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When Stack Overflow Goes Offline...

Ben Halpern on July 30, 2019

Do you... Get some fresh air Go for lunch Panic ...
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nektro profile image
Meghan (she/her)

And The 10X programmer didn't realize it had gone down.

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taillogs profile image
Ryland G

The 10x programmer is already more stackoverflow than human.

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garetmckinley profile image
Garet McKinley

All jokes aside, THIS is the exact reason I will happily inject a neuralink into my brain.

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desi profile image
Desi

The 10x Programmer is Sentient StackOverflow

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cmelgarejo profile image
Christian Melgarejo

Whats stackoverflow? I havent had one since C++

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binh0103 profile image
Binh0103

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

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Adam Crockett 🌀

When the 10X does eventually go to sleep, stackoverflow will throw a run-time exception.

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Mik Seljamaa 🇪🇪

i ain't a 10X, more like .1X but i still did not notice it, useless for me i guess lol i only check a certain post that has been closed about programmer productivity ...lol

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Yechiel Kalmenson

No "all of the above"? 😭

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Ben Halpern

As the implementer of this still admin only because it's kind of unfinished feature, I knew that the answers would appear in random order no matter what order I input them. So "all of the above" wasn't really in the cards. 😵

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Massimo Artizzu

"All/none of the others"?

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yechielk profile image
Yechiel Kalmenson

That makes sense...

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Unclear right now if it's a bug or feature. It helps ensure the poll is less biased.

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Martin Himmel

I remember reading a comment on Twitter a while ago that the third option (of four) seemed to regularly have a higher count than the rest, even (or especially?) on nonsense polls.

So, the idea of randomizing them to lower bias makes sense. I'd call it a feature. 😄

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Sergio Daniel Xalambrí

Maybe, when finished, the poll could have a way to add that option with a flag and always render them at the bottom of the list.

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Adam Crockett 🌀

/\w/gm

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Vincent Grovestine

You forgot "Gross indifference".

Not that Stack Overflow and assorted Stack Exchanges aren't useful, but whatever happened to stretching one's brain and hitting sources of official documentation? Or is this just me being an old curmudgeon? #GetOffMyLawn

:)

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leojpod

I'll join you on that. #RTFM

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leob profile image
leob • Edited

RTM is noble but it just takes way more time than relying on others who've already RTM for me ... yes call it lazy but I call SO my biggest productivity boost ;-)

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🦄N B🛡 • Edited

What if I want to rely on others to Read The StackOverflow for me?

Maybe a platform could summarize and pre-digest what those others write?

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leob profile image
leob • Edited

I've seen many examples of that, websites trying to "distill" and regurgitate the knowledge from Stackoverflow, and it's worse than useless ... it's always outdated, you're missing the context, you get a ton of annoying ads (people running those 'platforms' need to make money somehow), it's polluting my Google search results ... waste of time.

Ten times better to get the info straight from the horse's mouth, that is, Stackoverflow. And github issues often contain nuggets of gold.

Websites trying to aggregate or 'improve' info which they've sourced from authoritative sources only make things worse. It reminds me of the shadowy world of the numerous Wikipedia clones/rip-offs which often don't do much more than scrape info literally from Wikipedia and add a ton of ads to it. I've come across those websites, pointless and an utter waste of time.

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Sm0ke

rm -rf node_modules && yarn

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Adam Crockett 🌀 • Edited

Both? Must really like packages. 🤔

Edit: Oh sorry that would run yarn, I misread.

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awwsmm profile image
Andrew (he/him)

Closed. Not a question.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I’m very fond of making this available with dev.to, it's much more feasible for us than others because we built for CDN-oriented distribution from day one, so an extra layer at the absolute edge wouldn’t be a dramatic leap.

Still an undertaking though.

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Avalander

Sometimes I hack SO and take it down so that I can go get lunch.

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Kieran

I contemplate the meaning of life, whilst begging the computer gods for help.

this also reminds me of a joke "How did they build stackoverflow... before stackoverflow?"

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Damir Franusic

Become a 10xAssassin 😂

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Rémy 🤖

Much cooler, can't argue with that

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vimmer9 profile image
Damir Franusic • Edited

Well I should thank You for writing that awesome article about John Wick and 10x devs 😁. I can't get it out of my head (in a good way heheh).

