Good thing I started contributing to the stack overflow

About this Article

This article is a transcript of the author's LT presentation at the meet-up held on 12/17/2022 to celebrate the 1st anniversary of the official Japanese version of Stack Overflow.

The content of my presentation was to introduce the good things I felt since I started contributing to Stack Overflow. (I use "contribute" in the sense of asking questions, answering questions, and voting.)

The good things I've felt since I started contributing to Stack Over Flow

1. Learn by answering 📖

This may seem like an obvious statement, but it is still the biggest good thing I felt.

Let me delve a little deeper into what I meant by learning by answering here.

First, in answering the questions, you need to verbalize your understanding.
This will allow you to gauge the depth of your understanding and will help you better understand the topic of the question.

In answering the questions, you may also need to verify the correctness of your responses. For this purpose, searching the topic can help you better understand.

You have prepared your answer. In order for the questioner to understand it, you will also want to be aware of easy-to-understand answers.

I think this will also give us training in teaching.

Finally, by encountering many questions, you will learn to know what are good questions and what are bad questions. I think it is very important to know how to ask good questions in order to learn.

2. Reduce the number of unknowns with the follow function 💡

Stack Overflow has a follow function. This is useful and I use it often.

When I am looking through the list for questions that I can answer, I often come across questions that I am very interested in but cannot answer. When this happens, I follow the question anyway and wait for someone else to answer it. By following a question that I don't know the answer to, I can learn from other people's answers.

I think this also makes me more sensitive to what I don't know and gives me an opportunity to learn, because I am aware that I am trying to answer the question, rather than just casually looking at the list.

Easy to contribute to the community 🙌

One final point is that it is easy to contribute to the community. I have recently become more aware of contributing to the community. (I wrote How to make your first OSS contribution, which you can read if you like 🙇🏻)

There are many ways to contribute to the community, but I recommend Stack Overflow because it is a low hurdle for community contribution and anyone can start right away.

Summary

Here are some of the things I've learned since I started contributing to Stack Overflow.

1. Learning by answering 📖.
2. Reduce the number of unknowns with the follow function 💡
3. Easy to contribute to the community 🙌

I had the opportunity to give a LT at a celebratory event called "Meetup for the 1st anniversary of the official Japanese version of Stack Overflow.

I will continue to do my best ✊

The article is also available in Japanese: https://zenn.dev/takuyakikuchi/articles/db8239b8fabe31