In 2009, I answered a CSS question on StackOverflow about word-wrap in an HTML table.

5 years later, almost every time I go to the site, I am greeted with new reputation points from people upvoting my my answer. I now have a reputation of 3,602 which the site tells me is in the top 10% overall! My answer, which is the top answer to the question, has been benevolently edited and commented upon and the question protected due to its popularity.

I got lucky. If I had this problem I wouldn’t know the answer today and would go looking for the answer on StackOverflow. Even if someone asked the question today and I did know the answer, someone else would probably answer it before me. I just happened up on an unanswered question to which I’d just happened to figure out the answer in some other work I was doing.

The significance of this is that figuring out these little technical details of user interface implementations really is how I make my living, and it’s also how I leave the Web a little bit of a better place than I found it. As my tagline says, repairing the world, one byte at a time.

(For those who aren’t familiar, StackOverflow is a hugely influential online question and answer forum for computer programming questions. I like to say, only half jokingly, that my job as a software developer isn’t really about knowing how to do anything but about knowing how to find the right answer on StackOverflow.)