Stack Exchange changes its name back to Stack Overflow

Stack Exchange is now Stack Overflow — again.

https://twitter.com/spolsky/status/643824744014446593

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Stack Overflow emerged in 2008 as an online place for developers to ask technical questions and give answers to one another. In 2010, cofounder and chief executive Joel Spolsky announced plans to expand the question-and-answer technology to launch Q&A forums for a wide variety of subjects. The company changed its name from Stack Overflow to Stack Exchange less than a year later.

There are now forums for more than 140 topics. But Stack Overflow itself is kind of a big deal. Alexa said it’s the 56th biggest site on the Internet. (Stack Exchange is No. 158, while Q&A site Quora is No. 136.) Now the company name is going back to mirror the most prominent Stack Exchange site there is.

“Seven years ago today, Joel announced the public launch of Stack Overflow,” explained Jay Hanlon, Stack Exchange’s vice president of community growth, in a blog post today. “Since then, our strategy has centered around building useful tools for developers and then — if they worked — expanding them to serve a wider market. We think our new company name better reflects this core philosophy, and will continue to lead to good things for devs and non-devs alike.”

So what’s changing? Not much, truth be told. The Stack Overflow logo has been spruced up. And the company’s blog, podcast, and other corporate entities will get the name change.

But that doesn’t mean the company itself no longer cares about all its other sites.

“And just to be clear, Q&A remains our core product, and we’ll continue to invest in helping it serve more of the world’s developers, chemists, photographers and whatever the heck these awesome people are,” Hanlon wrote.