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Maroun Maroun
Maroun Maroun

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Why Stack Overflow Is Part of My Daily Routine

It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed - Napoleon Hill

If you've ever been interested in programming or anything related to and been around the net long enough, you've come across Stack Overflow, accidentally or on purpose.

What is Stack Overflow?

Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming

It was in 2013 when I asked my first question in Stack Overflow, got down-voted and my question was closed. Back then, I didn't know why was that πŸ€·β€β™‚οΈ all that I asked for was a solution for my homework, and by saying "solution" I mean a full solution. I didn't expect comments like:

  • You should solve your homework by yourself
  • What have you tried?
  • Be more detailed

It was an easy question for professional programmers who live in Stack Overflow, why are they being offensive?

After leaving the community, disappointed, for a couple of months, I decided to take another risk and ask another one. It was a practical and detailed question. Some senior members edited my question, fixed some typos and reformatted it, making it look much better.

Not only that I was up-voted, got a detailed answer, learned how to ask and got some points, but I was also encouraged and informed that I was really close to the solution.

I began visiting Stack Overflow on a daily basis, just to check if my question has new answers or comments. While hanging out there, I saw a very similar question to mine, I knew the answer! But just before I posted it, I had to verify it's good by opening my IDE, running the code and validating it - By doing so, I was more confident about the subject being discussed and I better understood the problem!

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes - Peter Drucker

By navigating through Stach Overflow, I get exposed to new fields and keep atop new technologies, I can choose what subjects I'm interested in and filter questions accordingly.

Every day I learn something new through reading more posts from users. Sometimes I find myself investigating questions that I came across because I was curious about, I challenge myself to find a solution to that problem. By doing this, I do research, I try new things, I dive into other fields and not only that I'm helping the original poster, but I'm learning new things. I can get comments to my answers and improve them, I can comment on answers, edit answers and questions, vote on them and more.

Stack Overflow is the place for programming questions, it's an endless source of knowledge, use it.

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