I reached 5k rep on StackOverflow and this is how it helped me

Yippee, my milestone has finally been reached; I went over the magical 5000 reputation on StackOverflow.

This currently places me in the top 4% this year, and in the top 2% in my country.

At the beginning, I was asking way more questions than giving answers, but that leveled out and recently I surpassed the number of questions (138) with the number of answers (147).

My current top 5+1 questions by number of upvotes:

(61) What is disableSelection used for in jQuery sortable?
(39) How to replace text between quotes in vi
(18) Serialize form not working in jQuery
(15) Add three dots in a multiline span
(14) PHP function to evaluate string like “2-1” as arithmetic 2-1=1
(12) jQuery Themeroller Gallery for Mobile

My current top 5+1 answers by number of upvotes:

(19) jQuery: select an element’s class and id at the same time?
(18) How to open a link new tab with print command?
(13) Linking using relative path on Github README.md
(7) Google MAP API Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property ‘offsetWidth’ of null
(6) jQueryMobile data-dismissible in version 1.2
(6) What’s the difference between “ionic build” and “ionic prepare”?

For these questions I got the golden Famous Question badge (question with 10,000+ views):

In the question on meta.StackOverflow about how did StackOverlow help me, my answer was:

StackOverflow helped me a lot. Let me elaborate on this: currently, according to my upvotes, it helped me exactly 3,630 times a lot. Imagine that, learning 2.5 new useful things on average each day for four years now. And all that for free. Pro bono. Only upvote and (optionally) a kind word required.Priceless!

Also, more specifically, it helped me 133 times when I asked my own question (surprisingly, only 4 of them remained unanswered so far).

My experience with StackOverflow was very positive from the start (something I’ll elaborate a bit more below) – it was my first few weeks on a “test period” for a new job and I couldn’t solve one thing. They said it would be tricky and I sort of hoped that if I get it done quickly I’ll get some recognition. I did my fair share of googling and looking around the site (I knew about SO at that time already, but just haven’t asked any questions yet) and since I didn’t find any related question I finally decided to post. Not surprisingly, I got the answer in a matter of minutes. Sure enough, I did get permanently employed after that (and few other small tasks that I had to do on top of that).

See, I would like to emphasize on a way that I asked my first question, by repeating that I’ve googled quite a lot and searched through existing SO questions. Now, we who are around here a bit longer know what started to happen. New users started to come and, well, the quality of questions was not on a given level. And, that’s why it hurts me to see quite a lot of people shitting on StackOverflow (yeah, we know who they are – simple google search will turn out quite a few posts), but if we would just be honest and acknowledge the fact that it somehow seems that these days everyone wants something “out of the box – give me the codez plz”, without ever doing the research them self. What’s the learning value in that, I honestly don’t know.

Anyways, fast forward 4 years, I’m still loving it. Somewhere along the lines of using StackOverflow daily, I’ve grown as a developer and turned from the one who asks questions to someone who tends to contribute back to this wonderful community by giving answers. And, just yesterday I’ve “set the record straight” and leveled the number of my questions with the number of my answers. In the future I hope to help even more.

As for other opportunities StackOverflow provided me, I can only say countless. I don’t have a huge rep, but nevertheless I’ve gotten into an invite only programming site thanks to my SO profile. Also, I’ve gotten few requests to write a book, be a technical reviewer, and I get a lot of clicks from SO tomy blog. It seems a bit cocky to say, but people do tend to look at you differently when you say you have a somewhat fairly large amount of rep on SO. For me, it’s some kind of a badge of honor, to be honest 🙂

All in all – thank you StackOverflow.

See you at 20k! 

I reached 5k rep on #StackOverflow and this is how it #helped me https://t.co/A7xnWVOzkq pic.twitter.com/ZqiDFCyy7z

— Nikola Brežnjak (@HitmanHR) December 16, 2015