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What/Why

It is hard to explain this website without first describing what is Stack Overflow and who is Jon Skeet. Firstly Stack Overflow is a fast-growing website featuring questions and answers on a wide range of topics in computer programming. It has already built up a large community and has an addictive quality that is largely down to its Reputation system.

Meanwhile Jon Skeet is a software engineer who currently works for Google. He has recently gained minor celebrity within the developer community by becoming a prolific contributor to StackOverflow. At the time of writing he has totalled 2,738 answers in the 5 months he has been registered. This works out at roughly 500 questions per month!

Of course being this prolific is astonishing in itself, however it wouldn’t be of much value if the answers were of a poor quality. That is what stands Jon Skeet apart, his answers have a consistent and almost reference  quality. It was this that led me to think that it would be fun to create a website that farmed Stack Overflow of all the questions that Jon Skeet has answered and put them in an AskJeeves.com style website. If you want to know what Jon Skeet thinks about a topic, put it in AskJonSkeet.com and see.

How

The website is built using Simple.Web and Lucene. A spider crawls Stack Overflow and builds up a search index of questions and answers. Special weighting is added to answers that have been accepted as the answer, or that have a lot of votes.

Disclaimer

This website was made as a bit of fun, and is not affiliated with Jon Skeet, nor is it meant as a substitute to searching Stack Overflow itself to get questions and answers within their full context.

More Jon Skeet.

csharpindepthJon Skeet has also written a book on C# called C# in depth. I would recommend this book without hesitation to any .net developer. It explains a lot within a small amount of space whilst still remaining a joy to read. He has a rare gift of being able to describe complex subjects, in a way that makes them easy to understand.

 


Jon's Links

For more Jon Skeet trivia please visit the Jon Skeet Facts on Stack Overflow.

Any questions or comments please contact me on andrew.rimmer@outofmemory.co.uk or visit me Andrew Rimmer at my blog Out Of Memory.