The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Gaming

Jon Quixote

jlericson.com

In which the author considers whether a community is more like a giant or more like a windmill.

GamingEngineering management / careersEssays / personal

’10’15’20’25
Posts
166 from 16 Mar 2010 to 3 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (7 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://jlericson.com/feed.xml

2026 7

  1. Friday is a masterpiece of theme, deckbuilding and push-your-luck
  2. Cartesian career advice
  3. _Skyway_ is, somehow, a thematic city builder
  4. _The Sandwich Guy_ serves the ingredients he's dealt
  5. My rating system
  6. VentureBoard _Backgammon_
  7. _Arkham Horror: The Card Game_

2025 5

  1. _Exit: The Game—The Polar Station_
  2. After 16 years, we’re renewing the Brand
  3. _The Blood of an Englishman_: Head to head fable simulator
  4. Using Conway’s Law for good
  5. Thanks for the diamond. Now what?

2024 6

  1. My OpenSSL warrant canary
  2. Communities Manager at the OpenSSL Foundation
  3. Building a Lord of the Rings keyboard
  4. Hiatus
  5. Supporting pop-up communities
  6. Running multiple Discourse sites on a single server

2023 28

  1. The proper role of shame
  2. BoardGameGeek: Building a community platform
  3. Why I recommend Discourse
  4. Standing up for each other
  5. Introducing my community consulting business
  6. Stack Overflow: Building a community platform
  7. Bias: Conscious and unconscious
  8. Community managers are conflicted advocates: Stack Overflow lost a good one in Catija
  9. Find the Jack
  10. If more users could vote, would they engage more?
  11. Rewriting a Git repository: Dealing with distribution
  12. Stack Overflow’s strike is over: But its problems persist
  13. Stack Overflow’s CEO doesn’t understand Stack Overflow
  14. Why AI is a problem on Stack Overflow
  15. The data dump diversion
  16. What Stack Overflow is telling employees about the strike
  17. How’s the Stack Overflow strike going?
  18. Why I’m signing the Stack Overflow strike letter
  19. Beware of low-hanging fruit
  20. Moderation by humans
  21. Stack Exchange moderator strike
  22. Why conflict is inevitable
  23. Glassdoor review of Stack Overflow: Management feudalism means your mileage may vary
  24. How’s business at Stack Overflow?
  25. Remote work isn’t a mistake
  26. ChatGPT can code: How terrifying is this development?
  27. Communities are like reservoirs
  28. Sharing an Outlook calendar with GCal

2022 12

  1. What emojis are most popular?
  2. Importing a remote database archive
  3. Working on a Discourse theme: Setting up your environment
  4. Registration and retention
  5. My year at EDB
  6. Community as meta-product
  7. Crypto Cards: Rules
  8. The mystery of the missing Oracle Cloud IP
  9. Docs 2.0: The beginning of a beautiful friendship
  10. Docs 2.0: An overnight success 15 months in the making
  11. Docs 2.0: Everyone can contribute
  12. Solving Agricola: Family Edition

2021 16

  1. A comprehensive guide to investing: The condensed version
  2. A day in Reserve
  3. Rewriting a Git repository: How we stopped making everything worse
  4. Prototyping with shell scripts
  5. Rewriting a Git repository: Unlimited growth (in a bad way)
  6. Starting a new community
  7. Installing PostgreSQL the hard way
  8. I’m joining EDB as a Developer Advocate
  9. Reading the tea leaves at Stack Overflow
  10. Finding a community manager job in 2021
  11. Hosting Discourse for free!
  12. How are minds changed?
  13. Ask not what a community is worth . . .
  14. My year at College Confidential
  15. Creating Discourse permalinks with shell commands
  16. Wisdom scaled

