How to get help from technic community?
11 Sep 2019We meet technical issues when we learn how to program. When there is a bug in our code, we can get some help from the web. Asking questions in a technic community is an effective way when we cannot find a similar problem on the internet. However, some people are not familiar with the rules of asking questions. They post their questions arbitrarily and get little help from the community. On the other hand, people get more support from the community when they have spent time learning the question by themselves and posting smartly. Based on the instruction How To Ask Questions The Smart Way by Eric Raymond, there are rules that help us ask questions in a smart way.
First of all, what is a smart question? In my opinion, a smart question is a question that people are willing to answer it. To be more specific, when people see incredibly long paragraphs, they don’t want to read it. When people see grammar errors and typos everywhere, they can’t understand it. If there isn’t the code attached when the publisher wants someone to fix the bug, people can’ t find what’s wrong in the code directly.
I often visit StackOverflow to search for similar questions when I have some technical issues. I find that people who have a clear statement to the problem are more likely to get help. I think this one is an example of a smart question:
We can see that the statement part is short and precise; therefore, people can read it in a few seconds. Besides, the code is attached with highlights and comments. Therefore, people who want to answer this question address the issue at a glance.
As a result, people post their solutions in different ways. The publisher, the contributors, and the people who are reading this post can all learn something. This post is an effective, efficient, and helpful one which demonstrates how a smart question looks like.
However, when the publishers don’t put effort on the questions by themselves, these posted questions will waste others’ time. Here is an example:
First, the publisher should not attach the code as a photo. We cannot quickly run a piece of code from a photo. What’s more, the photo is hiden in a text link. Second, the publisher didn’t spend much time on the problem. People who are reading the code can easily find there are too many errors, and the publisher doesn’t even double-check the code.
Asking questions in a smart way can save people’s time, and the post will be a good example for people who have a similar issue. This is the way how we can get effective and efficient help from a technic community. We need to follow the rules, then people will say welcome to us. This is how we can get help from the technic community.
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