How many times have you searched for the answer to a problem in Google to find nothing but forums with people who have the same questions but no solutions posted even though the question was raised months, even years earlier?

If you post a question and no-one managed to provide you with an answer do you:-

• post up your solution when you’ve found it? or
• simply forget about the post and leave everyone else to figure it out themselves too?

Unfortunately there are a number of people in the latter category (myself included from time to time) and being a web developer means I run into this type of issue more than I would like but, I’ve recently come across yet another great reason why you should go back and answer your own question when you have managed to work out the answer.

A few months ago I was working for Alienation Digital in Glasgow and I had a problem with creating a custom validator using a callback in Symfony and I posted the problem to the Symfony forums, and later, the solution I used to rectify the problem.

Fast forward a few months and you now find me working for Line Digital in Edinburgh and I’m now working on a new project which has a very similar problem. Obviously I don’t have access to the code I wrote while at Alienation Digital but unsurprisingly I had forgotten I have already solved this problem as it’s months since I had to last think about it.

So out comes Google again, I enter my search phrase and I am amazed that the first forum post (which resulted in the path to the solution) was my own post that I wrote while at Alienation Digital.

So the moral of the story is to answer your own posts, even if you do end up feeling like you’re talking to yourself because you the next person your post helps out may be yourself.