Stack Exchange's Really Big Monitor Setup

[bigohms]

I kinda expected more from a group hosting millions of conversations a year and undisclosed$$ derived from it. Think bigger, like Visa's NOC big...

http://images.fastcompany.com/upload/visa-headquarters.jpg

[m0nastic]

I used to design and build NOCS as a network management consultant, and we found one thing to be universally true at every NOC we designed:

1.) Even though the person who hired us fell in love with the set of NORAD from the movie Wargames with walls of giant monitors, not one of the NOC analysts sitting at their desks ever once looked up at the big screen (unless it was late at night and they replaced the network map with a first-person shooter) to do their job. They always look at the event viewer at their desk.

The big wall of screens is purely to impress customers/investors during visits.

[nphase]

NOC-style dashboards seem hardly appropriate for the first thing you see when you walk into an office..

[rwmj]

Very Wargames ... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086567/

[absconditus]

This sort of thing was popular during the dot-com boom.

[brendn]

While you're clearly implying that this is an indicator of a second tech bubble, you're using faulty logic to arrive at that conclusion. Computers were also popular during the dot-com boom. So was the Internet. That doesn't mean that a focus on internet computing caused the bubble, or even indicated it.

If you want to say that this is a managerial dashboard wankfest that may indicate a company more obsessed with metrics than with building a great product, just say it.

[zokier]

Why 3x580 instead of a single eyefinity Radeon? Would seem like a obvious choice for such project.

[sp332]

Since you don't need 3D acceleration, maybe a single Matrox card would be more appropriate. e.g. One of these http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/graphics_cards/m_... can drive 8 monitors.

Edit: whoops, didn't notice it was $$$$.

[smackfu]

Odd that half the screens have couch-style content and half have desktop-style content.

[michaelbuckbee]

It looks like they took at least a little inspiration from Panic's Status Board: http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/03/the-panic-status-board/

[gecko]

While we borrowed incredibly heavily from Panic's design at Fog Creek, I think StackExchange's is an example of parallel evolution more than anything else at this point. Panic built an absolutely beautiful board, but the idea of a board didn't originate with them, nor is there much overlap between StackExchange's and theirs.

[bproper]

Spolsky's interview technique here is flawless

[sgrove]

I was thinking they were using Leftronic for their dashboard, but looks like they say it's Geckoboard. Interesting how there's a convergence around how dashboards look - I imagine it's like michaelbuckbee said, that Panic's design is a huge inspiration for others.

[rickette]

This reminds me of the Ultimate Wallboard contest that Atlassian put out last year http://ultimatewallboard.com/entries

[lutorm]

Really big???

This is really big:

http://www.nas.nasa.gov/hecc/resources/viz_systems.html

[dhbanes]

too much bezel

[twog]

Does anyone know what is powering the analytics? Is it gecko board? Or a custom solution?

[pmjoyce]

Paul from Geckoboard here. Geckoboard doesn't collect or store the stats, it collates and displays them.

These guys are hooking in to their analytics package. The web analytics services we connect to include Google Analytics, Chartbeat, GoSquared & Mixpanel natively, but you can use our push & pull APIs to connect custom widgets.

[joshmlewis]

He mentions Geckoboard