Aggregated online interactions

This blog hasn’t seen much action lately, but that’s a misrepresentation of my online interactions. Most of my interaction in the past few months has been on Stack Overflow Q&A, and some on Stack Overflow “Documentation” as well as a small amount on GitHub. I wanted to aggregate some of those interactions on my blog, as well as perhaps cross-post bits and pieces here, mainly for my own reference.

Let’s start with the first: aggregating the bits and pieces that I want to have easy links to.

Stack Overflow Documentation

  • Showcasing all common Angular constructs“. I’m linking to the most up to date version. I wrote V1 of that article, which was subsequently improved by various other folks. It’s the tutorial (and equally important: the style of tutorial) I wish I’d had when I started learning Angular.
  • KnockoutJS “Equivalents of AngularJS bindings“. Linked page summarizes the state SO Documentation is currently in, at least for low-traffic tags: little and poor collaboration, and some frustration because some decent examples I wrote just don’t get reviewed (neither approved nor rejected). Thinking I might turn my content there into a (series of) blog post(s) here. Not sure yet.

Stack Exchange Q&A

At around 20 questions and 200 answers in 2016 so far I’d say I’m “moderately active”. Here’s a few that stood out when I browsed through my recent history:

I also gave SoftwareRecs.SE another shot, posting some questions, but they fit right into my question history: lots of unanswered tumbleweeds. And not for lack of trying, as I spend a lot of effort on making my questions there as good as they can be. The main reason I do that (and the reason I keep coming back to softwarerecs.se, in spite of the tumbleweed-factor) is that thinking carefully about your wishes and requirements at the least will help you find something yourself, if no-one else recommends anything.

And even though I haven’t interacted with Cooking.SE much lately, every stray upvote now and then to my “Cooking fish in a dishwasher” answer makes me smile.

GitHub

I don’t interact as much here yet as I’d like. I specifically wish I remembered more often than a measly four times to create gists, because the ones I did create are ones I tend to go back to. In addition to gists, I’ve gotten to creating only very few issues and pull requests, something I want to work on.

One shoutout by the way to the DefinitelyTyped repository, because that community has to deal with a really scattered committer base, and seem to do so pretty well. My pull request (though small) was reviewed and merged quite quickly.

In Closing…

What to do next? The tags I followed on Stack Overflow for answering seem to have dried up a bit. Perhaps some more interaction on GitHub, as well as re-editing some of the above links into blog posts? Then again, a few weeks of vacation to Hawaii are coming up as well, so it might be a while again before posting…

Episode 7: Area 51 Stack Exchange Challenge

Episodes 7 through 9 of this Stack Exchange Challenge will be all about meta-sites. First up: Area 51, the breeding grounds for new sites in the Stack Exchange Family. This episode will not follow the regular “Stats, My own Q&A, Interesting Questions” format, because this subsite is different.

What is Area 51?

The introduction on the site itself sums things up pretty good:

Area 51 is the Stack Exchange Network staging zone, where users come together to build new Q&A sites. New site ideas are proposed, discussed, and the best go on to beta.

Key word here is “users”. This refers to a subset of existing Stack Exchange users: those that take an above-average liking to the Q&A format of the Stack Exchange network. Folks (like yours truly) that leech and occasionally “commit” to actively participate to a new Q&A site, and folks that actually actively propose, monitor, and drive new proposals.

Current Statistics

It’s not possible to roll up statistics as I did in the other episodes, as there are no “Questions” in Area 51. However, there is one interesting statistic, which is the number of proposed Q&A sites by topic:

Topic Number of Proposals
Technology 208
Culture 104
Science 74
Life 70
Recreation 50
Professional 43
Arts 40
Business 27

As you can see, Technology is twice as big as the second-largest category. This is no surprise, because the largest Stack Exchange sites (which are the most obvious gateway to Area 51) are all tech sites.

All this has an interesting effect on Proposals, and on the sites that make it into beta and beyond. These sites, no matter what category they fall in, tend to draw these very tech-savvy users that roam Stack Exchange. This causes an unusually high degree of… well… geekness on those sites. I’ve contributed my fair share of geekness, and others have too.

Interesting Proposals

The default view shows the hottest proposals, which is nice because there’s a total of 616 proposed Q&A sites. I guess from those proposals a few are (as far as I know) interesting in one way or another:

  • Atheism and Agnosticism is interesting, because the same proposal has already been shot down twice. Much to my surprise, any trace to the old proposals has been erased.
  • Stack Overflow in (French / Hindi / Italian / Spanish / etc). Some of those have even been closed before and have been restarted. Glad I’m proficient in/at/with English.
  • Lockpicking! I’m currently committed to actively particpate if this site reaches beta. Purely recreational stuff, of course…

The above proposals are the ones that piqued my interest. Have a look yourself to see if there’s any you like. To each his own.

Conclusion

The basic idea behind Area 51 seems solid. The fact that the user base is not too diverse may not work in its favor though. Not that it matters to me: most topics improve with a touch of geekness to it as far as I’m concerned. I’ll be browsing the staging area every once in a while, and perhaps one day even participate in a beta.

Stack Exchange Challenge

My new hobby: the great Stack Exchange sites.

In the 90’s most of my questions on software development were either answered by friends and family, trial and error, or books. I’ve always loved reading books on this topic. Most of my books have some particular animal on the cover, from the company with a man on a mission. In addition to books, the new millenium lured me to the Google Groups on C#. It seems at the time of writing this only a “new” Google Groups exists, which is a good thing: even though I enjoyed reading and posting there very much, the spam drove me (and many others) away.

Of course, just Google Search remained a very decent source for answers to development questions. In recent years, the search results have slowly started to point to one particular site: Stack Overflow. The various interesting sister sites quickly grabbed my attention.

I can highly recommend looking at the sites they have, and joining some of the discussions. Overall, the communities seemed very friendly to me as long as you put effort and thought in your questions and answers. Personally, I’m seriously considering to set myself up for a challenge and investigate one site a time, with perhaps a blog post on my findings. Now where shall I begin?