Stack overflow has been helpful to my work for a long time.
There were several times that I attempted to make a contribution by answering questions. However, I find it difficult to do so as a rookie programmer. It appeared that most “basic, easy and common” questions had already been asked and answered. So all “later questions” naturally became harder, which requires more than a programming rookie(like me) to contribute.
I like Stack overflow and its community, but somehow it feels difficult to be part of it (which has been addressed recently):
- If I don’t contribute
- Then I don’t have “reputation”.
- Then I can’t even upvote my favorite answers to show some gratitude.
- Then I feel unhappy, realizing that SO prevents me from being a good person.
So I determine to work towards 100 reputations on SO a few weeks ago. Everyday I spend sometime to work on some questions I could manage, mostly related to R or other yihui’s packages that I use(xaringan, rmarkdown, blogdown & stuff). Turns out that It only requires some time and research to make a contribution!
During this time, I’ve also learned a few new things! ^[reprex is really cool to produce an R related reprex, and ifelse in R is slow]
As of today, I’ve answered 12 questions in total. From which I get 316 reps, which exceeds my goal already!
I can finally upvote those answers I like.
I am happy again.
Update: now I am at 831 reps
Update2: now I am at 1542 reps. Someone on the github xaringan repo even mentioned my answer
Update3: 191217, I’m at 2101 reps.