Our portfolio company Stack Overflow (or Stack as I prefer to call them) has launched something new and interesting today.
It is called Stack Overflow Documentation.
This is what Stack co-founder and CEO Joel Spolsky told me about Documentation a few weeks ago:
The current state of developer documentation is pretty abysmal. It’s spread all over the place, in a million different formats. It’s never complete and rarely includes good example code. Even the best developer documentation is usually on a static website with no community or crowd sourcing features, so it stagnates.After months of beta testing, we are launching a global, crowdsourced developer documentation section on Stack Overflow that covers everything from programming languages to APIs and frameworks. It will be completely community generated, with all the reputation stuff that made Stack Overflow successful (voting, reputation, tags, community moderation, etc).When you poke around at the state of developer documentation on the web in 2016, it feels a lot like… developer Q&A before Stack Overflow. It’s fragmented, half of it is out of date, it’s very very uneven in quality, and when you find a bug there’s no way to fix it. We think that applying the mechanics of Stack Overflow Q&A to crowdsourced documentation will make as big a difference in developers’ lives as the original Stack Overflow.
The secret sauce behind Stack’s success is the fact that crowdsourcing information is way better than the top down approach when it is combined with a specific set of tools that make the crowdsourced data super high quality. The latter is what Joel calls the “reputation stuff” (voting, reputation, tags, community moderation, etc).
It makes all the sense in the world that Stack would focus their secret sauce at Developer Documentation in addition to Developer Q&A. So if you are working in Javascript and want to find some documentation or contribute some documentation, go here. If its Docker that’s giving you fits, go here. And for Android devs, this is for you. The entire Documentation section is here.
Developer Documentation is in Beta right now and though it is pretty good already, I expect it will get a lot more complete and a lot more thorough in the coming months. And if you are so inclined, please help make that so.
