Finding the Answers You Seek
07 Sep 2017Finding the Answers You Seek
For beginning programmers, like myself, there are a lot of occasions that come along where something just won’t work no matter what you do. Whether it is a compile error or a hardware issue, there are times when no matter what resources you come across, they don’t have the solution to your problem. That is when you realize it… You. Need. HEEEELP!!!! There finally comes a point when you feel so desperate that you want to scream across every corner of the internet for anyone who happens to be awake and will be able to help you at that moment.
Thankfully, there exists two gentlemen, who cared enough to share their very valuable and widely supported advice on how to find the answers you seek. Eric Steven Raymond & Rick Moen’s short and sweet solution to this is simply to ask questions the smart way. In their short essay appropriately titled: How to ask questions the smart way, they summarize the best way to ask questions and the worst way to ask questions. They include multiple examples of each and explain in detail the reasoning behind typical replies to tech forum questions.
Now the intention of this essay is not to troll or tease beginner programmers that need help. Contrarily, it’s mission is to genuinely help them, and the responder answer their questions faster and more accurately. A great place to find examples of these questions is Stack Overflow: a popular tech-based help question site. Here is a question I found there that gives me an impression that the asker had already read this article. The question is: “How to create web based terminal using xterm.js to ssh into a system on local network”. Although this is more of a general questions and less of a ‘help me solve this problem’ question, It still reflects enough of Raymond and Moen’s suggestions and I felt it got a great response because of this.
To start, the question title contains several keywords that tell the responder what they are trying to do (create a web based terminal), under what specific circumstances (using xterm.js), and why (to ssh into a system on local network). In the body of the post the user explains where the question arose, their ideas or attempts to solve it, and a thorough example of their intended implementation. The answer to this question, was fantastic! It was a short list of bullets and steps in order move forward. The response even ended with an invitation to ask more questions. The questioner was polite, used proper grammar and was thanked the responder.
A counter example of a smart question that I found was this one right here: “Segmentation Fault !!!!! Help me”. This question received a score of -8 on stackoverflow, showing that the hacker community strongly disapproved of the title and question format. The body of the question did contain a few details of why the user needed help. However, the questioner also included a scrollable copy of their program that wasn’t working. It received one attempt from a responder, yet the response was not fruitful to the user because it was followed by another question from him. Although no one responded to the last question, there was later activity on the question telling the user that their question was bad and that it should be moved to a different forum.
In summary, volunteer programmers that answer forum questions are a powerful resource that should be communicated with carefully. The best way to do this is to not waste their time and ask questions the smart way. This is great, because it helps you get faster answers to the questions you have. I will finish this by highlighting a request from the authors of the essay of topic. They have requested that I display prominently: “we are not a help desk for your project!” So if that thought even crossed your mind, give their essay the respect it deserves and read it again before asking them any questions.