stackoverflow.co

During my time at Stack Overflow, the web needs of every team expanded exponentially with the ambitions and growth of the company. From a technical perspective Stack Overflow started life as a total .NET monolith, so all pages were bundled in with the stackoverflow.com application itself - marketing, legal, careers etc. While this was simple, stable and secure, it meant the needs of the rest of the org was beholden to engineering cycles and hand-coding everything.

In early 2022 I proposed creating a new property to meet the needs of a much faster paced company while simplifying the codebase by removing non-product related elements. Furthermore, adopting a continuous deployment philosophy so changes could happen multiple times a day as the whole company optimised and launch new content.

We settled on stackoverflow.co as the domain to keep a logical separation between the product and 'everything else' - taking inspiration from Reddit and Meta. This also maintained the strict security requirements of not sharing the stackoverflow.com login cookie with 3rd party services.

I created the setup end-to-end using the Vue.JS powered Nuxt 3 hosted on Netlify Enterprise. There are now variety of supporting websites - the jobs board, landing pages, blog and internal meetup site - all under a single monorepo so they can share components, such as forms and Stacks components.

Additionally, I procured and onboarded Sanity as our CMS which allows flexible workflows and granular permissions. This transformed internal worflows: the legal team can now update terms and conditions, the communications team can add press releases and product marketing can post insights for customers.

Working with the Marketing Operations team, I designed and built the lead generation pipeline for the marketing contact forms which connect prospective customers with the sales team.

At a high level, the system makes use of Netlify features such as 'serverless' Functions & Forms to add redundancy to the system which is responsible for millions of dollars in revenue.

At east stage there are extensive custom integrations with Marketo, Salesforce, Google Analytics 4 for tracking form engagement, real-time system monitoring with Datadog dashboards, end-to-end tests using Mabl and Slack bots to report status back to the wider team.

The system has near eliminated lost leads due to system outages or human error, and ensures Marketing spend is optimized by intelligently tracking attribution through the pipeline.

In August 2023 I also migrated the company blog from Wordpress to this new stack bringing the additional benefits, including 2,500 articles dating back to 2008 and 16,000 comments.

For further details about the setup, you can read my interview with Netlify.