I also almost never get on SO anymore, but I used to all the time. For me, SO was really great when I was a beginner (< 5-ish years professional software work)

I also almost never get on SO anymore, but I used to all the time. For me, SO was really great when I was a beginner (< 5-ish years professional software work), or using very new, rapidly changing tools where community Q&A is vital to helping solve That Big Problem. After enough pain, I've decided that stability is probably the most important feature of a tool. Clojure, ClojureScript, MySQL, and Mongo fit that bill perfectly for me. When looking at libraries and APIs, I try to get a gut-sense of how stable they are, and I never upgrade if my only reason for upgrading is there's a new version number out there. Also, I make a lot of sub-projects, so that any breaking-change upgrades I need to make for legitimate business reasons are isolated to one .jar. I'm also an Ubuntu -> Mac convert for the same reason. My time is just too valuable these days to lose money on tooling, and that keeps me off SO. :-) Please don't take this as "SO is bad" -- I think it's really great, and have answered several questions there, voted in elections, etc.. But these days, experience and stability in tooling have the side-effect of not much SO time.