I’m unsure of whether this should be a blog post or an article, so I’ll probably make it both. I’ve probably written most of it before in Stack Overflow answers, but as I couldn’t find anything when I was looking earlier (to answer a question about Stack Overflow answers – now deleted, so only available for those over 10k rep) I figured it was time to write something in a medium I had more control over.

This is not a guide to getting huge amounts of reputation on Stack Overflow. As it happens, following the guidelines here is likely to result in decent rep,  but I’m sure there are various somewhat underhand ways of gaining reputation without actually being helpful. In other words, I’m not going to explain how you might game the system, but just share my views on how to work with the system for the benefit of all involved. A lot of this isn’t specific to Stack Overflow, but some of the advice isn’t applicable to some forums.

Hypocrisy warning: I’m not going to claim I always follow everything in this list. I try, but that’s not the same thing – and quite often time pressures will compromise the quality of an answer. Oh, and don’t read anything into the ordering here. It’s how it happened to come out, that’s all.

Read the question

All too often I’ve written what I thought was a great answer… only to reread the question and find out that it wasn’t going to help the questioner at all.

Now, questions are often written pretty badly, leaving out vital information, being vague about the problem, including lots of irrelevant code but leaving out the crucial bit which probably contains the bug, etc. It’s at least worth commenting on the question to ask for more information, but just occasionally you can apply psychic debugging to answer the question anyway. If you do have to make assumptions when writing an answer, state them explicitly. That will not only reduce the possibility of miscommunication, but will also point out the areas which need further clarification.

Code is king

I can’t believe I nearly posted this article without mentioning sample code.

Answers with sample code are gold… if the code is appropriate. A few rules of thumb:

• Make sure it compiles, assuming it’s meant to. This isn’t always possible – for example, I often post at work from a machine without .NET on it, or on the train from a laptop without Java. If you can’t get a compiler to make sure your code is valid, be extra careful in terms of human inspection.
• Snippets are okay, but complete programs rock. If you’re not already comfortable with writing short console apps, practise it. Often you can write a complete app in about 15 lines which doesn’t just give the solution, but shows it working. Imagine the level of confidence that gives to anyone reading your answer. Get rid of anything you don’t need – brevity is really helpful. (In C# for example that usually means getting rid of [STAThread], namespace declarations and unused using directives.)
• Take a bit of care over formatting. If possible, try to prevent the code wrapping. That’s not always realistically feasible, but it’s a nice ideal. Make sure the spacing at least looks okay – you may want to use a 2-space indent if your code involves a lot of nesting.
• If you skip best practices, add a comment. For example, you might include // Insert error handling here to indicate that production code really should check the return value etc. This doesn’t include omitting the STAThread attribute and working without a namespace – those are just reasonable assumptions and unlikely to be copied wholesale, whereas the main body of the code may well be. If your code leaks resources, someone’s production code may do so as well…

Code without an explanation is rarely useful, however. At least provide a sentence or two to explain what’s going on.

Answer the question and highlight side-issues

Other developers don’t always do things the way we’d like them to. Questions often reflect this, basically asking how to do something which (in our view) shouldn’t be attempted in the first place. It may completely infeasible, or it may just be a really bad idea.

Occasionally, the idea is so awful – and possibly harmful to users, especially when it comes to security questions – that the best response is just to explain (carefully and politely) why this is a really bad thing to do. Usually, however, it’s better to answer the question and give details of better alternatives at the same time. Personally I prefer to give these alternatives before the answer to the question asked, as I suspect it makes it more likely that the questioner will read the advice and take it on board. Don’t forget that the more persuasive you can be, the more likely it is they’ll abandon their original plans. In other words, “Don’t do this!” isn’t nearly as useful as “Don’t do this because…”

It’s okay to guess, but be honest

This may be controversial. I’ve certainly been downvoted twice on SO for having the temerity to post an answer without being 100% sure that it’s the right one – and (worse?) for admitting as much.

