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Comment by macando | Hacker News Reader

Since switching almost completely to JavaScript, Node.js and React I noticed that my time spent on Stack Overflow dropped significantly. I found my answers in API docs and GitHub issues most of the time.

I never created an account. Once I had listed most recent Redux and React questions, had an answer to one that was pretty tricky within one minute since posting and while I was typing out the answer in my editor somebody already had their answer posted and accepted. With code formatting and everything.

What's left is the unanswered questions that look like really specific, obscure, and unpaid debugging sessions to me.

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Github issues have also replaced most of my stack overflow usage. Part of it is that I'm now more experienced, so most of my questions are about edge cases or potential bugs and not "How do I call system()?". But it also feels like stackoverflow took off because it was lower friction than mailing lists and experts exchange, but has been overshadowed as projects migrated to github and most developers already having a github account, rendering it lower effort. This changed things by (a) having stuff in google results from other sites and (b) encouraging developers to write better docs to reduce the rate of support requests in github issues.

> (a) having stuff in google results from other sites

Yeah. Programmers now give really nice answers to basic questions about the up and coming tech on their personal/company blogs.

Also, SO benefited from having a decent code formatting in a time where code blocks looked horrible pretty much everywhere else. They lost that edge.

> I found my answers in API docs and GitHub issues most of the time.

I noticed this a few years ago and I think it is more about experience than language. As a beginner, your code doesn't work and you aren't sure why. As an experienced engineer, your code doesn't work, you tracked it to a specific section, that section calls into X framework so you go to those API docs to learn how it works.

I think it's a virtuous cycle of modern development that popular SO questions make their into the official documents. And things people find super annoying just get fixed and disappear. I had some issues with a popular framework a few years back and got answered by the creator directly.

JavaScript is consistently in the #1 spot on their yearly developer survey, and remains as one of the most common tags on questions, so your experience certainly doesn't translate to the average JS developer.

People learn in different ways.

Some people will read the documentation, and MDN etc have excellent documentation.

Others will ask questions on SO.

That's likely just a function of the popularity of such language, in terms of constantly attracting newbies.

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