51–60 of 136 posts
This is awesome. I can't count the number of times I've found an Android function that has almost no documentation. I usually post a question and answer on SO if I work out how it works. I only wish it were organised a bit more like normal documentation - i.e. into classes and methods. Might make it easier to find things.
This is awful, another trick site that fools people into doing work that they could be getting paid to do, all for the joy of getting some "karma." Well kids, karma ain't gonna pay the rent. If you want to get experience volunteering to write documentation for software, then find the existing official documentation and add to that (or start it, preferably in a repository close to the actual code). Any profits that ge…
My StackOverflow profile helped me get a new job with a good payrise. It's also helped me a better developer.
I'm absolutely ok with them making a profit, and they're a hell of a lot more ethical and useful than what went before them.
This is awful, another trick site that fools people into doing work that they could be getting paid to do, all for the joy of getting some "karma." Well kids, karma ain't gonna pay the rent. If you want to get experience volunteering to write documentation for software, then find the existing official documentation and add to that (or start it, preferably in a repository close to the actual code). Any profits that ge…
If this gains traction I don't think we'll feel the benefits till a little later down the line. I've contributed a little to the Swift tag but the real advantages come from technologies that don't already have good documentation. I'm considering starting a tag for the enreco HTML -> PDF generator I use quite a lot as the official documentation isn't great.
> enreco HTML -> PDF generator What is that? Googling it only brings up this comment thread.
What I'm most worried about is the duplication between the canonical documentation of a project and the StackOverflow one. As the author of an open-source project, I try my best to write a great documentation, and I would be a bit annoyed if people started to add examples to StackOverflow just to gain reputation there instead of contributing to the "official" one. Also, SO is ranked way higher than the smaller-projec…
I think they should link back to the official documentation wherever it makes sense. They could even automatically import official docs into their system if the license permits that and a standard tool is used.
Instead of having some innovation when it comes to spammers, wikipedia and stack overflow punish the original content creators.
What I'm most worried about is the duplication between the canonical documentation of a project and the StackOverflow one. As the author of an open-source project, I try my best to write a great documentation, and I would be a bit annoyed if people started to add examples to StackOverflow just to gain reputation there instead of contributing to the "official" one. Also, SO is ranked way higher than the smaller-projec…
What I'm most worried about is the duplication between the canonical documentation of a project and the StackOverflow one. As the author of an open-source project, I try my best to write a great documentation, and I would be a bit annoyed if people started to add examples to StackOverflow just to gain reputation there instead of contributing to the "official" one. Also, SO is ranked way higher than the smaller-projec…
There's one question I saw on Stack Overflow a while back that irritated me. If you copied and pasted the literal question directly into Google, the top hit was directly to the canonical documentation, where you could just scroll down to the clearly marked heading, and copy and paste the sample code and have it work straight away. When I pointed this out, I was berated for not understanding that Stack Overflow is try…
The official docs are the reference (and at best some common questions are answered). Stack Overflow is a Q&A site. It doesn't replace the docs; it complements them.
The new "Documentation" section on stackoverflow is just categorized code examples created and ranked by the community. It doesn't replace the docs too. Though It is not clear how the Documentation feature will evolve and whether it will be as useful as the Q&A part.
This is awful, another trick site that fools people into doing work that they could be getting paid to do, all for the joy of getting some "karma." Well kids, karma ain't gonna pay the rent. If you want to get experience volunteering to write documentation for software, then find the existing official documentation and add to that (or start it, preferably in a repository close to the actual code). Any profits that ge…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair, that best answer is totally editable by any user to be more informative and/or link to the canonical source of information. There are few projects whose docs have such low contribution friction, for better or worse. And unlike project-specific documentation, it comes in one basic format and set of norms. I also don't think there's a problem of spoonfeeding information to developers. If a developer at Comp…
I was just idling in the Documentation chat channel and based on what I was seeing there, it appears links to sources are discouraged on StackOverflow documentation. Presumably, they're aiming to eventually host new content that's better than what's already out there. I think it's a bit silly -- at least make a Sources section where folks can click to view links to existing docs!