A month ago, I checked into stack overflow to see if I could help someone out – you know, be a good boy and give back to the community.
A person had a basic question about string concatenation in SQL. I promptly answered and provided a code snippet example. The OP was overjoyed! Angels heralded from the heavens, baby kittens were born. I broke the 1,000 point barrier when he checked my answer.
The next day I hopped on and my credits were back down below 1k. Wait, what!?
He unchecked my answer. Was it wrong? Nope. And neither was he.
It turns out someone posted an answer he liked better from which I learned a few things, which is awesome!!
- it’s not about me or my points. I was disappointed that I lost my lovely 1k status, but that just reflected a selfish motive. I learned that I need to work on my character.
- SQL 2017 has a new function: STRING_AGG() which finally performs what people have been wanting and hacking in SQL scripts since 2008. (Oracle 11gR2 had this ability in 2009 with the LISTAGG function.)
- StackOverflow doesn’t have an alert for when your answer is declined. When someone accepts your answer, promotes it or demotes it, a little red or green badge appears over your score. If someone unchecks your answer, you don’t see a red badge. It would be nice if they drew the user to the question so, like in this case, he can learn some new tricks.
In this industry, one of the properties that sets apart a jr. developer from a seasoned one is the variety, value and vastness of knowledge built from experiences and experimentation. A little adjustment and this could have been an automated lesson. Why doesn’t StackOverflow take its vast knowledge base and perform a medical analysis on people’s posts (questions) to find similar questions that have been answered? StackOverflow has more opportunities to be mined for those who look for the potential.
(Image by Pawel Janiak on Unsplash)
(Image by Pawel Janiak on Unsplash)