While google has always served me to find answers to a wide array of programming and technical issues, I don’t recall any one tech QA site which was consistently reliable. I regularly dug out answers from google group discussions to some old bulletin board archives to the typical flashy QA sites infested with scammy ads.
Stackoverflow.com provides a spot-on solution to this very precise problem. Not only it is a clean and functional site free of annoying ads, it actually engages the users to help others more. The reputation scoring logic is a feedback loop, which gets a programmer addicted in no time. I think it works marvelously well.
To top it off, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, the founders of stackoverflow made their software reusable. There is also superuser.com and serverfault.com based on the same platform but geared more towards sysadmin crowd. And slowly, many other sites are adopting this very successful platform, for example: answers.onstartups.com.
I am very happy to be involved with helping the programming community and learning at the same time. I guess I have nearly stopped spending time on facebook and twitter. I recommend all my coworkers and techie friends to start contributing in these platforms already.
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