Social Networking Meets Software Development: Perspectives from GitHub, MSDN, Stack Exchange, and TopCoder

Many successful software companies use social networking as a way to improve the services or products they provide. To gain an understanding of the role social networking plays in today's software development world, the guest editors of the January/February 2013 issue conducted semistructured interviews with leaders from four successful companies: Brian Doll, an engineer who manages GitHub's marketing; Doug Laundry, a principal group program manager at Microsoft; David Fullerton, vice president of engineering at Stack Exchange; and Robert Hughes, the president and chief operating officer of TopCoder. The first Web extra at http://try.github.com is a video of Joel Spolsky discussing the structure, software, technology, and culture of Stack Exchange. The second Web extra at http://blip.tv/play/gvUBgqLbRgI.html is a video of Matthew McCullough and Tim Berglund demonstrating how Git not only incorporates the best features of existing source control systems but also includes unique distributed capabilities that make version control commands available without connectivity, allowing you to choose when to interact with a network. The third Web extra at http://blip.tv/play/gvUBgqLbRgI.html is a video of Matthew McCullough and Tim Berglund demonstrating how to leverage Git's powerful yet underused advanced features. The last Web extra at http://youtu.be/SK6TBI1bNLI is a video of Thomas Baden, Chief Information Officer, State of Minnesota, Department of Human Services, describing the experience of working on the TopCoder Platform and with the members of the TopCoder Community.