41–50 of 94 posts
When SO's down, all the programmers grind to a halt. When HN's down, all of them accelerate to levels normally unseen.
So what happens when both SO and HN are down? Where does that spontaneously unleashed energy go?
So it's a bit like a bloke who hardly ever has a drink blogging how he "no longer needs alcohol" because he went through a whole weekend without sipping a beer : )
I know that you can use SO passively - only by searching - but the real power of the forum lies in the cases where your problem is original and you have to summon the community to give you a hand.
Maybe I'm weird, but I end up in an SO page perhaps one a week, and maybe 50% of that time is it actually useful. I really had no idea it had taken on such importance (real or imagined) for others.
As in, there is a number of people out there who literally taught them selves programming with the help of SO. Thats pretty cool imo.
Sure beats wading through forum posts of old, answers dead linking to nowhere, elitist derps claiming OP should just google for the answer (which that same forum post is returned as the top result)
It sounds like this guy just finally figured out how to teach himself without going straight for the answers at the back of the book. Not a bad thing.
> Whenever a library behaved in an unexpected way, I started digging into the code to really understand what was going on. Instead of asking StackOverflow if an API exists or a library has a particular feature, I read the docs instead. Instead of asking if my theory will work, I figure out a way to test it, and try it on my own machine. Yes. Or you could use Stack Overflow, and also learn something you didn't know by…
Is not using something for a single day a sign you never need it? I sometimes don't refer to SO for weeks, simply because I'm dealing with problems I can figure out without it. But sometimes I'm dealing with something I'm totally unfamiliar with, and docs and tutorials are badly written, and then some example on Stackoverflow can be a great help. And more importantly, sometimes I'm stuck on something really obscure.…
Simply put, search has gotten much better, and programmers have mass adopted blogging.
I wasn't aware of StackOverflow's existence when it was first gaining traction; in fact, I think I first discovered it around the time that it ceased to be as necessary as, from what I've gathered, it once was.
Nowadays, when I do a search, 80% of the time there's a blog post that gives me a detailed answer to my question with an in-depth explanation of why. StackOverflow is often useful for answering my questions, but seldom really scratches the itch of why (with exceptionally insightful answers comprising a minority). I think most programmers that have achieved mastery gain more satisfaction by blogging and having their insights centralized, publicized, and monetized to their liking than they do from accruing points on SO.
"Instead of asking StackOverflow if an API exists or a library has a particular feature, I read the docs instead." That's what you're supposed to do :) Ask the question only after you do the homework, not INSTEAD of it
In my experience, just googling a (simple) question is much faster than trying to browse any documentation by some other means. One could say that the web is the docs nowadays and Google is just the frontend.
What V-2 rightly said is that you should do that before asking on SO, not before looking through it for an answer.
Anyway, this whole article is pointless, and senseless. I fail to see why people would upvote it.
My top-voted answers are surprisingly general: http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/97277/when-ca... and http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/67598/how-are... (the top-voted answer by Olin Lanthrop is one of the highest-voted answers on the site and well worth a read). But I got 16 upvotes by translating assembler to English: http://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/86744/from-c-... which I hadn't realised was such a rare skill in this area.