Up until a couple of weeks ago, my impression of Stack Overflow was just simply as a site that showed up on my Google search results when investigating coding issues. Sometimes I found the answer I needed there, sometimes not. And then, while in one of the sessions at PASS Summit 14 – was it one of Kendra Little‘s? – the presenter mentioned that Stack Exchange makes their data available as an anonymized dump. You can find it at https://archive.org/details/stackexchange, hosted by the Internet Archive. It’s quite a large chunk of data – I’m grabbing just the Stack Overflow stuff now and intend to use it for some presentations that are in the works.