It’s obligatory to be cranky about anything that Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky put out into the world together. I got over my initial grumpiness and discovered that StackOverflow is actually pretty cool. I’m casey #18424 over there.
SO is a question and answer site for programmers. People post questions, others answer, onlookers vote answers (and comments on answers) up and down. The question pages are well done and easy to read and digest.
I only wish that it were a little more… social and personalized. Seriously. This is not something that I usually wish. I’d like to use the site for learning and helping others but right now it seems (mostly) suited for asking questions and helping others if you are either really dedicated or lucky enough to stumble over questions that you know the answer to.
Here are some things that I’d love to see. I’d post these in meta.stackoverflow but I’m too lazy to see if they’ve been suggested already and I’m a little scared of the community over there. Ironic, eh? For the Love of Ravelry is similar. Participating on a totally different site is definitely helping me see things that can be improved on Ravelry when it comes to community and participation.
My wishes. It’s very possible that I’m either doing it wrong, missing something that exists, or just missing the point, but here they are:
- Friending or following – some way to watch questions and answers from people who consistently post things that seem interesting or educational (to me). I know that I can do it by subscribing to tons of RSS feeds but…
- Something other than tags for organization. Using piles of tags with no relationship or hierarchy makes browsing the piles of questions sort of painful.
- Some sort of recommendation or matching tools that shows me questions that might interest me. Maybe based on my votes or something. “Interesting tags” isn’t working very well because of high volume and huge variation in questions tagged with things like “ruby” and “javascript”.
I guess these all address the same problem – discovering questions that interest me is hard.
If you code for work or for fun and you haven’t seen it already, check it out… and if you are looking for the answer to a coding question, toss “site:stackoverflow.com” on the the end of your Google search before you try anything else.
