There is such a thing as a dumb question
17 Jan 2018
Asking for a technical question on stackoverflow is something I rarely do, in fact I never actually have posted a question on the site as of currently writing this essay. I usually will exhaust all my searches and documentation reading before I even think about going to ask for help on the technical question I needed answered.
I believe that one should do as much as they can trying to solve their problem before asking for help. In the context of programming, most of what you will need are in the documentation. It is usually a vast and deep tool to read through but it is truly helpful in understanding what you need. This will benefit you in two ways; one, you can solve your problem by finding the solution on your own and two, you will learn a lot more when you are able to take the steps that led you to the solution.
If someone does need to form a question and post to a technical forum, such as stackoverflow, they should be fully prepared about what their main goal is and what they have already tried. The question should be relative to the context of the forum that the question was posted to. The question should also be posted with the idea in mind that it will serve to help someone else in the future who may also run into the same problem you are posting about. Having this type of good question will help the community as a whole as everyone benefits from what you have posted. To give an example of a bad question to post would be this question. As you can see this does not provide a useful post seeking a technical solution to a problem but rather looks for opinions on the matter of choosing between C# or Java to learn. We can see that the post was marked as closed for reasons of “not constructive”.
Here is a better question that was posted with the heading “I’m having a hard time understanding Java objects and classes”. You can see that the question seeks help on the subject matter of understanding java objects and classes. Furthermore the question includes code snippet examples for users to read through and they also attached a link that directs the readers to previous sources they tried to learn from. This is an example of a much better question as it gives readers better context on where original poster is having trouble.
I believe being able to ask smart questions will help you not just get the answers you need but also fully understand what you are talking about. Employing myself to these guidelines of a smart question will help me become a better software engineer and also better communicate with others in my field.