Now, I’ve been using SO almost constantly since it started. It’s probably the best general resource for answering programming questions on the internet. What I haven’t really been doing until recently is contributing.

Why contribute? Well first off, I have legitimate answers to some of the questions on there. Helping other people out with understanding their code is lots of fun. But there’s more to it than that.

Answering questions on SO helps my code review skills. There’s a big gap between knowing the answer to a question and clearly explaining it, especially without speaking about it in person. It’s really hard to leave a good answer without going over 10 lines.

I wasn’t initially expecting this, but I also get my code reviewed. People will comment on my answers to suggest optimizations, point out mistakes, or just agree with my solution. All of these help me to write better code.

It also helps me learn. Because I want to give good answers, I commonly double-check my solutions before submitting my responses. I spend about as much time in the Rails docs as I do writing text. This reinforces my own skills and often teaches me something new that I didn’t know before.

The last thing I do is pick questions that I don’t know the solution to, and then try to solve them. I’ll create a new Rails project, add the code from the question, and then work through it until the problem is resolved. This is pure learning for me, with the bonus that I can pass my findings onto others.

If you do any kind of coding, I’d recommend contributing to Stack Overflow. Not only will you be helping others, it’ll make you a better programmer.

Actually, it’s not that bad. One of the reasons I took my job was because I enjoy these ‘right brain’ problems. Applying flair and creativity to something as rigid and mathematical as software is incredibly rewarding.

It’s definitely not easy to switch over from left brain to right brain mode. Thankfully, there are some really great resources for software developers like me who are dabbling in unfamiliar territory. Here are a couple that I’ve found useful.

Presentation is Everything

Slide design for developers is a fantastic guide to giving better presentations. I still default to ‘bullet lists and pictures’ way too often when I’m presenting. After reading this article I resolved to start putting some visual punch into my slides cut down on the text as much as possible. From the article:

My slides are not designed for people who didn’t see the talk in person. They’re designed to support my words, not some online audience.

This is something that is easy to forget when writing slides. I never used to write slide notes which resulted in my constantly turning round to read my own slides while presenting them. If you need to read your own slides, you’re doing it wrong. My colleague Edward recently gave an internal presentation rooted in the principles introduced in the article and it was stellar.

Copywriting

We recently designed the Shopify App Store, and part of that involved writing guidelines for developers who are publishing their apps there. After being the App Store custodian for six months I’ve seen my fair share of good and bad attempts at listings. It’s easy to tell them apart, but harder to quantify exactly what a good listing has that a bad one doesn’t. Furthermore, we have to explain these concepts (once we’ve figured out what they are) to developers.

I’ve found Copywriting for Geeks to be a great resource for figuring these things out. It’s got a great guide for doing precisely the kind of writing we’re encouraging our developers to do with their app listings, and helped me to pin down the points I wanted to make. Right now you can get it for free (in exchange for signing up for the author’s mailing list), so I definitely recommend taking a look.

I’d love to see this coupled with a dynamo accessory so that you could mount it to your bike and charge the bag while cycling. If I hadn’t recently bought a Thule messenger bag for my work laptop (which I love by the way), I’d definitely try one out.

This isn’t related to anything in particular, but here are a couple of great signs that I saw at Starbucks stores recently:

I saw the Link/Starcraft 2 one a few weeks ago in Little Italy, and the Admiral Ackbar sandwich board was spotted today at South Keys. They both made me smile, so I thought I’d share them.