I use SO in a lot of different ways. I enjoy looking for questions that I can answer in any of the languages that I have experience with. I also use it as a simple search engine for inspiration; if I have an implementation task I'll often search SO first with some of my ideas to make sure I'm not reimplementing the wheel. All of our development at the lab is in Java, which I've been using for about 4 or 5 years on-and-off, so I don't often find myself asking a lot of "how do I do this?" syntax or technicality questions when it comes to the day job stuff; it's usually a cursory search for details or an algorithmic type question.
As far as actually asking questions, I've been on SO for a few years so I've used it for a lot of different things over time. I used it when I was first getting acclimated with C and Java outside of class projects, and now I use it whenever I'm picking up a new pet language. I've been asking and searching a lot about Haskell lately.
>Just like the printer post above, it's incredible how many webcams are left completely unsecured.
Likewise. I started noticing that SO results to software-related queries were of sufficiently better quality that I started to qualify some searches with site:stackoverflow.com. (Similarly, I also add site:ycombinator.com with some other types of searches.)
It's too bad that SO/SX has fragmented their URL structure to make the site: qualifier less effective. E.g., it would have been better to have developer.stackexchange.com, superuser.stackexchange.com, etc. Then you could choose to do just site:stackexchange.com to search the whole corpus vs site:developer.stackexchange.com to be more narrow.
