My Reputation on Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is the preeminent forum where programmers ask questions and provide answers to technical, programming-related issues on the web. One's reputation on Stack Overflow is nearly universally recognized across the professional programming community as an indication of one's competence as a programmer. This is why Stack Overflow is a place where companies will pay premium rates to advertise jobs and recruit candidates. In some ways, it is the Chronicle Careers section of the programming world.

This is a screenshot of my profile page on Stack Overflow. As of the time of this writing, my reputation score is 3,941. That makes me rank number 39,613 out of 9,351,588 users or in the top 0.4%! A more typical assessment only ranks you out of "regular users," defined as anyone with a reputation of 200 or more. In that evaluation, I'm 39,613 out of 424,723, or in the top 9%.

Another way to gauge my impact is by the number of times people have viewed responses that I have written to questions on the site. At current count, that is over 382,000 page views.

Yet another metric is the badges one has earned. I've got 39 Bronze, 27 Silver, and 4 Gold badges. Some of my favorites are:

• Famous Question: a question with > 10,000 page views
• Necromancer: have your answer selected and upvoted five times on a question > 60 days old (most questions on SO are answered within a few minutes, and rarely longer than 24 hours)
• Tumbleweed: Asked a question with zero score, no answers, no comments, and low views for a week, i.e. either you stumped everyone, or nobody cared enough to answer

I encourage and reward my students for creating profiles on Stack Overflow, and let them know that if they accrue sufficient points prior to graduation, it is something that they can list on their resumes.