I have been with this site for close to an year now (most of the time as an observer thou.. ) and wondering what keeps me engaged with this site.. I can think of
I would love to hear from others (newbies, experts, veterans, moderators.. ) on what you love / hate here or what keeps you to come back to this site everyday..
I'm a solo practitioner (for the most part) and quite frankly found that answers on this site bootstrapped me over the years into a better SFDC admin/developer (others on the site could argue whether I'm sufficiently "better") but I know that I've improved a lot.
SFDC is an interesting system in that it is reasonably accessible to casual developers (point and click configuration, simple triggers, simple VF pages) and as such the community needs the help from folks who have been there and can assist quickly.
As such, and perhaps lacking other outlets to contribute to a community, I find this to be a site where I continually learn from others (I mean you Keith C and sfdcfox, among others), have a chance to revisit and cement my knowledge by working on other's issues and hence save them time, and enjoy the recognition that is generously proferred.
The user interface is clean and far superior to the the SFDC Developer Forum where I have ceased to visit except when directed via a Google search.
The system also is well-moderated and avoids the self-promotion or religious wars found in other forums (which turn me off) - as such, the weltanschauung of SFSE matches my own outlook.
I found the SFSE about 4 months ago looking for answers to my own questions and have been addicted ever since. I am a sole developer/admin at my company and quite often had to turn to google for help. I had one problem that I just couldn't figure out but had no choice but to figure it out, it took me a very long time but finally had the right search terms and found an answer here. I started trying to get my rep points up high enough to thank that user for posting his question/answer(which I learned later is frowned upon), but ended up loving the challenge of trying to figure out/find answers for others.
I find the SFSE one of the best resources for SF QA and want to do what I can to help both the users of and the site itself continue to be successful.
I used to work in a larger team of SF admins and developers that regularly took time out to share knowledge. I've changed role since and missed that interaction in terms of seeing how people would approach a situation differently and general sharing of what people are trying to achieve in the Salesforce world. I had a number of "I wouldn't even think of using Salesforce for that!" moments.
I've always been aware that if you work on your own (to an extent) that you could develop habits in terms of how to approach something and unless you are involved in a community (whatever it is) and proactively reviewing other approaches then you stagnate.
SFSE has helped me develop and prevented me becoming blinkered both in terms of approach but also functions/parts of Salesforce that I either haven't used or don't use currently. Helps to keeps me fresh :)
Because...compared to Premium Support on this site I get:
Besides that I can give back by answering the questions of other, which sometimes ;-) feels good.
The main reason I love coming here is to find interesting and unique questions and answers for the Force.com platform. It's even more exciting when I actually have a solution to an interesting problem. I generally love sharing with others what little I can.
Currently, I am not doing any Force.com development at my job, so this place is sort of my Force.com fix in the meantime.
During my little bit of free-time I like to work on utilities for the Force.com platform to encourage easier development or at the very least, utilities that move towards configuration over code. Whenever I get stuck on something or want to ask a question about a new approach, I may come here to get some better inspiration. 99% of the time, I receive great feedback towards that new idea.
Another thing that I'd like to emphasis is the quality of answers here. A majority of the time, the solutions are much more elegant and well-thought compared to other variants of Stack Overflow. Granted, I think part of that has to do with the fact that the Force.com platform generally leans a developer to have a design-first mindset (which I love immensely).
