Lord Loh.'s "How is spinlock different from polling?" was one of those questions that made me think "Huh, he's right, what is the difference?" when I first saw it. But after reading Jorg's answer, it makes perfect sense to me; I feel like I learned something.

pduersteler's "Git branching from a feature branch to work on a subfeature" Most git branching questions strike me as people confusing themselves by overcomplicating things, and the answers often seem to only make things more complicated, but MichaelT's answer was surprisingly clear, to the point that it "feels obvious" in retrospect.

David Moles's "Why does(/did) Bertrand Meyer think subclassing is the only way to extend a “closed” module?", answered by gnat is a rare example of a question about a very abstract, high-level design principle that manages to be interesting, answerable and show genuine research effort.

Here are two questions where a (low-rep!) OP did everything right in asking their question, and as a direct result they got exactly the answer they needed. This is the kind of Q&A that makes me think "the system does work!"

• TBridges42's "Is a large static initializer a code smell?", answered by amon
• James Ko's "Is it possible to avoid abstraction inversion in this scenario?", also answered by amon

Finally, some high-quality answers that convinced me not to close-vote questions which initially seemed too broad/opinion-based to get a good answer:

• Thomas Owens's answer on BЈовић's "Where to describe architectural problems?"
• MichaelT's answer on Kimble's "Estimating in groups - How to extract useful statistics / estimates?"
• MichaelT's answer on Carcigenicate's "How does a skip list work?"

Lord Loh.'s "How is spinlock different from polling?" was one of those questions that made me think "Huh, he's right, what is the difference?" when I first saw it. But after reading Jorg's answer, it makes perfect sense to me; I feel like I learned something.

pduersteler's "Git branching from a feature branch to work on a subfeature" Most git branching questions strike me as people confusing themselves by overcomplicating things, and the answers often seem to only make things more complicated, but MichaelT's answer was surprisingly clear, to the point that it "feels obvious" in retrospect.

David Moles's "Why does(/did) Bertrand Meyer think subclassing is the only way to extend a “closed” module?", answered by gnat is a rare example of a question about a very abstract, high-level design principle that manages to be interesting, answerable and show genuine research effort.

Here are two questions where a (low-rep!) OP did everything right in asking their question, and as a direct result they got exactly the answer they needed. This is the kind of Q&A that makes me think "the system does work!"

• TBridges42's "Is a large static initializer a code smell?", answered by amon
• James Ko's "Is it possible to avoid abstraction inversion in this scenario?", also answered by amon

Finally, some high-quality answers that convinced me not to close-vote questions which initially seemed too broad/opinion-based to get a good answer:

• Thomas Owens's answer on BЈовић's "Where to describe architectural problems?"
• MichaelT's answer on Kimble's "Estimating in groups - How to extract useful statistics / estimates?"
• MichaelT's answer on Carcigenicate's "How does a skip list work?"

Lord Loh.'s "How is spinlock different from polling?" was one of those questions that made me think "Huh, he's right, what is the difference?" when I first saw it. But after reading Jorg's answer, it makes perfect sense to me; I feel like I learned something.

pduersteler's "Git branching from a feature branch to work on a subfeature" Most git branching questions strike me as people confusing themselves by overcomplicating things, and the answers often seem to only make things more complicated, but MichaelT's answer was surprisingly clear, to the point that it "feels obvious" in retrospect.

David Moles's "Why does(/did) Bertrand Meyer think subclassing is the only way to extend a “closed” module?", answered by gnat is a rare example of a question about a very abstract, high-level design principle that manages to be interesting, answerable and show genuine research effort.

Here are two questions where a (low-rep!) OP did everything right in asking their question, and as a direct result they got exactly the answer they needed. This is the kind of Q&A that makes me think "the system does work!"

• TBridges42's "Is a large static initializer a code smell?", answered by amon
• James Ko's "Is it possible to avoid abstraction inversion in this scenario?", also answered by amon

Finally, some high-quality answers that convinced me not to close-vote questions which initially seemed too broad/opinion-based to get a good answer:

• Thomas Owen's answer on BЈовић's "Where to describe architectural problems?"
• MichaelT's answer on Kimble's "Estimating in groups - How to extract useful statistics / estimates?"
• MichaelT's answer on Carcigenicate's "How does a skip list work?"

Lord Loh.'s "How is spinlock different from polling?" was one of those questions that made me think "Huh, he's right, what is the difference?" when I first saw it. But after reading Jorg's answer, it makes perfect sense to me; I feel like I learned something.

pduersteler's "Git branching from a feature branch to work on a subfeature" Most git branching questions strike me as people confusing themselves by overcomplicating things, and the answers often seem to only make things more complicated, but MichaelT's answer was surprisingly clear, to the point that it "feels obvious" in retrospect.

David Moles's "Why does(/did) Bertrand Meyer think subclassing is the only way to extend a “closed” module?", answered by gnat is a rare example of a question about a very abstract, high-level design principle that manages to be interesting, answerable and show genuine research effort.

Here are two questions where a (low-rep!) OP did everything right in asking their question, and as a direct result they got exactly the answer they needed. This is the kind of Q&A that makes me think "the system does work!"

• TBridges42's "Is a large static initializer a code smell?", answered by amon
• James Ko's "Is it possible to avoid abstraction inversion in this scenario?", also answered by amon

Finally, some high-quality answers that convinced me not to close-vote questions which initially seemed too broad/opinion-based to get a good answer:

• Thomas Owens's answer on BЈовић's "Where to describe architectural problems?"
• MichaelT's answer on Kimble's "Estimating in groups - How to extract useful statistics / estimates?"
• MichaelT's answer on Carcigenicate's "How does a skip list work?"