I was recently on a chairlift talking to my uncle who is a technology exec at a finance company in New York, and he told me that one way they vet people is by looking at their Stack Overflow score. I've landed on Stack Overflow pages many times in the past, but successfully finding and answering questions takes putting in a decent amount of effort and requires knowledge about the problem domain (sometimes, a lot of knowledge about it!). Well, in an effort to selfishly increase my own fame and unselfishly help other struggling devs I've recently began to really try to look for questions that I can answer and provide a solid answer for. I've learned some tips to make the search faster, weed out the fluff, and make it much easier to find those low-hanging fruits. The tip I'll share here is to strategically search for Stack Overflow questions. Enjoy! :)
It's All About The Query Parameters
A lot of people don't realize it, but the search box on the Stack Overflow website is actually pretty powerful.
If you type in just regular text then it will return questions and answers that match that text, but the real key is in using the special parameters that the search recognizes. For example, here are some basic pointers for using the search box on Stack Overflow:
- [ruby] agile
Use square brackets to search for mentions of “agile” within the - [ruby] tag - "product manager"
Use double quotes to search by a specific phrase or string of special characters - [c#] -[java]
Use a dash prefix to exclude [java] jobs from your [c#] search - dev or designer
Use the word “or” to search jobs tagged with either phrase - ([r] or [c]) and remote:true
Use parentheses to group complex queries
Use the "created" Search Parameter
The default questions that Stack Overflow provides in the search can be from weeks or even months ago. While these may be worth a lot if answered well, they are probably really difficult to answer since other people have passed them up. by putting "created:1d" or "created:1w" you can pick off some easy questions that have just been answered and simply haven't been spotted yet by some other knowledgeable person looking to answer questions.
My Usual Query
I normally like to search for questions that are open, have not yet been answered, are not closed, have been created recently (like within the last day), and have been tagged with things that I know about.
All together, here's my normal search query:
[tags-to-search] created:1d answers:0 closed:no hasaccepted:no is:question
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