OK Thanks everyone for their questions, and also thanks to hashnode for hosting this Q&A! See you on Stack Overflow.. or any Discourse instance ;) https://discourse.org

use Discourse and Stack Overflow. ;) Great communicators are rewarded on both of those platforms, by design.

Read marketing books! They're actually quite good https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-one-thing-every-software-engineer-should-know/ Alongside that, cultivate the skill of asking for money, because your product is great, and worth it.

Primarily, complaint driven development and building alongside/with your community! https://blog.codinghorror.com/listen-to-your-community-but-dont-let-them-tell-you-what-to-do/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/complaint-driven-development/

I wrote about this a fair bit at https://blog.codinghorror.com/what-does-stack-overflow-want-to-be-when-it-grows-up/

I used to think netbooks were gonna be big :( Turns out, it was phablets instead!

Neither, really. In a startup mindset, you want to optimize for people who are a little bit crazy and obsessive enough to get things done at (almost) any cost. https://blog.codinghorror.com/we-hire-the-best-just-like-everyone-else/ Now this can go quite badly in the moral sense (Theranos, Uber) so when I say this, I DO NOT mean do things in an unethical way, or to take unethical shortcuts! Just work hard and be obsessed with the problem you're working on.

The new shiny is always overrated. Be skeptical! Think UNIX! Old and dumb, but it works, that's the ticket! ;)

Well, when I started in 1994 virtually nobody used source control, continuous integration, or unit testing.. heck even by 2000 very few people did that .. so I'd say software engineering is a very young field!

I don't think I could have done anything much differently for SO. I can only think of two things was not starting meta.stackoverflow.com sooner, but that still came relatively soon. splitting into two projects, careers and stack overflow proper, so early on with so few people working #2 was painful, and I can technically blame Joel for that, but we felt it was key to get the income part of the project going as soon as possible so we could figure out how to make it a sustainable business. I think the Q&A format was less relevant to programmers back in 2007.. though it was in fact was ASTOUNDINGLY common on the web! It blew my mind how many random Q&A sites there were on the web when I began researching it in 2008! People may laugh (and justifiably so) at Yahoo Answers but it had crazy levels of real world usage by real people. Q&A was a latent market, I think, and we tapped into that for the programming use case. As far as work/life balance, I think integrating more women into the field will help. It's awfully easy to work 12 hours a day when you don't have any children in the picture, and this goes for fathers as well as mothers.