Stack Overflowing

How to unlock Stack Overflowing in Cheevos, visit Stack Overflow, MDN, or dev.to. Worth 10 XP.

The story

Partner. You went to where the answers live.

Cache has strong feelings about developer reference sites, feelings he does not hide. These are the pages where the actual construction of the web gets explained, argued about, and eventually solved by a stranger who will never know they helped.

He has archived old Stack Overflow threads from 2009, questions about problems that stopped existing years ago because the software they were about does not exist anymore either. He kept them anyway. He says the specific bug does not matter. What matters is the shape of the interaction: someone was stuck, someone else showed up, and the record of that exchange is still sitting there, doing nothing, meaning everything.

MDN is different in his eyes, more like a reference library than a rescue mission, but he keeps a folder for it too, thick with bookmarked pages about things browsers can do that most people never learn. Same instinct either way: someone needed to know something, and the internet, for once, just told them.

The turn: Cache thought he collected objects. It turns out one of his favorite things to collect is the moment a problem gets solved. That is what these sites are full of, and you just visited one.

The catalog entry

DEVELOPER RESOURCE VISIT Acquired: Visited Stack Overflow, MDN, or a similar developer reference site. Condition: Debugging. Or learning. Possibly both. Rarity: Common. Cache's Notes: These sites are primary sources for how the web was built. Cache has archived old Stack Overflow threads from 2009 about questions that no longer apply to anything. He finds them extremely interesting as historical documents. Someone was stuck. Someone else helped. The problem is solved in the record, even if the problem no longer exists.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

One visit is all it takes.

  1. Open a new tab.
  2. Navigate to stackoverflow.com, developer.mozilla.org (MDN), or dev.to.
  3. Let the page load.

Cheevos matches the hostname of the page against these three well-known developer resource domains. Stack Overflow is the question-and-answer archive where developers post bugs and get community-sourced fixes. MDN, run by Mozilla, is the standard reference documentation for HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that most working developers consult daily. Dev.to is a community publishing platform where developers write and share tutorials and experience reports. All three represent the same underlying idea: people teaching each other how the web actually works, for free.

Where it fits in the Stash

Cache's archive of solved problems keeps one entry per visit, and this is yours. To meet the raccoon who never stops reading old forum threads, read the story.