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Jason Belcher

I honestly spend most of my time on MDN. It's friendly and usually correct and no one berates you for browsing it's contents. ;D

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kip13 profile image
kip

Change this and test, change that and test, change and test....

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Antonio Radovcic

But where do stackoverflow devs go when they have a question 🤯

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Kat

Probably stackoverflow but since that is down in this scenario... slack group?

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andy profile image
Andy Zhao (he/him)

Lunch time, any time 🍝

 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Oh yes, I couldn’t agree more. Even our modest service worker integrations have been iffy thus far.

But I still feel like it’s a pretty interesting pursuit.

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Ryan

I question my ability to code. As an experienced dev, I lean on stackoverflow for validation more than I do for actual answers.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

That's true. Often it's part of my workflow no matter how much I need it. It's just part of the process no matter what.

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Antonio Radovcic

I just ask a stackoverflow dev to zip me their local instance and run it on localhost duh

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Alex Parra

What is Stack Overflow?
I only use Google...

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matt kocaj

It’s that website google always takes you to. Someone asks a question and there are answers..
😋

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hussein cheayto

Hahahahah good one. There's dev.to 😉

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Davor Minchorov • Edited

I go to the slack and discord communities or other forums to look for answers

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Massimo Artizzu

... Go on MDN instead.

But it's good that SO is basically almost never offline. Kudos to them!

(By the way, the dark theme doesn't quite work when hovering over the options. I might make a PR for that 🤔)

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Aravind Kothandaraman

End of the day, it's another website. Hosting. Bad things happen. I would really love to see few more choices, like go elsewhere for help, and to be funny may be, add an option as call 911, NASA, CIA.

Jokes apart, all in a serious situation, I would then lean on Google entirely for another source of help. Possibly MSDN for my needs.

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Muhammad Arslan Aslam

This doesn't look nice!

Should I file an issue on GitHub?

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guitarkat profile image
Kat

Yes.

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Sebastian Vargr

I would probably not mind beyond being mildly annoyed about having to read actual docs and source-code.

I would however google some stack overflow questions and share them in our team slack at intervals.

Just to remind everyone, then revel in their despair.

--

At least that is what i like to imagine, i am usually more benevolent.

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Madza

When Stack Overflow Goes Offline...
I contact them directly via do-not-reply@stackoverflow.com

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edm00se profile image
Eric McCormick

Other: read the source vendor/language API docs.

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TakaakiFuruse

Don't Panic!! Just ask why Stack Overflow is offline on Stack Overflow!!

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v6 profile image
🦄N B🛡

Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.

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KristijanFištrek

Where is "Endlessly crying in a fetal position denying the existence of God"?

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xowap profile image
Rémy 🤖
  • Pray the gods of archive.org
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Fulton Browne

Thank for my next nightmare.

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Fulton Browne

oh and I just checked stack overflow to make sure its online.

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Fida Muntaseer

I just post about it on Facebook/Twitter! :D

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Giuseppe Vetri

I usually switch to another non-code related task. I just said "let's organize the next month to-do's" and after that I'm going to check dev.to

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leob profile image
leob

... keep plodding along, but now tasks take at least 3 times longer!

(I took the liberty to add an option that wasn't there yet in the list)

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Juneau Lim

LOL so I'm not alone here. LOL

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Chris Shepherd

Search with google and find that every link I try to get to is blocked by the corporate firewall!

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Vatsal Hirpara

Mild Panic

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itachiuchiha profile image
Itachi Uchiha

I thought about how can they fix the problem without StackOverflow.

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mattkocaj profile image
matt kocaj

Go back to google and hope it can track down one of those wonderful SO “mirrors”
(Not)

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Achilles Moraites

Stack Overflow is offline: A good opportunity to relax and have lunch or a cup of coffee

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Firoz Ansari • Edited

Or use Google Cached result to browse Stack Overflow responses. Or search Stack Overflow data dump index using ES on my local machine.

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Salli Figler

getting away from the problem gives me a new point of view and getting some fresh air is always healthy

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Menai Ala Eddine

Ask dev community before StackOverflow.

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Kostas Bariotis

On a serious note, I will just continue researching what-ever I am looking for. I cannot just admit that I am 100% dependent on StackOverflow.

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@lukeocodes 🕹👨‍💻

Probably due to MDN docs being so good these days, I didn't even know SO was down!