---
title: Six weeks in 2013
description: >-
  In September 2013 I answered 31 questions on Stack Overflow. In October, eight. Then it stopped.
  Here is what was actually going on.
url: https://expiredqueues.com/six-weeks-in-2013/
date: '2026-03-08T10:00:00.000Z'
image: https://expiredqueues.com/images/og/six-weeks-in-2013-03e4d342.jpg
---

Retrospect posts stack-overflow

# Six weeks in 2013

8 March 2026 By Adrian 3 min read

In September 2013 I answered thirty-one questions on Stack Overflow.

In October, eight. November, one. December, two. Then a trickle for a few years, and nothing after May 2017.

Half of everything I ever earned on that site came out of about six weeks. I only noticed this recently, when I went looking through my own numbers, and the first thing I wanted to know was what I was doing that autumn.

## Bengaluru

I had moved to Bengaluru the year before, in 2012, and [walked straight into consulting life](https://expiredqueues.com/books/the-passionate-programmer/). Neudesic. IBM. A bank. [The MNC circuit](https://expiredqueues.com/on-the-verge-of-mnc-life/), badge on a lanyard, someone else's logo on the laptop lid.

The money came with it. First real money I had earned, and I was young enough to treat that as a personality. Evenings out, weekends gone, the whole thing. I am not going to pretend it was a period of quiet craft.

So the honest version is: I had money, I had a city, and I had a job that filled the day without filling the head. Stack Overflow was what happened in the gaps.

## What it cost the blog

Here is the part I did not see coming.

This blog ran 15 posts in 2010, 21 in 2011, 17 in 2012.

Then 2013: four.

Same season. The writing did not stop, it changed venue. It moved from a thousand words with screenshots to six lines in an answer box, and it picked up a score.

A post here took an evening and got read by whoever turned up. An answer took twenty minutes and got accepted by a stranger the same night, with a number attached. It is not hard to work out which one a twenty-something with a consulting salary and a hangover picks.

## Eight weeks at the door

I signed up on 26 July 2013 and asked a question the same day, about [inverting a white image to black with SVG filters](https://expiredqueues.com/css3-filter-invert-support-in-internet-explorer-10/).

My first answer is dated 19 September.

Eight weeks in between. Not because I had nothing to say - because I could not say it. New accounts on Stack Overflow could not comment, could not do much of anything, until enough reputation had accumulated. So you upvote, and you wait, and eventually the site decides you are allowed to speak. I remember it as weeks of grinding for permission to help.

Then the gate opened, and thirty-one answers fell out in one month.

## And then it stopped

There was no decision. Consulting got heavier, the novelty wore off, and a few of my answers [got deleted by other people](https://expiredqueues.com/answers-need-expiry-dates/), which took the shine off in a way I will write about separately.

Then in 2016 I went dark on the whole internet. Deleted LinkedIn, deleted Instagram, the lot. I came back around 2020, and only because a startup needed me findable again.

The blog thinned out to nothing in the same stretch - one post in 2016, two in 2018, two in 2019. I had assumed that was the industry moving on without me. Turns out it was mostly me, moving on without the industry, and taking the writing with me.

Six weeks in 2013 is still [the most productive I have ever been in public](https://expiredqueues.com/most-read-thing-i-wrote/). I would like to think that is a low bar and not a peak.

[Previously Smart living, but quieter](https://expiredqueues.com/smart-living/) [Next I went back and fixed the commas](https://expiredqueues.com/answers-i-went-back-to-fix/)

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