ReadWriteWeb

This weekend, venture capitalist and avid blogger Fred Wilson pointed out an interesting blog post written by Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood. In the article, Atwood explains how his company takes advice from Charles de Mar - a character in the 1985 movie Better Off Dead - who rather bluntly tells a first time skier to "go that way, really fast." Atwood says his company has focused mainly on speed, and believes speed of iteration is more valuable than quality.

When asked if he would mind his startup being described as "a Tumblr for designers and developers," Forrst founder and developer Kyle Bragger said he wasn't sure, but that he probably wouldn't mind. After all, that is precisely what his product is - a community where users can share their links, pictures and text in a micro-blog format, with a little Stack Overflow-style Q&A thrown in. This budding startup has quickly gathered a unique and loyal community of designers and developers that are sharing thousands of posts and comments each day, and today I had to chance to chat with its founder.

Stack Overflow, the uber-popular software developers' Q&A site created by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood in 2008, now has a sister site called Server Fault. This new site, designed with the needs of system administrators in mind, uses the same engine that Stack Overflow does for voting, editing, and tagging.

We heard about Spolsky and Atwood's plan to launch an I.T.- themed site back in January of this year, but it wasn't until the end of May - only days ago - that the site actually went live for the public to use.

Picture if you will, a collaborative site that runs on two servers, is managed by four people, and has attracted a third of its target demographic within six months of launch. A site that has had 800,000 posts submitted by its users in its short lifetime and has 16 million pageviews/month - and growing.

This is the story of Stack Overflow, a free question and answer site built by developers for developers that has fostered a strong and committed online community in under one year. How? Easy, according to founder Joel Spolsky; all it takes is an understanding of anthropology and a lot of determination.

Stack Overflow, the software developers' Q&A site created by rock star programmers Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, saw 3 million unique visitors last month - just the 4th month the site has been live, according to Spolsky in the latest episode of the Stack Overflow podcast. Now the team plans to create a spin-off site serving what they believe is an even bigger audience, IT professionals.

Traffic wise, the well constructed site appears to be an early and unqualified success. It's also a lot of fun to read. The people behind the long established but widely reviled paid Q&A site Experts Exchange must be struggling to control bodily functions.