Remembering All Those Helpful Stackoverflow Posts

How often has this happened to you?

2 years ago

  • You are spelunking on Google and StackOverflow (SO).
  • You find what you need.
  • You graciously upvote and/or leave a comment.
  • You update your code and leave a comment.
  • You move on

Now

  • You come across the same problem. You remember finding it before. But it's a different job or project. Spelunking begins!
  • You look through your bookmarks
  • You try to remember how you Googled for it the last time
  • You eventually find it after an hour
  • You move on
  • This possibly happens again in the future

Now in the perfect world, we're keeping a programming notebook or remembering to bookmark/tag/organize what we find. If you do, awesome, I wish I was you. For the rest of us mere mortals, read on.

I wanted something that would let me search my collection of SO things so I could find it later. Here's where I ended up: Every SO post I star being automatically bookmarked with full-text search

The Flow

  1. Use an instance of stack2rss to get an RSS feed of SO posts I've starred.
  2. Run a Zap that pulls these in and sends them to my bookmarks (tagged as 'stackoverflow')
  3. Search using Pinboard Premium which downloads the questions and archives them. (this is optional)

This has been working for me and I've already be able to re-find things that helped me before.

Setup

  1. Spin up an instance of stack2rss. There is a demo available, but I've found it tends to go down. I've submitted a PR so you can 1 click install to Heroku. Click this Deploy
  2. Get the url for your starred feeds: https://[YOUR-HEROKU-APP].herokuapp.com/2.2/users/[YOUR-SO-ID]/favorites?order=desc&sort=activity&site=stackoverflow
  3. Login or Register with Zapier
  4. Create a 2 step zap with the trigger being RSS by Zapier and Pinboard's create bookmark action
  5. Set each up as follows

This has already saved me a lot of time. If you'd like help setting up, leave me a comment below