Greetings, colleagues. Over the past few years, Stack Overflow has become a useful tool for developers. Many of the questions asked by Google and Yandex in the very first links lead to clear and comprehensive answers on this resource. Most developers use the Stack Overflow site exactly as a knowledge base of programmers, the ability to quickly get the right answer. Under the cut, I’ll tell you about some interesting cases of the underwater part of the iceberg: hidden answers, rewards, pumping karma, and much more, hidden from the surface.

The answer is not always marked with a green check.

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Many times on hackathons and consultations I stood behind the backs of guys looking for an answer to Stack Overflow. And more than once I observed such a picture: a person goes to Stack Overflow from a search, searches for an answer marked with a green check mark, does not find and immediately closes the tab, summing up that “here, they also asked on the stack - and nobody knows”.

Sometimes the answer is really no. But more often than not, it’s just a little different from where we expect:

• Even if there is no answer to the question, we carefully look at the comments: perhaps the necessary information is simply not arranged in the form of an answer. This often happens if the respondent suffers with excessive modesty and does not consider that his comment is a complete answer.
• If there is no answer marked with a green check mark, it does not mean at all that they did not answer the question. Often, the author of a question simply forgets about it and does not return to the site to mark one of the answers. If there is no green check mark, it makes sense to carefully review all the answers, focusing on the number of votes. By the way, special sorting is provided for this.
• And even if the answer is, it does not mean that it is the only one. Sometimes it happens that the person who asked the question and did not get a satisfactory answer, marks the first one. After some time, a more detailed answer may be given to the question, but the author of the question is already gone. Therefore, if the answer, decorated with a green check mark, did not help you, do not be lazy to look through the entire list. Perhaps somewhere at the end of the list is a real solution to your problem.

Bounty for the answer

The opportunity to offer a bounty for the answer is ignored by many: there is no reputation to offer a reward, and it’s not clear why anyone would need it. In vain they ignore, by the way: even the most difficult questions to which no one answers, immediately get answers if you supply them with a bounty of the appropriate size. Moreover, bounty can be set not only for your own, but also for someone else's question.

Why bounty so strongly affect the attractiveness of the question? Several factors. Firstly, this is the easiest way for newbies to quickly gain a lot of reputation. Secondly, top developers can measure themselves in this way: a reputation of several hundred thousand points on Stack Overflow looks very solid in a specialist's resume and helps to find a good job if you want to change it.

Where to get the reputation to spend it on the bounty? About this below.

Unclear sources of reputation

The most obvious way to earn a reputation is to answer questions. He is the most difficult. You can quickly get several answers to simple questions at once, but really complex questions are really ... hard to answer. Stack Overflow users who earn reputations using answers put special filters to get instant notifications about new questions in a very narrow area that they know best. Such specialists can answer the question within ten minutes, getting a maximum of reputation points per day for their efforts.

Filters are put on tags. If you want your question to see the maximum number of experts, do not be lazy to spend the extra 30 seconds and indicate all possible tags that have at least something to do with the question.

But what to do if you have no desire to watch the questions and waste your energy on countless answers, only a small part of which will bring a reputation? The solution is rather unexpected - ask questions.

Reputation is given not only for the answers, but also because someone liked your question. In this case, the question does not have to be ingenious. Many regulars mark with voices just neatly designed questions corresponding to the written and unwritten rules of service: no grammatical errors, highlighting the code, etc. Moreover, new users often vote for the questions they found through the search, so each question can become permanent reputation generator. A few dozen questions in a year are capable of bringing a thousand or another reputation points for the next year, which can then be spent on bounty for really important things. If something goes wrong for more than half an hour, it would be a good idea to spend ten minutes on drawing up a quality question on Stack Overflow, after which you can safely return to finding a solution. If someone answers, you will save a lot of time. If you yourself find the answer - feel free to answer your own question, it only takes a couple of minutes, but in the future it will increase the flow of passively generated reputation.

Stack overflow more than it looks

Not everyone knows that stackoverflow.com is not the only question and answer ecosystem website created by Joel Spolsky. This is a constantly growing network of sites, collectively called the Stack Exchange and uniting dozens of highly specialized sites with the same interface and a single user profile (but separate reputation). The complete list of sites at stackexchange.com/sites also contains platforms for discussing the work of the network itself and Area 51, where new question and answer sites are offered and “grown”.

Russian version of Stack Overflow for specific questions

The Stack Exchange network includes not only specialized sites like “Questions about Ubuntu”, but also Stack Overflow versions for different regions. In particular, a Russian version has recently been launched, which is available at ru.stackoverflow.com .

Over the past year, at many conferences and meetings, I have often encountered a misunderstanding of the designation of the localized version by developers. Many speak in the spirit of “Any real programmer (s) knows English. Why do we need another stack with fewer participants and questions?!? ”

In reality, this is not at all the case. The purpose of the Russian Stack Overflow is not at all to duplicate the functionality of the English version. Joel creates localized versions not for the language itself, but for countries and regions. Try to ask on the main site anything related to the development for 1C, you will not even find such a tag there. But on the Russian version both tags, and questions, and answers - everything is presented in large quantities. IT is a huge area, divided not only by platforms and areas, but also regionally. Many countries and regions have their own major players in soft-engineering, who specialize in the local market and are little known outside of it. The Russian-language version of Stack Overflow is an opportunity for developers to discuss Russian-specific solutions, use tags in Russian, communicate in their home time zone, and sip a relevant reputation.

By the way, about the reputation. As I wrote above, it is very difficult to earn a high reputation on the global Stack Overflow due to too much competition and differences in time zones. At the same time, high reputation on the stack adorns the resume, which is especially important for beginning specialists who want to demonstrate qualification in the absence of formal experience. The recent Russian stack has allowed many developers to start pumping their reputation “from scratch” in much more comfortable conditions.

Chukcha not a writer?

And the last. At the consultations I am often asked in which language to write comments in the source code. I would like, of course, to write in English. But there is a delicate point: most IT people are really good at English - but only for reading. When you need to write a clear and succinct comment, many people get stuck: it’s one thing to read articles, news and books fluently, and quite another to write it yourself. Many developers formulate questions for the stack in such a way that even after a thoughtful reading it is not clear what they mean.

Comments in English are advisable to write, if most of the developers in the team really know English well. The same with questions: many developers do not want to ask questions simply because it is not so easy for them to formulate them in a foreign language. The Russian version removes this barrier, and now the colleagues will no longer have such a convenient excuse: “It’s difficult to formulate a good question on the stack, so I didn’t ask and I was digging for three hours” :)