I, like thousands of other developers, have fallen in love with Stack Overflow. I still use Google for the random programming questions that my teammates and I come across during the work day, but I am always stoked when an SO link comes up on my searches. I generally check the site periodically throughout the day, although I don’t have time to troll it (like several other users seem to) and haven’t quite committed to setting up an RSS feed for it. It is a tremendous resource, and though I was initially skeptical about its completely user-driven format, I’ve come to realize that that is exactly what makes it such an effective site.
For some odd reason, I’ve had particularly vivid dreams lately (no, it’s not as a result of Chantix, although it should be). The other night I dreamt that I was sitting in my chair in our living room with my laptop on my lap, as I do most evenings after work. I think we were watching the Twins bullpen throw another game, and my daughters were in their various states of chaos. All in all, a very normal evening, except I was dreaming it. Anyway, in this dream, I was in the midst of one of my frequent evening scrolls through the Unanswered question list on Stack Overflow, and noticed that my reputation had suddenly increased by 50 points. I went to my user-profile page, and it had increased again, along with two new silver badges. I clicked on the logo to go back to the SO homepage, and my reputation had increased by thousands, with gold badges and silver badges and accolades galore. I was euphoric!
It was such a realistic dream that I actually checked my reputation right away the next morning, only to see the sad reality that is my true reputation.
This got me kind of mad. I mean, what do I care what a bunch of other geek/dork/nerds think of my geek/dork/nerd abilities? Just because I don’t hang on every single (often unintelligible) question that is posted shouldn’t make me less important or intelligent than the Stack Overflow Pantheon. I mean, seriously, do these guys even have real jobs? Do their bosses know that they’re spending hours of precious coding time scanning for reputation fodder?
Being a ruminant son of a bitch, I reflected on this for a while, and realized that I do care about my Stack Overflow reputation, and that’s OK, because beside being the best place on the web for software developing questions, Stack Overflow has become a center of excellence. It is the premier community of software engineers on the internet, and having a good reputation among your peers is always a good thing.
Lately I’ve been posting more answers because I’ve decided that, good or bad, answers always help everyone. Even if they’re bad or incorrect, they are a learning experience for both me and everyone else that sees how the community reacts to them. It’s like a class that you really want to learn from; good students understand that in order to learn, they need to pay attention and put themselves out there, both by asking and answering questions. And the brilliance of the site’s underlying mechanisms is that you are rewarded for putting yourself out there. Every now and then I’ll hit the site and notice that my reputation has been bumped up by ten points because someone up-voted something I posted months ago. That’s really frickin’ cool, if you ask me.
So, I say kudos to Spolsky and Atwood for designing a site that has become such a powerful community. And even if my reputation sucks, I’ll still be reading, asking, answering, and ultimately, learning.