Stack Overflow, and its Q&A network Stack Exchange, have been growing exponentially for the last five years. They now encompass
~150 Q&A sites
~9 million users
~13 million questions
~22 million answers
In this talk, I will describe:
* The physical architecture of Stack Overflow. How many servers are there? What is their purpose and what are their specs?
* The logical architecture of the software. How do we scale up? What are the main building blocks of our software?
* The tooling system. What supports our extreme optimization philosophy?
* The development team. What are our core values? What footprint do we want to leave as developers?