Why and how I engage on Stack Overflow

28 Sep 2022

Some weeks ago I had an interesting talk with one of my colleagues. He told me that he’d appreciate to give some of his knowledge back to the community by participiating actively in the Stack Overflow community. But he also felt a little reluctant due to the rules of this platform, about how to ask good questions, providing good answers and not getting downvoted.
Long story short, he asked me whether I could do an internal presentation about this. Although this hasn’t taken place yet, I decided to share my thoughts here with a greater audience.

My personal motivation for engaging in Stack Overflow

I created my first question on Stack Overflow on May 20, 2015 and for a very long time, I was merely a consumer of this platform. I asked a question from time to time, but as you can see in my reputation graph, around 2019 I got more active by writing comments and answers.

I think it was at that time when I felt mature enough as a software developer to give profound answers. But it was also a certain shift in my personal attitude: to not only “consume” knowledge from the community, but to feed it as well with the experiences I made over the years.
Over time my enthusiasm and conviction about the need for open-source software and its surrounding ecosystems (like the open question and answer platform Stack Overflow) got more traction. This gave me the motivation, but also some kind of obligation to share and help.

Today Stack Overflow is an essential part of my day-to-day business. Of course I’m still reading and learning, but during the day I try to spend some time on commenting and answering to questions I feel confident enough.
But in contrast to my early years, being an active member of the software development community (be it Stack Overflow, GitHub, a blog or whatever platform else) has become an integral part. I’d even consider the phrase Sharing is Caring a motivation not just for a job but for the profession of software development.

Some hints for your start on Stack Overflow

I’m pretty sure that there is a myriad of more experienced and suited people to ask what you should and what you shouldn’t do, but here are my key points:

1. Be precise and concise
2. Focus on your niche of experience
3. Failure is Success

Be precise and concise

Nobody wants to read lengthy questions or answers unless they contain a lot of value. But too short questions or answers are hard as well, because there is a lot of room for interpretation.That’s why I always ask myself:

Would I want to read this question/answer? Do I provide enough information about the context / tools / versions?

If I’m not convinced, I rephrase my text, add additional information, etc. And the best questions for me are still those which include some little repro code that I can paste into my IDE or a sample repo on GitHub.

Focus on your niche of experience

As you might know, Stack Overflow has its own tag concept. In the beginning I was almost unaware of it. But over time I found it a very powerful feature, because it allows me to focus on my niche of experience I feel most comfortable with.

For example, I gathered a lot of knowledge about .NET, C#, the JetBrains product family (Rider, R#, TeamCity) and (unit) testing. But I earned almost no credit for questions related to C# or .NET alone, because there are so many people out there who are more profound and quicker than me.
But especially in the JetBrains space there are not too many active users, giving me an opportunity to share my experiences.

To get rid of all the noise I’m not interested in, I created this Stack Overflow query. It only contains the tags I’m interested in, allowing me to focus on my niche of experience.

Failure is Success

I’m not a real fan of Stack Overflow’s downvote concept, because I simply don’t believe that humans are good in differentiating between I’m downvoting your question and I’m downvoting you.
But in spite of that I try to see downvotes as a certain form of constructive criticism. Due to my former thoughts, I feel offended when somebody downvotes my question. And yes, there are definitely some unfriendly people and trolls on Stack Overflow. But the majority is not - they are friendly and helpful people.
And this thought helps me to try to accept this, keep calm and try to get behind it:

Why was it downvoted? Did I miss some information?

And the next question or answer will be better, because we are humans (most of us 😉): we make mistakes and we learn (also most of us 😉).

Closing thoughts

I hope I could give you some valuable insights and would appreciate your thoughts and motivation about participating on Stack Overflow. Feel free to leave a comment and I hope I’ll see you soon on Stack Overflow 🤓

Thanks for reading and take care!