Sometimes there are questions which are slightly outside your own area of expertise, but they feel an awful lot like a situation you’ve been in before. In this kind of case, you can often write an answer which may well help – and would at least suggest something for the questioner to investigate a a possible answer to their problem. Sometimes you may be way off base, which is why it’s worth explaining in your answer that you are applying a bit of educated guesswork. If another answer is posted by an expert in the topic, it may well be worth the questioner trying their solution first… but at least you’re providing an alternative if they run out of other possibilities.

Now, somewhat contradictory…

Raise the overall accuracy level

It should go without saying that a correct answer is more helpful than an incorrect one. There are plenty of entirely inaccurate answers on Stack Overflow – and on newsgroups, and basically every online community-based resource I’ve ever seen. This isn’t surprising, but the best ways to counter it are:

• Challenge inaccurate information
• Provide accurate information yourself

One of the key aspects of this is to provide evidence. If you make an objective statement without any sort of disclaimer about your uncertainty, that should mean you’ve got good reason to believe you’re correct. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to provide evidence, but as soon as there’s disagreement, evidence is king. If you want to assert that your code is faster than some other code, write a benchmark (carefully!). If you want to prove that an object can be collected at a certain point in time, write a test to show it. Short but complete programs are great for this, and can stop an argument dead in its tracks.

Another source of evidence is documentation and specifications. Be aware that they’re not always accurate, but I generally believe documentation unless I have a specific reason to doubt it.

Provide links to related resources

There have been a few questions on Stack Overflow as to whether it’s appropriate to link to other resources on the web. My own opinion is that it’s absolutely appropriate and can add a lot of value to an answer. In particular, I like to link to:

• MSDN and JavaDoc documentation, or the equivalent for other platforms. With MSDN URLs, if they end in something like http://msdn.microsoft.om/foo(VS80).aspx, take the bit in brackets out of the URL (leaving http://msdn.microsoft.om/foo.aspx in this case). That way the link will always be to the most recent version of the documentation, and it doesn’t give WMD as many problems either.
• Language specifications, in particular those for C# and Java. I generally link to the Word document for the C# spec, which has the disadvantage that I can’t link to a specific section, and it won’t just open in the browser. On the other hand, I find it easier to navigate than the MSDN version, and I’ve seen inaccuracies in MSDN.
• My own articles and blog posts (unsurprisingly :)
• Wikipedia
• Other resources which are unlikely to become unavailable

The point about the resources not becoming unavailable is important – one of the main arguments against linking is that the page might go away in the future. That’s not a particularly compelling argument for most reference material IMO, but it is relevant in other cases. Either way, it’s worth including some sort of summary of what you’re linking to – a link on its own doesn’t really invite the reader to follow it, whereas a quick description of what they’ll find there provides more incentive.

One quick tip: In Chrome I have an MSDN “search engine” set up and in Firefox a keyword bookmark. In both cases the URL is http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/%s.aspx – this makes it easier to get to the MSDN page for a particular namespace, type or member. For example, by typing “msdn system.io.fileinfo” I get straight to the FileInfo page. It doesn’t work for generics, however. At some point I’d like to make this simpler somehow…

Care about your reader: spelling, grammar and style matter

I’m lucky: I’m a native English speaker, and I have a reasonably good natural command of English. Having said that, I still take a certain amount of care when writing answers: I’ll often rewrite a sentence several times until I feel it works. I’ve noticed that answers with correct spelling and grammar are generally upvoted more than ones with essentially the same content but less careful presentation.

I’m not recommending style over substance; I’m saying that both are important. You could be putting forward the most insightful comment in the world, but if you can’t communicate it effectively to your readers, it’s not going to help anyone. Having said that…

A time-limited answer may be better than no answer at all

I answer Stack Overflow questions in whatever spare time I have: waiting for a build, on the train, taking a break from editing etc. I frequently see a question which would take a good 15 minutes or more to answer properly – but I only have 30 seconds. If the question already has answers, there’s probably no sensible contribution I can make, but if the question is completely unanswered, I sometimes add a very short answer with the most important points I can think of at the time.

Ideally, I’d then go back later and edit the answer to make it more complete – but at least I may have given the questioner something to think about or an option to try. Usually these “quickies” are relatively fruitless, but occasionally I’ll come back to find that the answer was accepted: the slight nudge in the answer was all that was required. If I’m feeling diligent at that point I’ll still complete the answer, but the point is that a brief answer is usually better than nothing.

