Why Ask Smart Questions?
30 Jan 2020
Communication is key?
Why is communication so key in Software Engieering? Problems always arise when coding and sometimes, you can spend hours looking through code, pulling your hair out just to find out that you are simply missing a semi-colon at the end of line 152. This is a big problem in this industry and is the reason for the god-sent StackOverflow. Here users can freely communicate with eachother by asking and answering questions involving problems within the code they are trying to write. This site gives coders such as myself a resource to find answers to things I don’t know, teaching me new strategies and giving me tips that I can use for my code and beyond.
What Makes a Good Question
With that being said, users who ask questions need to be descriptive about what they want to ask. If you want someone to help you, you need to help them by asking a “good” question. Asking a good question as a software engineer may go a long way, more so then you think, because from this you can not only help yourself but others who may have the same problem. Googling a problem in my code most of the time shows up on stackoverflow with a person who has asked a somewhat similar question that I need to be solved. On stackoverflow, I found a prime example of a good question with a clear title of the problem, a description of what is wrong, and light code work shown for an example. This person states, “Why do some variables declared using let inside a function become available in another function, while others result in a reference error?”, this is a very precise question. This person also has a brief description of the problem and provides light code that won’t overwhelm someone looking to answer the question.
What makes a Bad Question
Users who ask bad questions wont get the results that they want. Simply copying and pasting lines of code won’t help the reader understand your problem (most of the time). A bad question title example I found was “How can i get right http status code on sapper?”, a somewhat general question, not very interesting or eye catching. Within the question were numerous pictures, lines of code, and no description what-so-ever which led the question to having no responses.
Changing my ways
Before this, I was sometimes a “bad question” asker, this article changed my point of view on how I should be asking questions. My mentality has since shifted and I know what I need to do inorder to get the response that I want. Asking a quality question will yield quality results!