On Stack Overflow and our other code-related sites, creating a minimal, complete, and verifiable example is the best way to get an answer to your question. We’ve always loved JSFiddle and sites like it because they let both askers and answerers reference runnable, working code that demonstrates their problem or solution.

Unfortunately, the use of these external sites introduces a few problems:

If the link breaks, the post becomes worthless.

If the code isn’t embedded in the page, visitors are forced to go elsewhere to get the full content of the question or answer. …

We rolled out three new badges last week!

These recognize a pattern that sets Stack Exchange apart from the forums and message boards that came before it: answering and editing questions, the ability to not only write an answer that can be useful beyond the immediate asker but also re-write the question such that it can be found and understood by future readers. Thanks to this capability, brilliant explanations need not languish under titles such as “C++ problem” or “Java doubt” – having written an answer that ably fixed the problems in the asker’s code, it is possible to also fix the problems in his writing! …

When we launched our iOS and Android apps, we were pretty sure they’d help our most active users in a couple of ways:

Push inbox notifications are epic – you can know the minute you get an answer or someone comments on your post.

The personalized mobile feed lets you browse all content relevant to you, whether it’s posts from your communities or replies to your posts.

Voting, commenting, and minor edits are all things you often want to do when you’re away from your desktop, and an interface built for touch makes them a breeze. …

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason. - Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey

A big part of scaling up an engineering team is getting serious about monitoring and alerts. A good monitoring system collects data from all of your various systems — for example, how fast pages are loading, or server CPU usage, or emails being sent — and alerts you when something isn’t working correctly. When everything works perfectly you can sleep easy at night knowing that you’ll get an alert if something isn’t working correctly. …