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I can't pinpoint the exact moment but I noticed I've been finding more and more answers in the official documentation, GitHub issues and project source code. Ma

I can't pinpoint the exact moment but I noticed I've been finding more and more answers in the official documentation, GitHub issues and project source code. Maybe Google got better at indexing docs or people started writing higher quality documentation but where I used to land on SO multiple times a day I will now visit it a few times a week at most. Also when the mentioned sources hit a search result it's almost always better quality (SO has gems for sure, but I often encounter outdated, incorrect or half solution answers and the format is not structured so that you can share your process which makes it hard to examine how someone got to that point and where to take it from there - unlike say GitHub issue thread).

wastedhours 6y ago
Documentation as a sales and SEO tactic has been undervalued for so long that it's surprising it's taken this long for projects to clock onto the fact. It's definitely a great trend for questions to be answered by the right communities up front rather than endless SO questions asking slightly different variants of the same thing. (And if you run a project and aren't thinking about your documentation in that way, do start!)
axlee 6y ago
> people started writing higher quality documentation I think that's certainly the case. We went from raw, technical-specs style documentations revolving around feature description towards a more usage-based documentation style, which is far more effective at answering the most common questions when approaching a new software: "How can I do X using this software? What if Y happen when trying to do X?" Also, projects like Django and companies like Stripe provided great examples to follow when writing solid documentations for respectively frameworks and APIs and led the way to an overall higher quality of docs, by mimetism. It also doesn't hurt that a well-documented product sells better and has easier adoption: maybe the popular software/frameworks/languages/APIs of today are not exactly the "best" of yesterday, but people naturally gravitated towards the better documented ones.
seventh-chord 6y ago
Ive experienced the same thing, but have attributed it to gaining more experience. I feel like the questions answered on stack overflow usually are ones that one can trivially solve by knowing where to find documentation, and the questions I end up wanting help with are too specific to bring up sensible search results. Maybe I'm just bad at using search engines though...
- devmunchies 6y ago
  > attributed it to gaining more experience This was my thought. When I google stuff and will still see stack overflow as a top result but click on the official documentation instead, which is usually the 3rd or 4th result. SO is still showing up, I just visit it less because I get more value from docs these days.
- rubber_duck 6y ago
  I think experience (learning where to search) is a part of it. But a lot of the software I was working with 10 years ago was not open-source - these days I can look up the source all the way to OS level when doing Android stuff for eg. And documentation is really just much much better - MSDN of old was considered gold standard but nowdays it would be considered bad documentation - like someone else said above docs moved from pure references to more use case focused which makes it much more searchable and eats in SO space.
DevKoala 6y ago
Reading the API reference or source code of the libraries I interface with is my first instinct today. In the past I would Google for the answer and land on StackOverflow. I don’t feel there was a radical change across all libraries I just have more experience under my belt, and it is faster to navigate the docs.
apocalyptic0n3 6y ago
I've noticed the same thing. If it's a public library I am trying to figure out, I search the GitHub issues before StackOverflow now. As a PHP developer, even when I have a general language question, I find myself looking at the Laravel GitHub issues or Laracasts before SO now. I can generally find the answer quicker there. And that's assuming I don't find the answer in the PHP docs, which are generally pretty good.
dgb23 6y ago
One of the documentation sites that were decent since a long time but have _massively_ increased over the last years is MDN [0]. It's just incredibly well designed and their tutorials and documentation pages are friendly but thorough. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN_at_ten/History_of_MDN https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN_at_ten/History_...
- Dirlewanger 6y ago
  I'm not a fan of everything Mozilla does, but their MDN docs are an exceptional standard that other language docs should aspire to.
- rubber_duck 6y ago
  This - unfortunately Google rarely lands there - but I use it exclusively when I need to lookup JS stuff.
  - dgb23 6y ago
    Tip for those who use DDG: You can prefix your query with '!mdn' (plus a space). To search in MDN directly.

wastedhours 6y ago

Documentation as a sales and SEO tactic has been undervalued for so long that it's surprising it's taken this long for projects to clock onto the fact. It's definitely a great trend for questions to be answered by the right communities up front rather than endless SO questions asking slightly different variants of the same thing. (And if you run a project and aren't thinking about your documentation in that way, do start!)

axlee 6y ago

> people started writing higher quality documentation I think that's certainly the case. We went from raw, technical-specs style documentations revolving around feature description towards a more usage-based documentation style, which is far more effective at answering the most common questions when approaching a new software: "How can I do X using this software? What if Y happen when trying to do X?" Also, projects like Django and companies like Stripe provided great examples to follow when writing solid documentations for respectively frameworks and APIs and led the way to an overall higher quality of docs, by mimetism. It also doesn't hurt that a well-documented product sells better and has easier adoption: maybe the popular software/frameworks/languages/APIs of today are not exactly the "best" of yesterday, but people naturally gravitated towards the better documented ones.

seventh-chord 6y ago

Ive experienced the same thing, but have attributed it to gaining more experience. I feel like the questions answered on stack overflow usually are ones that one can trivially solve by knowing where to find documentation, and the questions I end up wanting help with are too specific to bring up sensible search results. Maybe I'm just bad at using search engines though...

devmunchies 6y ago
> attributed it to gaining more experience This was my thought. When I google stuff and will still see stack overflow as a top result but click on the official documentation instead, which is usually the 3rd or 4th result. SO is still showing up, I just visit it less because I get more value from docs these days.
rubber_duck 6y ago
I think experience (learning where to search) is a part of it. But a lot of the software I was working with 10 years ago was not open-source - these days I can look up the source all the way to OS level when doing Android stuff for eg. And documentation is really just much much better - MSDN of old was considered gold standard but nowdays it would be considered bad documentation - like someone else said above docs moved from pure references to more use case focused which makes it much more searchable and eats in SO space.

DevKoala 6y ago

Reading the API reference or source code of the libraries I interface with is my first instinct today. In the past I would Google for the answer and land on StackOverflow. I don’t feel there was a radical change across all libraries I just have more experience under my belt, and it is faster to navigate the docs.

apocalyptic0n3 6y ago

I've noticed the same thing. If it's a public library I am trying to figure out, I search the GitHub issues before StackOverflow now. As a PHP developer, even when I have a general language question, I find myself looking at the Laravel GitHub issues or Laracasts before SO now. I can generally find the answer quicker there. And that's assuming I don't find the answer in the PHP docs, which are generally pretty good.

dgb23 6y ago

One of the documentation sites that were decent since a long time but have _massively_ increased over the last years is MDN [0]. It's just incredibly well designed and their tutorials and documentation pages are friendly but thorough. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN_at_ten/History_of_MDN https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/MDN_at_ten/History_...

Dirlewanger 6y ago
I'm not a fan of everything Mozilla does, but their MDN docs are an exceptional standard that other language docs should aspire to.
rubber_duck 6y ago
This - unfortunately Google rarely lands there - but I use it exclusively when I need to lookup JS stuff.
- dgb23 6y ago
  Tip for those who use DDG: You can prefix your query with '!mdn' (plus a space). To search in MDN directly.