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5 Reasons Why You Should Start Contributing on Stack Overflow
It’s always a good feeling to give back
Stack Overflow is the leading community for developers where people are able to ask and answer programming-related questions. More than 21 million questions have been asked, more than 31 million answers have been provided, and more than 80 million comments have been made! I have to admit that most of the posts are pretty bad, but there are definitely tons of answers that are amazingly useful, well-written, and justified.
Apart from the very basic questions asking how to print a string with Python, Java, or Go, there are also numerous unpopular questions to which you’ll find some useful answers. These hidden gems are more valuable — especially when you are working with less popular or emerging technologies that are/were lacking resources on the internet.
I’ve been actively contributing on Stack Overflow for the last couple of years and almost on a daily basis. In this article, I am going to attempt to convince developers to start contributing to the site. It has been an amazing journey for me so far that has helped me expand my horizons, learn tons of new things, and even meet new people in the community. And if you are a developer who loves their job, I am pretty sure you will like it too.
Learning New Things
Typically, people will answer questions about technologies or frameworks they are extremely familiar with. This way, they are confident that their answer is good enough and will get at least a few upvotes. But nothing is stopping you from answering questions about concepts you barely know about. That’s actually a very good opportunity to learn new things and also apply this knowledge to the (hopefully) specific context and problem the original author of the question asked about.
Additionally, in our field, there are numerous transferrable bits of knowledge. If you are a Python developer, then you would probably be able to answer a few questions related to dynamically typed languages in general. Likewise, if you know how to write a Kafka Consumer in Java, chances are it won’t be too hard to write one in Python or C# as long as you can read the documentation required to do so.
