I recently spent an enjoyable Sunday morning tracking down a Chrome extension-related bug. Though not as epic as some past bugs, it was still interesting, since it involved the interaction of four distinct codebases (wix.com's, Facebook Connect's, the extension, and Chromium's).

The reason why I'm writing about it here (or rather, just pointing it out), is because it seemed like a bit of waste to have that experience live only on Stack Overflow. It's not that I don't trust Stack Overflow (they seem to have good intentions and deeds). However, I'm no Jon Skeet, Stack Overflow isn't a big enough part of my online life that I feel like I have an enduring presence there. The test that I apply is "If I vaguely recall this piece of content in 10 years, will I be able to remember what site it was on? Will that site still be around/indexed?" The answer to the latter is most likely yes, but to the former, I'm not so sure (I already have a hard time searching across the mailing lists, bug tracker and Stack Overflow silos).

On the other hand, a blog post is too heavyweight for every piece of (notable) content. The lifestreaming fad of yesteryear also doesn't seem right, I don't want this aggregation to be necessarily public or a destination site. ThinkUp (and a plugin) seems like what I want, if only I could get over the PHP hurdle.

My earlier stance on Stack Overflow was based on being a pretty casual user (answering the occasional Reader question, using it as a reference when it turned up in search results). Now that it's an official support channel, I've been using it more, and the Kool Aid has started to wear off. For every interesting question, there are repeated ones that end up being about the same topic. For Chrome extension development, a recurring issue is not understanding that (nearly) all APIs are asynchronous.

Is the right thing there to mark them as duplicates of each other, since they have the same underlying cause? I tried that recently, and the moderator did not agree (relatedly, I'm amused that Eric Lippert's epic answer about local variables is on a question that was later closed as a duplicate). Even if closing as dupes were OK, what should the canonical answer look like? Presumably it would have to be something generic, by which point it's not all that different from the section in the official documentation that explains asynchronous functions. Is it just a matter of people not knowing the right terminology, so they will never search for [chrome extension api asynchronous]? Is the optimal end state a page/question per API function asking "Why does chrome.<API name here>() return undefined?" with a pointer to the documentation?