On April Fool’s, Stack Overflow introduced their copy/paste keyboard which later became a real thing – The Key. There had been other jokes in the past limiting the number of times you could copy text from their pages before you had to start paying. Many coders learn new languages quickly by using examples from SO and related sites. I know I tend to use SO for Bash related shortcuts.

As time goes on, I find myself using these sites less and less and when I do get there it’s more of a last resort. I’ve exhausted all my other options and I’m just fishing; prolly better off not thinking of the problem for a while.

So what is my first resort? GitHub. Or I’ll pull apart a library on my local machine and step through it. Ninety percent of the time, I’ll either find what I’m doing wrong or find what the code is doing wrong. In the latter case, I’ll head back to GitHub and see if there are any related outstanding issues. I sometimes will track down conversations on Gitter or Slack.

Using non-open source products kind of infuriates me when there are issues and all I have to rely on are the community and their last resort – support (or paid support). Support invariably leads to a) it’s on our roadmap or b) we’ll look into it and get back to you. Hardly satisfying.

I like to tinker and it’s not easy when the hood is welded shut.