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Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is a free online community where programmers help each other solve problems. Watch the 30 min screencast here (Password: the topic of the 2nd question you answered when you introduced yourself to our community written in camelcase)

Why Use Stack Overflow?

Active participation on Stack Overflow:

• Helps you learn faster
• Builds your professional portfolio with a record of solutions you find for others
• Earns you reputation points that also look great when applying for a job

What can you do on Stack Overflow?

• Find Solutions to your problems – e.g. search for programming problems by keyword, name, and ERROR MESSAGE
• Provide Solutions to other peoples’ problems
• Help Maintain the Community by helping new people

It's Productive

All programmers:

1. Encounter and create bugs and other vexing issues
2. Search for and use code examples found online to get unstuck

Great programmers do a few more things:

1. Realize that code is communication & pick readable, understandable solutions
2. Refactor cautiously, judiciously, and incrementally – improve one component one step at a time rather than making changes to everything at once
3. Instead of optimizing their own work, make decisions that optimize the team’s work (even if it means suboptimizing your own). Improvements and refactoring might be useful to you, but create waste and rework for your teammates – even if you have the best of intentions.

Ultranauts do a few more things:

1. We use publicly available resources to help us figure out our programming problems
2. We ask each other about programming problems instead of going to the client first (we want to be prepared and look our collective best when we ask them questions)
3. If we’re blocked for more than 1-2 hr, we ask for extra Ultranauts eyes to take a look
4. We give back to the community by sharing solutions in developer communities like Stack Overflow
5. We strive to ask questions of others (both on and off StackOverflow) using Minimum Reproducible Examples

It's Popular

Resources

• Stack Overflow Intro Slide Deck - 25 Feb 2020
• Stack Overflow Intro Screencast (30 min)

-- NicoleRadziwill - 03 Apr 2020

-- JesseSmith - 06 Oct 2021