Don’t be afraid to delete (or edit heavily) useless answers

It’s almost inevitable that if you post enough answers, one of them will be less than helpful. It may start off being a good one, but if a later answer includes all the information from your answer and more, or explains it in a better way, it’s just clutter.

Likewise if you make a wild stab in the dark about the cause of a problem, and that guess turns out to be wrong, your answer could become actively unhelpful. Usually the community will let you know this in comments or voting, but sometimes you have to recognise it on your own.

Be polite

It’s a shame that I have to include this, and it’s even more of a shame that I need to take better notice of it myself. However boneheaded a question is, there’s no need to be rude. You can express your dismay at a question, and even express dismay at someone failing to read your answer properly, without resorting to inflammatory language. In the end, no-one really wins from a flame war. Remember that there’s a real person at the other end of the network connection, and they’re probably just as frustrated with you as you are with them. If things are getting out of hand, just write a polite note explaining that you don’t think it’s productive to discuss the topic any more, and walk away. (This can be surprisingly difficult advice to heed.)

Next time I get too “involved” in a question, could someone please direct me to this point? And don’t take “But I’m right, darnit!”  as an excuse.

Don’t “answer and run”

Sometimes an answer is very, very nearly spot on – but that final 1% is all the difference between the reader understanding fully and having a dangerous misunderstanding of the topic.

Stack Overflow makes it pretty easy to see comments to your answers: monitor this carefully so you can respond and clarify where appropriate. Many web forums have an “email me if this thread is updated” option – again, this is useful. It’s really frustrating (as a questioner) to be left hanging with an answer which looks like it might solve a real headache, if only you could just get the ear of the author for a moment.

Having said all of this:

Have fun

In my experience the most useful users are the ones who are obviously passionate about helping others. Don’t do it out of some misguided sense of “duty” – no-one’s paying you to do this (I assume) and no-one can reasonably complain if you just haven’t got the time or energy to answer their question. Save yourself for a time when you can be more enthusiastic and enjoy what you’re doing. Go ahead, have a cup of coffee and watch a Youtube video or something instead. You don’t have to check whether there are any new questions!

One of the answers to my “controversial opinions” question on Stack Overflow claims that “programming is so easy a five year old can do it.“

I’m sure there are some aspects of programming which a five year old can do. Other parts are apparently very hard though. Today I came to the following conclusion:

• If your code deals with arbitrary human text, it’s probably broken. (Have you taken the Turkey test recently?)
• If your code deals with floating point numbers, it’s probably broken.
• If your code deals with concurrency (whether that means database transactions, threading, whatever), it’s probably broken.
• If your code deals with dates, times and time zones, it’s probably broken. (Time zones in particular are hideous.)
• If your code has a user interface with anything other than a fixed size and a fixed set of labels (no i18n), it’s probably broken.

You know what I like working with? Integers. They’re nice and predictable. Give me integers, and I can pretty much predict how they’ll behave. So long as they don’t overflow. Of have an architecture-and-processor-dependent size.

Maybe you think I’m too cynical. I think I’m rather bullish, actually. After all, I used the word “probably” on all of those bullet points.

The thing that amazes me is that despite all this hardness, despite us never really achieving perfection, programs seem to work well enough most of the time. It’s a bit like a bicycle – it really shouldn’t work. I mean, if you’d never seen one working, and someone told you that:

• You can’t really balance when it’s stationary. You have to go at a reasonable speed to stay stable.
• Turning is a lot easier if you lean towards the ground.
• The bit of the bike which is actually in contact with the ground is always stationary, even when the bike itself is moving.
• You stop by squeezing bits of rubber onto the wheels.

Would you not be a touch skeptical? Likewise when I see the complexity of software and our collective failure to cope with it, I’m frankly astonished that I can even write this blog post.

It’s been a hard day. I achieved a small victory over one of the bullet points in the first list today. It took hours, and I pity my colleague who’s going to code review it (I’ve made it as clear as I can, but some things are just designed to mess with your head) – but it’s done. I feel simultaneously satisfied in a useful day’s work, and depressed at the need for it.

