StackOverflow Fanatic

This year I've spent a lot of time on StackOverflow. For those of you who don't know, this is a site where people post coding questions. Other people answer these questions. There are points and there are badges. It's somewhat of a gamified thing, but the gamification is a head fake. StackOverflow sells some ad space, but the also have job postings. Imagine that you're a company looking to hire developers. StackOverflow is a place that is likely to grab their eyeballs for your ads. And you can see how helpful their code is as rated by their peers. They've successfully gamified the jobhunt!

Anyway, since I've been spending so much time on StackOverflow during my jobhunt I'm now 43 days into the "Fanatic" badge, which is awarded for 100 consecutive days on the site. I've tried, unsuccessfully, to go after this badge before, but a trip to stay at Grandma's (where there is no internet) threw me off. Everyday I get on I try to answer a question, but I don't always have time to find one. Additionally, as part of this daily ritual, I'm going for the "Enthusiat" badge on a number of other sites in the StackExchange family. This badge is awarded for 30 consecutive days on a site. I even made an OCD listing of all the sites to just click through.

Cara finds this all to be a bit silly. And, yeah, visiting a bunch of sites every day just to tick them off my list is probably a little silly. But usually I browse through a few questions while I'm there or ask one of my own. And when I go into a job interview and they reference my StackOverflow contributions as impressive and part of the reason they're considering me for the job, then I figure it's probably not a waste of time.