Jeff Atwood is a programmer and writer best known for the blog Coding Horror and for co-founding the question-and-answer site Stack Overflow. On his own “about me” page he describes himself as a “reasonably experienced Windows web software developer” whose central conviction is that “studying code isn’t enough; you have to study the people behind the software, too.” He traces his start in programming to the 1980s, writing BASIC on a TI-99/4a microcomputer.
Atwood began blogging at Coding Horror in 2004, and by his own account the blog “transformed his life.” The name is borrowed from Steve McConnell’s book “Code Complete,” reflecting Atwood’s habit of writing about the dangerous and embarrassing code patterns programmers fall into. Over the years the blog became one of the most-read independent voices in software, covering craftsmanship, usability, hiring, and the everyday frustrations of the working developer.
In 2008 Atwood partnered with the software writer Joel Spolsky to build Stack Overflow. He announced the project on Coding Horror in April of that year in a post called “Introducing Stackoverflow.com,” explaining that he wanted to stop merely commenting on software and “build stuff” instead. The site grew out of his and Spolsky’s shared frustration with the existing landscape of programming help sites, and Atwood let his blog’s readers vote on the name.
Beyond Stack Overflow, Atwood went on to co-found Discourse in 2013, an open-source platform for online discussion forums intended to modernize the aging forum software of the prior decade. His writing and his products share a consistent theme: that the social design of a system, how it shapes the behavior of the people using it, matters as much as the code underneath. He lives in Alameda, California.