If you're a developer, there's no doubt that you utilize StackOverflow's vast amount of questions and answers in your technical endeavors. Whether you use it for reference, or use it to learn, the resource is phenomenal and the platform rocks.
Recently I have been addicted to SO and feel great engaging in the very act of giving back. I love sharing knowledge and being able to pass along anything I've learned wins.
I started perusing the top answerers for tags, and their most viewed questions. I found it tremendously useful (there are some *brilliant* people answering questions extremely thoroughly) but found the experience sub-par for learning purposes.
That weekend I decided to throw a website together (scratching an itch from going from zero to published project in a weekend), which ended up becoming Stack-Ed. In short, Stack-Ed helps one learn about any topic (on the stack-exchange platform, but particularly StackOverflow in this case). As succinctly put in a tweet,
Stack-Ed seems great for learning programming things you didn't know you didn't know: stack-ed.com
— Jeremy Singer-Vine (@jsvine) January 28, 2013
I plan on writing a follow-up blog post on the rise to #1 on Hacker News but as can be seen in the photos uploaded with this post, after launching and posting to HN 30 minutes went by without any activity, then the following happened:
2.54am - #4
2.59am - #3
3.42am - #2
4.10am - #1
I figured such a hack would resonate with the HN community and it sure did! I managed to get just shy of 19,000 visitors that day alone, with several spikes as a result of tweets from SO engineer Ben Dumke-von der Ehe and a retweet from Jeff Atwood!
This is pretty neat: stack-ed.com
The comments were extremely helpful, and I was happy to post the project on GitHub. That week, I also implemented a trending questions/answers TwitterBot - http://www.twitter.com/stack_ed, via the github.com/nirvanatikku/ga_twitterbot project.
The reception from the StackExchange folks was absolutely amazing. Several folks said really kind words and sent me a t-shirt and stickers! Pretty sick. I plan on creating mobile versions soon (and most likely open sourcing those, too), so stay tuned!