It’s hard to believe that Stack Overflow has been “a thing” for over a year and a half now. I quit my job in March 2008, we announced Stack Overflow in April 2008, and the site was launched in September 2008. The rest is kind of a blur. During 2009, the company became somewhat stable,…

It’s hard to believe that Stack Overflow has been “a thing” for over a year and a half now. I quit my job in March 2008, we announced Stack Overflow in April 2008, and the site was launched in September 2008. The rest is kind of a blur.

During 2009, the company became somewhat stable, and has threetwo totally awesome associates who are finally getting a reasonable fraction of what they’re worth. It’s only appropriate that Stack Overflow, the company, start giving back to all the people and projects that helped us succeed.

First and foremost, our community moderators. They, more than anyone, set the tone and direction for the community — and generously contribute their time to make Stack Overflow, Server Fault, Super User, and Meta Stack Overflow into places you’d actually want to participate.

As a gesture of thanks for their contributions this year, Stack Overflow offered to make a donation to the charity or nonprofit of their choice. I’m happy to report that through our moderators, the following donations were made:

I also wanted to give back to the tools, people and projects that helped us build Stack Overflow. To that end, I browsed the meta question What was Stack Overflow Built With and donated to every project we rely on that accepts donations — even if those “donations” are licenses:

Upgraded our individual Beyond Compare licenses to corporate full edition licenses ($150)

Upgraded our donated VisualSVN licenses to corporate full edition licenses ($150)

Licensed copy of PowerGREP, 3 copies of RegexBuddy ($270)

Donated $200 to DotNetOpenAuth

Donated $200 to HAProxy

Donated $1,000 to Creative Commons

Donated $1,000 to jQuery

Donated $500 to Markdown

Donated $200 to TortoiseSVN

Donated $200 to Cacti

Donated $200 to Ubuntu (Canonical)

We also donated another $500 directly to jQuery, as well as indirectly to a number of other popular open source projects, through our sponsorship of the Bad Code Offsets program.

To me, the whole point of having money — once you have enough of it to cover your basic business needs, of course — is using it to effect positive change in the world. It is my hope that we can make these donations a yearly tradition at Stack Overflow — and increase the size of the donations every year, too.

So, thanks to everyone who participated in Stack Overflow, Server Fault, Super User, or Meta Stack Overflow during 2009. We hope you enjoyed whatever time you spent there, and more importantly, got something useful out of it.

Here’s to a happy and prosperous 2010!