I emailed Jeff Atwood last night a one line email. "You should make a StackOverflow API using OData." Then I realized that, as Linus says, Talk is Cheap, Show me the Code. So I created an initial prototype of a StackOverflow API using OData on an Airplane. I allocated the whole 12 hour flight. Unfortunately it took 30 minutes so I watched movies the rest of the time. You can follow along and do this yourself if you like. Preparation Before I left for my flight, I downloaded two things. First, I got Sam Saffron's "So Slow" StackOverflow SQL Server Importer . This is a little spike of Sam's that takes the 3gigs of XML Dump Files from StackOverflow's monthly dump and imports it into SQL Server. If you care, that…(read more)