How I made 75k reputation on StackOverflow while helping people understand Kotlin
Why you should contribute to StackOverflow
For more than 12 years ago, since I started getting into programming, I have been googling many of the problems I am facing during the day, and most of the time I find my answers on StackOverflow. You know this yourself, I’m pretty sure. StackOverflow: The place every programmer is a little bit dependent on. 🤣
Even after 10+ years in the space, I still find it extremely useful to have this kind of resource. Something has changed, though. I don’t only consume content on the website but also contribute to it. Until May 2017, I didn’t even have an account on StackOverflow. At this time, I was getting interested in knowing what it’s like to answer questions instead of just reading them. I enjoyed helping others to solve their Kotlin-related problems ever since I started learning the language. This was my initial motivation for creating an account and contributing to StackOverflow.
The Kotlin Gold Badge
After around 10 months of answering about 400 questions, in March 2018, I was awarded the golden Kotlin badge, which means that I had spent quite some time on the platform already. I was always motivated to receive the badge since only three other people got it by then. You can become kind of addicted to answering actually… 😉
Lessons learned from contributing to StackOverflow
Teaching improves your own knowledge
When I began contributing to StackOverflow, I realized it can be quite hard to give answers on the fly. It’s not that easy. Most of the time, you need to think about the way of looking at the problem from the questioner’s point of view. Regularly, you’ll find yourself researching for answers by studying the documentation, forums, and other resources. Most questions also require you to solve the presented problem in your own IDE before coming up with a solution. It can be really time-consuming if you really try to understand other people’s problems and, of course, provide a comprehensible answer to them. Nevertheless, the entire effort has been totally worth it since I learned so many things about the Kotlin language itself and also about problem-solving in general. You don’t always know the answer to newly submitted questions right away and therefore have to put in some thought and research yourself. This is always helpful and very valuable.
You give something back to the community
What I learned during t of actively contributing to SO is that you shouldn’t always just consume. In the case of StackOverflow, it’s almost a bit disgraceful if you only read posts but never tell the authors that their work has been valuable to you. I did the same for many years myself, no question! You don’t need to feel bad about it. I just want to raise awareness that many good answers cost the author a lot of time and effort before they shared them with all of us for free. It isn’t that hard to vote on these posts. If you don’t do this yet, consider an account and give something back to the people you learn from. 🚀
Why you should start contributing
In my opinion, contributing to StackOverflow is a good thing for many reasons. You’ll obviously learn something from teaching and help others inescapably. Whatever topic you choose to participate in, you’ll be better at it afterward. More importantly, you’ll learn to value the contributions of fellow answerers. You’ll recognize that it sucks if you don’t get up-voted yourself by the people that consume your knowledge and, as a result, upvote other people's contributions. Even if you don’t want to answer questions, voting should be the least you can start with. If you’re willing to become an answerer though, I’d recommend choosing a niche topic as I did with Kotlin. Entering tags like Java, on the other hand, is much more difficult because so many people are already involved in it.
A while ago, I ran a quick poll on Twitter to confirm my assumptions: Most developers consume but don’t offer their knowledge on StackOverflow.
I hope my points make some sense to you and provoke you to follow my advice.
My stats
I myself have become a bit less active with answering questions myself and my current answers count for the Kotlin tag is at 604:
With a total upvote count of 6.7k for my Kotlin answers, this leaves me at #3 in very nice company. 🍻 Overall I collected around 75k reputation since I started my account on StackOverflow in 2017. Of course, you keep earning credit passively, even when you don’t contribute new questions. In case you wondered, with my reputation, I’m at an all-time rank of #1807 (as of May 28, 2023).
Closing words…
I do understand that many people have made worse experiences on StackOverflow than I did. I know for a fact that the community isn’t always nice. It depends on the tags you get into. I understand that StackOverflow is not just good and there are reasons you can criticize it for. If, after reading this article, you’re willing to learn from StackOverflow users who have experienced the bad habits of the website, you should definitely read this post: My Love-Hate Relationship with StackOverflow.
Thanks for your time.
📚 I write articles mainly about Kotlin here and would love to invite you to read about more Kotlin topics.
