software world

This isn’t just the place for programmers’ questions and answers.

Who doesn’t know what Stack Overflow is? It is the source answer to a million programming questions (21 million questions per Wikipedia in 2021) If you are a programmer, then most likely you have mentioned this before.

The basic usage is shared below:

But besides just questions and answers, did you know that Stack Overflow has other uses? Here are seven of them:

Every year, Stack Overflow surveys thousands of developers to get some insight into our developer demographics.

In 2022, over 70k developers have been surveyed, Below is some interesting information.

An online resource for learning how to code

most popular technology language

and much more… see this

The above surveys are only insights for a particular year. However, sometimes we like to know the changing trend over the years.

In Stack Overflow, we can check trends on various tags on Stack Overflow questions.

For example, I like to know how popular mobile development platforms, such as Xamarin, React Native and Flutter, have been over the years.

I just need to add tags, and the data graph will be shown below.

The graph shows that Xamarin is slowing down, React Native is hitting flat, and Flutter is growing relatively fast.

There is a privileged attribute called site-analytical It is only available if you have scored 25k on Stack Overflow.

Considering that most of the developers use Stack Overflow, from analytical, we can roughly understand the tendency of developers at the macro level.

Seen below are two examples of the most current data.

historical trend

From this data we can understand that

• Stackoverflow grows from 2008 to 2014
• Steady and gradual decline since 2014
• A spike in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit globally
• From 2020 onwards, there has been some slight drop in the number of answers, which is less as compared to the questions contributed

analytical data

From the data, we can see that developers mostly use Google and are followed by Bing (>30x less than Google) and DuckDuckGo (150x less than Google) by some distance.

It seems that the Russian site yandex.ru refers to Stack Overflow highest, followed by Github.

We may not notice if we use the comment feature in Stack Overflow for a certain question/answer. If the comment comes up frequently, Stack Overflow will automatically propose you to use its chat function.

To access the chat room directly, Stack Overflow has provided it below:

It has many chat rooms. I search for Android-specific rooms, as you can see below:

Note: Some points will be required to talk in chat, create chat or create chat gallery.

Stack Overflow lists users and ranks them based on their reputation achieved for the week, month, year, quarter or all of them.

If you want to find recent reputable developers, like what I did, I rank the top ranking developer for the week and find the keyword I’m interested in, for example, Android. I get a developer from the following list:

Click on it. I can reach them on LinkedIn, Twitter or GitHub. If I want to hire someone from Italy with an Android experience, I’ve got a contact!

Professionally, many people use LinkedIn. It is used by all businesses. Everyone can write about their experience and others can support it. The reliability of the material still has to be verified.

But if a profile is in Stack Overflow, it automatically confirms one’s passion for development. Not having a Stack Overflow profile doesn’t mean one isn’t a good developer, but having a solid Stack Overflow profile does have its own weight.

Below is a profile of Stack Overflow founder, Joel Spolsky, who is solid in his VB6 and VBA.

And Android community celebrity, Jake Wharton has received a gold badge in Android since 2014

So, use Stack Overflow, and build your developer profile! Be excellent!

This is a small out-of-the-box idea.

If you have general programming inquiries, you can ask your colleagues. If they manage to help you, you can say thank you! how awesome!

Wouldn’t it be great if you could also give them some reward points in their Stack Overflow profile?

This can easily be done by asking your colleagues questions and also by posting questions in stackoverflow. If they answer your question well, you can upvote it, earning them 10 points.

And if their answer is the best, you can mark it, and it will give them another 15 points. You will get two marks for choosing your preferred answer.

Thanks great, but the stackoverflow point is tangible. And you lose nothing but a few extra mouse clicks, but instead, you’ll have the following:

• More people can contribute to answer your question (besides your colleagues)
• A community that can also help you verify answers (to find out the best, never bias in nature)
• You also have an easily searchable question and answer in the future (stackoverflow stuff is indexed very well in google search)
• When typing your question, you’ll probably find that Stack Overflow already has a question you’re looking for an answer to.

Isn’t it great?

That’s what I see. In addition to answers and questions, Stack Overflow remains a great developer community-building tool in many other areas. Take advantage of it because it’s for you.

If you discover other interesting uses of Stack Overflow, do share. I would love to hear from you.

P.S. I am not affiliated with Stackoverflow in any way. Just sharing my experiences, thoughts and appreciation on how it benefits me. I hope this will benefit others.