The coding blog of Alastair Smith, a software developer based in Cambridge, UK. Interested in DevOps, Azure, Kubernetes, .NET Core, and VueJS.
Stack Overflow, as I mentioned in my last post, is a new community site developed by Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood aimed at enabling developers to to help each other. Much like asking a question of a trusted friend or colleague (but with 5,379 to call on), there are no holds barred on the questions that you can ask. Even questions that you think might be “dumb” questions are tackled. For example, my curiosity was piqued by enums and whether values could be added to them dynamically. I already knew to a certainty of roughly 98% what the answer would be, but I asked it anyway. As it turns out, two people thought it a “good” or “useful” question, too, and it picked up nine answers. My community reputation is now pushing close to the magic 100 mark, when I can start down-voting questions and answers. Stack Overflow has been in beta for approximately three or four months, and goes live on Monday. In a wicked cool crossover of a wiki, a blog, a forum and a Digg/Reddit-type community site, developers post questions on programming, and they get answered. The good questions are applauded. The bad ones are shuffled under the carpet. And your reputation goes up and down according to the quality of your questions and answers (as decided by the readers).
In addition to the core value proposition of the site, it has a number of nifty web-2.0 features. I particularly like the “similar questions” suggestions that appear when you’re writing a question to try to cut down on duplication, and the live preview of your text to make sure you’ve got the (slightly clunky, I find) Markdown syntax correct. Others are more “expected” in this day and age, like a comment or vote being registered via AJAX and thus not requiring a page refresh.
Jeff and Joel have plenty of followers not immersed in the .NET framework, and there are already plenty of questions up on C++, Ruby, PHP, Java, and others. There are also questions on topics related to programming, such as version control and continuous integration. It’s already become a hugely useful resource for me, and I hope it will continue to be so once the doors are opened next week. Go check it out! Details on how to access the beta are available from http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2008/09/help-us-beta-test/.