Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Semi-related story of mine:

1. Stumble upon some specific problem with a web framework we use.

2. Jump straight to stackoverflow.

3. Sbd had a similar issue, nice.

4. Sbd wrote a very concise answer, nice too.

5. There's my nickname under the answer. Oh, wait...




I'm getting the statement about once a quarter at work of:

Yeah I found this bug and I worked through it, did a bunch of googling or internal searching found a similar issue and welp it was a ticket from you (me) 2 years ago.


Which is why I am trying to get better at what I used to to: writing down and sharing problems I saw.


I have a giant dev file (well, 2 really: 1 for personal, 1 for work) that I use as a scratchpad. Anything I work on goes there. Makes it easy to find things.

Monthly I pull out useful things into notes about that topic. Run into a weird problem with spring framework? Copy out the relevant info into springframework.md.


It drives me nuts when you find a forum post and they never reported back. Or it's a terse "I figured it out."

I try really hard not to do that for internal or public forums. The odds are better than you think that you'll stumble on the same topic a few years from now.


Or it say "Google it" and thats how you ended up there.


Wisdom of the Ancients

https://xkcd.com/979/


I try to at least move the problem forward. However does anyone have a way they make sure to close those things out and circle back? I mean other than just doing it?

On internal tools I do do that but that's a smaller number.

Worse is stuff like car and fridge repair. I have no idea what forum I find qqs on.


I'm sad that I cannot share my experiences the same way :-( 99% of my "interesting" bugs are almost all Xbox One/PS4 related, so I can't write a blog post about "how I found out that Sony's implementation of file read is not compatible with regular stdio" - it's hugely interesting but this stuff is NDA'd to such an extent that I wouldn't risk writing openly about it - but I'd love to.


.


I've found a good way to do that is running a personal blog. In fact, I write as if the audience of my blog will be myself in the future. It's nice to help out others who face the same problem tho.


Does "Sbd" stand for something, or is that your username?


The abbreviation "sth" occurs here a lot, probably because of people who learned English with the help of dictionaries that use "sth" as an abbreviation for "something". I suspect "sbd" also comes from the same source.


Somebody


Uh, OK. Never seen that before.

"Sby" would've made way more sense. Or heaven forbid we use one more character to make the nearly obvious "sbdy."


It's a recurring theme with me, though a bit different where my name is under step 3, and I only realized that when I tried to upvote the question and couldn't.


Heh, that happened to me too... I loved it.


THANK YOU!!!

I really thought this only happened to me :-)


Have experienced this too. Haha.


SO is my notebook.


This.

Why create my own silo of documentation when I can just put the answer where I'm likely going to find it (Stack Overflow).




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: