10k Rep on Stack Overflow; looking back

After almost 14 years on the Stack Overflow platform, I [finally crossed the 10,000 point reputation threshold](https://stackoverflow.com/users/649048/millhouse) in January 2025. My early days were dominated by Java, moving into Mockito (still by-far my [most popular answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/7682895/649048), contributing almost a quarter of my total rep!), Spring, then Scala, and into the Play Framework before moving into less-niche territory in the JavaScript/TypeScript world, where the sheer enormity of the user-base made it difficult to be either the first *or* the best at answering anything.

The little "kick-up" around 2021-or-so probably correlates to the widespread uptake of React Hooks, which provided a fairly rich environment of footguns, misunderstandings and head-scratchers as people tried to `useEffect()` their way out of the old `componentDidMount` world. As I'd immersed myself quite deeply into the documentation on "the new way" at the time, and had done a few small greenfield side-projects that used it, it was a pretty fertile period for rep-gathering. Sadly Stack Overflow in 2025 is not what it once was, with a lot of "low-hanging-fruit" (newbie questions, typos, easily-Googleable error messages) being dispensed-with by LLM agent/assistants in a role that they are (and I say this very cautiously) not terrible at. As a result I imagine 10k rep would be very tough going were one to start from scratch today. Nevertheless, as an immense collection of human knowledge and expertise (which I'm sure all the AI scrapers have trained on) it is still remarkable.