Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky created Stack Overflow as a question-and-answer website for topics in computer programming, and also as a more open alternative to similar websites like Expert-Exchange.
The "Stack Overflow" name was chosen by a voting in April 2008 by readers of Coding Horror, Atwoord's programming blog.
It began in July 2008 when Atwood sent his subscribers invitation to take part in the private beta of Stack Overflow. Since the website was only limited to a number of people, Atwood reviewed people's opinion and see what he could do to build the website according to the community's needs.
Many parts of Stack Overflow's design was decided by voting processes.
The website was first announced to the general public in September 2008 as a Q&A website for programmers.
Stack Overflow is a platform where users can ask and answer questions. They can vote question and answers, as well as edit questions and answers like Digg or wiki. The more active users are in Stack Overflow can earn them reputation points and badges.
What makes Stack Overflow different from others in the competition is by having a way to close questions. This is to prevent low quality questions to surface. Stack Overflow only accepts questions about programming that are focused to specific problem. Questions that are have broader nature are usually rejected by the site's users, and marked as closed.
But in 2013, the features was redesigned so questions can be put "on hold" when they are on a review queue.
In order to appeal more diverse users, Stack Overflow has sister websites like softwareengineering.stackexchange.com where users can ask for question with broader queries.
Stack Overflow is a privately held website, the flagship site of some others, including the Stack Exchange Network.