2020 23

  1. My answer about using preferred pronouns
  2. Star Realms’ leveling system
  3. Ignoring others for community peace
  4. Moderating on Discourse
  5. How to simplify Google Form attendance taking
  6. Tinkering with my blog as procrastination
  7. Responding to reader mail
  8. Reacting with ‘thanks’
  9. Managing mistakes
  10. Does the 2020 survey show Stack Overflow made progress on its welcoming initiative?
  11. The Power of Story
  12. Netlify as a hosting option
  13. Heroku as a hosting option: Or how to avoid lock-in
  14. My one-sided retrospective of Stack Overflow’s pronoun affair
  15. Sourdough and the art of tending a culture
  16. College Confidential’s costly theme
  17. Remote Communication: A Field Guide
  18. Accountability culture
  19. Parable of the rose garden
  20. An account of my meeting with the Stack Overflow management team
  21. Misunderstanding Meta
  22. 2019 in Review
  23. Why I left Stack Overflow

2019 18

  1. Founders
  2. Control and Agency
  3. Unicorn Meta Zoo #9: How do we handle problem users?
  4. Unicorn Meta Zoo #8: What does leadership look like in our communities?
  5. Unicorn Meta Zoo #7: Interview with Nicolas
  6. Unicorn Meta Zoo #6: Interview with Catija
  7. Unicorn Meta Zoo #5: Interview with Cesar M
  8. The value of Disneyland’s mission
  9. Adios to Unfriendly Badges! Ahoy, Lifejacket and Lifeboat—Stack Overflow Blog
  10. Unicorn Meta Zoo #4: What makes for a healthy community?
  11. Unicorn Meta Zoo #3: How do we grade questions?
  12. The meristocracy theory of community
  13. Master of my own domain
  14. What is a Community Product Manager?
  15. Unicorn Meta Zoo #2: What is the role of moderators?
  16. The Token Economy of Stack Overflow
  17. Unicorn Meta Zoo #1: Why another podcast?
  18. Why are answer rates dropping?

2018 12

  1. The Tony the Pony problem
  2. If 95%+ of comments have been rated as "fine", does the site deserve its reputation of "unwelcoming"? Do we still need to focus on it?
  3. Chaos, lost trust, grief and restoration
  4. What does constructive criticism of a design change look like?
  5. Steam comments
  6. What can we do to encourage (or discourage) a second question?
  7. How Stack Overflow for Teams Fits into the Community—Stack Overflow Blog
  8. Was there a Documentation post-mortem?
  9. Is Stack Overflow really racist/sexist?
  10. Does Stack Exchange really want to conflate newbies with women/people of color?
  11. The Puppet Race: Asking a question and getting comments
  12. Stack Exchange 2017 in Review

2017 8

  1. The Puppet Race: Learning Ruby by Writing Documentation
  2. Why are there so many bad questions?
  3. The Puppet Race: Documentation was no PED
  4. Sunsetting Documentation
  5. The Puppet Race: Get set
  6. The Puppet Race: On your mark
  7. Why don't we keep public records of suspensions?
  8. Stack Exchange Year in Review 2016

2016 9

  1. When a Crisis Hits, Who Manages the Managers?
  2. What, exactly, is Documentation?
  3. Why do people answer questions on Stack Overflow?
  4. How to conduct hallway usability tests without any hallways.
  5. What Happened to Stack Overflow in 2014?
  6. Building a customer support system: Automated responses
  7. Fair Elections and STV
  8. If at first you don’t succeed . . .
  9. Stack Exchange Year in Review 2015

2015 12

  1. My Adventure with Late Answers
  2. How to vacation like a community manager.
  3. Empathetic criticism
  4. How can we make the most of our upcoming site self evaluations?
  5. Computer Science and women
  6. Building a customer support system: Adding a honeypot
  7. Building a customer support system: Tickets are people too
  8. The yolk’s on us
  9. Building a customer support system: Training
  10. Building a customer support system: Moving from email to Zendesk
  11. Thought experiment: What would happen if we didn’t have close votes?
  12. So long Winter Bash 2014

2014 5

  1. Winter Bash 2014—Stack Overflow Blog
  2. How do weekly topic challenges work?
  3. What is Stack Overflow’s goal?
  4. Stack Overflow is not yet a vast wasteland: a history of moderator tooling
  5. How big is the Fastest Gun in the West bias?

2013 3

  1. Hide trivial comments
  2. Please welcome Jon Ericson, Community Manager—Stack Overflow Blog
  3. How can we encourage small beta sites to grow?

2012 1

  1. My 1999 Chevy S-10 pickup

2010 1

  1. The problem with extrinsic motivation