or we'll talk about how Scott is not a developer evangelist, despite popular belief. He is a community manager for ASP.net, IIS, anything angle bracket or curly brace related, anything "webby".

• You can buy a single Q-Tip or Lego lightsaber on Amazon. (Most Lego fans don't like Lego Star Wars.)

• Why do we have both Programming.SE and Stack Overflow? Joel tells us about the historical reasoning behind it. It's a party line: Stack Overflow is for things you do at the computer, and Programmers is for things you do at the whiteboard.

• Do people still use Twitter? We thought they'd all moved on to App.net, but that's only for people who had fifty dollars (that they didn't spend on the new iPod connector).

• "Do you realize that you are a biscuit away from turning into Jerry Stiller?"

• Scott works remotely. Joel inquires: how does he make that work? Scott shares some tips! (Possibly… a blog post?)

• One of Scott's biggest tips is to use more face-to-face communication instead of text-based. We don't necessarily agree, and so we explore the topic in depth. Jay agrees, that debates and discussions are not productive in text-based chat.

• Scott will probably teach Computer Science when he retires… but then, he'll be allowed to have an opinion!

• Back on the "working remotely" topic. There's a difference between being on a distributed team and being the remote person on a not-so-distributed team. The latter is harder! Scott insists on camera at every meeting.

• We want to spend as much as we possibly can on remote collaboration, so we talk about some of the tech you can use to accomplish that.

• Windows 8 is coming out on Friday (or for the past year, if you are a developer or you tried to download it). How is it? Is it awesome, or did someone move everyone's cheese? Listen in to find out… and then move on to a general discussion of changing user interfaces and what that does to users who are loyal to companies.

• Let's talk about something else that isn't twitter! Scott and Stack Exchange have in common that they provide an audience for answered questions, so Q&A isn't one-on-one communication. It makes it useful for everyone. Stay tuned for the Joel Theory of Blogging. Is twitter the decline of modern blogging?

• Joel spoke to a bunch of recruiters in London, where he told them that their job is to make the company awesome enough that great candidates come to them. Joel has a lot of projects, remarks Scott, and we discuss them - including Trello and what makes it great, and Scott's suggestions for improvement.

• What has everyone been doing since Joel was on the road? Some stuff we already talked about and some stuff we can't talk about yet.

• Check out This Developer's Life. It's the best knock-off out there.

Episode source