One of our New Year’s resolutions here at Stack Exchange is to take a hard look at our user experience. As the network has grown and our audience expanded, the system has grown with it – but there are some rough edges in places that can use a bit of smoothing. You’ll be seeing a lot of improvements over the next few months, but today I’d like to announce the first bit of polish: built-in profile pictures.

We have used Gravatar to let you manage your profile picture since roughly six to eight weeks before Stack Overflow entered beta. Gravatar is a wonderful service that lets you use a con …