Stack Overflow Milestone

Look how special I am.

This is it. From what I can tell, 25,000 is the last milestone that can be achieved. So I’m at the top of the mountain.

I haven’t had as much time to answer questions on SO lately, but I still find answers on there all the time. I love the way the site is organized and the outstanding UI. I wish I could get the comments box on this site to behave just like their answer boxes. And by “wish”, I mean I want it to be that way without any effort on my part.

I did happen to answer a question the other day about the “Loop without Do” compiler error. As usual, properly indenting your code avoids these errors. I guess people didn’t like the question as it got a few downvotes. I’m not so critical. I think people tend to forget their early struggles as they become more proficient with something. I remember when I first starting learning Ruby, I didn’t know enough to formulate a non-stupid question. It’s not knowing what you don’t know that can be the most frustrating. And a little throw away tip like indenting can be really helpful.

I’m really thankful there are sites like SO (and NNTP back in the day) that give me an avenue to help people. I get so much more out of it than I give that I feel guilty (not really).

10 thoughts on “Stack Overflow Milestone

  1. Congratulations Dick. SO is a funny place. I’m not sure if it’s a good use of my time to answer questions there, or a bad one. For sure, I’ve learned heaps myself from helping others. But it’s a tsunami, and I often think my time would be better served writing blog posts. Or finishing my book. But at the same time I want that reputation counter to keep it’s upward climb (I’m at a mere 1846) ..possibly more than I want to help the actual posters out. SO’s gamification obviously works well on attention-starved basket cases like me. Maybe I should unplug the internet and get a dog who can “like” me every time I merely walk past it.

    If there was one thing I could change about SO, it would be this: blocking downvotes where no-one had left a comment. I hate mysterious down-votes, like the one here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47277206/combine-multiple-tables-rows-into-master-table/47278774#47278774

    Another thing I find about SO is that compared to a couple of more friendly Excel-based forums (like Chandoo’s great one) , answers at SO tend to focus fairly narrowly on giving the OP what they explicitly asked for, rather than making them more aware of what they likely need to know. Not enough people ask “Yes, but why do you want to do that?” or “How ’bout using a PivotTable/PowerQuery/PowerPivot instead of formulas/VBA/brute force”. But then again, it’s these type of “I think you’ve taken the wrong approach” answers that tend to garnish downvotes.

  2. SO uses Tags. You can go to https://stackoverflow.com/tags and type ‘Excel’ or whatever you’re interested in.

    If you choose https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/excel-vba for example, then you can choose Unanswered across the top to see what questions have not been answered.

    If you’re an rss guy like me, you can create a feed out of any tag or combination of tags. I subscribe to

    http://stackoverflow.com/feeds/tag/excel+or+vba+or+excel-vba

    This morning there are 574 feed items that I haven’t read. I’m not a completionist like I was back in the nntp days. I scan through the feed items for something interesting and mark the rest as read.

  3. I hadn’t heard of Isso before. Thanks for the suggestion. Now maybe I can migrate to Ghost and Isso and away from WordPress. That will violate my new year’s resolution of not tinkering with my blog though.

  4. I use the ‘Stack a lot, and I make a point of answering a question every time I use an answer: “Don’t just consume, create and contribute”.

    Meanwhile, congratulations: you have contributed eight times the value that I have!

  5. With some delay, Congratulations !
    During the past 2 years I have used SO a lot, I must have improved my VBA by 200% just by reading the answers over there, and also answering a few posts of my own.

    Every time I saw an answer you posted, it was a sure thing to read, understand and later on to implement.

    Thanks so much for contributing, and hopefully you’ll continue to do so :)


Posting code? Use <pre> tags for VBA and <code> tags for inline.

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