This is my Stack Overflow profile. There’s lots of numbers: my score, my views, my gold, silver and bronze badges.
The one I’d like to draw your attention to is “1 consecutive.”
Until recently that number was somewhere around 780. Yes, I’d logged into Stack Overflow every single day for well over two years. I’ve offered hundreds of answers and earned quite a few points from people voting for them. Mind you, I’d answer questions even without a scoring system, but it does increase my attraction to the site.
All this time on SO answering, commenting and checking my standings makes me a bit twitchy. So recently I challenged myself to break the streak and go a day without logging in. A day sounded like a long time and I wasn’t sure I could do it.
But I made it through that day, and then a couple more. And although I’ve looked at it briefly over the last two weeks, I’ve pretty much stayed away. Surprisingly, I’ve enjoyed it.
I’ve rediscovered an activity known as “reading novels,” and another excellent pastime which I call “sitting in the back yard drinking a beer.” It also turns out I have a “child” and a “wife.” How great is that?
Don’t get me wrong, I love Stack Overflow. It’s an awesome resource that pops up daily with great answers to my never-ending stream of technical questions. I’m also very proud of my SO contribution to the advancement of Excel and VBA knowledge.
And I live in hope of passing Dick in the all-time Excel_VBA top answerer list.
But for right now I’m going to do a little thing I like to call “taking a nap.”
Just think if Tim Williams put some of those ‘comments’ as answers. He’d have a million.
True that!
I don’t know if you know the history of Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Stack Overflow. He had a lot to do with Excel programmability (VBA) back in the 90’s.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/AboutMe.html
Thanks for the link, Omar. Yes, I actually subscribed to Joel’s blog and knew about his history with Excel, although I’d forgotten the particulars.
Occasionally, he answers an Excel question on SO, kind of like a Greek god coming down to earth to hang with the mortals.
Oddly, he also worked at Juno for a while.
yeah, but he was only a project manager, not a coder or anything, although I have heard him say that he wrote the functional spec for VBA?
I’ve rediscovered an activity known as “reading novels,” and another excellent pastime which I call “sitting in the back yard drinking a beer.” It also turns out I have a “child” and a “wife.” How great is that?
Those are interesting properties and methods. My object model is about to radically change, as method .InternationalFlightArrives of the FamilyHolidayWithMe object is due to be called at 3pm today, at which time my .wife and .kids properties will be populated again.
I guess that means you’ll be back to only three or four posts a week :).
Whoops, I meant the FamilyHolidayWithoutMe object.