I joined Stackoverflow early on since it had a prevalence towards .NET and I’ve been working with Microsoft web technologies since the mid 90’s.

My SO account is coming up to 17 years old and I have nearly 15,000 points, 15 gold badges, including 11 famous questions and similar famous answer badges, also 100 silver and 150 bronze. I spent far much time on that site in the early days, but through it, I also thoroughly enjoyed helping others. I also started to publish articles on CodeProject and it kicked off my long tech blogging “career”, and I still enjoy writing and sharing knowledge with others.

I have visited the site maybe once a year since 2017. It got to the point that trying to post questions was intolerable, since they always got closed. At this point I have given up on it as a resource, even though it helped me tremendously to both learn (to answer questions) and solve challenging problems, and get help for edge cases, especially on niche topics. For me it is a part of my legacy as a developer for over 30 years.

I find it deeply saddening to see what it has become. However I think Joel and his team can be proud of what they built and what they gave to the developer community for so many years.

As a side note it used to state that was in the top 2% of users on SO, but this metric seems to have been removed. Maybe it’s just because I’m on mobile that I can’t see it any more.

LLM’s can easily solve those easy problems that have high commonality across many codebases, but I am dubious that they will be able to solve the niche challenging problems that have not been solved before nor written about. I do wonder how those problems get solved in the future.