My Stack Overflow journey
Tags: community, stackoverflow
Published: 2019-02-22 15:13:35

---
title: My Stack Overflow journey
published: true
tags: Community,Stack Overflow,community,stackoverflow
canonical_url: https://ankitvijay.net/2019/01/10/stackoverflow/
---

[Stack Overflow](https://stackoverflow.com/) does not need an introduction. It is one platform that has helped millions of developers across the world to be a better programmer. It is **Google** of software development. Maybe even more, because, Google still has competitors, Stack Overflow has none.

<amp-fit-text layout="fixed-height" min-font-size="14" max-font-size="48" height="50"><p>Recently, I managed to cross <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/users/921127/ankit-vijay">1000 reputation points</a> on Stack Overflow. You may be thinking, what’s the big deal? Who writes a blog post for that? There are hundreds of people out there with over 100K reputations and many who may be adding 1000 reputation in a day. You are right, it is not a big deal to reach have 1000 reputations after 10 years of being a programmer. But still, it is somewhat special for me.</p></amp-fit-text>
### My first question

I have been using Stack Overflow since forever but I have never been very active on the platform I asked my [first question](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7253930/integrate-facebook-fan-page-with-phone-application) way back in 2011 when **Windows Phone** was still a rage.

### What motivated me  

What really changed my outlook towards the platform was [this question](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29113123/process-waitforexit-not-waiting-for-multiple-chrome-instances). I was at a customer location, highly stressful environment desperately looking for a solution to a not-so-easy problem. However, probably within 15 mins, my question was downvoted with a comment that I need to provide more information. I edited my question, provided more information but all I got was two not very helpful answers. This made me feel, maybe Stack Overflow is not so helpful platform after all, especially, if you were a new user. I found Stack Overflow to be hostile where you had to be lucky, very descriptive (difficult for a new user) or have a good reputation to get an answer to your question. The barrier of entry was just too high.

What I wanted to change with my small contribution to the otherwise great community, was to help the folks who felt the same way as me. I never had time, energy or motivation to spend hours on Stack Overflow. But, spend a few minutes here and there in a week.

Other such example was [this question.](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47935231/ways-to-secure-an-anonymous-web-api-request) I spent 20 mins framing the question, trying to explain my problem in-depth. But, it was downvoted within a minute without any explanation. Luckily, by that time I had gained enough reputation to put a [bounty](https://stackoverflow.com/help/bounty)and get a good answer from the community.

### My contribution in numbers

- Asked 15 questions on the platform, with 26 replies and 5 marked as answers.
- Answered 96 questions, of which 35 answers were upvoted at least once, 22 were marked as answer and 3 were downvoted.
- My most [popular question](https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/330364/should-we-create-a-new-single-instance-of-httpclient-for-all-requests) till date is not from Stack Overflow but Stack Engineering. It has received 51K views and 36 upvotes.
- Edited 41 posts, raised 27 flags and cast 114 votes, mostly upvotes.

### How Stack Overflow has helped me

Contributing to Stack Overflow has helped me in many ways. It has helped me to better frame my problem statement. I feel I’m able to explain my problem to others much better than before. When I answer others question, I need to do a little bit of research myself, helping me to learn and grow. It gives immense satisfaction and joy to know that I could help a fellow developer somewhere in the world with his/ her problem. When I find questions for which I have no idea, it makes me realize where I stand. It keeps me grounded. Few of my questions/ answers have turned into a blog post and visa-<g id="9" data-gr-id="9">versa</g>. But, most importantly, Stack Overflow has helped me become a better programmer.

If you are a programmer to then I encourage you to contribute to Stack Overflow or similar platform. I’m sure you will enjoy the experience and learning which comes along with it.

The post [My Stack Overflow journey](https://ankitvijay.net/2019/01/10/stackoverflow/) appeared first on [Hi, I'm Ankit](https://ankitvijay.net).