I submitted my first question to stackoverflow the other day, and I must say the entire experience was extremely pleasant.  What is stackoverflow?  Well, many bill it as a newer and better experts-exchange.com but to even mention the two properties together is an insult to the people that built stackoverflow, their mothers, and their mother’s children, including them (so that’s a double insult!).

It is a site where coders can share knowledge through question and answer with a heaping spoonfull of awesome added for good measure.  Here’s a list of ingredients in that awesome:

• Open ID support
• Reputation points
• tagging
• Badges!
• A clean, simple, attractive design

Is there a need to break down reputation by subject matter?

The reputation points is perhaps what interests me the most.  Let’s face it, we’re a hierarchical society.  There are always going to be people at the top of a given field, and if you consider yourself a professional in that field you should know who those people are, even if you are one of them.

Stackoverflow provides a good, quantitative measurement of the general expertise in the software development field.  No, it doesn’t replace resumes and body-of-work, and no it is not a perfect system by any means.  But, when you’re quickly looking for an answer to a software development question, you want and trust an answer from a person with a higher reputation score.

But, is reputation too generic?  I would like to see the points split between the tags that a person is involved with.  There would still be an overall reputation, but when viewing someone’s profile I would like to see from which tags those reputation points came from.

Stackoverflow's profile tag list

Stackoverflow already does this to a limitted degree, but from what I can tell, the number next to a person’s set of tags is simply the amount of times they’ve been associated with it.

Take the image to the left for example.  I can tell this person has been associated with CouchDB five times, but without clicking through to each of the articles can I tell how much of his reputation is based on his knowledge of CouchDB?  I can infer this from the relative number of CouchDB tags to the rest of his tags, but I’m stupid and lazy and I don’t want to have to infer anything.

As an asside, this person is Paul Davis – one of the most active members of the CouchDB community.

Don’t missunderstand me here, I think stackoverflow is absolutely great.  So is their reputation system.  But, I think splitting up their reputation between the tags that a user is involved with would go a long way towards making this the defacto community and hub for  expert sex changes software development.

What do you think?