Zero to Hero: The story of Stack Overflow

By David W. Sutton

It grew from humble beginnings in 2008. Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky created the go-to resource for programmers, developers, coders and data scientists seeking solutions to their questions and help resolving coding errors. Stack Overflow is a tool everyone has used countless times during their technology careers.

Stack Overflow has become a massive online community where viewers can read, respond and resolve questions and problems, and help troubleshoot coding bugs in just about any programming language. It’s unknown whether the adage no one can write three lines of code without needing to Google something has ever been proven.

What is known is that most of the time Google sends programmers to Stack Exchange for solutions.

Stack Overflow sprouted from Atwood’s programming blog, Coding Horror, and grew to include job postings in addition to the viewer responses and fixes for coding errors, questions and bugs.

According to SimilarWeb, an internet traffic tracking site, daily total visits hover around 250 million, and it has become an internet behemoth. It is not a far-fetched claim that it’s a relied-upon tool in every programmer’s quiver.

Stack Overflow fields questions from multitude languages that include Python, C++, Spark and everything in between. And houses answers from its vast community of users that has resolved countless error messages and allowed many programs to run smoothly.

No one knows where it will go next in terms of expansion or programming languages. As long as programmers have issues, the site will be there to provide answers and solutions at no cost.