I read the Joel on Software RSS feed for its occasional tidbits, and yesterday brought a lovely one. He wrote a column for Inc magazine, where he espoused the virtues of his latest effort, a website called Stack Overflow. So far so good, and I’m always happy to see new programmer resources online.

The irony emerges in his boasts of the sites’ stability and scalability:

We’re not going to need big racks of computers; it turns out that Jeff and his programmers were so good that they built a site that could serve 80,000 visitors a day (roughly 755,000 page views) using only one server that costs a few hundred bucks a month.

I should also note that ‘stack overflow’ (Wikipedia has a nice page on it) is a bug/error that causes unpredictable failures.

So this morning I go to look and get this:

Yep, site down. Without the boasting it would have just been growing pains, but with the boasting it transcends into hubris and irony. Oops.