Secrets of Stack Overflow / Voximplant Blog

Greetings, colleagues. Over the past few years, Stack Overflow has become a very useful tool for developers. Many questions asked by Google and Yandex in the very first links lead to clear and comprehensive answers to this resource. Most developers use the Stack Overflow site precisely as a knowledge base for programmers, the ability to quickly get the right answer. Under the cut, I’ll tell you about some interesting cases of the underwater part of the iceberg: hidden answers, awards, pumping karma and much more, hidden from a surface look.

The answer is not always marked with a green tick

Many times at hackathons and consultations, I stood behind the guys looking for an answer to Stack Overflow. And more than once I watched such a picture: a person switches to Stack Overflow from a search, searches for an answer marked with a green checkmark, doesn’t find it and immediately closes the tab, summarizing that “here, they also asked on the stack and nobody knows.”

Sometimes there really is no answer. But most often it is, just a little off where we expect:

• Even if there is not a single answer to the question, we carefully look at the comments: perhaps the necessary information is simply not framed as an answer. This often happens if the respondent suffers from excessive modesty and does not believe that his comment is a full answer.
• If there is no answer marked with a green checkmark, this does not mean at all that the question was not answered. Often, the author of a question simply forgets about him and does not return to the site to mark one of the answers. If there is no green checkmark, it makes sense to carefully review all the answers, focusing on the number of votes. By the way, a special sorting is provided for this.
• And even if there is an answer, this does not mean that it is the only one. Sometimes it happens that a person who asked a question and did not receive a satisfactory answer marks the first one that comes across. After some time, a more detailed answer can be given to the question, but the author of the question has already caught a trace. Therefore, if the answer, decorated with a green checkmark, did not help you, do not be too lazy to view the entire list. Perhaps somewhere at the end of the list is a real solution to your problem.

Bounty for the answer

Many people ignore the opportunity to offer a bounty for an answer: there are no reputations to offer a reward, and why someone might need it is not clear. In vain, they ignore it, by the way: even the most difficult questions that no one answers will immediately receive answers if they are provided with bounty of the appropriate size. Moreover, bounty can be set not only for your own, but also for someone else's question.

Why does bounty affect the appeal of a question so much? Several factors. Firstly, this is the easiest way for beginners to quickly gain a lot of reputation. Secondly, top developers can measure their strength in this way: a reputation of several hundred thousand points on Stack Overflow looks very solid in the resume of a specialist and helps to find a good job if you want to change it.

Where to get a reputation to spend it on bounty? About it below.

Unobvious sources of reputation

The most obvious way to build a reputation is to answer questions. He is the most difficult. For simple questions, you can quickly get several answers at once, but it is really ... difficult to answer complex questions. Stack Overflow users earning a reputation with answers set up special filters to receive instant notifications of new questions in a very narrow area that they know best. Such specialists can answer the question within ten minutes, receiving maximum reputation points per day for their efforts.

Filters are tagged. If you want your question to be seen by the maximum number of experts, do not be too lazy to spend an extra 30 seconds and indicate all possible tags that have at least something to do with the question.

But what if you have no desire to guard the questions and waste your energy on countless answers, only a small part of which will bring a reputation? The decision is rather unexpected - ask questions.

Reputation is given not only for answers, but also because someone liked your question. Moreover, the question does not have to be brilliant. Many regulars mark with their voices simply neatly formed questions that correspond to the written and unwritten rules of the service: without grammatical errors, with highlighting the code, etc. Moreover, new users often vote on questions they found through a search, so each question can become permanent reputation generator. A few dozen questions per year are able to bring a thousand or two reputation points next year, which can then be spent on bounty for really important things. If something doesn’t work out for longer than half an hour, it’s a good idea to devote ten minutes to writing a quality question on Stack Overflow, after which you can safely return to finding a solution. If someone answers, you will save a lot of time. If you yourself find the answer - feel free to answer your own question, it will only take a couple of minutes, but in the future it will increase the flow of passively generated reputation.

Stack overflow more than it seems

Not everyone knows that stackoverflow.com is not the only site of the ecosystem of questions and answers created by Joel Spolsky. This is an ever-growing network of sites, collectively called Stack Exchange and combining dozens of highly specialized sites with the same interface and common user profile (but with a separate reputation). The full list of sites at stackexchange.com/sites also contains platforms for discussing the operation of the network itself and Area 51, where new Q & A sites are offered and “grown”.

Russian version of Stack Overflow for specific questions

The Stack Exchange network includes not only specialized sites like “Ubuntu Questions”, but also Stack Overflow versions for different regions. In particular, the Russian version was recently launched, which is available at ru.stackoverflow.com .

Over the past year, at many conferences and meetings, I often came across a lack of understanding by developers of the purpose of the localized version. Many speak in the spirit of “Any real programmer (s) knows English. Why do we need another stack with fewer participants and questions?!? ”

In reality, everything is completely different from what it really is. The purpose of the Russian Stack Overflow is not to duplicate the functionality of the English version. Joel creates localized versions not for the language itself, but for countries and regions. Try to ask something on the main site related to development for 1C - you won't even find such a tag there. But on the Russian version, and tags, and questions, and answers - everything is presented in large numbers. IT is a huge area, divided not only by platforms and areas, but also regionally. Many countries and regions have their own major software players who specialize in the local market and are little known outside. The Russian version of Stack Overflow is an opportunity for developers to discuss specific solutions for Russia, use tags in Russian,

By the way, about the reputation. As I wrote above, it is very difficult to earn a high reputation on the global Stack Overflow due to too much competition and differences in time zones. At the same time, a high reputation on the stack adorns the resume, which is especially important for beginning specialists who want to demonstrate qualifications in the absence of formal experience. The recently appeared Russian stack has allowed many developers to start pumping their reputation “from scratch” in much more comfortable conditions.

Chukchi is not a writer?

And the last one. At the consultations, they often ask me in which language to write comments in the source code. Of course, I would like to write in English. But there is a subtle point: most IT professionals are really good at English - but read-only. When you need to write an understandable and succinct comment, many people have a slip: it is one thing to fluently read articles, news and books, and quite another to write yourself. Many developers formulate questions for the stack in such a way that even after a thoughtful reading it is not clear what they mean.

It is advisable to write comments in English if most of the developers on the team are really good at English. The same is with questions: many developers do not want to ask questions simply because it is not so easy for them to formulate them in a foreign language. The Russian version removes this barrier, and now colleagues will no longer have such a convenient excuse: “It is difficult to formulate the question well on the stack, so I did not ask and dug myself for three hours” :)