Just over a year ago, we were excited to report on a new website for programmers. StackOverflow was the brainchild of coders/rockstars Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, and it was a social Q&A channel that promised to give programmers solutions for even the most obscure bugs.
Apparently, that approach to developer support was a solid one. These days, the site gets around 1.8 million unique visitors a month and has served as a prototype for white-label Q&A sites for companies, too. The site’s latest merit badge is an official nod from the Android team, which has announced StackOverflow as the official home of Android developer Q&A support.
Android rep Roman Nurik wrote in a blog post, “We’re working with StackOverflow to improve developer support, especially for developers new to Android. In essence, the Android tag on Stack Overflow will become an official Android app development Q&A medium.”
Nurik further noted that StackOverflow’s format was particularly helpful for beginners new to the Android platform. However, he did state, “It’s also important to point out that we don’t plan to change the android-developers group, so intermediate and expert users should still feel free to post there.”
The StackOverflow “Digg for developers” model has worked well for all kinds of programmers, clearly. The models has also been successfully applied to such diverse topics as mathematics, parenting and even World of Warcraft – all built on the company’s StackExchange white-label platform.
