Sorry for the lack of posts recently. The title says it all — I’ve been quite busy for the last couple weeks.
For one thing, I’ve been working on my Stack Overflow reputation, with the goal of reaching 2,000 reputation points. Why, you ask? Well, I like explaining things to interested people, and I enjoy being recognized as an authority on topics that matter to me. Also, typos and misspellings really irritate me, and 2,000 reputation points is the level where you’re allowed to edit other people’s posts. 🙂 (I’ve almost achieved my goal: I’m at 1,995 as I write this. 😀 )
The second major thing absorbing my time has been Project X. It seemed to be stuck, so I decided to shake some ideas loose by writing a talk explaining how it worked, geared toward a large audience of smart software engineers that really wanted to hear it. I figured that would help keep me motivated, since (as I mentioned above) I like that sort of thing. The results were phenomenal: I’ve made more progress on the design in the last two weeks than I have in the previous eight months!
In fact, I think I’ve finally discovered a workable solution to the core problem that I’ve been wrestling with for the last five-plus years. 😀 It’s the toughest problem I’ve ever dealt with, and it’s a lot closer in complexity to particle physics than normal programming — easier in some respects because I don’t need to tinker with a huge particle accelerator to get any information, but harder in others because I didn’t even have a hypothesis that explained how it worked at the lowest levels. Now I do, and it’s on the fast-track to being promoted to theory. 🙂
With any luck, I’ll be able to get back to regular blogging soon.
They’ve got a name for people like that on slashdot, karma whores. 😉 Except I suppose there is more productivity involved on Stack Overflow. I’ve tried to find questions to answer, but usually it seems they have already been answered with the same answer I’d pick; at least the ones I can answer, and I want to avoid “me too” posts.
I just spotted a comment you edited, congrats on your new position as Head Censor of Stack Overflow. 😉
One rule I made for myself when I began: no stupid “what’s your favorite programming beverage” style of questions, and no answers to them. It’s a good way to get a lot of reputation points quickly, but I’d rather be known for good, solid, informative questions and answers, so that’s what I limit myself to.
As for finding questions to answer: it’s hard to answer more quickly than everyone else on there, especially for the easier questions (though it can be done with fast fingers and luck, especially late at night or on weekends). Try to come up with some interesting questions instead, you can still get reputation points that way. I earned about half of my reputation that way, exploring portions of C++ that many people didn’t know existed.
Yup, I made it over the 2,000 mark just a few minutes ago, and corrected a couple spelling mistakes in an otherwise-good answer that I ran across. 🙂
You mean there’s one besides Dr Pepper?