thanks, Jeff Atwood.

As a programmer, you sometimes encounter problems that you don't find the solution to on your own, and as we all know, the internet is a place full of spam and porn, with some really valuable information hidden in between. Stack Overflow, and later the rest of the stackexchange network, succeeded where many others (yahoo answers, expertsexchange, the millions of forums out there) failed, create a Q&A site with content that actually made the internet better.

This stack of valuable information was founded by Jef Atwood, and Joel Spolsky. These guys did some great work, involving the community in nearly every decision. After reading the Steve Jobs bio, where Steve's children describe how much they missed there father, who was spending all his time at Apple, Jeff decided it was time to step down from his daily work at StackExchange. He wrote a blog post about it, on  codinghorror.

What I think makes Jeff's work so great is his vision that the tools don't matter, it's how you use them. Prammers often get very religous about the tools they're using, focussing on the technology instead of the goal of the product they're building. Jeff and Joel have put a lot of thought in the principles behind stackoverflow, where i find the no-nonsense rule, which makes a much better signal to noise ratio, th e most important one. Everyone who makes a platform where people can interact seems to think that their platform needs some way to send private messages, a way to leave comments on people's profile, and some way to friend/follow people. What they don't realize, and what the people behind Stack Exchange did realize, is that socializing does not have to be part of an application. Stack overflow is not about making friends, networking,... It's about sharing and obtaining knowledge. By making the site slightly less social, they've also prevented the site from getting cluttered.

Another point I've learned from Jeff is how important gamification is in an online platform. Many sites give users credits points, badges, reputation, rankings,... but somehow, whenever I hear someone giving examples of gamification, I hear stackoverflow being mentioned.

For all the times I couldn't find that one bug, or had no idea how to implement that one feature, or had no idea how to structure that routine, and found help on stack overflow, I want to thank Jeff. I wish him the best of luck with his wife and children. And if someone takes the time to write a biography of him, he can be described as a loving and caring dad.