One of the reasons I love working at Stack Overflow is we’re allowed encouraged to talk about almost anything out in the open. Except for things companies always keep private like financials and the nuclear launch codes, everything else is fair game. That’s an awesome thing that we haven’t taken advantage of on the technical side lately. I think it’s time for an experiment in extreme openness.

By sharing what we do (and I mean all of us), we better our world. Everyone that works at Stack shares at least one passion: improving life for all developers. Sharing how we do things is one of the best and biggest ways we can do that. It helps you. It helps me. It helps all of us.

When I tell you how we do <something> , a few things happen:

You might learn something cool you didn’t know about.

We might learn we’re doing it wrong.

We’ll both find a better way, together…and we share that too.

It helps eliminate the perception that “the big boys” always do it right. No, we screw up too.

There’s nothing to lose here and there’s no reason to keep things to yourself unless you’re afraid of being wrong. Good news: that’s not a problem. We get it wrong all the time anyway, so I’m not really worried about that one. Failure is always an option. The best any of us can do is live, learn, move on, and do it better next time.

Here’s where I need your help

I need you to tell me: what do you want to hear about? My intention is to get to a great many things, but it will take some time. What are people most interested in? How do I decide which topic to blog about next? The answer: I don’t know and I can’t decide. That’s where you come in. Please, tell me.

I put together this Trello board: Blog post queue for Stack Overflow topics

I’m also embedding it here for ease, hopefully this adds a lot of concreteness to the adventure:

It’s public. You can comment and vote on topics as well as suggest new topics either on the board itself or shoot me a tweet: @Nick_Craver. Please, help me out by simply voting for what you want to know so I can prioritize the queue. If you see a topic and have specific questions, please comment on the card so I make sure to answer it in the post.

The first post won’t be vote-driven. I think it has to be the architecture overview so all future references make sense. After that, I’ll go down the board and blog the highest-voted topic each time.

I’ve missed blogging due to spending my nights entirely in open source lately. I don’t believe that’s necessarily the best or only way for me to help developers. Having votes for topics gives me real motivation to dedicate the time to writing them up, pulling the stats, and making the pretty pictures. For that, I thank everyone participating.

If you’re curious about my writing style and what to expect, check out some of my previous posts:

Am I crazy? Yep, probably - that’s already a lot of topics. But I think it’ll be fun and engaging. Let’s go on this adventure together.