I’ve considered writing a bit about this before, but not done so for fear of looking like a jerk. I still think I may well end up looking like a jerk, but this is all stuff I’m interested in and I’ll enjoy writing about it, so on we go. Much of this is based on experiences at and around Stack Overflow, and it’s more likely to be interesting to you if you’re a regular there or at least know the basic premises and mechanics. Even then you may well not be particularly interested – as much as anything, this post is to try to get some thoughts out of my system so I can stop thinking about how I would blog about it. If you don’t want the introspection, but want to know how to judge my egotism, skipping to the summary is probably a good plan. If you really don’t care at all, that’s probably a healthy sign. Quit now while you’re ahead.

What is a micro-celebrity?

A couple of minutes ago, I thought I might have been original with the term “micro-celebrity” but I’m clearly not. I may well not use the term the same way other people do, however, so here’s my rough definition solely for the purposes of this post:

A micro-celebrity is someone who gains a significant level of notoriety within a relatively limited community on the internet, usually with a positive feedback loop.

Yes, it’s woolly. Not to worry.

I would consider myself to have been a micro-celebrity in five distinct communities over the course of the last 14 years:

• The alt.books.stephen-king newsgroup
• The mostly web-based community around Team17’s series of “Worms” games (well, the first few, on the PC only)
• The comp.lang.java.* newsgroups
• The microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp newsgroup
• Stack Overflow

The last has been far and away the most blatant case. This is roughly how it goes – or at least how it’s gone in each of the above cases:

• Spend some time in the community, post quite a lot. Shouting loudly works remarkably well on the internet – if you’re among the most prolific writers in a group, you will get noticed. Admittedly it helps to try hard to post well-written and interesting thoughts.
• After a while, a few people will refer to you in their other conversations. For instance, if someone in the Java newsgroup was talking about “objects being passed by reference”, another poster might say something like “Don’t let Jon Skeet hear you talking like that.”
• Play along with it, just a bit. Don’t blow your own trumpet, but equally don’t discourage it. A few wry comments to show that you don’t mind often go down well.
• Sooner or later, you will find yourself not just mentioned in another topic, but being the topic of conversation yourself. At this point, it’s no longer an inside joke that just the core members of the group “get” – you’re now communal property, and almost any regular will be part of the joke.

One interesting thing you might have noticed about the above is that it doesn’t really take very much skill. It takes a fair amount of time, and ideally you should have some reasonable thoughts and the ability to express yourself clearly, but you certainly don’t have to be a genius. Good job, really.

How much do you care?

This is obviously very personal, and I’m only speaking for myself (as ever).

It’s undeniably an ego boost. Just about every day there’s something on Stack Overflow to laugh about in reference to me. How could I not enjoy that? How could it not inflate my sense of self-worth just a little bit? I could dismiss it as being entirely silly and meaningless – which it is, ultimately – but it’s still fun and I get a kick out of it. And yes, I’m sorry to say I bore/annoy my colleagues and wife with the latest Stack Overflow news, because I’ve always been the selfish kind of person who wants to talk about what they’re up to instead of asking the other person about their interests. This is an unfortunate trait which has relatively little to do with the micro-celebrity business.

One very good thing for keeping my ego in check is that at Google, I converse with people who are smarter than me every day, whether at coffee, breakfast, lunch or just while coding. There’s no sense of anyone trying to make anyone else feel small, but it’s pretty obvious that I’m nothing special when it comes to Google. Now, I don’t want to put on too much false modesty – I know I have a reasonable amount of experience, and I happen to know two very popular platforms reasonably well (which really helps on Stack Overflow- being the world’s greatest guru on MUMPS isn’t going to get you much love), and perhaps most importantly I can communicate pretty well. All of these are good things, and I’m proud of my career and particularly C# in Depth…

… but let’s get real here. The Jon Skeet Facts page isn’t really about me. It’s about making geek jokes where the exact subject is largely irrelevant. It could very easily have been about someone else with little change in the humour. Admittedly the funniest answers (to my mind) are the ones which do have some bearing on me (particularly the one about having written a book on C# 5.0 already) – but that doesn’t mean there’s anything really serious in it. I hope it’s pretty obvious to everyone that I’m not a genius programmer. I’d like to think I’m pretty good, but I’m not off-the-charts awesome by any means. (In terms of computer science, I’m nothing special at all and I have a really limited range of languages/paradigms. I’m trying to do something about those, but it’s hard when there’s always another question to answer.)

