The virtual world of the Internet is evolving at breakneck speeds and it is the developers/programmers/innovators that are driving it in the background. GitHub and StackExchange are the two most popular social networks leveraged by this community to share, help and expand their knowledge.

As discussed in the previous chapter on GitHub, there are some strong trends and insights clearly visible from the data available. Building upon the same, this chapter dealt with data related to StackExchange.

We started off with understanding the humble beginnings of this platform followed by ways of getting our hands upon its data. This was followed by utilizing the data dumps as our primary source of data from the StackExchange platform. The next step was to understand what data is available to us and how it is organized into separate files. We then utilized the power of R to use this data and extract some interesting insights related to programming languages, demographics, and so on from the data itself. This chapter also leveraged our learnings from the previous chapters to preprocess, visualize, and analyze the data.

This chapter, in conjunction with the previous one, brings about an interesting point wherein we see somewhat similar trends and practices when it comes to a population with similar skill sets. It will be interesting to see how and if data from both GitHub and StackExchange together can be utilized to uncover even more interesting information.

The next set of chapters raise the bar and provide even more challenging exercises for readers to explore through two completely different, yet long standing, social media platforms. Stay tuned!