1 Intro
Stack Overflow is known for being the site you inevitably arrive at when googling a coding question, and I have been passively using it for over 5 years. It’s an invaluable tool when trying to debug code and understand error messages.
The basic idea is that someone has probably got stuck in the same place as you before, and if they asked on Stack Overflow there is then a searchable solution ready and waiting online, as members of the community can post answers.
2 My First Question
Recently, I have been coding in Microsoft’s flavour of SQL. It has been over a year since I was last using it, and I started getting frustrated when a join wasn’t working as planned. I was ready to jump ship and wrangle the data in R instead, but that wasn’t really the right solution as it would be complicating the matter if a colleague came to run the code.
After not being able to google my way to a solution, I took a deep breath and posted my first question onto Stack Overflow:
3 The Response
Within a minute, I had a (potentially automated) question asking what I had tried already. I updated my question accordingly.
Within 10 minutes, someone posted a solution. This solution pointed out an incompleteness in my toy example. I updated my question accordingly.
Within 2 hours, and a few conversation threads, 3 solutions had been posted. There was one I preferred, but all answered the question as I had posed it.
I was impressed by two things in my response:
Everyone was respectful.
This is surprising as it is, after all, the internet.
People wanted to help.
Yes there may be incentives within the points structure of the site, but these were friendly experts giving me a free helping hand.
4 Conclusion
I do not usually post on the internet, for fear of a negative experience. However, this first posting on Stack Overflow was an entirely positive experience. Who knows, one day I may even be posting solutions on the site…