Stack Overflow Hits 10M Uniques (opens in new tab)

Just for reference there are roughly in the region of 15-30 million professional developers in the world. However this doesn't include a fairly large chunk of people (i.e students) who are probably the group most likely to be using StackOverflow. So I think Joel might be pushing it a bit to say most software developers are using it (although they have a fairly respectable chunk of the market).

It will never equate to the number of user accounts because we don't require users to register. You can get in on all that hot Q&A goodness account free.

There was never a deliberate effort from TC to ignore StackOverflow, I linked to it in some of my posts there.

IIRC we simply were not in the loop on their news, announcements or tips.

A lot of the TC'ers use Quora which is why it is mentioned a lot, but in TC dev we were definitely big fans of StackOverflow, its just that the full-time writers didn't use it or notice it as much.

If you look at Techmeme, you can see that StackOverflow hasn't been getting much attention from the usual tech blogs:

http://techmeme.com/search/query?q=stackoverflow&wm=fals...

I figure it is for the same reason - they weren't actively reaching out to the tech bloggers and instead using their own blogs for PR. Still worked out well for them :)

Agreed. I've found it especially valuable as a bit of a teaching tool lately. I spent three years in a mind-numbing COBOL-based job, and now I'm building a PHP application to try to showcase the fact that I am more than the sum of my career, and to try to find a decent job.

Since I'm doing this in isolation, I'm trying to use StackOverflow as a surrogate mentor. When I have a question about how to do things, mostly design issues, I can usually find an existing discussion (yes Jeff, discussion) on the topic. It sucks up an awful amount of my time, but I feel like I've grown a lot professionally because of it.

Quora has a much smaller community mostly composed of people interested in start-ups in the Silicon Valley. They get coverage on sites like TechCrunch and HN because of that and the founders left Facebook (most likely because Zuckerberg replaced one of them as CTO with Brett Taylor).

I talked to them and they believe they can beat the competition simply by piggybacking off Facebook's social system and by using AI filtering to prevent people from being overloaded since they allow every topic unlike Stackoverflow.