It’s worth bearing in mind the “micro” part of micro-celebrity. I suspect that if we somehow got all the C# developers in the world together and asked them whether they’d heard of Jon Skeet, fewer than 0.1% would say yes. (That’s a complete guess, by the way. I have really no idea. The point is I’m pretty sure it’s a small number.) Compared with the sea of developers, the set of Stack Overflow regulars is a very small pond.

What I care far more about than praise and fandom is the idea of actually helping people and making a difference. A couple of days ago I had an email from someone saying that C# in Depth had helped them in an interview: they were able to write more elegant code because now they grok lambda expressions. How cool is that? Yes, I know it’s all slightly sickening in a “you do a lot of good work for charity” kind of way – but I suspect it’s what drives most Stack Overflow regulars. Which leads me on to reputation…

What does Stack Overflow reputation mean to you?

In virtually every discussion about the Stack Overflow reputation system and its caps, I try to drop in the question of “what’s the point of reputation? What does it mean to you?” It’s one of those questions which everyone needs to answer for themselves. Jeff Atwood’s answer is that reputation is how much the system trusts you. My own answers:

• It’s a daily goal. Making sure I always get to 200 is a fun little task, and then trying to get accepted answers is a challenge.
• It’s measurable data, and you can play with graphs and stats. Hey we’re geeks – it’s fun to play with numbers, however irrelevant they are.
• It’s an indication of helpfulness to some extent. It plays to my ego in terms of both pride of knowledge and the fulfillment of helping people.
• It’s useful as an indicator of community trust for the system to use, which is probably more important to Jeff than it is to me.
• It’s a game. This is the most important aspect. I love games. I’m fiercely competitive, and will always try to work out all the corners of a game’s system – things like it being actually somewhat useless getting accepted answers before you’ve reached the 200 limit. I don’t necessarily play to the corners of the game (I would rather post a useful but unpopular answer than a popular but harmful one, for serious questions) but I enjoy working them out. I would be interested to measure my levels of testosterone when typing furiously away at an answer, hoping to craft something useful before anyone else does. I’m never going to be “macho” physically, but I can certainly be an alpha geek. So long as it doesn’t go too far, I think it’s a positive thing.

I sometimes sense (perhaps inaccurately) that Jeff and Joel are frustrated with people getting too hung up about reputation. It’s really unimportant in the grand scheme of things – rep in itself isn’t as much of a net contribution to the world’s happiness as the way that Stack Overflow connects people with questions to people with relevant answers really, really quickly. But rep is one of the things that makes Stack Overflow so “sticky” as a website. It’s not that I wouldn’t answer questions if the reputation system went down – after all, I’ve been answering questions on newsgroups for years, for the other reasons mentioned – but the reputation system certainly helps. Yes, it’s probably taking advantage of a competitive streak which is in some ways ugly… but the result is a good one.

One downside of the whole micro-celebrity thing – and in particular of being the top rep earner – is that various suggestions (such as changing the rep limit algorithm and introducing a monthly league) make me look really selfish. It’s undeniable that both of the suggestions work in my favour. I happen to believe that both work in the community’s favour too, but I can certainly see why people might get the wrong idea about my motivation. I don’t remember thinking of any suggestions which would work against my personal interests but in the interests of the community. If I do, I’m pretty sure I’ll post them with no hesitation.

Summary

Yes, I like the attention of being a micro-celebrity. It would be ridiculous to deny it, and I don’t think it says much more about me than the fact that I’m human.

Yes, I like competing for reputation, even though it’s blatantly obvious that the figure doesn’t reflect programming prowess. It’s part of the fuel for my addiction to Stack Overflow.

With this out of the way, I hope to return to more technical blog posts. If anything interesting comes up in the comments, I’ll probably edit this post rather than writing a new one.